The sixth edition of New Orleans Entrepreneur Week, expected to draw 5,000 attendees, opened over the weekend with a trio of business pitch contests for youth entrepreneurs, an around-the-clock hackathon aimed at developing technologies for the tourism industry and a half-day session on growing restaurant businesses.
Monday begins the festival’s week of business hours events taking place at Gallier Hall. Events include he $50,000 Water Challenge for entrepreneurs with strategies for managing coastal and water issues, and a talk by Andrew Yang, who founded Venture for America, a twist on Teach for America that deploys college graduates to work in startups across the country in similar fashion as the education group places people in schools.
The Water Challenge, sponsored by the Greater New Orleans Foundation and The Idea Village entrepreneurship hub that produces Entrepreneur Week, includes four startups seeking money to advance their projects. The ventures include an environmentally minded landscaping company, a social journal for people to report potential effects of climate change that they notice, a coastal protection system based on growing oyster beds and a green construction company.
The pitch competition takes place from 3:20 p.m. to 5 p.m. Discussions and exhibits on water management and environmental strategies begin at 9:30 a.m., including an 11:15 a.m. speech by Sen. Mary Landrieu.
Yang, the Venture for America founder, speaks at 3:30 p.m. on the challenge of recruiting talented college graduates to help build startups.
Other events throughout the day include discussions of crowd-funding rules under the federal JOBS Act, public relations strategies for business owners, legal issues facing businesses, learning from failure, how to test business ideas and an event called the Salesforce-Silverline Challenge, which offers a business coaching course to a winning participant.
Speak Your Mind