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Start-Ups Get a Start in New Orleans
by Constantine von Hoffman
Just eight years after New Orleans was devastated by Hurricane Katrina, Kevin Wilkins (MBA 1992) says the city is poised to join Silicon Valley, Boston, and Austin (Texas) as one of the nation's entrepreneurial hot spots. If it doesn't, it won't be for lack of effort on his part.
Wilkins moved to the Crescent City four years ago from Boston with his wife, New Orleans native Ginny Wise, and three sons. Prior to his arrival, he had been a brand manager for Proctor & Gamble, a marketing vice president for Fidelity Investments, and a managing director for the pension firm State Street Research. Although the family moved because Wise got a job at Tulane, Wilkins quickly saw opportunities in the city's burgeoning business scene.
"I'm an entrepreneur at my core, and after Katrina everyone needed to become an entrepreneur. Everyone needed to start over. Everyone had to open up shop again," he says.
He soon became an entrepreneur-in-residence at Idea Village, a nonprofit organization dedicated to keeping entrepreneurs in New Orleans by supplying them with strategic consulting and educational services. It does this by matching firms with experienced executives like Wilkins and also by inviting graduate students from HBS and other top business schools to spend spring break helping a company solve a major strategic problem.
"It's really impressive to see all the people from HBS come down here when they could be spending the week on vacation," says Carol Markowitz (MBA 2003), a corporate finance expert from Los Angeles whom Wilkins recruited to work at Idea Village. "The alumni network has also been very helpful."
After serving as Idea Village's COO, he left in May to start TREPwise: a for-profit company that supports tech companies when they are past the start-up phase but still haven't generated significant growth and sales. Wilkins says the emergence of a number of organizations like his, which are dedicated to supporting entrepreneurs, is proof of New Orleans' status as a business incubator.
"My client list is robust out of the gate, currently working with all incubators in New Orleans as well as many high-growth companies," Wilkins notes. "I am also working with several organizations undergoing change management exercises that require a new way of thinking about common issues."
"Thirteen years ago, Idea Village was the only game in town," he says. "People thought they were nuts, but now we have this plethora of organizations." He then rattles a few off: Propeller, which helps startups with social missions; the New Orleans BioInnovation Center; The New Orleans Startup Fund; 4.0, which helps education startups; and the Greater New Orleans Foundation, which helps with companies working on water resource issues.
This outbreak of entrepreneurship is the result of an influx of well-educated citizens to the city. From 2007 to 2009, more people with college educations moved to New Orleans than to any other U.S. city, on a per capita basis—and there's no indication that has stopped.
What's attracted them?
"It is a very easy city in which to adopt new approaches," says Wilkins. "It's a very open city in which to take a risk. That's not often the case. It's often very hard to get any kind of education reform into schools in Boston, for example, because it's an established system, because there's a process and it's working. Here they're willing to try anything—as long as it makes sense, as long as these new ideas are tested."
Wilkins says the city's biggest challenge right now may be the reputation it still has among people who don't have any recent experience in the city. To them, New Orleans is a corrupt, unsafe city whose primary draws are music and parties. While he realizes the city will always be known for Bon Ton Roulez, he thinks people who see only that are missing a big part of the picture.
"The city has a lot of cultural assets, absolutely. But it's much more than the festivals and parades," he says. "I've been visiting the city for 27 years, and it's changed. Today the city is thriving from a business perspective, from an early-stage business-development perspective, across multiple sectors."
Wilkins adds that this is perhaps an upside to the tragedies New Orleans has endured: "The beauty of Katrina—if there is a silver lining to Katrina—is it washed a lot of problems away. It forced the city to start over and do things right.
"We've moved way beyond that. Katrina's now eight years ago. Now New Orleans has become as a very innovative city. It's the Austin of 20 years ago. It's the Silicon Valley of 40 years ago."
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