Each week Michael Hecht, President and CEO of GNO Inc, visits the show to discuss business happenings around the New Orleans area. Michael explains how the city is a great spot for startups and new businesses of any kind to succeed, and it’s those companies that continually infuse money into the city. With much of the Crescent City’s economic success tied to the hospitality industry, he recognizes the importance of proper law enforcement so the city can pull off a safe Mardi Gras, Jazz Fest, and other big events.
We saw a very positive press conference by the Mayor on Tuesday trying to accommodate all the Mardi Gras krewes. You can never make everybody totally happy, but everyone gave up a little bit. Mayor Cantrell’s message had an ‘all hands on deck’ tone to make sure Mardi Gras happens in 2022.
I think that there is recognition that economically and psychologically, we absolutely need to have Mardi Gras, and we need to have Jazz Fest. I'm glad that this has been kind of taken up now as a political imperative. We got to figure out a way to move forward… we're seeing that COVID is becoming endemic. If you kind of look at the data in South Africa right now, hospitalizations have gone from 19% under Delta to about 2% under the Omicron variant. The virus is becoming smarter, it's becoming more pervasive, but less deadly, and that means that we're gonna learn how to live with it.
We've created a culture right now that we have to break out of, whether it's ‘defund the police’ or ‘reimagine’ laws. Human capital matters in a law enforcement business. When we don't have the human capital, these parades and the routes suffer.
We rely on our NOPD for so many reasons. People are beginning to recognize the importance of public safety for everyone and they're beginning to vote with that in mind. London Breed, the Mayor of San Francisco has changed her position on how they're dealing with drug abuse, homelessness, and street crime. She said that some people aren’t going to like what I'm going to do, but it's the right thing to do and I don't care. I think the pendulum is beginning to swing back a bit, and that's probably a good thing.
I read that IMOTO, a real estate images firm, was bought by a larger company. That company's track seems really interesting.
IMOTO is one of these firms that goes around and snaps photos of your house so you can sell it. I think it shows there's a lot of cash out there, that there are a lot of companies that have money on their books and they're looking to put it to productive use. It also shows a recognition of quality, national scale companies in the New Orleans region that are worthy of purchasing and rolling up to help make national and global firms bigger and stronger. This all speaks to this flywheel of entrepreneurship. When you have these companies that start here and then they're acquired, it creates cash, which creates the next generation of entrepreneurs, the next generation of philanthropists and the next set of companies. This is what's supposed to happen.
I think one of the things that’s held New Orleans back for a long time is that the culture was more about wealth preservation than it was about wealth creation. When you had this culture of wealth creation, the spinoffs are vast, but when you have a culture of wealth preservation, there are no spinoffs.
Man, you said it! When granddad sits you down on his knee and says, your job is not to screw it up, then all you're doing is preserving your empire of dirt and you're not growing a garden. I was talking to a woman who's been in Austin, Texas since the 1970s the other day and we were talking about the story of Austin. My understanding of what made Austin what it is today was the growth of Dell Computers. The woman told me it was Dell and the Dell-ionares, all of the people that cashed out of Dell Computers, who went on to start their own companies and start their own venture capital firms. New wealth, new companies, new philanthropy, new jobs are how you begin to get real momentum. I think that's why it's an exciting moment for us in New Orleans, particularly in a post COVID environment, where workers can now live and work anywhere. If you could live and work in a place like Greater New Orleans as opposed to New York, or San Francisco and have a good company to work for - you would do it.
