The road to NOEW: Mike Massey’s backpack report

From March 20 – 27, New Orleans’ annual business festival, New Orleans Entrepreneur Week, returns. The week of programming, centered upon innovation and entrepreneurship, will culminate in the crowd-driven pitch contest The Big Idea. In partnership with The Idea Village and its blog, #IDEAinsider, NolaVie presents “The Road to NOEW,” a month-long series highlighting some of the entrepreneurs who will be showcased this year.

Mike Massey’s backpack content. (Photo: Robert Warren)

Though unilaterally innovative and driven, members of New Orleans’ entrepreneurial community are an eclectic bunch in their backgrounds, the premises of their ventures, their appearances. One unifying aesthetic among the city’s varied composition of entrepreneurs is the eponymous ’trep backpack.

With New Orleans-based entrepreneurs serving as celebrities in their own right during NOEW, we want to know: What exactly goes inside their overstuffed backpacks?

NolaVie has asked some of the entrepreneurs participating in NOEW to reveal the contents of their backpacks and tell us a little bit about why these items are staples in their bags.

Today, we hear from Mike Massey, the co-founder of Locally.com — an online platform based around the pressing need and demand for buying locally produced goods, connecting shoppers from any American zip code to merchants and a variety of products in their area — about the contents of his backpack.

1) Microsoft Surface – The most versatile tablet/full computer; at 2 lbs, it keeps me connected to absolutely everything for 10 hours.

2) Backup Charger – 10-hour days of heavy voice and data traffic kills my phone – so I keep a charger ‘just in case.’

3) 100 Biz Cards – I hand them out like crazy.

4) Notebook – I write down notes about meetings and thoughts that come to mind all day long.

5) ID and Amex – I can travel anywhere with these two things. It’s the first and last thing I check before I leave my house.