Podcast
It's Baton Rouge: Out to Lunch
Hosted by ItsBatonRouge.la · EN
OUT TO LUNCH finds Baton Rouge Business Report Editor Stephanie Riegel combining her hard news journalist skills and food background: conducting business over lunch. Baton Rouge has long had a storied history of politics being conducted over meals, now the Capital Region has an equivalent culinary home for business: Mansur's. Each week Stephanie holds court over lunch at Mansur's and invites members of the Baton Rouge business community to join her. You can also hear the show on WRKF 89.3FM.
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Bucking The Trend In Baton Rouge
2d ago00:34:20Tap to summarizeThe media industry is having a rough decade. Newspapers are closing and local TV stations are being consolidated by distant owners. The advertising dollars that used to fund local journalism have mostly migrated to platforms that have no particular interest in what’s happening in your neighborhood. But, along with a number of other trends you can probably name, Baton Rouge isn’t following the rules. Brandon Foreman is CEO of Family Resource Group, a Baton Rouge company that has been connecting families to this community for over 30 years with its “Parents Magazine.” Today Family Resource Group publishes nine brands across seven markets — from Baton Rouge and New Orleans to Denver, Cincinnati, Birmingham and beyond — and has expanded well beyond print into digital campaigns, podcasts, and technology tools for advertisers. Brandon came to FRG through a somewhat unlikely route. His background is in technology — he ran a software company, a broadband internet provider in New Orleans, and launched several other ventures before arriving at the helm of a media company. He and his wife Amy, who is a publisher, received the 2024 Spaht Scholar Award from the East Baton Rouge Parish Library for their work championing literacy and education. When Brandon’s not running around taking care of business, he’s probably in the air. He’s a licensed pilot, and says the skies are where he does some of his best thinking. André Moreau literally needs no introduction. He's a celebrity. A Baton Rouge native and LSU graduate, Andre started his career as a fundraiser at a university, decided at 27 that wasn’t the right fit, walked into television, and spent the next 40-plus years anchoring the news. Andre was the lead sports anchor at WAFB for years, then left for Columbus, Detroit, Los Angeles and San Diego before coming home to Baton Rouge in 2008. He co-anchored the top-rated newscasts at WAFB with Donna Britt, then spent years as anchor and managing editor at Louisiana Public Broadcasting. Andre has an Emmy, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Louisiana Association of Broadcasters, and a Special Achievement Award for his coverage of Louisiana’s coastal crisis. He’s covered hurricanes, earthquakes, Stanley Cup parades, NBA championship parades, presidents, and yes, a pope. He retired from LPB in June 2023. By March 2025 he was back on the air at Louisiana First News. He says he missed being plugged in. He missed the scoop. Local media is under real pressure right now. Stations are being bought by companies that have never set foot in Louisiana. Print advertising keeps shrinking. The economic model that paid for local journalism for a century is still being worked out. Yet, here we are in Baton Rouge, bucking the trend. Brandon is betting that if you build media around a community rather than just broadcasting at it — events, partnerships, publications people actually want in their homes — the business will follow. And André continues his 40 years of believing that local news matters to a community. Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs on the Boulevard. You can find photos from this show at itsbatonrouge.com.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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HR Pickleball
1w ago00:28:05Tap to summarizeWhen was the last time you started a new job? Do you remember what the onboarding was like? The paperwork, the benefits forms, the direct deposit setup, the login credentials that didn’t work yet? Today there’s a whole industry built around making that whole process way less painful — and my first guest today runs one of those companies, right here in Baton Rouge. Craig Broome is a Baton Rouge native who thought he was going to law school. He got interested in employment law at LSU and ended up in human resources instead — landing an HR role at a chemical plant during his senior year. That turned into a career, which eventually led him to a Baton Rouge HR and payroll company called ESS. And then in 2016, he partnered with the Sternberg family to launch Highflyer HR. Along the way Craig served in the Marine Corps Reserve from 1994 to 2001 as a heavy machine gunner — which is not a detail you expect from someone who runs a payroll company, but there it is. Highflyer processes payroll for roughly 25,000 employees a week. It serves about 500 clients across 40 states, and has grown from Craig working alone to a 25-person team. The company works with businesses from five employees to over 5,000 — their range includes everything from restaurants and retailers to fire departments and industrial operations. Craig says the goal was never to just sell payroll software. It was to figure out where a business’s people systems were breaking down and fix theme. Another way people connect and gather is over their love of sports. I'm thinking of pickleball. If you haven’t played it yet, you probably know someone who can’t stop talking about it. Xander Triay is the Founder of Baton Rouge’s only pickleball facility - it’s called Electric Pickle. Electric Pickle opened in late 2025 with six outdoor pickleball courts. Open play sessions regularly draw 30 to 40 people. The venue welcomes about a thousand visitors a month. The restaurant and bar menu is built around a few signature items, including a roast beef po-boy based on a family recipe and, yes, house-made pickles. Xander grew up on the Northshore, near Fontainebleau State Park, and spent almost ten years with Chick-fil-A — in leadership roles, working on corporate initiatives, traveling the country to help open new locations. His plan was to eventually run his own store. But that path required a lot of travel, and Xander wanted to stay closer to family. His sister is in Baton Rouge, and when developer Dyke Nelson reached out about a new concept coming to Electric Depot in Mid City, Xander was in. Xander will tell you he’s not really a pickleball person — he’s an operations person. But he’s pretty clear about what Electric Pickle is actually for: it’s a neighborhood place that happens to have courts, not a sports facility that happens to have a bar. Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs on the Boulevard. You can find photos from this show by Ian Ledo and Miranda Albarez at itsbatonrouge.com.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Down On The Fly Farm
2w ago00:28:30Tap to summarizeHere’s a number that I keep coming back to. American restaurants throw away somewhere between 22 and 33 billion pounds of food every year. To put a price tag on it, that’s about $162 billion in food costs that just disappear. That’s before the restaurant makes a single dime. I’ve been thinking about that number since I started putting today’s show together, because both of my guests have something to say about it — just from very different places. My first guest is Kristen Smith. She and her husband Tre started a food truck in the middle of a pandemic, and they’ve been figuring out the food business ever since. Kristen runs the operations side — the compliance, the systems, the strategy. She’s not someone who wastes much. Resources or time. Kristen was born right here in Baton Rouge, grew up partly in Illinois when her dad’s job took the family north for a stretch, and came back to Louisiana through Teach For America in 2014, working in East Feliciana Parish schools. Her husband Tre was in the kitchen — working as executive chef at Little Village Downtown. When the pandemic hit, Tre got laid off. Around that same time, family came through with $20,000 to help them take a shot at the thing they’d always talked about. They drove up to Ohio, bought a food truck, and came home and launched Tre’s Street Kitchen in late 2020. Two weeks in, state restrictions changed again and they had to pivot almost immediately. For months they worked out of grocery store parking lots. Things have changed a lot since then. Tre was actually a guest on this show in 2023 — so much has happened since, we thought it was worth having Kristen come in and bring us up to date. They’ve done concessions at LSU, a Garth Brooks concert, a sauce line that went from their website to airport retail. And they’re now working toward a brick-and-mortar restaurant and grocery distribution by the end of the year. David Fluker grew up in the insect business — his family runs Fluker Farms in Port Allen, which has been supplying live insects to the reptile and research markets for decades. So he’s not someone who needed to be talked into bugs. What he needed was the right idea. That came from a friend who showed him fish waste being broken down by black soldier flies. The concept stuck with him for years while he kept working. Eventually, with researchers at Texas A&M and a grad student from South Africa, he launched Soldier Fly Technologies in 2015. The company processes organic waste — manure, produce scraps, feed mill byproducts — using black soldier fly larvae that turn all that material into animal feed and agricultural products. What David learned — and a lot of his competitors didn’t — is that growing insects at scale is really an operations problem as much as a biology problem. So Soldier Fly Technologies built its own breeding systems and production software, and now licenses all of that internationally. He has active projects in Mexico, Panama, El Salvador and California. He also helped start the North American Coalition for Insect Agriculture, which works with regulators as the industry gets sorted out. Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs on the Boulevard. You can find photos from this show by Ian Ledo and Miranda Albarez at itsbatonrouge.com.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Speed Food and Love
May 1700:31:44Tap to summarizeMiranda Albarez hosts this edition of Out to Lunch. If there’s one thing that has consistently evolved as society has progressed over the millennia, it’s the speed we do things. Every year, people’s patience grows thinner and attention spans, smaller. And with the invention of these tiny computers that we keep in our pockets 24/7, we no longer take in life without first viewing it through the screen. Most of us have probably heard the phrases “phone eats first” or “Hold on, I need a video of this before you mess it up”. As a byproduct of “progress” for increased production, we have lost much of what many consider makes for a “full” life. We’re always sharing, always needing the scoop, always moving. But are we truly living? At the end of the day, no matter what speed humanity moves, we still have basic needs to meet whether or not we feel like we have the time. And that’s where my two lunch guests today come in. While many entrepreneurs and businesses would find a way to encourage people to slow down, my guests are finding ways to catch up with people in their daily lives and run alongside them. Speed Bancroft has been chasing startup ideas for years, but Speedy Eats may just be the one that stuck. Originally from Monroe, Speed came to Baton Rouge after years in Jackson, Mississippi, drawn by what he saw as a stronger ecosystem for entrepreneurs. He launched Speedy Eats in 2017, but the concept began a year earlier in his living room, where he started building an automated hamburger vending prototype. That idea eventually evolved into an automated pizza concept, and in 2019 the company raised capital to develop its first-generation system. The original model was built around automated pizza stores, but after an unsuccessful crowdfunding campaign in 2022 and ongoing capital challenges, Speed made a major pivot. Instead of building full restaurant-style automated stores, he focused on what he thought was a more scalable model: automated outdoor walk-up and drive-thru food vending units. That pivot—he says—may have saved the company. Now, these aren’t your everyday vending machines. There are two major concepts: A 10-foot by 3-foot walk-up store and a larger 30-foot by 8-foot automated drive-thru. The vision focuses on serving hot, homestyle meals in areas where other traditional restaurants can’t go. Unlike traditional restaurants, the units don’t require water or sewer infrastructure, allowing them to operate in places most food businesses can’t— think industrial corridors, rural highways and underserved roadside locations. Speed sees that as a major opportunity. There is still traffic where there’s no food, and Speedy Eats can go where others can’t. The company has locations planned at Ole Miss, in Iowa, and near the Meta data center construction site in Holly Ridge, Louisiana. Hannah Wilson is founder of Red Stick Speed Dating. Originally from the Chicago area, Hannah came south for LSU, fell in love with Baton Rouge and began working remotely while living in New Orleans. As a content creator and she was documenting her dating life online through her Mimosas and Lipstick social channels and talking openly about frustrations with dating apps. One experience, in particular—a “Hey girl” message alerting her that a man she was seeing was also dating someone else—became a turning point. She started asking a simple question: If the apps aren’t working, where do people actually meet? That led her to launch Speed Dating NOLA in April 2024, and later expand into Baton Rouge in October of 2025. Hannah has now produced over 20 speed dating events in the Baton Rouge area and hosts two to four per month. Typical events include: 15 to 20 participants with men’s and women’s groups balanced as evenly as possible. She organizes events for different age brackets, anywhere from 20s to 60s, as well as heterosexual and LGBTQ-focused events. Hannah is a one-woman show—from venue coordination and check-in to event facilitation and match follow-up. Every event is adjusted based on the venue, age group and crowd dynamic. Red Stick Speed Dating also isn’t just about selling romance as much as creating structured social opportunity. Even when participants don’t meet a romantic match, many leave having made a friend or simply feeling more confident after trying something new. Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs on the Boulevard. You can find photos from this show by Ian Ledo and Miranda Albarez at itsbatonrouge.com.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Bikes and Buses
May 1000:27:00Tap to summarizeThere’s a particular kind of business story that you can really only tell about Louisiana. It usually starts with somebody who barely had two nickels to rub together, an idea that almost nobody else took seriously, and a lot of stubbornness. It almost never starts in a glass tower in a major metropolis. It starts in places like a front yard near LSU. Or in a small office somewhere on the way to the oil patch. Both of my lunch guests today are Louisiana people who built something out of, more or less, nothing. One of them runs a national company that has 400 vehicles, 25 offices around the country, and was a Super Bowl LIX vendor. He started it the year after he graduated from LSU. The other one runs a nonprofit in Mid City Baton Rouge that began with one neighborhood kid showing up at his front door asking him to fix a bike. Today it has worked on more than 10,000 bikes, and is the centerpiece of a $2 million renovation of a former church and rug shop on Government Street. Both of these guys are in their thirties. Both went to LSU. And both of them have grown their organizations far faster, and far further, than anybody would have predicted when they started. Corey Rosales is a New Orleans native who came to Baton Rouge for college and then stayed long enough to start a company. He graduated from LSU with a degree in petroleum engineering in 2018. A year later, in 2019, he founded American Safety. American Safety started out as an environmental response and industrial services company. Then COVID happened, and a record-breaking hurricane season happened, and Corey kept saying yes to opportunities. Today American Safety is a multi-division operation – industrial services, environmental response, disaster relief, and transportation. They have 25 offices, more than 400 vehicles, and somewhere between 300 and 500 employees, depending on the time of year. They were a vendor at Super Bowl LIX in New Orleans, where they moved more than 10,000 people during the event. They’re now the official transportation partner of the New Orleans Saints and the Pelicans. And, as part of their expansion, they recently acquired Baton Rouge–based Dixieland Tours. The President and CEO of American Safety is Corey Rosales. In 2010, Dustin LaFont was a recent LSU graduate, an AmeriCorps alum, and a middle school history teacher in East Baton Rouge Parish. He had grown up biking to school in Houma, and he commuted by bike at LSU to save money on gas and parking. In his spare time he’d sit in his front yard fixing up old bikes. One day a kid from the neighborhood came up to him and asked if he could fix his bike. Then more kids showed up. Then more. The neighbors started calling it “the front yard bike shop.” Dustin made it a nonprofit. After two years of running it on top of teaching, he quit his teaching job to do it full time. That nonprofit is called Front Yard Bikes. It’s now the largest community bike shop in Louisiana. Kids ages 6 to 18 earn credits by learning bike mechanics, welding, gardening, cooking, and cycling safety, and they apply those credits toward a bike of their own. Older kids can move into paid internships and earn job certifications in mechanics. In 2022, CNN named Dustin a CNN Hero. In 2023, City Year gave him their national Alumni Leadership Award. And right now, on Government Street in Mid City, Dustin and three other Baton Rouge nonprofits are in the middle of a $2 million build-out of a place called Youth City Lab – a former church and rug shop they’re turning into a bike shop, a performance stage, a barber shop and library, and a community gathering place for young people. The Founder and Executive Director of Front Yard Bikes is Dustin LaFont. There’s a tendency, when we talk about Baton Rouge business, to look toward the big oil and gas companies, the chemical plants, the institutions on the river. And those are real, and they matter. But the story of Baton Rouge is also Corey Rosales – a kid from New Orleans who came here for college and ended up running a transportation and disaster response company that helped move 10,000 people through Super Bowl LIX. And it’s also Dustin LaFont – a kid from Houma who came here for college and ended up creating a youth workforce development program in his front yard that now occupies an entire renovated block on Government Street. Both of these entrepreneuras are doing what Louisiana, at its best, has always done – they saw a need, they said yes, and then figured out the rest as they went. Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs on the Boulevard. You can find photos from this show by Ian Ledo and Miranda Albarez at itsbatonrouge.com.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Home Sweet Homes
Apr 1900:28:30Tap to summarizeHow many companies do you think are involved in building a single house? Take a guess. Five? Ten? Maybe twenty? Fifty-three. On average, fifty-three different companies touch a single home before anyone moves in — foundation crews, electricians, plumbers, pest control, lighting specialists, insurers. Karen Profita represents all of them. She runs the Home Builders Association of Greater Baton Rouge, the largest homebuilders association in Louisiana and the 25th largest in the country. Karen came to the homebuilding industry through a side door. After COVID disrupted her work at Audubon Nature Institute, she briefly pursued an idea for a seafood industry incubator — extracting collagen from crab shells, that kind of thing — that never quite got off the ground. A conversation at the Parade of Homes led her to an open position at HBA GBR. She says it was the rare job that combined everything she actually cares about: real estate, business advocacy and supporting local entrepreneurs. HBA GBR has more than 800 members across every corner of the residential construction industry. Sara Landry West, owner of South Coast Organizers, helps people figure out where things go in the homes they build, buy, or rent. Sara spent nearly eight years teaching first grade — mostly in charter schools. She was good at it but the hours were long and the breaks were short. So, during the 2018–2019 school year she made a decision: she left over Christmas break and didn’t go back. Sara spent the first months of 2019 doing what every new business owner has to do — filing the LLC, building a website, practicing on friends’ homes for free so she’d have photos to show people. Within a few months she had paying clients she’d never met before. South Coast Organizers has now worked with nearly 200 clients — people moving, people grieving, people who just had a baby and can’t find anything any more. The projects look beautiful on Instagram — the before-and-after photos, the labeled bins, the pantries that somehow fit everything — but Sara says what you don’t see is the heavy lifting, both literal and otherwise. Organizing is the easy part. Walking into someone’s home under stressful circumstances requires a different skill set than most people expect from a professional organizer. Karen and Sara, are both in the business of "home." Karen spends your days advocating for the people who build homes, trying to keep the cost of those homes from getting further out of reach. Sara helps people through the moves and the losses and the general accumulation of life — inside their closet, with their things, helping them figure out where everything goes. You can build a house, but you ultimately have to make it a home. Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs on the Boulevard. You can find photos from this show by Ian Ledo and Miranda Albarez at itsbatonrouge.com.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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The Don & Susan Show
Apr 1200:28:00Tap to summarizeIn Hollywood, power couples from the 30s, 40s, and 50s, icons like Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, and Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, exemplified glamour both on and off the screen. At the pinnacle of their careers, these romantic couples were closely followed and adored by movie-goers, capturing the public’s imagination during a Golden Age of film. Today, power couples are more often found on smaller screens, not in a seductive embrace but wielding power tools while knocking down interior walls or building decks. I’m thinking of course of the husband and wife teams on popular home decor and renovation shows, couples like Dave and Jenny Marrs of “Fixer to Fabulous,” and Egypt Sherrod and Mike Jackson of “Married to Real Estate.” You might not have ever heard of Don and Susan Charlet, co-owners of the home decor and furniture gallery The Corbel, but you can be sure that in social circles from Zachary to St. Francisville, Don and Susan are a local power couple. Don Charlet is no stranger to entrepreneurship—he worked in the family funeral home business for the first decade of his career. Then in 2000, with his brother, Don launched Charlet Brothers Construction, a custom residential homebuilder and remodeler responsible for some of the first homes built in the Copper Mill neighborhood. In 2003, Don and Susan opened The Corbel on Highway 61 between Zachary and St. Francisville. Then, after 20 years of business, they relocated The Corbel to downtown St. Francisville where the curated home goods and antique furniture shop became the anchor store for a multi-business redevelopment project called North Commerce. Today, North Commerce includes The Corbel, boutiques Barlow and Deyo, the eight-room Hotel Toussaint, event venue Mallory, a pizza restaurant and a microbrewery. Starting a business is stressful and challenging under most circumstances. What often determines whether a business succeeds or fails is the commitment and perseverance of the business partners. With 5 successful businesses and a lifetime of memories in marriage, it’s safe to say Don & Susan have struck the right balance for success. Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs on the Boulevard. You can find photos from this show by Ian Ledo & Miranda Albarez at itsbatonrouge.com.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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My Original Plan Was...
Apr 500:29:10Tap to summarizeThere’s a line I keep hearing from people who run small businesses in Baton Rouge. It goes something like: I didn’t plan this. I was doing something else, I saw a gap, and I walked through it. Norisha Kirts Glover has a degree in mass communication and an MPA. She spent years in nonprofit fundraising in Washington, D.C. and California. In 2015 she walked through a door marked “commercial construction” — an industry where women and people of color were barely present — and decided that was exactly where she needed to be. Norisha is originally from the Alexandria area. She came to LSU for college and stayed. In 2015, an opportunity came along to enter commercial construction. She researched it, noticed that women and people of color were dramatically underrepresented, and decided to launch NRK Construction anyway — or maybe because of that. The firm picked up early traction after the 2016 floods, working through extensive residential renovation before moving deeper into commercial work. NRK is intentionally small — three to four employees, about $3 million in annual revenue, with two major projects at a time. Norisha says that’s not a limitation; it’s a choice. Her superintendent is on every job site and every client meeting comes with an agenda. Norisha’s aiming next at healthcare, education and federal contracting. Ralph Whalen grew up in New Orleans, studied English at Dartmouth, and has tried to leave Louisiana several times. Chicago, New Hampshire. He keeps coming back. Ralph started his career implementing Epic — the electronic health records platform that runs inside most major hospitals — and worked his way up to Senior Vice President at a healthcare IT firm called Divurgent. In September 2020, he launched Benzait, a consulting firm that helps hospitals and health systems figure out how to adopt artificial intelligence responsibly. Benzait works with medium to large health systems, building the governance frameworks and technical infrastructure that AI actually requires before it goes anywhere near a patient. Ralph says the biggest problem in healthcare AI right now isn’t a lack of technology — it’s organizations rushing to adopt it before they’ve figured out what problem they’re trying to solve. His job, a lot of the time, is to slow people down just enough to get it right. Ralph and Norisha both entered rooms where the conventional wisdom said they didn’t quite belong — a woman in commercial construction, an English major in healthcare tech — and found that being the unexpected person in the room turned out to be an advantage. Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs on the Boulevard. You can find photos from this show by Ian Ledo and Miranda Albarez at itsbatonrouge.com.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Tech Never Sleeps
Mar 2200:29:55Tap to summarizeThink about the last time you showed your ID. Maybe at the airport, maybe at a bar, maybe somewhere you had to prove you were who you said you were. You pulled out a card. A piece of plastic. Maybe it was a little beat up. Maybe the photo was from ten years ago. There’s a decent chance that if you live in Louisiana, you’ve also used a phone to do that. That digital driver’s license on your phone — that was built right here, in Baton Rouge, by a company called Envoc. Calvin Fabre built it. Calvin is a long-time friend of Out to Lunch: he's made multiple appearances on this show over the years as he's developed his company, and some of Louisiana's most advanced tech. He's been writing code since he was 12 years old — 1978, give or take — when he got an Atari 800 and discovered that he could make a computer do exactly what he told it to do. He has essentially been doing that ever since. Calvin studied computer science at Southeastern Louisiana University and built Envoc into a software firm that now works on some of the most consequential identity technology in the country. You may know Envoc best as the company behind LA Wallet — Louisiana’s digital driver’s license. Calvin divested the IP on that about a year ago, but the work continues: he’s now sitting at international standards meetings with Apple, Samsung, Google, and representatives from Hong Kong, New Zealand and Canada, working out what digital identity should look like everywhere. He’s also thinking carefully about who gets left behind when identity goes digital — seniors, low-income users, people who don’t trust the technology or can’t easily access it. For Calvin, that’s not an afterthought. It’s the whole point. Samantha Morgan started her career as a journalist — arts writing, then Hurricane Katrina turned it into hard news overnight, then broadcast, then the BP oil spill, then digital. Eventually she stopped working for other people’s newsrooms and started her own production company - Quick Flip Media. She says she named it after a phrase she repeated every day for twenty years in television: flip it quick. Samantha is a Baton Rouge native — Old Goodwood, specifically — who has tried to leave more than once. She jokes that the natural disasters keep pulling her back. Calvin and Samantha have both ended up running their own business after years of building something for someone else. And in both cases, the reason seems to be the same: the problem was too interesting to leave to other people. Calvin has been at this long enough that he was building software before most of the people who use it were born. Samantha has covered enough Louisiana history that she has a personal archive most newsrooms would envy. Not surprisingly, neither one of them are done. Because, after all, tech never sleeps. Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs on the Boulevard. You can find photos from this show by Ian Ledo and Miranda Albarez at itsbatonrouge.com.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Apps Born In Baton Rouge
Mar 1400:28:10Tap to summarizeI’m Amy Irvin, host of Out to Lunch in Baton Rouge. I was a college student once. A long time ago. And like a lot of college students, I picked some of my classes based on the professor. Word of mouth, mostly. What my friends said. Whether the 8 a.m. course section was worth getting out of bed for or not. These days, there’s a website that tries to do that systematically. You’ve probably heard of it. Rate My Professor. And if you’ve ever spent time on it, you might have noticed it’s also a place where students settle scores, write reviews about a professor’s appearance, and occasionally make things up entirely. My lunch guest, Nash Mahmoud, noticed the same thing. He happens to be a professor. He also happens to be a software engineer. So he built something better. Nash came to the United States from Jordan in 2008 to pursue a graduate degree at Mississippi State. He got his master’s, then his PhD, then a tenure-track faculty offer at LSU — and somewhere along the way between learning his way around campus, walking to football games, and dining at local spots around town, Baton Rouge became home. He’s been teaching software engineering at LSU for the better part of a decade. A few years ago, while advising nearly 40 students at once, he started paying close attention to how they were using Rate My Professor to make decisions about their education. What he saw bothered him: anonymous reviews, no way to verify whether the reviewer was even a real student, bias against female faculty, and a single bad comment that could follow a professor for years. Nash spent a couple of years researching the problem. Then he started coding. On March 14th, 2024 — Pi Day — Nash launched Professor Index, a verified, AI-powered professor review platform designed to reduce misinformation and bias. It’s now live at 20 universities and has more than 3,500 downloads. Professor Index has become so popular that students are sending in requests to add more campuses faster than he can keep up. My other lunch guest, Courtney Sparkman, taught himself to code because a problem at his job was driving him crazy and he couldn’t find anyone else to fix it. He was running security companies, then. Now he runs a software company that serves 700 of them. Courtney is from Chicago and moved to Baton Rouge when his wife — his fiancée at the time — got a job here after pharmacy school. He says the thing that surprised him most about Baton Rouge was how welcoming the city is to newcomers. Courtney is a self-described serial entrepreneur. Before coming to Baton Rouge, he helped his father build a security guard company from the ground up — zero employees to about 300, and several million dollars in revenue — before they sold it. Then he went to work for a larger security firm and immediately recognized every problem he thought he’d left behind: guards showing up late, incident reports written hours after the fact, supervisors with no real-time visibility into what was happening in the field. Courtney taught himself to code and built the solution himself. It’s called OfficerApps. OfficerApps launched in 2013. Today, OfficerApps serves about 700 security companies, from five-person operations to firms with thousands of officers in the field. Nash and Courtney have both figured out — the hard way, mostly — that building the thing is only the beginning. Getting people to use it, trust it, and tell someone else about it: that’s the actual work. Nash launched his Professor Index app on Pi Day and is now traveling to college campuses to make the case in person. And in Courtney's case, besides being the software developer he also answers OfficerApps support calls himself so customers know somebody’s there. Neither of these fathers of apps born in Baton Rouge planned it quite the way it happened. That turns out to be a pretty common feature of good ideas. Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs on the Boulevard. You can find photos from this show by Ian Ledo and Miranda Albarez at itsbatonrouge.com. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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