This post has been coming together for a while, and I’m excited that I am finally getting a chance to share the coming capital options for startups in NOLA.  My feeling for a while has been that the seed capital gap and lack of VC in general in Louisiana has been one of the biggest challenges facing startups.  The Receivables Exchange had to go raise its capital outside of Louisiana.

As far as local angel funding, here’s what I wrote to Ben Rosen after his visit to New Orleans last week during Launch Fest:

The next step is to develop a strong, active, angel community to fund these companies, and keep them in New Orleans, rather than needing to go to Austin, NY, Boulder or the Valley for capital & talent.

A big part of our mission at Launch Pad is getting the investment community familiar and comfortable with these types of investments, which may be non-traditional for the region where wealth has traditionally been generated through oil and gas and the port.

It appears that we are on the verge of a tidal shift in the availability of capital for startups locally (fingers crossed).  Here are some of the things that are happening now and on the horizon.

• Idea Village – open – an eight year old non-profit that provides grant funding & educational curriculum. The 2010 class has just completed, and the application process for 2011 will be open towards the end of this summer.
• Leap Frog Ventures – projected launch Q3 2010 – a non-profit evergreen fund that Leslie Jacobs, Rick Rees, and Ben Allen are putting together in conjunction with GNO Inc.  The fund is based on the JumpStart program in Cleveland OH. Projected to raise $5-8 million from public and private sources and make seed investments of $250,000 – $500,000.
• GNO, Inc Opportunity Fund – projected launch Q3 2010 – this is a fund that will package CDFI funds from local banks into an evergreen investment fund that will make low interest convertible debt loans to local startups.  I am unsure of projected raise, the average size of loans is likely to be around $250,000.
• South Coast Angels – open, currently accepting pitches – this is a local angel fund managed by Clayton White and Choose Taurman.  This is a member managed angel fund, so it is different than an angel network like the events we do at Launch Pad.  My understanding is that they have $2-3 million committed and they are currently seeking investment opportunities of $250,000 to $500,000. They are using AngelSoft software to manage the application process and you can find out about it here.
• National VC Activity – starting – one of the best opportunities I see is to build strong ties to the national VC community, particularly NY, Boston & Austin.  The Kraft Group investment in NakedPizza led to Steve Schlafman’s participation in Launch Fest.  In addition, David Safaii of Windspeed Ventures came to Launch Fest and is getting connected with the local community.  Nurturing and strengthening these ties is critical.
• Barrett Vernon Montgomery LLC – open - Disclosure: Investor in Launch Pad.  Currently managing two funds.  Funds under management: $30 million. General size of investments are seed investments of $100,000 to $300,000 with follow on capital of up to $3 million.
• Long Branch Ventures – open – Michelle Oaks has been an active angel investor in the New Orleans community over the last two years.  Long Branch invests in early stage companies with an investment criteria that includes the company be based in Orleans Parish.
• Trumpet Ventures – open – Spun off from Trumpet Group in 2009, Trumpet Ventures invests financially and also by providing services in exchange for equity.
• Launch Pad Angel Network – open – We host quarterly angel pitch events at Launch Pad at the IP.  We hosted the last one during Launch Fest where we had ten 5 minute pitches by entrepreneurs.  70% of the startups were invited to contact an investor following the pitches.  Range of capital has been early stage prototype to seed capital.
• Voodoo Ventures – open – Voodoo recently made an investment in Jackson Square Group.  I am open to other strategic investment opportunities.

I am particularly excited about the new funding sources coming online listed above.  While I still believe that we’d benefit greatly from a seed accelerator program, and Launch Pad has some things underway to launch one, I think the capital is going to be flowing locally in the next 6 months to a year looking for deals.  If you have a startup idea, now is the time to get your business plan, or better yet, prototype together.

If I’ve made any mistakes above, feel free to contact me.  If you are a source of capital, and would like to be listed, please add a comment, and I’ll add you to the list.  Here’s to solving the seed capital gap in New Orleans!

I’m excited to share more details about TribeCon, a conference about communities – both online and offline.  Tiffany Starnes and I have been working for the last six months to put it together along with a lot of help from our Tribal Council and a lot of friends from Net2NO.

We’re producing the conference in partnership with the Voodoo Experience.  TribeCon will be the official interactive component of the Voodoo Experience.  This is a tremendous opportunity for TribeCon. The Voodoo Experience has grown into a huge annual music festival, and together we can build TribeCon into a integral part of the experience and a major interactive conference.

So let’s get to the details:

• What: TribeCon is a conference about building communities, online and offline.
• When: October 29-30, 2009
• Where: Voodoo Experience – City Park, New Orleans, LA
• How much: $169 for TribeCon includes single day Voodoo Experience ticket. $269 for TribeCon includes three day Voodoo Experience Ticket.
• Who: The speakers are all people passionate about building communities.
• Why: Building a community around your brand, cause, or mission is the most powerful way to grow.  Today’s social networking tools make it possible to reach your audience in powerful new ways to build a movement.  At TribeCon you’ll learn how to build community online to effect action offline.

Why does TribeCon need New Orleans?

One of the things I’m most excited about is bringing the conversation about authentic online communities to New Orleans.  Having the Voodoo Experience has a partner enables us to make this truly a world-class conference.  TribeCon connects with New Orleans because we have such a deep sense of community here.  From the Mardi Gras indian tribes to front porch neighbors, New Orleans culture is rooted in community.  Andrew Larimer, Tim Soslow and Matt Tritico will be curating a special panel presentation that will be a celebration and exploration of community in New Orleans.

Inspired by SXSW, and now TribeCon is just six weeks away.

The idea for TribeCon was inspired on the Y@ Pack trip to SXSW organized by the Net2NO community.  We had such an amazing experience together, and it was truly amazing what a motivated community can accomplish.  On the bus ride back from SXSW in March, we hatched the idea for TribeCon.  We pitched it at the GNO Inc Digital Media Alliance meeting in May, and though I regrettably made a couple of miscues in my pitch (ugh), we started to line up support and Robbie Vitrano helped us line up meetings with Rehage Entertainment.

So after a long summer of laying the ground work, here we are, just six weeks away from the inaugural TribeCon, with a supportive partner in the Voodoo Experience and a tremendous slate of speakers. Tiffany and I are both getting much less sleep these days, but we’re doing it, and really excited about producing TribeCon.

TribeCon is important to the tech community, and important to New Orleans.

So, you’re interested in getting involved?

Fantastic.  We need your help to make this a success.

• We’re bouncing a lot of ideas off our friends and supporters in the Tribal Council.  Everyone on it has been tremendously helpful and it has really shaped what this conference is, in addition to helping us make decisions on branding, marketing, content and more.  Membership is open to all, so join the Tribal Council.
  
• We will be looking for volunteers to coordinate a number of things for TribeCon.  If you’re interested getting to TribeCon for free, please contact us.
  
• We’re also looking for sponsors to support TribeCon and connect with an audience of community activist and online influencers.  We have a sponsorship package that we can send you, please let us know if your interested, or know someone for us to reach out to.
• Stay updated with all of the latest, follow @tribecon on Twitter.
  
• Ready to sign up? Great, head on over and buy a ticket to the conference.

Thanks to everyone for all your support.  We’re excited to present TribeCon and connect with the community.

Have more questions? Hit me up in the comments! Thanks.

We’re back from SXSW and I was invited to present a review of the Net2NO Y@ Pack’s efforts at the Digital Media Alliance (DMA) yesterday. It is great to see the DMA gaining steam and taking an active leadership role in the New Orleans tech community.

While I was tapped to present the results from the SXSW road trip, I have to say that it was a total team collaborative effort. The leadership of Damien Lamanna, Jessica Rohloff, Adele Tiblier, Tiffany Starnes & Andrew Larimer was what made this trip possible. And of course the support from GNO, DDD, City of NO, and all our sponsors. We’ll be posting a case study that is being put together very shortly with success metrics, but I wanted to convey how impactful the support of the trip was in terms of raising awareness about the New Orleans tech scene.

On the way home from SXSW, Tiffany Starnes, Adele Tiblier & I spent eight hours brainstorming on a bus about what we wanted to do next, how we were going to capture and build on this momentum. We kept coming back to community. We got home and tore through Seth Godin’s Tribes, and started bouncing the idea off people we respected, forming a Tribal Council. Today, we’re pleased to present our conference idea that heretofore has been under wraps.

What is happening in New Orleans right now is just a microcosm of what is happening all over the world. Traditional organizations with top down power structures are giving way to grass roots community-driven movements. Let’s call them tribes. These tribes self organize and galvanize to action. Let’s put a conference on to explore this phenomenon:

The Tribe Conference is a conference for people passionate about building communities. Over the last several years there has been an explosion of grass roots organizations that have been built through connecting people online with the mission of spurring action offline. These communities have developed organically and have consolidated national and international presence through websites, wikis, and branding. The communities are very grass roots and inherently local. As these communities evolve, there is a further need to facilitate a sharing of ideas, best practices, and development of a national community for the growth of all of these movements. The Voodoo Tribe conference mission will be to educate and connect communities, with a focus on the exchange of ideas about common ties of community-building, rather than a focus on what the communities do.

When we look at the ideal time for a conference like this in New Orleans, it fits well with the Voodoo Music Fest which is a great music festival around Halloween each year. The ethos of the music fest fits well with the idea for this conference too. I’d be interested in feedback on whether that timing is a draw or a drawback. We believe people like to come to New Orleans around great events like that to get some of the New Orleans cultural experience in addition to the conference.

The communities we would be interested in reaching out to are the ones that share these common threads:

• unconferences / unorganizations / movements / tribes
• web-based self organization through twitter, facebook, wikis, meetup.com, google groups, etc
• grass-roots but part of a larger national & international movement that people have simply picked up and run with
• Examples: Net Squared, BarCamps, WordCamps, Co-working, Ignite, Social Media Club

Want to learn more? Contact me, Tiffany or Adele. Want to be a part of the movement? Join our Tribal Council. Let’s make this happen together.

I’m taking a quick moment this morning to reflect on everything that happened, and everyone we met at WordCamp NOLA this weekend. I wasn’t able to be there on Saturday because of family commitments, but Friday was a really stellar day and I heard the same about Saturday.

I want to thank John Ramirez and Computer CC for all the hard work they put into WordCamp. John has worked tirelessly for the last 8 months to put this together, and everything at the conference was first class. They really worked hard on and went the extra mile to make the conference as professional as possible.

Thanks to all the speakers who gave their time and in some cases traveled to New Orleans to be a part of this. But most of all, thank you to all the folks who came out and participated, you made this what it was!

There was very positive feedback on Twitter. @lizmoney said:

RT @w2scott: Seriously: RT @lizmoney: RT @champsuperstar: can we do #wordcampnola again next weekend? L$: can we can we?

Thanks to everyone for the support, it’s exciting to have great events like this happening in NOLA!

Lots of good updates to post today, so I’m going to get at it rapid-fire…

• The Feast, a social innovation conference that Michael Karnjanaprakorn is bringing to New Orleans for the first time on February 6, 2009 has moved to a larger venue due to the strong demand. Michael announced today that the conference will be held at the Contemporary Arts Center. They’ve released additional $99 tickets (available only until Friday) so go register to attend today. I’m going to be speaking at the conference, and I’m working on my talk now. Any thoughts, send them my way.

• Startup School v2 will be held at Tulane on Thursday Jan 29, and Saturday, Feb 7. This Startup School will be geared around the $40,000 Tulane Business Plan Competition. We’re putting this together in conjunction with the TEA, SENO, VoodooTEQ, and hope to have the participation of many of the excellent judges from last time. Keep in mind that for the Tulane competion, each entry needs to have a student (from any university) on the team. More details to follow.

• 504ward will announce the first round finalists this Friday.

• 9th Ward Field of Dreams is an amazing project that Brian Bordainick behind. He working to build a $1.85 million state of the art football field in the Upper 9th Ward for Carver High school and the community. If you haven’t heard about this yet, check out the ESPN article and find out how you can help make it a reality.

• Net2NO is taking a road trip to SXSW and we want you to be a part of it. We’ve broken into subcommities to put together the party, travel and pitch. If you’re interested in helping New Orleans to take SXSW by storm in March, sign up here.

• GNO Inc’s Michael Hecht presented at NetNO last night about the new Digital Media Alliance launch. This initiative is focused on equipping us, New Orleans’ creative class of knowledge workers to succeed and attract more businesses and talent to the city. One of the things that has already been prepared is a slide deck to pitch New Orleans as a great place to locate your business. Take a look below.

Gno Cdm Deck

If you have anything that I’ve left off, hit me up in the comments. I’ll include it in the post. Thanks to everyone who is contributing.

It is coming down to the wire. I’m working hard on the final edits on our exec summary, how about you?

I saw Jessica White from 504ward last night, and she is begging cajoling arm-twisting strongly encouraging all Startup School attendees to get their plans submitted.

We all worked hard over the last few weeks to get our brilliant business ideas conceptualized, fortified, and most importantly written down. Now its time to take that final step and make sure you’re formatted correctly, you have your 54 sec YouTube pitch, and send it off to 504ward.

I really hope that everyone who participated in Startup School and anyone who is on the fence about giving their business plan the final push to get it in to 504ward will get it done in the next 36 hrs. Damien Lamanna is convinced that the winner is going to be from Net2NO. I hope the winner is from New Orleans and maybe even attended Startup School.

While I’m trying to polish up my own plan with Will & Barre, I am available for quick phone calls if anyone needs any moral support to get over the hump.

It’s final push time gang. Let’s get it done.

Looking for something to do tomorrow night? Love New Orleans, but live in the Bay area? Well today is your lucky day.

The Idea Village will be doing a presentation at the Googleplex titled “New Orleans Uncovered: Revitalization, Reinvention and You.”

Tim Williamson, Lauren Baum from Idea Village, and Robbie Vitrano from Trumpet, have traveled out to California to spread some NOLA love and tell our story. Lucky dukkys.

In case you weren’t aware, the 504ward business competition has been supported by Google and the video portion of the submission is a YouTube video. Just two more days to get your app in.

Details after the jump.

Also:

If you’re not able to jet out to San Fran to catch this presentation, why not catch a great presentation by our very search engine guru, Christopher Skinner from MakeBuzz. He’ll be presenting at Net2NO meeting tonight, so be sure to be there if you can’t jet off to SF. RSVP now.

Please join members of Google.org and The Black Googlers Network, for aninteractive discussion about the untold story of New Orleans as Google proudly welcomes The Idea Village to the Googleplex in Mountain View at 6:00 p.m. on Wednesday, December 3rd for a talk entitled “New Orleans Uncovered: Revitalization, Reinvention and You.” A hosted reception will immediately follow.

The Idea Village is an independent 501(c)(3) non-profit organization with a mission to sow the seeds of change through innovation and entrepreneurship in the New Orleans region by advocating for a culture of innovation and providing strategy, talent and resources to high impact ventures.They arespearheading innovative change in the trenches of New Orleans, a great American city recently named by BusinessWeek as one of the best places to ride out the recession. Challenges in New Orleans are not unique but if they can be solved there, they will pay dividends to our global community for generations to come.

Dozens of Googlers, including members of Google.org and BGN, were fortunate enough to assist with the development and launch of their 504ward $200,00 Business Plan Competition launched on September 25, 2008. This competition offers$100,000 cash and $100,000 in professional resources to the entrepreneur who can best retain the 3,000+ young people who have flocked to New Orleans with dual aspirations of sparking social change and advancing their careers in the living laboratory of post-Katrina New Orleans.

While on the West Coast, The Idea Village is inspiring a network of innovative talent to contribute to the reinvention of a great American city and providing tangible, immediate opportunities to directly engage in this historical moment.

LOCATION:
Google Headquarters
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, California 94043

MAP:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=1600+Amphitheatre+Pkwy,+Mountain+View,+California+94043&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=60.54737,111.445312&ie=UTF8&z=17&g=1600+Amphitheatre+Pkwy,+Mountain+View,+California+94043&iwloc=addr

CHECK-IN:
Please check-in at the Lobby of Building 41 starting at 5:30 p.m. A Registration Table will be set up to check-in guests.

RSVP:
Please RSVP Tara Canobbio, tcanobbio@google.com by Tuesday, December 2nd

This event is open to invitees and their guests interested in the recovery and development of the Greater New Orleans area since Hurricane Katrina. We hope you are able to join us for this important discussion and find out how YOU can change the world – starting in New Orleans.

Thanks to everyone who came out to the first night of Startup School last Thursday. It was a great event and I think everyone is pretty jazzed about the 504ward competition and the enthusiasm of the participants who are all going to be entering great biz plans in it.

We had a great lineup of speakers: Me, John Laurie from UNO, Richard Montgomery from VCE Capital, Chris Reade from Carrollton Technology Partners, and the inimitable local film auteur Ben Reece from Deltree.

Some highlights:

• My presentation is embedded below, but I focused on finding and communicating the reason your business needs to be in New Orleans.
• John emphasized the need not to work backwards. You really should have your whole plan done before you write your exec summary. Bios, not resumes. Financial highlights, but not full pro-forma for the exec summary.
• Richard spoke to the difference between what he views as a fundable company, and the goals of 504ward. He is looking for high-growth companies that can do $50 mil in sales in 10 years. While those companies are a fit for 504ward, so are sustainable “lifestyle” companies, that generally aren’t able to attract VC capital.
• Chris got everyone fired up with turning their plan into reality. He spoke of the pitfalls of expensive office space and friends as partners. He also recommended an LLC for most companies and talked about filing online through the Secretary of State’s website. He recommended having a good lawyer to make sure you have a good operating agreement if you have partners.
• Ben got people thinking about their video submission. It was agreed that everyone should do one because its an opportunity to forge an emotional connection with the panel of judges.

We’ve prepared an extensive collection of business plan resources and added them to our wiki.

On Friday, Jessica White of the Idea Village invited me to join her and Leslie Jacobs who is behind 504ward on the Garland Robinette show to talk about the entreprenuerial community here in New Orleans. You can listen to the podcast of the interview online on the WWL site.

Idea Village asked me to emphasize the following points with regards to what they are looking for in 504ward submissions. I wanted to post them here for anyone who wasn’t able to be there:

• You must be a sustainable business
• You must prove how you retain the 23 – 34 year old demographic
• The competition is not about attracting new people but about the retain the people currently in New Orleans

So, thanks to everyone for making it such a great event. The second part of the workshop series is this Saturday, Nov 22 9am-noon. We’ll be doing “speed dating” work-shopping of business plans. More details on the wiki. If you’re not registered yet, sign up and attend.

The 504Ward was announced this week by Idea Village. It’s a business plan competition with a $100,000 grant to the winning business along with services by many other New Orleans area firms.

The competition is designed to attract new start-ups to New Orleans or to seed local start-ups with the expressed intent of providing good jobs for 23-35 year old’s in the city.

At the competition launch on Thursday night at Tipitina’s, representatives from Google were on hand to throw their support behind the competition. They included a promise to promote the compeition on YouTube which potentially will draw quite a bit of attention. An interesting component of the competition is its emphasis on a video component to the submission process. This is a trend that I see continuing to grow, we submitted a video application as part of our TechCrunch50 conference application.

The evening’s highlight was the unveiling of a short film produced by Trumpet and directed by Benjamin Reece promoting the rising to the challenge of entrepreneurship in the new New Orleans. Ben has emerged in the last several months as one of New Orleans’s brightest young talents along with his partner Tung Ly. His short film 50 People 1 Question has drawn attention all over the world, and he directed a inspiring short for the 504ward that you can watch below. You should come see him speak at the next Net2NO meetup. (Who is that guy in the opening shot I wonder.)

504ward Promotional Film from Benjamin Reece on Vimeo.

I am very excited about the interest and support in the New Orleans start-up community right now, and this is just another example of great things happening. Though the award will likely have a national applicant pool, I really hope that many bright young New Orleanian’s apply for the grant. I feel a sense of pride and a competitive desire to show that this award can be won by a home grown business that will benefit New Orleans, that great businesses don’t just have to locate a satellite office here, but that they can be born here. My personal challenge to local start-ups is that we take this award home ourselves. Let’s make it happen NOLA.

Learn more about the 504ward, read the complete rules, and apply. Applications are due December 4th.

There are some cool things going on around here that I wanted to share:

• Lafayette CampFiber – Saturday, October 4 – As I’ve mentioned previously, excitement is in the air in Lafayette with the fiber network that is being installed as we speak. With this as a theme, Geoff Daily has been spearheading the BarCamp-style event planned for the October 4th. This is the second BarCamp in Louisiana and already has a lot of people registering. I was hoping to do a VC 101 talk, but have a wedding that weekend. Will Donaldson is going to lead the discussion. Get over to Lafayette for this great unconference. Register on the wiki or through Eventbright.

• NetSquared NO Meetup - Tuesday, September 2 @ 7pm – Jessica Rohloff is rocking out the social media + nonprofit focus of NetSquared by getting this event kicked off right here in New Orleans. The location is TBD, but should be a great group. I’ll be leading a discussion on what New Orleans Non-Profits can learn from Web 2.0 – blogging, community building, brand authenticity & transparency.This is going to be a lot of fun. Sign up on the Meetup site.

• Jelly Co-Working – Friday, August 29 – Benjamin Reese is getting Jelly, a national collective of co-working initiatives off the ground here in NOLA. If you haven’t heard of co-working, its a way for those of us who work alone “virtually” either from an office or at home, to get together with other human’s every once in a while and have a conversation in person, not just over twitter. We’re going to try to do one right here at Voodoo next Friday! Register on the wiki if you think you can make it. Free wifi and coffee, and maybe we’ll get some beer for the afternoon.

Hope you can make it to all of these, its exciting to see the Louisiana Tech community gelling this way.

Take note: these are all “open source” community initiatives. We’re getting it together down here, and its by the contribution that we all make. We get out of it what we put in. Let’s build it together.