Thoughts on New Orleans Social Entrepreneurship
I’ve had the opportunity over the last couple weeks to spend some time with the nascent NOLA social entrepreneurship ecosystem. It’s been pretty cool. For example, I met an amazing couple that’s growing a backyard garden that has transformed into a community garden, and they’re looking to expand to a lot across the street from where the husband grew up.
So they went through an accelerator/incubator program. They applied to PitchNOLA, where if their pitch was successful, they would have earned $3500. That would have been a Big Deal to them. The judges were more interested in funding something innovative at an earlier stage. And whatever, it’s their money to spend.
But because the capital architecture here is so young, funding for social entrepreneurship hasn’t yet had the opportunity to segment the way it has in other places (not unlike tech, in California and the North East). The result is that all projects, charities, and platforms are shoveled into the same pipe. And that means my new favorite couple in town is stuck in an awkward place.
They’re already successful, and looking to execute on a larger, but not LARGE scale, but they’re abandoned to the old crowd-sourcing money approach – begging. Of course, they’re going to keep going, and hopefully they’ll get the money, but its a lot harder than it should be.
There are some steps being taken to shake out the pipeline. For those who can scale (with a big S), there’s an incubator in the works and a VC fund for those executing at that level (or just high margin enough). There’s stuff like PitchNOLA for seed rounds (as ever, not enough). But there’s a giant hole at the $3k-$50k level, which is goofy, because that’s what’s going to have immediate impact.
-Shlok
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