It's New Orleans: Out to Lunch

You may have heard people who started up businesses talking about how they found investors. Typically, they’ll say something like, “We pitched our idea and raised X amount.”

It sounds simple. But when you dig a little deeper, delivering a successful pitch to investors is not quite as straightforward as describing your business as “The Uber of dating” or “Air BnB for pets.” Financing a start...

There are countless myths and reports throughout human history of places where spirits come down to earth. Where the intangible meets the material world. In the US, there are few places that better demonstrate this crossroads than New Orleans. 

People have tried to explain how the joy of living here triumphs over everyday things like dysfunction and potholes, with slogans like “The Big Easy,” and “The city th...

In the 1800’s Thomas Edison invented, among other things, the light bulb, the record player, and the first motion picture capture device which paved the way for the birth of movies.

Was Thomas Edison a genius? In response to that question Edison said, “Genius is one percent inspiration and 99% perspiration.”

Meaning, you can have a great idea, but you also have to have the tenacity and work ethic to bring it to li...

Maybe this has happened to you. You stumble onto a great new show on Netflix - and when you tell your friends about it, everybody seems to know about it already. But for some reason you never got the memo.

Peter's lunch guests today don’t have shows on Netflix, but they both have unique stories and successful businesses that maybe you know all about, but in Peter's orbit they’ve flown under the radar. Until now.

Haley S...

I’m going to hit you with some statistics. About women.

Here’s the first one: Around 50% of the population in the US are women. You probably knew that one. 

Here’s another one. Women-owned businesses. According to the National Association of Women Business Owners, 42% of existing US businesses are owned by women. So, pretty good. Right?

Now, we move on to entrepreneurs. This one’s not so good. Of all th...

People typically get invited onto shows like this because they’re successful. So, it will come as no surprise to you that my two guests on Out to Lunch today have success stories. What might surprise you, is the magnitude of their success.

Cathy Deano is the founder of Painting With a Twist. It’s a pretty simple concept: you get one or two friends together, you go to a Painting With A Twist studio, you get given a canva...

If you’re a visual artist and you have an idea for something you want to create, there’s not much standing between you and making your vision a reality. Maybe just a piece of paper and a pencil.

However, if your idea for a new creation is a business, well, things are a bit more complex. If you grew up in a community or a family who were not business-people, or you didn’t get a business education, you might have li...

You can do a lot with money.

After you’ve spent it on necessities like food, housing, and education, if you’ve got money to spare you can buy stuff.

Or, you can use your excess money to make more money.

There are fundamentally two ways of doing this. Investing. And gambling. There are people who will argue that those two are actually the same. It’ll be interesting to see if my lunch guests today draw any similarit...

We use numbers to measure all kinds of things. Inches, pounds, degrees, birthdays…

Numbers that denote height, weight, and temperature, are culturally neutral. Numbers that measure years are not. We give select numbers of years special  significance. 18, you can vote. 21, you can buy alcohol. 65 you can collect social security.

We regard numbers that measure decades as milestones. One hundred is the big one. 50 years - ...

Not too long ago, people who had an office job talked about “being chained to a desk.” Today, a desk job is the most liberating of all employment options. Your desk can be at your house, in a coffee shop, in your van, or at what’s come to be called a “co-working space.”

Co-working spaces are typically modeled after the re-imagined office that was born back in the day when Google and Facebook were start...

In most cities in the US, after you’ve blown it out on New Year’s Eve, if you want another socially approved excuse to party you have to wait a bit. Memorial Day is 5 months away. At best you might be able to get away with Spring Break – that’s about 4 months.

Here in New Orleans, you have less than a week till the next round of society-sanctioned excessive eating, drinking and socializing begins. January 6t...

We’ve long known, in the US, that our global economic advantage rests on an educated workforce. To that end, a couple of generations ago, America was virtually alone in providing free, readily available high school education.

As knowledge-based industries have grown, so has the demand for a higher-educated workforce. Today, over 60% of US high school graduates go on to college. That’s almost twice the number of other OE...

New Orleans has given the world all kinds of music. We refer to ourselves as the birthplace of jazz. We’re one of the principal breeding grounds of funk, bounce, and brass band music. And then there’s a style of piano playing that’s so identifiably from here it’s simply called, “New Orleans piano.”

Generations of legendary New Orleans piano players became identified with the places they played. F...

If you’re not a musician, you might occasionally think how great it would be to be a musician. If you are a musician, you might occasionally think how great it must have been to be in The Beatles.

New Orleanian Bruce Spizer is not a musician. He’s a lawyer and an accountant. But, not only has he occasionally thought how great it must have been to be in The Beatles, he’s written 16 books about them.

Bruce is a worl...

Hi, it's Peter Ricchiuti. I’ve got a scenario I want to run by you, and I want your opinion.

Here’s the situation: It’s morning. I get ready to leave the house. I pick out an outfit, get dressed, I look great. Then my wife says, “You can’t go out looking like that. That shirt doesn’t go with those pants. That tie is hideous. And 1998 called and wants its jacket back.”

So, here’s my qu...

When you’re talking with someone and they want to know what final conclusion you want them to draw from your conversation, they might ask you, “What’s the bottom line?”

The origin of the term, “the bottom line,” is business accounting. It refers to the literal bottom line of a financial statement - a company’s profit or loss. This literal bottom line is what we typically regard as the sole point of a business: the bigger the profit...

When we text each other we use acronyms and abbreviations like OMG and LOL to convey meaning and emotion. And then there’s IRL – In Real Life. We use that to signal that we know the difference between the digital universe and reality.

Online, you can play a first-person-shooter game with other people. In real life, you can join the US military and learn to use an M4 assault rifle. It’s the standard issue weapon designed to shoot an...

The common wisdom we’re taught when starting up a business is, “Solve a problem that needs solving.” But the truly exceptional success stories of our time have not followed this advice.

When Coca Cola came along, nobody who was enjoying a long, cool glass of lemonade was clamoring for a sweet, syrupy, brown drink. When Uber came along people weren’t fantasizing about getting into a car with a total stranger. And when Jeff Bezos sta...

What is fear?

Fear is a natural response to a perception of danger. All creatures on earth have it. We use fear to spur us into action - to run or take other steps to save our lives.

There are many studies listing specific fears of different societies. Believe it or not, here in the United Sates, one of our greatest fears is public speaking. In numerous studies, the fear of public speaking ranks number one – higher even than the fe...