What 10 Founders Are Saying About Starting Up in New Orleans
Silicon Valley has long been recognized as the global hub for startups, attracting thousands of founders to California to build tech and innovation companies. However, influential business leaders such as Steve Case, the founder of AOL, have been advocating that there are U.S. cities outside of the San Francisco Bay Area that provide founders just as fertile ground to scale and exit successfully.
To this point, more and more founders have realized in recent years that they don't have to relocate to Silicon Valley to start, scale, or secure capital. Thriving startup ecosystems are emerging in various cities across the country, and New Orleans is one of them.
Entrepreneur magazine highlights four key pillars that define a great startup city: community support, a low cost of living, infrastructure support and technical assistance, and the ability to establish roots. New Orleans' startup ecosystem is strengthening year by year, with dozens of startup and business support organizations - including The Idea Village and dozens of others in the Startup NOLA ecosystem - who actively help founders gain access to resources, mentors, and investors. Additionally, the city offers a lower cost of living compared to major startup cities like San Francisco, New York City, and Los Angeles (according to nerdwallet, the cost of living in San Francisco is 68% higher than in New Orleans).
New Orleans’ culturally rich and creative vibrancy, combined with the growing startup ecosystem, makes this city a unique launching pad for entrepreneurs. In 2021, the city celebrated its first unicorn company with Lucid, a Cint Company, which achieved an exit valuation of $1.1 billion. Local economic development estimates over $2.5 billion in new wealth created through exited startups, and the number of up-and-coming companies only continues to grow!
What 10 Founders Are Saying About “Why New Orleans?”
“We [Branson Morgan and Rich Simmerman] both grew up in Louisiana, moved to California, then came back because there’s no place like home. New Orleans is arguably the most exciting, friendly place to follow your dreams, because the natural state of this city is to work with you, rather than against you. We also feel like people here largely lack access to sustainable, plant-based nutrition, so we see an opportunity to improve the public health of New Orleans.” Branson Morgan, co-founder and former COO of Enjoy Ceres
“NOLA has [support organizations, like The Idea Village] with connections to mentors that have tons of experience with growing scalable companies.” Jen Smiley, founder of Wake UP & Read the Labels
“We started in New Orleans because this is our home. We were born and raised in New Orleans and there is a ton of opportunity if you know where to look. New Orleans has cultural assets that can be leveraged if we find better ways to extract value.” Brent Craige, co-founder of JammAround
“With a family that has been in New Orleans for generations, I am a New Orleaninan to my core. I feel so appreciative of my time in New York City, but with a fully-remote company, I always knew I wanted to build and give back to a city that gave me so much. I feel grateful for the time to be here in New Orleans, to be with family, and to have met my husband-to-be in the city I love.” - Elizabeth D. Tilton , founder of OS BENEFiTS
“For me, New Orleans is a great choice because of the unique combination of a vibrant startup community, a very supportive and genuine culture, and a solid talent pool. As someone in EdTech, I also really appreciate that it has several nation-leading educational programs like 4.0 and Camelback, and a great pool of charter schools.” Joshua Anderson, founder of Gnomic
“When I moved to New Orleans in January of 2021, it was such an incredible experience. We're Midwesterners who kind of lived on the verge of the South. And so, in many ways, it felt like home. But New Orleans also has just a great cosmopolitan sensibility to it. [New Orleans is] a city where ordinary people can live and run a business. It's an absolute dream place to be.” Liam Meier, co-founder and former CTO of Brewsy
“Though I'm a Lafayette, LA native, I have been living in New Orleans since 2011. I came here for graduate school at Southern University New Orleans and I was practicing as an LMSW, focusing on trauma counseling with children. I LOVED my work, but entrepreneurship has been calling me and life has been preparing me for the journey that I could not deny. That connection to the city has supported my personal and professional growth since I got here. On top of that, The Idea Village has been supportive to me since I curiously Googled for help in 2020 and found their team, and their network and resources are undeniably solid. The founders here are amazing and down-to-earth. I'm a Louisiana girl through and through, and I would move [states] to build my company, because I believe in it that much. However, how amazing it is when you just don't have to!” Arielle, Founder and CEO of Bea's Bayou Skincare
“New Orleans is my home. I was born and raised here. It's important for me to contribute to this city and make a lasting impact for several reasons. [1] There's a unique opportunity to build a company in NOLA, and [2] there's so much potential to make a lasting impact. There aren't many beauty brands that come out of New Orleans and make it big. I want to be the example.” Sydni Raymond, founder of Bomb Ass Fro
“It made sense to move to a place where the city would love you back. And I think there's no place where the city loves you back as clearly as it does in New Orleans. It's an incredibly culturally profound place and every day it feels like we're learning something new about New Orleans that we love.” Neal Shulman, co-founder and CEO of Brewsy
“I'm so happy to be able to not only start and hopefully grow a company with a mission that I care about personally, but to be able to do it in my home city and grow the entrepreneurial ecosystem of that city. And the community here is dually meaningful for me. So it's not just that we're building Cluey, but also building into the local entrepreneurial spirit. To me, that opportunity is amazing, and is extra motivating for that reason. The other reason for ‘why New Orleans’ is that it takes a lot of resilience to build a startup, and I don't think that there's a city or community that I see as resembling resilience more than the city of New Orleans, for so many obvious reasons. That's something that we want embedded in the cultural DNA of our company as well: that level of resiliency.” Maryclaire Manard, founder and CEO of Cluey Consumer