Roughly 20,000 people, ranging from entrepreneurs and investors to government and higher education officials, came together to once again prove the Florida innovation ecosystem is flourishing.
The two day technology and innovation focused conference spanned April 20 and 21st in Miami. It was founded in 2014 by Manny Medina, who sold his company, Terremark, in 2012 to Verizon Communications for $1.4 billion.
"It started out of frustration, having founded a tech company and it being very difficult to hire, get funding — everything you take for granted today," Medina said to the full room of attendees. "The idea was how to move this forward."
Artificial intelligence reigned king at this year's conference, contrasted with last year's all-in focus on cryptocurrency and bitcoin. One of the keynotes, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, took the stage on day two to unpack the future of AI with Miami Mayor Francis Suarez.
"I was a grad student, however many decades ago, and AI was really hot. But none of it worked," Schmidt said. "30 years later, there was an explosion in 2011. All of a sudden computers got better at vision than humans and then better at games than humans."
The conference started with former Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady, who has dipped his toe into the tech entrepreneur space with his NFT company, Autograph. While his Q&A largely centered on his football career, the advice was applicable to the hundreds of entrepreneurs in the room.
"I worked every day to be the best I could be — not to be the best, but the best I could be," he said. "You get to choose the thing you get to be the best at. Pick something you really enjoy doing, work really hard at it, and I promise you’ll get good at it.”
The conference, tech expo and trade show had dozens of panels with experts from across the state. We sat in on several and gathered some of the key takeaways below.
On becoming a unicorn
"I think the things that matter are listening to your customers, figuring out their problems, solving that and charging money for it," said Auston Bunsen, co-founder of QuickNode, a Miami-based web3 development platform. "If you can find a problem you can solve better than anyone else, you can charge a lot more money for it and have higher gross margins, which makes people super interested in your company."
On working together
"Businesses need to make sure how important a successful local community is," Kaseya CEO Fred Voccola said. Voccola recently made headlines when Kaseya – an IT and security management company – snagged the naming rights to the now-called Kaseya Center, which hosts the Miami Heat. "People don't have to agree on everything; they have to agree on working to solve problems. We have something unique here. We have pragmatic people trying to solve problems — I don't know how you manufacture that, but it's also in everyone’s self-interest to do this."
On building an investor relationship
"Only take money from investors you trust — if you don't trust your investor, they won't trust you," said Dami Osunsanya, director of the Softbank Opportunity Fund. "We’re betting on something unlikely but could be huge. The goal is to have conversations throughout the process so that when something bad happens, you can lean on them. Write monthly written investor updates — whether things are going well or not. That cadence of continuous conversation will build trust. It's never too late; if you haven't started the relationship, go ahead and call them, have the dinners, have the email convo."
On what investors look for
"For something to be impactful at scale, it has to be sustainable — not that it has an environmental impact, but it makes sense and makes money," said Jackie Kossman, partner at Oakland, California-based Congruent Ventures. "When I look at early-stage founders, it's, ‘How does this company build a durable business that’s impactful? How does it change people’s lives?’ What we consume and how do we have it become an enduring venture scale business."
On the future of AI
"The best current use may not be the most useful for many of you, but it's finishing programming," Eric Schmidt, Google's former CEO and co-author of The Age of AI: And Our Human Future. "At some point, the programmer will be able to describe what they want, and the system will be able to write the whole program, which is a very very big deal. The thing to do is not pause but build more solutions now and get individuals and government to agree on them."
On future growth industries in Florida
"With space, it will dominate a lot state-wide. What is starting to bubble up is the Florida High Tech Corridor (which spans the I-4 corridor from Orlando to Tampa)," said Laura DiBella, president and CEO of Enterprise Florida. "And it hasn’t been advertised that Florida is going after the semiconductor area. We have initiatives occurring to position ourselves in that industry. There will be a lot in the central core in Orlando, but we're talking with companies from Tampa, Miami, Jacksonville — all over."
