Thanks to everyone who came out to the first night of Startup School last Thursday. It was a great event and I think everyone is pretty jazzed about the 504ward competition and the enthusiasm of the participants who are all going to be entering great biz plans in it.

We had a great lineup of speakers: Me, John Laurie from UNO, Richard Montgomery from VCE Capital, Chris Reade from Carrollton Technology Partners, and the inimitable local film auteur Ben Reece from Deltree.

Some highlights:

• My presentation is embedded below, but I focused on finding and communicating the reason your business needs to be in New Orleans.
• John emphasized the need not to work backwards.  You really should have your whole plan done before you write your exec summary.  Bios, not resumes.  Financial highlights, but not full pro-forma for the exec summary.
• Richard spoke to the difference between what he views as a fundable company, and the goals of 504ward.  He is looking for high-growth companies that can do $50 mil in sales in 10 years.  While those companies are a fit for 504ward, so are sustainable “lifestyle” companies, that generally aren’t able to attract VC capital.
• Chris got everyone fired up with turning their plan into reality.  He spoke of the pitfalls of expensive office space and friends as partners.  He also recommended an LLC for most companies and talked about filing online through the Secretary of State’s website.  He recommended having a good lawyer to make sure you have a good operating agreement if you have partners.
• Ben got people thinking about their video submission.  It was agreed that everyone should do one because its an opportunity to forge an emotional connection with the panel of judges.

We’ve prepared an extensive collection of business plan resources and added them to our wiki.

On Friday, Jessica White of the Idea Village invited me to join her and Leslie Jacobs who is behind 504ward on the Garland Robinette show to talk about the entreprenuerial community here in New Orleans.  You can listen to the podcast of the interview online on the WWL site.

Idea Village asked me to emphasize the following points with regards to what they are looking for in 504ward submissions.  I wanted to post them here for anyone who wasn’t able to be there:

• You must be a sustainable business
• You must prove how you retain the 23 - 34 year old demographic
• The competition is not about attracting new people but about the retain the people currently in New Orleans

So, thanks to everyone for making it such a great event.  The second part of the workshop series is this Saturday, Nov 22 9am-noon.  We’ll be doing “speed dating” work-shopping of business plans.  More details on the wiki.  If you’re not registered yet, sign up and attend.

The 504Ward was announced this week by Idea Village.  It’s a business plan competition with a $100,000 grant to the winning business along with services by many other New Orleans area firms.

The competition is designed to attract new start-ups to New Orleans or to seed local start-ups with the expressed intent of providing good jobs for 23-35 year old’s in the city.

At the competition launch on Thursday night at Tipitina’s, representatives from Google were on hand to throw their support behind the competition.  They included a promise to promote the compeition on YouTube which potentially will draw quite a bit of attention.  An interesting component of the competition is its emphasis on a video component to the submission process.  This is a trend that I see continuing to grow, we submitted a video application as part of our TechCrunch50 conference application.

The evening’s highlight was the unveiling of a short film produced by Trumpet and directed by Benjamin Reece promoting the rising to the challenge of entrepreneurship in the new New Orleans.  Ben has emerged in the last several months as one of New Orleans’s brightest young talents along with his partner Tung Ly.  His short film 50 People 1 Question has drawn attention all over the world, and he directed a inspiring short for the 504ward that you can watch below. You should come see him speak at the next Net2NO meetup. (Who is that guy in the opening shot I wonder.)

504ward Promotional Film from Benjamin Reece on Vimeo.

I am very excited about the interest and support in the New Orleans start-up community right now, and this is just another example of great things happening.  Though the award will likely have a national applicant pool, I really hope that many bright young New Orleanian’s apply for the grant.  I feel a sense of pride and a competitive desire to show that this award can be won by a home grown business that will benefit New Orleans, that great businesses don’t just have to locate a satellite office here, but that they can be born here.  My personal challenge to local start-ups is that we take this award home ourselves.  Let’s make it happen NOLA.

Learn more about the 504ward, read the complete rules, and apply. Applications are due December 4th.

There are some cool things going on around here that I wanted to share:

• Lafayette CampFiber - Saturday, October 4 - As I’ve mentioned previously, excitement is in the air in Lafayette with the fiber network that is being installed as we speak.  With this as a theme, Geoff Daily has been spearheading the BarCamp-style event planned for the October 4th.  This is the second BarCamp in Louisiana and already has a lot of people registering.  I was hoping to do a VC 101 talk, but have a wedding that weekend.  Will Donaldson is going to lead the discussion.  Get over to Lafayette for this great unconference.  Register on the wiki or through Eventbright.

• NetSquared NO Meetup - Tuesday, September 2 @ 7pm - Jessica Rohloff is rocking out the social media + nonprofit focus of NetSquared by getting this event kicked off right here in New Orleans.  The location is TBD, but should be a great group.  I’ll be leading a discussion on what New Orleans Non-Profits can learn from Web 2.0 - blogging, community building, brand authenticity & transparency. This is going to be a lot of fun.  Sign up on the Meetup site.

• Jelly Co-Working - Friday, August 29 - Benjamin Reese is getting Jelly, a national collective of co-working initiatives off the ground here in NOLA.  If you haven’t heard of co-working, its a way for those of us who work alone “virtually” either from an office or at home, to get together with other human’s every once in a while and have a conversation in person, not just over twitter.  We’re going to try to do one right here at Voodoo next Friday!  Register on the wiki if you think you can make it.  Free wifi and coffee, and maybe we’ll get some beer for the afternoon.

Hope you can make it to all of these, its exciting to see the Louisiana Tech community gelling this way.

Take note: these are all “open source” community initiatives.  We’re getting it together down here, and its by the contribution that we all make.  We get out of it what we put in. Let’s build it together.