As the Saints come marching in from their historic victory, and with Mardi Gras and New Orleans Entrepreneur Week just around the corner, the reasons to celebrate in New Orleans are piling up! Amidst this festive frenzy, The Idea Village is participating in history of its own. First Light Ventures is partnering with The Idea Village and its Entrepreneur Challenge Class of 2010 to launch Village Capital, a novel idea in the venture financing field that offers a new way to go about financing early-stage entrepreneurs.
The Idea Village -- which shares the role of testing the concept with other incubators in Mumbai, San Francisco, and Denver -- is an opportune launching environment because it provides a tightly-knit community of entrepreneurs in a city that attracting national attention as a focal point for bright young minds and as a catalyst for new ideas.
Instead of distributing the money directly to individual entrepreneurs, Village Capital provides a peer-selected investment and line-of-credit fund, which allows the entrepreneurs to organize the use of the funds amongst themselves. Together, the group of entrepreneurs decides both how to allocate the funds and who they should go to.
The concept behind Village Capital is grounded in the premise that the most informed, effective, and efficient distribution could come from the entrepreneurs themselves. After all, not only do they share knowledge about each other's businesses, but they also understand the intricacies of running a budding business and can thus more accurately analyze both the needs and the potential of their peers. In addition to gaining access to additional funding, Village Capital forces the entrepreneurs to sit on the other side of the investor's table, examining the proposals of their peers and thus furthering their own understanding of how to succeed in securing investment.
Watch First Light's Investment Analyst, Ross Baird, discuss the concept behind Village Capital:
First on deck for the cohort of entrepreneurs to assess was Kyle Berner’s of Feelgoodz pitch to the group for $100,000 in short-term working capital. The pitch was a true entrepreneurial moment – the group was expecting to allocate the money later in the spring, but Kyle needed the money as soon as possible to finance growth as Feelgoodz expands to Whole Foods stores nationwide. Convincing the group to make the investment in his company sooner rather than later, Kyle secured the needed capital which he will repay within 6 months for the IVEC class to reinvest in another team member business.
Feeling that buzz of energy and innovation in New Orleans? The city’s entrepreneurs certainly are!
PlayNOLA, one of the Idea Village’s Entrepreneur Challenge alumni and winner of the 504ward business plan competition, was recently featured in an article in Black MBA Magazine. The start-up, which organizes sports leagues for young professionals in New Orleans, is helping to reverse the city’s brain drain by providing a fun and easy way for these professionals to connect with their peers (but don’t think that means that things can’t get competitive!) Check out the article here:
It’s always great to see New Orleans’s entrepreneurs being recognized for their success!
In other news, this year’s New Orleans Entrepreneur Week website is officially up-and-running! For those of you eagerly awaiting this year’s events, this will provide you with a sneak preview. Details and events will be posted on the site - stay tuned!
I have a confession. Until almost four years ago I had never visited the South, nor did I really ever think I would. You see, I had perceptions about what the South would be like based upon history I had read, movies I had seen and a barrage of media coverage - unfortunately much of which did not always paint the region in the best light. But that all changed on August 29, 2005.
Like millions of others, I watched in horror as home after home, parish after parish, city after city was destroyed and its inhabitants left helpless for days before any aid was to reach them. Despite my previous reservations about the region, what I witnesses compelled me to immediate action and what I experienced as a result, change my perspective on the South and its people forever.
I met people who in the face of atrocities many of us could not conceptualize maintained a sense of dignity, gratitude and determination like no other. I saw cities that, though buried beneath the rubble and devastation, whispered of a long and culturally rich history that was often overshadowed by bleak eras that tainted its true beauty. At that moment I became resolute that these people - these quintessential American cities deserve to be lifted up and rebuilt in order to show the world that we are a nation that thrives in the face of adversity.
Two speakers demonstrated to me that this same determination is alive and well in New Orleans 3 1/2 years after the storms. During his time with us, Lieutenant Governor Mitch Landrieu warned us with a cautionary tale of how New Orleans is in essence the proverbial "canary in the coal mine" - that what happened there, could happen anywhere in America and therefore it is our duty to insure that New Orleans not only returns to its former glory, but surpasses it. I was as equally moved by Dr. Scott Cowen, President of Tulane University, whose actions pre and post Hurricanes Katrina and Rita not only assured the safety and well being of his students and faculty, but of other universities in the region and the city as a whole. For me, he was the embodiment of leadership that is only recounted in oft-told fables. The passion with which these gentlemen spoke about their city gave us all a sense of hope not only for the future of New Orleans, but for the future of all cities across the nation.
Hope was also evident in the 54 students, faculty and corporate teams who joined The Idea Village for a week of unparalleled impact. My primary role during the week was to lend my expertise as a Googler to the students in hopes of providing them with additional tools that would benefit the entrepreneurs as they worked to tackle the daunting tasks ahead. Even I, a seasoned veteran of the company, was pleasantly surprised at the effect tools such as Google Earth, Google Maps and AdWords could have on these small businesses in the hands of these talented individuals. For me it was a firsthand account of how technology truly can change lives for the better.
Hope was a theme that also resonated with the local leaders, business owners, tour guides and gracious hosts many of whom opened their homes and lives to us without reservation. They were quick to recount the tragedy that drew many of us there, but even quicker to thank us for our time and efforts - to remind us that what we were doing was going to provide lasting impact beyond what we could comprehend at that moment. But for the 54 of us, hope truly lay in the entrepreneurs who had dedicated their lives to changing the current climate of their beloved city through their business ventures. As a result of our work, their stories have been recounted in the numerous media sources that will catapult their life’s work onto the national stage but to us they will always be:
The young man whose is rapidly building a sustainable flip flop empire, winning hearts and believers along the way;
Two guys using the nation's favorite go to food, pizza, as a catalyst for a national dialog around diet, nutrition and a sustainable food system;
The attorney who is using the universal language of music to bring awareness to environmental issues - the hotly debated cause of the increasing number of hurricanes in the gulf coast region;
The team who, like Google, understands that data/information is power and is looking to make it more widely available to promote housing redevelopment in the region;
The team who feel that the green housing revolution is not only for the wealthy, but should be accessible to all regardless of soci-economic status;
And the team who understands that a city is comprised of many socio-economic levels and alternative housing options are necessary to attract some of the most vital member of the community
These entrepreneurs are true heroes. They are the ones ones who will work day-in and day-out long after we return home to establish the solid foundation upon which New Orleans will once again rise. They are the ones who will one day "pay it forward" to future entrepreneurs who share that same raw determination and drive that they once possessed, in what we anticipate will soon be a bustling mecca of art, culture and enterprise.
During our last evening, the team lead for Chicago Booth gave a whimsical toast which I will never forget. He compared our week in New Orleans to The Wizard of Oz, complete with Tornadoes (Hurricanes we knew, but Tornadoes?) and even our own Wiz (Thanks to Dr. Baum). For me, his speech brought to mind the last scene of the movie where Dorothy came to the realization that she always had the power to return home as it was always in her heart. Many would think that this San Franciscan left her heart, well, in San Francisco. But if it's true that your home is where your heart is, then I have another confession to make. Mine will forever be in New Orleans.
Something amazing has been quietly happening in New Orleans recently. Unless you know where to look, or caught one of the television news or radio interviews, you may not have heard the good news. This week was the annual Idea Village IDEAcorps Challenge, where business students and corporate volunteers from all over the country pay their own way to New Orleans to spend their spring break helping local entrepreneurs realize their dreams.
This year's Challenge found 50 of our nation's top MBA students and corporate brains - from the likes of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, DePaul University and Google - paired up with six budding businesses centered around sustainable industries that will attract and retain 22-35 year olds in the Crescent City. After working with companies like Naked Pizza and Feelgoodz eco-friendly flip flops for the week, today is the day the student teams will present their ideas: the business models, marketing strategies and expansion plans that will hopefully make these companies a household name in the near future.
Free consultations with such educated, innovative thinkers are a dream come true for someone struggling to bring his business to fruition. But they can be traced back to two things omnipresent in New Orleans: Hurricane Katrina and a cocktail napkin.
According to Tim Williamson, president and co-founder of Idea Village, the organization was born in 2000, when a group of New Orleanians who had been spread out across the country came back home, "energized by experiences in thriving communities across the United States." In their adopted hometowns, these citizens realized that an entrepreneurial community was essential for leading and inspiring positive changes in a city. Small businesses could be just what New Orleans needed to re-energize and modernize itself. They decided to help.
Visiting Graduate Business Students Worked With Local Entrepreneurs This Week The Times Picayune
Kyle Berner had big news to share Tuesday when he walked into a classroom-turned-conference room on the Tulane University campus to meet with a team of business consultants.
Berner had been informed minutes earlier that his company Feelgoodz, which sells biodegradable footwear, had extended its distribution deal with Whole Foods Market to include the four states in the Southern Pacific region.
The consultants were meeting to figure out how to fulfill the distribution deal Berner had landed weeks earlier to place his Thailand-manufactured flip-flops in the grocery store chain's South region. That deal, alone, meant Berner would have to increase his pace of flip-flop manufacturing from about 300 pairs a month to 2,000. Now, Berner told the consultants, he would have to add about 3,000 to that order.
The Idea Village touts New Orleans as a laboratory for innovation and believes the city will create a blueprint for the rest of the country to follow when it comes to fostering entrepreneurship. The IdeaCorps experience is an opportunity for the city to roll out its red carpet to the future of small business, as each MBA who leaves with a positive experience could be one who does business with or possibly in New Orleans.
And that Berner and the Naked Pizza guys plan to build their burgeoning empires here sends a clear signal New Orleans can foster small business growth.
Project 30-90 is overwhelmed by the Kellogg team assisting us for the week. We honestly weren't quite sure what the week would bring, but its been simply amazing. The team is crazy intelligent, passionate and invested in our project after only a few days. The intellect, critical thinking, feedback, assumption challenging and ideas they have brought forward are pushing this project to a new level. Add in their boundless enthusiasm and this has been a wonderful influx of new energy.
I think the best thing about this team is that as individuals they have each showed great understanding of the significance of this undertaking to me as the entrepreneur. Its not their name on the project, but they act as though it is. Put simply, they "drank the koolaid" on day one and have been fully vested since. They may have only planned on being here for a week, but they're all on the team for good, from now until September.
Tomorrow there is a judging of some sort of their work. We'll welcome any feedback the panel wishes, but I know that project 30-90 is the HUGE winner by having these wonderful folks assisting us.
