new-orleans
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Main Squeeze makes a habit out of healthy
A reluctant vegetable eater saw a franchise in a Louisiana juice bar. The harder trick was turning fresh produce, local service, and a very particular smoothie into something repeatable.
Scott Wolfe Jr. and the unfinished business of getting paid
He grew up working in grocery stores, built Levelset around contractors’ payment problems, and sold the company to Procore for approximately $500 million. Now Scott Wolfe Jr. is back at the contract table as CEO of AIA Contract Documents.
Evan Kirkham and the trouble with a good idea
A Cowboys fan built an app to improve the commentary. Then Evan Kirkham and his co-founders changed the business - and put the customer on the other side of the invoice.
The Publicist Who Knows What Holds a City Together
Denise A. Estopinal has spent her career between New Orleans institutions and the people they serve. Twenty-five years after founding The Estopinal Group, her story runs from City Hall and the federal courts to the women who put on Muses.
Cleveland Spears III Set the Table. New Orleans Needed More Room.
He started a communications firm at 25 and helped turn a friend’s fried chicken idea into a citywide gathering. Cleveland Spears III keeps finding reasons for people to meet - and reasons for New Orleans to benefit when they do.
Rebekah Gee and the art of starting again
A chance meeting at Jazz Fest brought Rebekah Gee to New Orleans. Her next act would take her from a $14 billion public institution to the daily work of building Nest Health.
Entergy’s next act is measured in megawatts
A utility born from sawdust now supplies the Gulf South’s digital ambitions. Its hardest problem is making a bigger grid work for the people already paying for it.
Drew Marsh and the arithmetic of keeping the lights on
He spent 24 years inside Entergy before becoming its CEO. Now Drew Marsh is trying to make the Gulf South’s appetite for electricity add up for the people who already live there.
Sevetri Wilson and the work that stays behind
A consultant can leave. The work cannot. From a Louisiana services firm to Resilia, Sevetri Wilson built a career around that problem - and is carrying its lessons into her next chapter.
John McNamara and the business of staying the course
From a California wire factory to a New Orleans investment firm, John McNamara has built a career around helping businesses take their next step. His other investments include a tuition-free school, seventh-grade financial lessons, and time at the finish line.
Levelset found the missing link between doing the work and getting paid
A missing waiver can hold up a perfectly good invoice. Levelset built a business around that awkward fact - and Procore bought it for approximately $500 million.
Ted Elliott Wants Software to Ship Before Dinner
After 18 years building software inside the Salesforce ecosystem, Copado’s CEO has reduced the future of DevOps to two human ambitions: fewer broken releases and more dinners at home.
Charlie Schaefer Left the Clubhouse and Built a Pack
He left a 13-year design career at Ralph Lauren with fabric on his mind, a wolf for a symbol and no appetite for timid golf clothes. A decade later, Greyson is still selling the same proposition: dress for the life beyond the course.
Henry Chassaignac Built a Career by Making Creative Work Accountable
The copywriter who opened Zehnder's Nashville office now runs the employee-owned agency. His career is a study in joining a good line with a hard number.
The Advertising Agency That Put Its Future on the Payroll
Zehnder Communications survived Katrina, built an analytics habit before it was fashionable, and made its employees the owners. Thirty years in, its most interesting product may be the way the agency itself is designed.
The Agency That Needed a Bigger Park
Spears Group found its most persuasive case study by inventing a festival, watching 40,000 people arrive, and realizing the venue was the first thing its marketing had broken.
Gambel Communications Knows the Person Who Knows the Person
The Metairie PR firm has spent 17 years turning a very New Orleans asset - knowing whom to call, and why they might care - into campaigns that move votes, registrations and millions of charitable dollars.
The Firm That Explains the Levee
For 25 years, Denise Estopinal has made a business of translating civic machinery into ordinary language. The work is rarely glamorous, but when the subject is a levee, a streetcar or a live power project, clarity becomes a form of infrastructure.
The Idea Village wants your startup to grow - and stay
A New Orleans nonprofit has built a route from a first business idea to venture capital. Its most revealing feature is the price of admission: no fee or equity for its flagship accelerator, with investment handled separately.
Imperial Trading
For more than a century, a New Orleans wholesaler has quietly kept America's corner stores stocked. Now Imperial Trading is betting that the future of the convenience store isn't the shelf - it's the kitchen.
Nest Health
Nest Health is a New Orleans-based value-based care company that brings primary medical, behavioral, and social care directly into the homes of families on Medicaid. Founded in 2021 by Dr. Rebekah Gee and Rebecca Kavoussi, the company offers 24/7 in-home and virtual visits at no additional cost to eligible families, treating the whole household - children, parents, and postpartum mothers - under one roof. Its model has reduced emergency room use, doubled vaccination rates, and delivered a two-to-one return for payer partners across Louisiana and Arizona.
Justin Wohlstadter
Justin Wohlstadter is the founder and CEO of Waldo, a New Orleans-based AI research platform that helps marketing agencies and brands get smart fast for pitches, brand strategy, and creative work. Before Waldo, he spent nearly a decade running Wonder (AskWonder.com), an on-demand human research service powered by thousands of analysts worldwide, and earlier co-founded BOLDstart Ventures, where he backed companies later acquired by Google, LinkedIn, Salesforce, and Akamai. A Harvard and Oxford graduate who wrote his master's dissertation on how the internet would reshape access to education, he has spent his entire career chasing one obsession: making it faster for a curious person to know more than they did a minute ago.
Tulane University
Tulane University is a private research university in New Orleans, Louisiana, founded in 1834 as the Medical College of Louisiana to fight cholera and yellow fever. Now one of 71 members of the Association of American Universities, it enrolls roughly 14,000-15,000 students across schools spanning medicine, public health and tropical medicine, law, architecture, business, science and engineering, social work and liberal arts. Known for a deep service ethic - it became the first major U.S. research university to require public service for graduation after Hurricane Katrina - Tulane pairs high-level research with a distinctive New Orleans culture.
Rebekah Gee
Dr. Rebekah Gee is the founder and CEO of Nest Health, the first value-based primary, behavioral, and social care provider built for whole families on Medicaid, delivered through house calls and virtual visits from a base in New Orleans. An obstetrician-gynecologist and health-policy researcher, she ran the Louisiana Department of Health from 2016 to 2020, where she led Medicaid expansion and pioneered a subscription drug-payment model for hepatitis C. She was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2017 and now runs a startup that has raised a $22.5M Series A to scale care for the families the system tends to forget.