When Eliza Harrison attended a conference in San Rafael, California, in 2015, she heard the words that would soon change her life.

She attended the Bioneers Conference, a conference aimed at providing solutions to environmental changes, as a sophomore pursuing a B.S. in environmental health science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

When Bren Smith, co-founder of the 3D ocean farming company GreenWave, finished speaking, Harrison walked away with information that would lead her to start her own company.

“During that presentation, he mentioned the fact that seaweed is five times more effective at carbon removal than any land-based plant, and as someone who has always been interested in climate change, that piqued my interest,” Harrison said.

City News Beat founder Greg Morey’s vision is to build the “next CNN”.

And thanks to Launch Chapel Hill, he believes he’s well on his way to realizing his dream.

On Friday, Morey joined nine other startups as part of an open house celebration at Launch Chapel Hill’s downtown headquarters on Rosemary Street, welcoming its 2019 spring cohort to its business accelerator.

The goal: to turn early-stage businesses into self-sustaining enterprises – in just 16 weeks.

When a startup business can succeed outside of its shared workspace at Launch Chapel Hill, Dina feels like dancing in her office.

After all, she’s done it before. The Launch program manager partied in the Rosemary Street building in 1992, back when the now-thriving business incubator was a nightclub, and she was a freshly minted MBA graduate. She and colleagues from the nation’s top business schools trained in the space by day to prepare for overseas assignments – she was on her way to Poland – and returned at night to drink and dance.

“It was my first time in Chapel Hill,” says Dina, a New Orleans native whose eyes survey the sunny, brightly colored office that bears no trace of its seedy past. “There was something about this place, about Chapel Hill itself. I always hoped to return.”