I spent yesterday afternoon and evening with an eclectic group of entrepreneurs gathered for a discussion and networking and basketball tossing led by Business 2.0′s Josh Quittner and Erick Schonfeld. As one of the very very few academics there — Ted Zoller of the B-School’s Entrepreneurship program and Steve Jones, the B-School Dean being the others, I was flattered to be a part of the occasion.

Among the attendees were (in no particular order): Bob Young of Lulu (and Red Hat founder), Matt Wilson of rPath, Fred Stutzman of ClaimID, Babatola Oguntoyinbo of Sonecast, Chuck Messer of Tackle Design, David Sink of IBM (emerging tech group), Paul Garner of Motley Fool (and Executive in Residence at the UNC B-School), Tim Tobin of Greenbridge Development, Reyad I. Sawafta of QuarTek, Pete Durand of Integrian, Ed Iacobucci of DayJet (and Citrix founder), Michael Jones of ChannelAdvisor, Bryan Allis of Broadwick, John Edmond of Cree Research, Chris Marentis of Clearspring, Mark R. Wiesner of Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering, (who am I leaving out?)

Just took a call from Rick Smith who is writing up a longer article with pictures for WRAL and will link to that later. Rick tells me that the video of the discussion will be edited back at CNN and some of it aired on CNNMoney and less edited on the Business 2.0 site. Will link to those as they appear online.