Silicon Bayou Rising

TL;DR: In 2012, I turned down opportunities in New York to start a company in New Orleans, seven years after Katrina. This is the story of building Apptitude in a city that was rebuilding itself, and what that taught me about resilience, community, and building things that matter.

The Choice

In 2012, I had two options on the table. One was a comfortable path in New York, where everyone I knew in tech was heading. Brooklyn was booming. The startup scene was dense with funding, talent, and press coverage. It was the obvious move.

The other was New Orleans.

Seven years after Katrina, the city was still rebuilding. The tech scene was small, scrappy, and mostly ignored by the coasts. But something about it pulled me. I’d visited a few times and felt an energy that New York didn’t have. Not the energy of status and competition, but the energy of people building because things needed to be built. There was work to do, and the people doing it actually knew each other.

I picked New Orleans. Most people told me I was making a mistake.

Starting Apptitude

I founded Apptitude as a mobile-first shop. This was 2012, and mobile was still a frontier. Most businesses didn’t have apps. The ones that did were mostly bad ports of their websites. I saw a gap between what mobile could do and what people were building, and I wanted to fill it.

The early days were unglamorous. I was writing proposals during the day, writing code at night, and learning how to run a business in the gaps. New Orleans didn’t have a deep bench of mobile developers, so I had to build the team from scratch, often training people up from adjacent skills. What we lacked in headcount we made up for in focus. We didn’t have the luxury of building things that didn’t work.

Our first real clients were local businesses and regional companies that needed mobile done right, fast, and without the Bay Area price tag. We delivered. Word spread. Within a couple of years, we were working with national brands and Fortune 500 companies, building the kinds of apps and systems that people actually relied on.

What New Orleans Taught Me

Resilience is a design principle. When you build in a city that has been through catastrophic failure, you think differently about systems. You plan for the flood. You build with recovery in mind. That mindset carried straight into how I build software today.

Community beats competition. In a smaller market, collaboration isn’t optional. You share leads, recommend competitors when the fit is better, and invest in making the local ecosystem stronger because a rising tide lifts everyone. The status games that dominate bigger tech hubs simply didn’t exist.

Place matters more than people admit. There’s a reason startups cluster in certain cities, and it’s not just about talent pools and funding. It’s about the culture of the place. New Orleans gave me permission to build something with meaning, not just something with growth metrics. That changed what I valued in my work.

Leaving and What Stayed With Me

I moved to Charlotte eventually, for family reasons. But New Orleans is still in everything I build. The bias toward resilience. The preference for community over competition. The belief that the work should matter, not just scale.

Apptitude still carries that DNA. We build production systems for real problems, not pitch decks for theoretical ones. We got that from New Orleans.

Key Takeaways

The “obvious” choice isn’t always the right one. Building outside the major hubs forces you to be resourceful and focused in ways that comfortable markets don’t.
Small markets force genuine collaboration. That’s a feature, not a limitation.
Resilience as a design principle applies to companies and code. Plan for failure. Build for recovery.
Culture shapes product. Where you build affects what you build and how you think about the people using it.
Meaning compounds. Building things that matter keeps you going longer than building things that scale.