Fast Company interviewed me for part 8 of their series “Why you should start a company in….” where they have been profiling the best startup cities around the country.  It was a privilege to speak on behalf of so many great entrepreneurs in New Orleans.

If you haven’t seen it, why not give it a read.  Here are my thoughts on “Why New Orleans is different or better than other cities?”

In a lot of ways, New Orleans is the city for our times, it fits the post-financial-crisis world. We dealt with our knockout blow in 2005 and the people here literally have rebuilt and re-imagined the city. We are ahead of the rest of the country that is just now dealing with the financial crisis. We’re already well into recovery and growth mode, so it’s an exciting time.  There’s something kind of magical that’s going on right now and it’s that gelling at the very beginning of an uprising where things really become a movement.

This really is a great time to start a business in New Orleans.  Here are a few places to dig a little deeper:

• Taylor Davidson wrote a post cataloging the startup scene in January.
• To dig into the tax incentives for businesses, check out my wiki, and LED’s site.
• Hot right now are the 2nd Net2NO SXSW road trip, the Google Fiber initiative, and Entrepreneurs Week
• One of the things I mentioned in the interview is a challenge around the lack of startup capital in New Orleans, this is something we’re working on too

I’d love to hear your thoughts on what makes New Orleans such a great place to start a company right now.

Aaron Patzer – Mint.com – How to Take Your Startup to the Next Level @ FOWA 2010

Idea to $170 mil acquisition in 3 years.

3 Phases of a Startup

1. Garage – <$100k in funding
   • Validate and idea
   • Create a prototype
2. Seed < $1mil
   • Launch and alpha product
3. Scale > $1mil

Garage – Rapidly Validate an Idea
Original Idea: Goal setting software

Talk to as many people as possible.  Don’t keep your business idea inside.  Don’t worry about stealing the idea.  Talked to 50-80 people.  He found that the money component really resonated.  People had issue with existing tools like Quicken & Microsoft Money.  Customer feedback before even building the app.
Solve a real problem that exists now and 5-10 years from now.  Don’t build a feature, build a business.  In 5 years, will this problem still exist.  Is it a transitional problem?

Garage: Goal = Prototype
Pre-revenue Valuation solver:

• + $500k / engineer = prototype development
• - $250k / business guy = idea, but not much to do

They built a real UI, and real prototype in July 2006. A prototype that is real and tangible will get you seed funding.

Garage to Seed: Raising Funding

1. solve a real problem
2. in a large market
3. real revenue potential
4. sustainable advantage – patents, people, user interface. need to be able to be leader

Seed: Proving revenue … before you have any

• The hockey stick looking curve is total BS
• Per transaction / per user revenue is much more important
• And a huge market opportunity

Competition: Quicken & LowerMyBills

• Lead-Gen & CPA Opportunity: $30+ /user / yr
• Business Model: Referrals & Lead Generation
• 7% of 16Bil online ad market

Seed Result – raised $750,000 and built prototype

Funded: Scaling People

• Train yourself to hire
• Hire better than you… then let them work
• Recommended book – Topgrading – sequential interview process. In interview questions “the why is always more important than the what.” – looking for pattern recognition. You can spot gaps, you can see true colors.

Funded: Beta -> Big Launch

• started blog ecosystem – find people to write guest posts
• private beta builds demand
• use exclusivity
• user feedback is key

Mint had 20,000 email addresses 1 month before launch. If you put a badge on your site, we’ll give you priority access to Mint.  600 people did it. Also gave great pagerank.   The alpha users got velvet rope treatment.

Beta Product: Jul-Sept 2007
Saw scalability issues come across with the real users.  Focus on building architecture.  Hiring marketers properly. Scaling marketing by building the blog outreach.

Funded: The Big Launch

• Venue: TechCrunch 40
• Aggressive PR – hire an agency
• Have a presence

Mint mojitos. Everyone in t-shirts. Rent adjacent space.  People’s choice award winner.  Result: Mint wins TC40 People’s Choice Award.  Off to the races.

• Q – Validate your idea?
• A – Talk to people.  Is it a real problem? Would you actually use it?  People will poke holes in it.  Find out other services that exist.  Don’t be super secretive.  Talk to parents friends, non early adopters.  Write down “concept statements” – go to train station, normal people.  What do you think of this concept?  Try different positioning statements & feature sets.  All on paper before you built anything?

• Q – Story behind domain name?
• A – Original domain – MyMint.com – he bought himself originally.  It must be easily spelled.  Have all its vowels.  Don’t chose your brand name based on availability.  Couldn’t afford Mint.com until series A round.  He bought it from a hedge fund investor.

• Q – Where’d the Mint interface come from.  UI is critical.
• A – The way that it was perfected was putting it in front of real users.  Take people off the street for a Starbucks $10 gift card. Mixture of ages, men, women, screaming babies.  Hire designers with very specific background Photoshop, CSS/HTML, and UI.  Designers make tradeoffs themselves.

I’m at FOWA in Miami today w/ Peter and Alex from Flatsourcing.  The first presentation was from Fred Wilson who makes amazing investments in great companies:

Fred Wilson – 10 Golden Principles of Web Apps

1. Speed – The most important feature, if its not fast, users will leave.  Early adopters are forgiving, the mainstream is not.
2. Instant Utility – It has to give people something immediately.  If you have to spend an hour loading data into the app before you can actually do something, people will leave.
3. Have a Voice – Stand for something, have a voice, don’t be bland.  The Twitter Fail Whale ending up on t-shirts, meant that something about their voice was connecting w/ society.  It sounded like a human being talking.
4. Less is More – Start by being simplistic. Delicious was a great example. People used it every day.  You do one little thing but you do it all day, its quick, easy and fast.
5. Programmable – Make your app programmable.  Make it possible for others to add to and build on top of your application.  If your API is not read/write its not an API, its RSS.  When people can add value to your application, they can add energy to your app, more data, and more richness.
6. Personal – Infuse your application w/ your users energy.  People feel more ownership when your app is personal for everyone.  Backgrounds, avatars, user generated content.   Makes people care about your app.
7. RESTful – In a REST architecture, your resources have a URL, and can be called by that URL.  Make the entire application have a clean URL.  Every component has its own URL that people can remember and type in.   Everyone can understand what a URL stands for, and it also is crawlable by search engines.  The web can get access to your app in deep ways.
8. Discoverable – When you launch a web app, its a needle in a haystack.  How is anyone going to find yours.  You must understand SEO, and build your application from the ground up to be optimized for Google.  It also needs to be optimized for social media, meaning virality.  The product itself must push itself out into the web and social media.
9. Clean – The application itself must be clean on the page.  Whitespace.  Big fonts.  Not too much functionality on each page.  Anyone landing on the page should know immediately what to do. (Tumblr login.) People underestimate how important it is to be efficient w/ the features on each page.
10. Playful – The ability to play in an application is important.  The game dynamic is something you can use to get users to do what you want.  Weight Watchers is a good example.  Set goals, and get rewarded for meeting goals.  Create a game dynamic in all apps to make it “fun to play.” Foursquare uses game dynamic as a way to power the development of a local information service.  Users will have more fun, and you can incent the kind of behavior you want in the application.

The marketing for an app has to be in the product.  Don’t hire a marketing team.  Guerrilla, street, or stunt marketing.  It’s not a coincidence that two of Union Square Ventures  apps (Twitter and Foursquare) broke out at SXSW.   It’s authentic, and not expensive.

The Union Square Ventures, five of the six keywords they believe in: Mobile, Social, Global, Playful, Intelligent.

Here are his slides:

The 10 Golden Principles for Successful Web Apps

Fred emphasized that these are his 10 principles, but there is a lively discussion going on over on his blog, where many other opinions are being expressed about what core tenants are important to an successful app.

Peter Bodenheimer and I went up the the Web 2.0 Expo the week before Thanksgiving, and spent the week hanging out with some pretty impressive folks. It’s clear there is a lot of energy in the NY startup scene right now, it reminded me of the first FOWA conference in 2006 where the Web 2.0 energy was palpable in San Francisco.

It’s important for me and Flatsourcing, TribeCon, and Launch Pad to be connected to New York. As strong as the New Orleans startup movement has been, its critical we maintain our direct ties to innovation hubs like Silicon Valley & New York. We need to know what they are up to and vice versa. In this post, I’ll summarize some of the exciting things we saw and people we met. In addition, I’ve got a proposal that I want to float to continue to build our ties to NY.

First, what we did and what’s happening in NY:

• Monday night we went to Ignite NYC and ran into Elliott Adams (good to see the state going to these conferences). This was my first Ignite, and we saw some great presentations in preparation for the launch of Ignite NOLA in February which Adele Tiblier and Chris Boudy are leading the charge on.
• Spent Tuesday hanging w/ Andrew Hyde, he’s just ran the NY Marathon and is hard at work on his new startup which I’m trying to twist his arm into locating to NOLA. (He hates winter weather. Advantage: NOLA)
• Watch the keynote by Tim O’Reilly for a great overview of the state of the web. He’s concerned that we may be entering another “closed garden” period.
• Chris Brogan was surprisingly Zen in his presentation, but and great. It reiterated to me how great it was to have his co-author of Trust Agents at Tribecon. Favorite quote: “The difference between audience and community, is which way you turn the chairs”
• Having the tweets running on the screen behind the speaker blew up with the final keynote. IMHO this is a bad idea, and I was glad we didn’t do it at TC.
• Tuesday night Pete and I went to the Net Neutrality Tech Debate at IAC. It was fascinating to see the policy makers who will shape the FCC legislation debate in this forum. Thankfully, the need for net neutrality won the debate with the more convincing argument.
• On Wednesday we went to the Launch Pad to watch startup pitches by 5 companies: Foodspotting, Apstrata, Earth Aid, Neighborhoodr, & Set Jam. All the pitches were strong, and it really pounded home to be how tight a pitch needs to be and how well the constraint of 5 minutes worked.
• Baratunde Thurston brought down the house with his keynote on Wednesday: “There’s a hashtag for that” If you watch one thing I’m posting, make it this.
• The conversation with Caterina Fake (founder of Flickr) was interesting for her commentary on the NY tech scene, and the reasons why she chose to locate her new startup Hunch in NYC.
• I really enjoyed the conversation with John Borthwork, founder of Betaworks. This is probably the most startup company/incubator going right now, and is an inspiration for me for where I want to take Voodoo Ventures. If you like Tweetdeck & Bit.ly, you’ll like where he thinks the web is headed.
• Wednesday night we met up with Mike Karnjanaprakorn, its exciting to hear about the success of By/Association and his understanding and use of the importance of mystery, human curation, and exclusivity.
• He soon spotted a check-in from Foursquare founder Naveen Selvadurai at a nearby bar. The power of Foursquare to connect people was quickly evident as it seemed every startuper in the city was there within 15 min. Chatted with Tantek Celik and Richard Blakeley. I think I finally grokked hype-local from Richard. Basically, the concept behind Neighborhoodr, is that the more granualary you slice a community the more you care about it. You may not care about everything going on in New Orleans (perhaps just the tech scene), but you care about everything going on on your street.
  

All in all a great week. I know the bullets review like an itinerary of “here’s what we did,” but I’m trying to convey the energy we felt being up there. Some of the clear concepts were mobile, hyper-local, and simplicity of concepts. I heard on more than one occasion from people that they hear “New Orleans has something going on…” but they all wondered “who was our signature startup?” Who is our signature startup? Not just a company that we all know about… a startup that everyone knows about.

So, what about the NOLA -> NYC connection you mentioned?

Well, we’re conjuring up an idea, and though its not ready for launch yet, I am interested to get feedback on it. It is based on a conversation that Brian Oberkirch, Perry Chen and I had at TribeCon. The idea is theirs, I’m just hoping to help implement it:

A visiting scholar program for startups.

The idea would be to bring startup CEO’s down from NYC to NOLA to work here, interact, mentor, and learn about what people are doing down here, and then take that gospel back to NY with them, spreading the seeds of what is happening here. Basically a direct, personal, mentorship and marketing program.

Take it a step further, and reverse it, sending Louisiana startup CEO’s up to NY to work, learn, and engage. Then we’ve got the sharing going both ways.

Economic development agencies like GNO & LED are already spending a lot of money on familiarization tours. I wonder if a program like this would qualify under that kind of budget? My guess is that using the lean, mean, startup fundamentals we all know so well, that we could create a very effective program.

What do you think? Would you support a NOLA-to-NYC visiting scholar program?

Taylor Davidson walked into Launch Pad yesterday, and I knew TribeCon had arrived. I don’t quite know why, but after all the work that has gone into this, having Taylor walk in was a powerful and emotional trigger for me. Not that seeing Nathan Heleine and Michael Karnjanaprakorn was too shabby, having them show up yesterday was great too.

But something about seeing Taylor. Probably because of our shared experience at SXSW and the fact that he has traveled the world since he was last here.

Anyway, TribeCon has arrived, and I am soooo ready for it.

I can’t wait until the other speakers and friends start rolling into town over the next two days. I can’t wait to toast the first NOLA Brew Houpitoulas on Wednesday night here at the Launch Pad and kick off the weekend with our Tribe. I can’t wait until everyone strolls into the Bingo tent on Thursday morning to see what an amazing atmosphere we’ve created for this conference. I can’t wait til you see the t-shirts, stickers, and all the beautiful collateral that Justin Shiels designed. I can’t wait to hear so many of the wonderful speakers take the stage and share their inspiring stories and messages about community building. I can’t wait to break bread (well, actually Jambalaya) with everyone at lunch, sitting at a 200 person picnic table under the oaks in City Park. And I can’t wait to hang with everyone in the TribeCon Lounge all weekend, our very own oasis in the center of Voodoo.

If you are still on the fence, take it from Champ Superstar, (and trust me) TribeCon is going to be an amazing experience. You will learn, share, connect, and be inspired. If you are committed to this community, to our community, to New Orleans, I’m asking you to join us for TribeCon. We’ve worked so hard, come so far as a community. Come share this experience with us. It’s very personal to me, but this is about all of us. If you haven’t yet, I am asking you, please buy a ticket right now and Join the Tribe. If you have, thank you.

Thank you to everyone who has worked so hard to make this a reality. Thank you to all the groups that have supported us along the way. And most of all, thank you for being there with us on Thursday.

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.

There’s been a lot of good news lately about entrepreneurship in Louisiana. With the renewal of the digital media tax credit and the energy around startups lately, things are just going to start taking off, right?

Well, maybe.

I still see some gaps in current eco-system that can be filled with a true mentorship-based seed fund. (In case you’re wondering, I mean a Y-Combinator / TechStars style investment program. Mentorship-based seed funds exist all over the country, I’ve compiled a listing here)

So where are the gaps? Well, here’s what I see:

1. The “Moving Companies to Louisiana” Strategy – one of the biggest stated goals of the digital media tax credit, and a strategy I see LED & GNO Inc among others pursing is trying to lure companies to move to Louisiana with the tax credits, etc. GNO Inc put together a great deck, on what makes New Orleans so appealing. Probably the most visible impact thus far is the EA Sports testing facility in Baton Rouge. Here’s the thing: Established companies have employees. Employees have families, houses, schools located near where the company is currently based. Even though knowledge-based industries like digital media don’t have large infrastructure needs, their employees have established lives.
2. Supporting the “Shoot for the Moon” Companies – I had a conversation with a Launch Pad member on Friday who has been through the startup process several times, and he and many others feel we don’t have the deal flow in Louisiana right now. The problem is that were not quite at the point where people are seeing the wealth creation of other successful companies, and frankly we’re just new to building a startup ecosystem. Deal flow is directly related to entrepreneurs willing to take huge risks. Entrepreneurs willing to take huge risks and “shoot for the moon” is directly related to having an ecosystem that supports risk-taking and acknowledges and accepts failure.
3. Bridging the Gap Between Business Plan and Business - having a great idea doesn’t mean you are prepared to run a company. Most people starting a company have great subject matter expertise or talent, but may not have a fully rounded skill set in the ancillary areas of building a company. First time entrepreneurs get bogged down in this stuff: accounting, legal, personnel management.

So, how does a mentorship-based seed meet these needs and more:

1. Move Folks when its Easy to Move – Start young. Most people entering Y Combinator are just graduating from college or in their 20’s. People are portable at this stage and many digital nomads would love nothing more try out New Orleans for a stint. We’re already seeing this with all the amazing young people coming down here post-K for Teach for America and programs like that. There is a huge difference in a person’s willingness to move based on what stage they are in their lives.
2. Go Big - A lot of people have a “go big” idea, and given the opportunity to pursue it, even for 3-6 months will usually determine if there is something there or not. Of course, this is the riskiest stage of an idea, but most people never get the shot to really go for it. I know so many people trying to bootstrap a startup right now, but paying the bills with freelance work. The freelance work engulfs you and you never really get to go for the big idea. Often times (I am an example), people build service businesses to pay the bills, and though they may be successful, they aren’t investable and aren’t the big win that we all want to see happen. A seed fund that provides Ramen-soup money for founders to pursue an idea and get it to a prototype without having to divide their time to pay the bills really gives entrepreneurs a shot to go big. Think what would happen in Louisiana if every summer we gave 10 young startups enough funding to build out their big idea.
3. Mentorship – these funds are called mentorship-based seed funds for a reason. They don’t just hand entrepreneurs $25k. They have a curriculum and program that teaches the skills required to run a business. Already in New Orleans we’ve created a set of entrepreneurial hubs. This is a huge start, because startups can ask each other questions, and tackle problems together. Filling this out with a true curriculum that removes the headaches of setting up your accounting, legal, etc would enable entrepreneurs to have a singular focus on building their product. We have people in this city willing to devote the time and effort, but the value of this contribution needs to be acknowledged and compensated.

What kind of investment are we talking about?

• 10 companies selected for June – August 2010. Each company gets $25,000 to build a prototype. – $250,000
• The administrative costs of the program are probably equivalent to the investment dollars. – $250,000

When I think about the real-world impact that a program like this would have and the allocation of economic development and grant dollars that are being spent in Louisiana on advertising, conferences, infrastructure, administrative staff, workforce development, it seems like a drop in the bucket to get a program like this off the ground and I believe it is an investment worth making.

What do you think?

A friend emailed me this afternoon with a question:

How do you deal with the negative reviews/press/self doubt phase in this entrepreneurial world?

This is a great question, and one that we all have faced as entrepreneurs and undoubtedly will face again. Building a business, launching a product, producing anything is incredibly difficult. It is all-consuming and an emotional rollercoaster.

First, its important to understand that we all go through it. I’ve felt on the brink of collapse before:

• I was producing a Mardi Gras event in 2004, and lost control of it before it even started. I can’t bring myself to say what happened but for a little while it looked like it wasn’t going to happen, and I was going to lose $25,000 deposit and refund $25,000 in tickets. Ugh. I went to my good friend Vaughn Mordentti and he bailed me out of the situation (not literally). I went to him hat in hand, and he saved my butt.
• In December 2008, I pulled the plug on siteMighty, a web app that I had put years and lots of investment into.
• I had dinner with my wife at Slice Pizza in 2003 and she told me that she felt if nothing happened with Destination VIP, I needed to start making arrangements to close it down. I had 14 employees on payroll at the time.

Looking back, each of those fit the old saying: things are darkest before the dawn. We pulled off the Mardi Gras event. Letting go of siteMighty allowed renewed focus on Flatsourcing and Launch Pad. And I sold Destination VIP three months after that conversation.

A few thoughts on how to get through these difficult moments when you face the self doubt and are thinking “what the hell am I doing, and how did I get myself into this.”

• A word on advice – everyone has advice for you. Only you have the complete picture. It’s OK to tell someone, I’m really not looking for advice here. Or to just listen and take it in. But always understand that advice or guidance is only one person’s opinion. Only you know what is really going on in your business, and you have the privilege (and maybe burden) of running it yourself. You’re an entrepreneur and you’re the boss.
• Dealing with criticism - criticism is like advice. Easy to give. Hear it, just like advice. But don’t dwell on it. It’s much easier to criticize than to produce something for someone to criticize.
• Forget everyone else – someone is getting more press, more attention, making more money, and having more fun than you right now. Forget about it. It’s not what is important. Focus on your business and let go of any comparisons to, or competition with others.
• Prioritize and let go - you have a ton to do. How much of it is mission critical, and how much do you want to get done. During times like these you’re feeling swamped. Make a list of what you have to do, then order the list. Focus on the top 20% of it. The rest probably can wait. Everything may not be perfect, or the way you envisioned, but as long as things are happening, you can improve it later.
• Ask for help – you know who is rooting for you. Now’s the time to ask for a little help. Be as open as you want to be, and don’t be afraid to be specific on what you could use some help on.
• Find balance – when times are tough, you need your family & friends more than ever. It is difficult to balance, because your business needs you more than ever, but you need support. Make time for family.
• Make a plan – One of the best stress relievers is getting things out of your head and onto a sheet of paper. Write down everything you have to do. Break it into chunks you can accomplish and feel like things are moving forward.
• Persevere – keep putting one foot in front of the other. Focus on crossing things off your to-do list. As much as you want to give up, don’t. Perseverance is one of the most important attributes of an entrepreneur.
• Everything will be ok – of course there are no guarantees, but you’re going to get through this. Take a deep breath, and keep pushing forward. It probably doesn’t feel like it right now, but someday you’re going to look back on this and how much you grew during this difficult time.

This post is based on personal experience. It’s not a panacea, but hopefully by reflecting on what has helped my during difficult times, I can help you when the going gets tough.

The last few months have been invigorating in New Orleans. There have a ton of exciting things going on in New Orleans, and the momentum in the entrepreneurial ecosystem is swelling to a head.

One thing that I’ve noticed myself slipping into, that I’m calling myself out on is the human tendency to lift yourself up by pulling others down. Something we’ve all known about and experienced since grade school. It’s a human tendency to compete, but I think its so important to understand that we are competing globally and nationally. The work we are all doing is to expand the pie, not slice it up in ever smaller pieces amongst ourselves.

With that in mind, I pledge to:

• Support my tribe, New Orleans entrepreneurs (and not just those in Launch Pad).
• When I have something nice to say, I’ll sing it to the world. When I don’t, I’ll keep my mouth shut.
• Focus on family, work & friends. Balance.
• Help people achieve, succeed, and go further than I have.
• Not succumb to the petty or get sucked into squabbles.
• Give what I can when I can, and be honest when I can’t.

I’ve been so inspired by working around the Launch Pad family. It is such a great vibe here, and we’re just getting started. I know that a big part of that is the support that we all provide for eachother and the successes we do and will celebrate together.

Negativity is such an energy suck and so unproductive. Positive energy is all I have time for right now. So, I’m brushing it off and ready to rock n’ roll.