New Orleans Entrepreneur Week starts this week. This is the first opportunity for area wannabe tycoons in three years, to meet potential investors at Idea Village’s annual startup festival.
The first spring event was held in 2009 and has been suspended for the past two years due to the pandemic. The organizers expect a record number of people to attend this year’s event and hear about its big themes: opportunities for Black entrepreneurs and opportunities within the umbrella headings “Clean Tech”, and “Culture Tech”.
Similar events like the South by Southwest festival, which was held earlier this month in Austin (which has a significant entrepreneur track), saw attendance fall this year compared to 2019. However, organizers at NOEW expect the event will be more attended than it was three years ago.
The New Orleans event is more focused on the local startup community and is more intimate than SXSW, which had an estimated 417,000 attendees in 2019. This year, attendance was down by 20% due to some reluctance for business travel. According to Austin media.
Ideal Village CEO Jon Atkinson stated that the startup accelerator expects a record 3,000 people to attend this year’s New Orleans Entrepreneur Week. This is the annual spring networking event and conferencing event after a two-year hiatus because of the pandemic.
Jon Atkinson is the CEO of Idea Village. The accelerator has been organizing the event since its inception. Next week’s events will feature 120 speakers from all over the nation. In 2019, there were approximately 2,000 people.
Atkinson stated that NOEW’s goal was to engage the regional and local ecosystem. Therefore, most of our audience members are from New Orleans and we expect growth in 2019.
The finale will take place at the Ace Hotel in the Warehouse District, just like in previous years. A winner will be chosen from the three finalists in this year’s pitch competition.
Thursday’s announcement by Idea Village was that the top prize money for this year would be eightfold higher after two successful graduates of their accelerator program, Patrick Comer of Lucid and Scott Wolfe of Levelset, announced that they had teamed up with other local investors in order to turbo-charge the jackpot to $750,000. The winner of $50,000 three years ago was the winner.
A watershed year
Atkinson stated that the major acquisitions of last year, which also included smaller, but still-significant, sales of “tech enabled” companies such as Turbo Squid’s sale to Shutterstock for $75 million, were a watershed moment in New Orleans’ startup community.
He said that the $2.5 billion plus in ‘exits that occurred in 2021 showed that New Orleans and its surrounding region can create world-class startups. “This year, we are focusing on how to get the flywheel turning faster in a way that’s uniquely New Orleans. This is a nod to the special community that has been created over the past 20 years.”
These are the three finalists for this year’s startup competitionJamm Around, which bills it as “a LinkedIn platform for music creators”,Cluey consumerDesigned for “socially conscious consumers”,Iconic Moments, which is using the NFT craze in order to help museums and cultural institutions raise funds. All three were part of The Idea Village’s VILLAGEx accelerator program which helps entrepreneurs transform their ideas into fully fledged companies.
Tuesday, the first day, will be devoted to the challenges faced by Black founders, entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs.
Addressing equal opportunity
Jessica Norwood, who was just in Essence magazine’s “50 Black Women Founders To Watch” listThis panel will discuss how Black founders can overcome additional hurdles that they face in comparison to White founders.
The Runway Company is a company that helps Black entrepreneurs raise capital for their businesses. She points out that Black startup founders are not able to access the capital they need from their family and friends, due to the large wealth gap between Black and White Americans.
Norwood stated that it was important to have this conversation on everyone’s lips. “There is no reason why New Orleans shouldn’t be the top place when people look for Black entrepreneurship. However, it just lacks infrastructure,” especially when dealing with investment capital.
Wednesday’s program will move to Gallier Hall. There, the discussion will split between “Clean Tech” and “Culture Tech”. Each of these topics covers a wide range of sub-industries.
Nish Acharya was the Director of Innovation & Entrepreneurship at Department of Commerce under the Obama administration. He later founded Equal Innovation to link startups and research institutions to create climate-related businesses.
He stated that most of the climate business areas are still in the early stages. New Orleans will need to attract research dollars and turn its successes into high-growth businesses if it wants to be known as a city that is a magnet for investment and startups in this sector.
“New Orleans has the potential to become the destination city for people who work on climate issues and develop businesses, but it can’t take its natural benefits — like the unique coastline, juxtaposition of industry and shipping — for granted,” said he. “Researchers in this area are not receiving as much funding as they should,” he said. They should be tapping into sources like the National Science Foundation or the Climate Innovation Fund, which were established by Bloomberg Philanthropies as well as Goldman Sachs.
What is an NFT and what does it do?
The “Culture Tech” talks cover a wide variety of topics, including “The Evolution of Media,” chats with Walter Isaacson (journalist and historian) and others.
“Monetizing culture” has been one of the most problematic concepts in the modern tech age. But Chris Cummings, CEO at Iconic Moments and one of the pitch finalists, stated that there has been an exponential growth in certain culture sectors.
NFTs (or non-fungible tokens) have been The subject is full of excitement and derision.Cummings says that digital objects sales increased from $200 million in 2020, to $27 billion by 2021, and reached $7 billion in January 2018.
His idea for NFTs, and other digital experiences in museums, has taken root. He was the only U.S. firm to win a prestigious award. United Nations World Summit AwardIts efforts in keeping museums alive during the pandemic.
The LSU Law School graduate-turned-tech-entrepreneur said by creating unique digital museum experiences which can have things attached like tickets for exhibitions, or donor credit his company grew 73% during the pandemic and has raised $3.2 million.
