Meet the tech entrepreneur helping Louisiana companies grow | Business News

Tony Zanders is taking the lessons he learned as a tech entrepreneur and applying them to his new job helping Louisiana startup companies get off the ground.

Zanders is a native of New Orleans and founder of Baton Rouge-based Skilltype Inc., a software platform that allows libraries to develop and share expertise. In the six years since its founding, more than 200 libraries, archives and museums across the U.S., Canada, U.K., Australia and Israel have adopted the platform.  

In February, he was selected to become president and CEO of Nexus Louisiana, the nonprofit business development organization designed to help high tech companies grow by connecting them to capital, resources and talent. It operates the Louisiana Technology Park, a business incubator in the middle of Baton Rouge, and, until Zanders’ hiring, was without a permanent president and CEO for nearly three years.  

In his short tenure at the helm, Zanders has already launched a number of new programs aimed at reinvigorating the organization. They include the Nexus Technology Cup, which will showcase the latest software and hardware being developed across the state. The competition is open to high school and college students, along with tech enthusiasts. 

“There is a strong appetite for change,” he said. “There’s a lot of excitement around what’s possible.”

In this week’s Talking Business, Zanders discusses how he sees Nexus serving as a resource for tech entrepreneurs across Louisiana and the potential for fledgling local businesses to solve major real world problems. 

What do Louisiana tech entrepreneurs say they need?

When you talk to the founders, the initial perception is that if only they had the money, if only they had that investment, everything would be OK. But lack of money or capital is not the problem. Galvanizing tech talent is the main challenge we have. Louisiana has bright minds in STEM fields. But they haven’t been exposed to this idea that they can use their skills — not just to go work a 9-to-5 job at Dow Chemical or Exxon, but to bring something into existence to solve a modern problem like the amount of carbon that we’re releasing into the air. The main issue we have here in Louisiana is not a lack of talent, but awareness around how those skills can be used to create new solutions to difficult problems.

You want Nexus Louisiana to be the vehicle for this sort of thing. Elaborate on that.

Our responsibility is to keep a pulse on what is the most advanced technology of our day and educate our community, our universities, even our high schools on the problems that can be solved through their skills and the projects they’re working on. We don’t need another dating app or another app to find crawfish. We need you using your attention span and your technical ability to solve real world problems. And Louisiana is ripe with problems.

We offer programs. We have a curriculum, and the output of those programs is a person who is equipped to take an idea and commercialize that idea and bring it to market using technology. We have one of the most diverse cohorts of technology builders in the state at Nexus, who can help you be successful in your endeavor to build that new technology. They come from oil and gas, the petrochemical industry, higher education.

You look at Nexus as being a statewide organization, not just a Baton Rouge thing?

I look at us as being Baton Rouge-based, Baton Rouge-centric, but the audience that we market to and provide services to, can come from any of the 64 parishes. If you’re willing to come to us, we will support you in that journey. We have people coming to Baton Rouge every week from New Orleans, from Lafayette and from Lake Charles.

What’s your goal for five years from now? Where would you like to see Nexus go next?

My assumption and hypothesis is that we have the people and the talent here. When they wake up in the morning and go to school or go to work, they simply don’t view themselves as technology entrepreneurs. My goal is to activate these bright minds, these really talented technical people, to make them realize they can help us solve some of our most difficult problems here in our state. I think by 2030 we can have a 1,000 technology founders here, locally, who have come through Baton Rouge. They may go back to Ruston, they may go back to Thibodaux to build their business. But our capital region is uniquely equipped to create an experience to prepare them for this journey. 

How are you applying the lessons you learned at Skilltype to this job?

I don’t come from wealth or means. I didn’t inherit anything, but I was able to talk to over 300 potential customers about Skilltype in the early days and convince nine of them to fund our research and development.  I’m really structuring our team, our programs and our services to deliver these insights at scale. We have stakeholders like LSU and Southern, and I want to do more work with our local high schools in Baton Rouge who are doing the hard work of training that next generation.

I think a lot of students sitting in class right now on a Thursday morning, like today, they may not understand the point of what they are studying. If I could only share one message with them, it would be that, we need you to get an A in this class. You may not realize why, but if you get an A in this math class and this science class. If you stay after school for a few more hours and work on this robotics project, you’re going to help our state be competitive on an international scale. I think Nexus can help support our teachers and our school administrators to connect the dots.