Steven King, CEO and co-founder of Blue Sky Robotics, joins me to talk about building a computer vision company that has pivoted twice in three years, from metaverse avatars to warehouse robotics to hospital automation. Steven, a longtime UNC professor, explains how a side project meant to capture realistic 3D avatars for the metaverse turned into a vision system for robotic arms, and how a client's ambitious accuracy target forced his engineering team to rebuild the company's core technology from scratch. That rebuild became the foundation for Blue Sky's current focus: helping hospitals like UNC Health and Mayo Clinic catch operational errors, from mislabeled dining trays to missing surgical instruments, before they become patient safety issues.

Along the way, we cover why the company built its early customer base on paying clients instead of venture capital, how real-world data has become Blue Sky's biggest competitive advantage over synthetic simulation, and why the team turned down deals that wouldn't scale even when it hurt short-term revenue. Steven also shares candid lessons on choosing a co-founder and staying flexible enough to let a company's direction change completely without losing its footing.

It's a grounded, detail-rich conversation about building a hard-tech company in North Carolina, with real numbers on accuracy, team growth, and what's coming next.

Timestamps
00:02 Cold open and sponsor thanks
01:34 Scot's preview: meet Steven King and Blue Sky Robotics
03:34 Welcome Steven King to the show
04:29 Life before Blue Sky Robotics
05:41 15 years at UNC: from photojournalism to computer vision
06:34 The Washington Post years and the trip to Liverpool
08:15 The spark: from innovation lab to startup
08:48 First idea: volumetric capture for the metaverse
09:45 The pivot: turning the camera outward for robots
10:25 Founding day and the first client
12:04 Bootstrapping with paying clients instead of VC
12:42 The 99.5% accuracy bet on fishing tackle
16:01 Edge inference with NVIDIA Jetson
18:18 Why fishing tackle data transfers to surgical tools
21:03 Saying no to deals that won't scale
23:07 Inside the use case: dining trays and dietary errors
24:45 Solving the 20% of surgeries that start unprepared
26:08 Building the "IoT toaster" for hospitals
27:00 UNC Health and Mayo Clinic partnerships
32:39 A 16-person team built on Triangle universities
34:00 What's next: raising capital and scaling to more hospitals
34:52 Founder lessons: pivots, pride, and picking a co-founder
35:40 Credits and sign-off

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Where to Find Steven King:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steven-king-b93885b/
Blue Sky Robotics: https://www.blueskyrobotics.ai/

Where to Find Scot Wingo:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thescotwingo/
Tweener Times: https://www.tweenertimes.com/
X: https://x.com/scotwingo

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This episode of Triangle Tweener Talks is hosted by Scot Wingo, presented and produced by NC Tweener Fund, with creative assets and design support from Walk West.

We couldn’t share posts like this without our amazing sponsors:

Platinum:
NC IDEA: https://ncidea.org

Gold Sponsors:
- Balentine: https://www.balentine.com/triangle-entrepreneurs
- EisnerAmpner: https://www.eisneramper.com
- Robinson Bradshaw: https://www.robinsonbradshaw.com

Silver Sponsors:
- Automated Consulting Group: https://automated.co
- Bank of America: https://business.bofa.com/en-us/content/technology-industry-group.html

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Triangle Tweener Talks is sponsored by:

• Atomic Object: https://atomicobject.com/

Ben Scruggs, CEO of Altis Biosystems, joins me to talk about building human gut models that help pharma, biotech, and nutrition companies predict how a drug or ingredient will actually behave in the body before it ever reaches a patient. The conversation covers what an epithelial barrier is and why the gut is such an overlooked bottleneck in drug development, how Altis's technology is being used for absorption studies, inflammation research, and toxicity screening, and why GLP-1 drugs make such a compelling test case for the company's platform.

Just as much of the episode is about Ben's own path: trained as a cell biologist, he spent close to a decade as a venture investor at Hatteras Venture Partners before stepping into the CEO role at Altis, a UNC spinout, about three years ago. He talks candidly about what surprised him most moving from advising founders to running a company himself, including the realization that most of the job is selling, not science.

Altis Biosystems has scaled from testing a few dozen compounds at a time to routinely screening thousands, using automation and robotics to keep pace with customer demand, and Ben shares where he sees the technology heading next, well beyond the gut.

Timestamps
00:00 Cold open & sponsor thank-yous
01:40 Scot's pre-show intro: today's guest, Ben Scruggs of Altis Biosystems
03:33 Episode starts
03:49 How Scot and Ben know each other
04:25 Ben's background: PhD in cell biology, postdoc in genomics
05:28 The pivot into venture investing at Hatteras Venture Partners
06:43 How UNC connections led Ben to Altis Biosystems
09:24 Inside Hatteras Venture Partners: 25 years, 100+ investments
13:06 Making the leap from investor to CEO
15:15 What Altis Biosystems actually does
16:34 What is an epithelial barrier, and why it matters
17:32 The three markets: absorption, inflammation, and toxicity
19:58 Why GLP-1 drugs are the ultimate bioavailability test
20:25 Altis's dual business model: full-service CRO vs. self-serve kits
23:29 Defining bioavailability
24:18 Beyond pharma: nutrition and CPG customers
28:37 The UNC tech-transfer story behind Altis
30:00 Advice for investors considering the jump to operator
31:42 The most underrated founder skill: selling
33:01 What's next: expanding beyond the gut
37:30 Scaling from dozens to thousands of compounds
41:39 Where to learn more about Altis Biosystems
42:10 Thanks and credits

Where to Find Ben Scruggs:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjaminscruggs/
Altis Biosystems: https://www.altisbiosystems.com/

Where to Find Scot Wingo:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thescotwingo/
Tweener Times: https://www.tweenertimes.com/
X: https://x.com/scotwingo

---

This episode of Triangle Tweener Talks is hosted by Scot Wingo, presented and produced by NC Tweener Fund, with creative assets and design support from Walk West.

We couldn’t share posts like this without our amazing sponsors:

Platinum:
NC IDEA: https://ncidea.org

Gold Sponsors:
- Balentine: https://www.balentine.com/triangle-entrepreneurs
- EisnerAmpner: https://www.eisneramper.com
- Robinson Bradshaw: https://www.robinsonbradshaw.com

Silver Sponsors:
- Automated Consulting Group: https://automated.co
- Bank of America: https://business.bofa.com/en-us/content/technology-industry-group.html

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Triangle Tweener Talks is sponsored by:

• Atomic Object: https://atomicobject.com/

Josh Guter, founder of Elephants, joins us for a live product teardown of the AI operations assistant he built for small teams. The conversation covers the architecture behind the assistant: roughly 64 purpose-built tools, an approval-gated write system that never lets the AI act without human sign-off, and the logging system Josh built to audit a codebase that, by his own admission, has become a black box even to him.

Josh walks us through his full build process, from sketching UI mockups in Adobe Illustrator to having Claude draft implementation plans and Codex tear them apart before anything ships, plus how he red-teams his own assistant before any change touches its tools or system prompt. He also shares how Elephants evolved from a low-code personal relationship manager built on Glide Apps and Make.com into a full-stack platform now running the daily operations of NC State's Entrepreneurship Clinic.

It's a candid look at what it actually takes to ship an AI feature people trust with real operational data, including the parts that still keep a solo founder up at night.

Timestamps
00:00 Cold open: "The devil's in the details"
00:45 Welcome back to Redacted
01:20 Introducing guest Josh Guter
02:33 Josh joins and how he and David met
02:56 What Elephants is: ops software for small teams
07:03 The real product: the AI assistant
08:04 The big question: model, cost, context, trust
14:04 Behind the scenes: Anthropic's API and the Make.com origin story
15:12 64 tools and counting
16:01 Managing the internal prompt library
18:07 Rebuilding full-stack with Opus 4.8 and Codex
20:38 Auditing a black box: breadcrumb logging
21:57 Claude Code as the new Make.com
25:10 The build process, start to finish
26:23 Illustrator mockups and the Claude/Codex review loop
29:05 QA without a QA team: red-teaming the assistant
31:51 Taylor's tangent: rebuilding an interview ingestion pipeline
34:09 The founders who never read their own PRs
35:02 Why nothing ships without user approval
36:57 It's a PWA, not an app
39:00 The "AI psychosis" moment
39:37 Josh's product vision: enterprise-knowledge AI
41:48 Where to find Josh and Elephants
42:08 Sign-off

Show notes from the episode: https://github.com/instanttaylor/redacted-podcast

Where to Find David:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidshaner/

Where to Find Taylor:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taylorcotner/

More about Offline: https://www.linkedin.com/company/offline-media-inc-/

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This episode of Redacted is hosted by David Shaner and Taylor Cotner, and presented and produced by NC Tweener Fund.

We couldn’t share posts like this without our amazing sponsors:

Platinum:
NC IDEA: https://ncidea.org

Gold Sponsors:
- Balentine: https://www.balentine.com/triangle-entrepreneurs
- EisnerAmpner: https://www.eisneramper.com
- Robinson Bradshaw: https://www.robinsonbradshaw.com

Silver Sponsors:
- Automated Consulting Group: https://automated.co
- Bank of America: https://business.bofa.com/en-us/content/technology-industry-group.html

------
Triangle Tweener Talks is sponsored by:

• Atomic Object: https://atomicobject.com/