Welcome back to another episode of the Friday Nooner featuring Pete, Jackie, and… Jenn? With the GrepBeat Godfather Joe Colopy visiting colleges with his daughter, the third hosting chair was filled by Jenn Summe. Jenn leads Primordial, Colopy Ventures‘ new initiative in early-stage tech investing, and sits between Pete and Jenn in Colopy Ventures World HQ. (We wrote about Primordial’s launch earlier this month.)
After some discussion of this week’s Raleigh-Durham Startup Week, Jenn revealed Primordial’s first investment—a check written to Raleigh-based Coworks and its CEO DeShawn Brown. Woo! (We first profiled Coworks, which makes software for coworking spaces, in 2019.) The crew also discussed a provision of the tax code that was not renewed by Congress, which is causing big headaches—and big tax bills—for tech startups. See yesterday’s GrepBeat newsletter for more.
This week’s guest was Nichole Lowe, the Founder of CEO of Raleigh-based Zoee, which we first wrote about in 2020 under its previous name. Here are some highlights from her time on the Nooner:
- Zoee is a SaaS tech company that helps streamline resources for coaching and consulting businesses.
- Before starting Zoee, Nichole worked with Prince (purple rain much?) as a video producer in the ’90s. But she left the film industry after 12 years, moved into the corporate world, and then realized where her heart truly lies—entrepreneurship. Nichole put her skills towards coaching and soon birthed Zoee.
- She said the success of coaching businesses depends on their specificity and streamlining. Recently, Zoee just launched a public profile page to help coaching businesses really take off. Nichole described it as a mix between Instagram and Linkedin.
- Jackie “exposed” Nichole’s early journalism studies in college, but to Jackie’s disappointment, Nichole said her journalism classes were more of a stepping stone into the videography and film industries.
- Nichole said the biggest thing she’s learned in her entrepreneurial journey is “fire fast, adjust faster.” Things rarely proceed the way you expect, so the key is to move quickly and then learn from each move. She said the timing of everything startup-related must be anticipated with patience and diligence.
- Nichole said right now the team is raising a small bridge round of financing and continuing to do data-driven feature updates to elevate and develop Zoee.
You can watch the full episode on LinkedIn here or Facebook here.
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