New Orleans Entrepreneur Week (NOEW) — a citywide celebration of innovation and culture — opens on March 24. Now part of the rhythms and rituals of our city, NOEW 2025 will be co-produced by Loyola University New Orleans and The Idea Village will once again connect local entrepreneurs with our vibrant business community, educate future startup founders and link our ecosystem to the global stage.
As NOEW celebrates 15 years, we take stock of the role that systems play in building a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem. NOEW has helped shape a local system of entrepreneurship built on collaboration and authenticity that is centered in a unique sense of place. We’ve seen homegrown companies like Lucid, Levelset and others bootstrap their startup and ultimately generate billions in new wealth, pulling our local economy into the 21st century.
As important and critical as these initial wins are, they can only take us so far. To thrive as a self-perpetuating system at scale requires that we consistently remove barriers to the resources that startups need to be successful: capital, talent, customers and access to interesting problems.
Venture capital is the critical fuel necessary to grow startup companies — which are truly the engines of local economies. Venture-funded startups create jobs at an outsized rate, and they are dynamic yet rooted and durable to most external shocks. Most importantly, they have the potential to create new wealth and pathways to opportunity at the individual level.
For most of the past decade, roughly 75% of venture capital has gone to just three states — California, Massachusetts and New York, leaving the rest of us to battle it out for the remaining dollars. Forty-seven states can’t be expected to grow their respective economies on 25% of the fuel. We must find other ways.
To break this cycle, we must invest locally. We must be bold enough to put our own capital at risk. Local institutions must rethink how we are allocating the investable assets we control. Despite a focus on local impact, local community-serving institutions (including banks, foundations and others allocating small and large resource pools) often send a disproportionate share of their investable assets to national and global markets without thinking about local economic consequences. If we want to change systems, we can’t continue to blindly export our collective savings and then wonder why national investors fail to support local growth.
According to recent IRS data, there are roughly 7,000 active nonprofit organizations and foundations domiciled in Louisiana. Collectively, these community-serving institutions hold $67.4 billion in assets. If just 2% of this local wealth were directed to investments in local startups, $1.35 billion would be yielded in additional LP (Limited Partner) capital available to local funds and local startups. Similar math and logic apply to local corporations and savings vehicles like pension funds with even higher numbers. Embracing this logic would represent exponential change.
We must make bold bets on ourselves to build a dynamic local economy. We must be thoughtful about how we can collectively build a better system.
Come to NOEW to be inspired about what is possible on an individual level but also for a window into what New Orleans and Louisiana could look like if we collectively aligned our assets and beliefs to create another $1.35 billion in local startup investment.
Jon Atkinson is CEO of The Idea Village, a nonprofit founded on the principle of supporting regional startups and the big thinkers that power them. He may be reached via email at jatkinson@ideavillage.org.
