Eric Danos Talks Business with The Advocate

Eric Danos, company owner and CEO of Danos Ventures, recently spoke to Tony McAuley from The New Orleans Advocate about Danos' growth and how it has planned for the future. Read this excerpt below, or read the full ariticle at Nola.com.

Danos Ventures was set up in February of this year and already has done the kind of transactions you alluded to. These include iCan Technologies, a training tech company spun out of Danos and run by a former employee, David Decuir, which made waves at the New Orleans Entrepreneur Week this year as a finalist in the pitch competition. Then, in March, you bought Wood's Gulf of Mexico offshore labor supply interests. Expand a bit on how Ventures will operate as the Danos umbrella holding company.

My job as head of Ventures is to incubate new opportunities as well as any kind of merger and acquisition activity that helps to grow opportunities on behalf of the family's companies. So, with iCan it came to an inflection point where we thought we could either hold it close and use it as a competitive advantage, or we could offer it to the world. It's now reached the point where David and iCan are like a child we've nurtured. It's ready to go and raise institutional capital and get the kind of expertise that will nurture it and allow it to grow a lot faster than if it was held within the confines of Danos.

And on mergers and acquisitions, what does buying Wood's interests say about how you see the future of the oil and gas industry?

Our view of what we do through Danos Ventures is not diversifying away from oil and gas but diversifying within oil and gas and other forms of energy. We really like the traditional oil and gas business. We think that there's decades of opportunity there. We're not at all fearful of making investments and continuing to be an oil and gas services company. At the same time, we're paying attention to lower carbon energy and alternative sources of energy.

What opportunities in energy do you currently see as most promising?

I think the Permian Basin and Gulf of Mexico are tremendous opportunities. The reason is the Gulf of Mexico leads in oil production with lower emissions than much of the rest of the world. They'll continue to see significant investment and opportunity. The Permian Basin has become an important and significant oil and gas player on the world stage, and there's a lot of investment opportunity there.

In alternative energy, we're watching what happens with solar, and we're doing some work in west Texas and New Mexico in the solar business. Then, there's lots of really fascinating things in south Louisiana in particular with carbon capture and storage, and maybe hydrogen as a future energy source. There's also a lot of talk about reducing emissions, methane emissions in particular.