A Place of Their Own

By Penny Font
Saturday, August 1, 2009
 
It all began nearly a decade ago on a cocktail napkin.

The dream was to create a village where entrepreneurs could work, play and collaborate together.
Now step inside that dream at 643 Magazine St. in New Orleans.

The former headquarters to the prestigious buttoned-up McGlinchey Stafford law firm has been transformed into the 
ultra-hip IP [Intellectual Property] Building, where dogs are welcome during the work day and the bar soon will be serving cocktails. It’s home to six of the city’s most successful entrepreneurial and tech-driven businesses, with room for more.

“From the very beginning, there’s always been this vision of clustering this activity—that you could actually create a village, an idea village; a village of entrepreneurs,” says Tim Williamson, president of Idea Village, which was founded in 2000 to nurture the entrepreneurial community in New Orleans. “The concept being, what if there was this actual physical manifestation of the entrepreneurial community?”

The vestiges of traditional corporate digs have disappeared from this place of their own. There’s a building concierge, whose duties include planning tenant get-togethers—including a Naked Pizza Friday—and who herself is contemplating a start-up business selling candy there. The lobby bears a neon-colored mural of Idea Village. Couches and flat-screens are plentiful. The shared Brainstorm Room is painted completely in white board for jotting down suggestions for the Next Big Thing as they free flow from the minds of those who work here. A fitness spa sits atop the top floor. And the walls of Carrollton Technology Partners pay homage to retro gaming with gigantic images of Donkey Kong.

This ain’t your daddy’s office.

Idea Village and GNO Inc. worked together to bring the IP Building to life. New Orleans born-and-raised developer Brian Gibbs bought the building from McGlinchey Stafford last July, with plans to convert it into apartment housing.

But he changed his mind after Williamson and GNO Inc. President & CEO Michael Hecht came to him with the idea for creating a collaborative office space—not as an incubator, but a home for well-established entrepreneurial firms. Gibbs went to work, and the first tenants set up shop in April.

“There is a nascent creative professional movement in the Greater New Orleans region, and the IP Building is going to be its physical and symbolic center,” Hecht says. “With these top tier firms, the IP creates critical mass, and will both help these companies thrive, and attract new ventures to our region. The IP clearly demonstrates the viability and vibrancy of the creative and digital media industry in our region.”

Tenants include iSeatz, an Inc. 500 online booking firm; TurboSquid, a 3D digital image retailer; Carrollton Technology Partners, a tech development firm; LaunchPad, which helps start-ups get off the ground; and Couhig Partners, a law firm specializing in intellectual property work. Idea Village and playNOLA, which helps young professionals network through sports and recreation, also call it home. CapDeVille, a wine bar/café, is on the way.

Combined, they bring more than 110 
employees and $61 million in revenues.

“We wanted to be in a different, more interesting space,” says TurboSquid CEO Matthew Wisdom. “This building creates a real sense of community. It’s a fascinating space.”

Inside iSeatz, which is on the ground floor of the IP Building, workers can gaze at passers-by through the massive windows, have a meeting on barstools at the break area in the middle of the office, or lounge on couches in front of the big screen. CEO Kenneth Purcell is also the one who pushed for the IP to be dog-friendly.

Michael Bauer, senior vice president for 
distribution and supply for iSeatz, says the move was a smart one for the firm, which previously made its home at Canal Place.

For one thing, it’s an impressive recruiting tool.

“Especially when you’re recruiting from outside the city, everybody has a different idea of what New Orleans is,” Bauer says. “We were at Canal Place in a high rise. This creates a different energy. The people we’re bringing in are young and creative. This building has a unique blend of that, which is what we believe makes a successful organization.”
Adds Chief Information Officer Allen Darnell: “Being in a building with like-minded people, we’re pulling that energy from everybody else.”

The building emerges at a time when such youth and innovation seems to be driving the resurrection of this historic city. For the first time, New Orleans has a majority of voters—138,582 of them—under the age of 45. The largest block—78,000—consists of those ages 21-34.
 
“If you’re a young, bright entrepreneur, New Orleans looks pretty interesting right now,” Williamson says. “There aren’t hundreds of thousands of layoffs; there’s actually a growing, entrepreneurial community. We’ve got our coolness, but there’s also a sense of opportunity here, where because we’re going through a transformation. It’s become a laboratory, really, of innovation and entrepreneurship, and that’s really attracting some folks who might not have considered New Orleans. They’re looking at this being on the ground floor or beginning of a city that’s on a positive wave.”

There’s also awareness along the corridor of the importance of entrepreneurship and innovation as a key component of economic development that didn’t exist ten years ago, when the idea for such a building was hatched.

The IP Building’s founders now are hoping this site will become a beacon for that young, creative talent.

And the concept won’t be limited to New Orleans. Williamson and Hecht have already discussed similar plans for the Northshore, the River Parishes and Baton Rouge. There are also thoughts of bringing top MBA students from across the country to the IP Building to work as a collaborative pool of interns for the firms housed there.

Says Williamson: “A building doesn’t create a community like this. But it can galvanize it.”