What TribeCon means to me

TribeCon is about the community I love, the tech community in New Orleans. Two things have inspired TribeCon for me more than anything else: First, the emergence of the grass-roots New Orleans tech community that picked itself up by its bootstraps on the heels of Katrina and realized that we had the both the opportunity and responsibility to shape this City’s future. This inspiration led to Net2NO, Launch Pad, the SXSW pilgrimage, GNO Code, and so many other groups. Second, after the death of my father, I examined everything I was doing, and decided it was time to follow the old entrepreneurs’ adage – do work you are passionate about.

Driven by these two things, in the back of the bus on the way back from SXSW in 2009 Adele, Tiffany and I had the spark of the idea to do a conference with the Voodoo Experience. We had no idea what we were getting into, but we pitched it to the community and pitched it to Voodoo and six months later were producing our first conference. It’s been such a great run to work with the amazing people involved in this event. Peter, Matt, Megan, Katy, Tiffany, Adele, Molly, Andrew, Melissa and many more people have given their time and energy to make this such a special event. Thank you guys, you are my Tribe!

I felt compeled to share my personal feelings here, if you have other questions, check out the interview on Silicon Bayou News.

Ignition in Kazan

kazan

Peter and I had the privilege of visiting a new startup incubator in Kazan while we were visiting our office in Russia this week.  They invited us to do a presentation and we did a talk called “How to compete with Silicon Valley from Russia” with a focus on early stage startups and perspective from the incubator/accelerator ecosystem in the US.  We started by answering the red herring title of the talk… don’t try to be Silicon Valley, build a great startup culture in Kazan.  And we drew a lot of parallels to what we’ve been focused on building in New Orleans.  Here’s my favorite “quote” from the talk:

«Мы любим стартапы! У вас, в России, есть прекрасные инженеры, прекрасные программисты, и мы рады тренировать начинающих бизнесменов, рады им помогать», – считает  Крис Шульц.

” We love startups! Do you, in Russia, there are excellent engineers, excellent programmers, and we are happy to train novice businessmen are happy to help them “- says Chris Schultz.

It has been fascinating to watch the startup ecosystem emerge in Kazan.  The IT Park is a beautiful facility that has opened with a lot of government support.  Of course, the energy is in the grass roots, and the collaboration thats emerging on the ground between Flatstack and the many spinoffs created by former employees is really exciting.

Slides and video of our talk below. We borrowed a lot of ideas from Dave McClure, Paul Graham, and Brad Feld, so thanks to them.

How to compete with Silicon Valley from Russia
View more presentations from Chris Schultz

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