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The five guysmet at a voodoo bar. They remem-
ber it as being in the late 1990s, maybe ’97, a time
when the promise of dollars trailing all that
computer code enticed them to return home,
to provincial New Orleans, and establish their
new lives. They worked in tech, at digital adver-
tising startups or websites. And they met that
night at Loa, with its swirling voodoo spirits, in
the International House hotel, to think up away
to bring even more like-minded friends back to
the Crescent City.
One of the five, a guy named Tim William-
son, pulled out a pen, took a napkin from the
bar and began scribbling notes. What the
tourist-jammed but otherwise commercially starved city needed, he said, was something like an
entrepreneurial incubator, a place where new ideas could develop and the people behind them
would know who to contact for funding at which VC firm or which bank; which academic to tap
for useful case histories; which lawyer to call. In short, New Orleans needed a village to support
good ideas. So Williamson wrote at the top of the napkin, “Idea Village.”
And so it went. The Idea Village launched as a nonprofit in 2000, and 12 years later it’s the reason
whyNewOrleans is the newU.S. businessmecca. Despite the city’s troubles, including
FERTILE
CRESCENT
WITH THE GROWING SUCCESS OF THE
IDEA VILLAGE, A GROUP OF BIG
THINKERS IS TURNING THE BIG EASY
INTOAN ENTREPRENEURIAL MECCA
BY PAUL KIX
HEMISPHERESMAGAZINE.COM
•
JULY 2012
•
ILLUSTRATION BY TIM TOMKINSON
73
INDUSTRY