About a month after Jared Taylor decided to move from Boston to St. Petersburg, his belongings were packed, and he made the cross-country trek.
It would be a major leap for any founder, but especially Taylor, who’s the CEO and founder of a medtech company — an area where Boston is king.
“I just loved the area and got sick of the snow,” Taylor said in an interview with Tampa Bay Inno, adding he did have some family already in the Sunshine State. “I read a lot of what was happening down here, and the entrepreneur ecosystem was starting to be built. Boston was an established ecosystem, and Tampa Bay was on the rise; I wanted to be part of the new ecosystem being built.”
The bet has seemed to pay off for Taylor, whose company, BlocHealth, was just acquired by St. Louis-based SteadyMD. The deal was completed for an undisclosed amount.
BlocHealth will remain its own brand while serving under the SteadyMD umbrella, which boasts more than 100 employees. SteadyMD is a B2B telehealth infrastructure provider, while BlocHealth offers a health care professional credential sharing network powered through blockchain and its technology. Taylor will become president of BlocHealth and senior VP at SteadyMD.
“The licensing and credentialing platform developed by BlocHealth will play a key role in helping us scale our clinician workforce even more efficiently to better serve patients and our partners,” said Guy Friedman, SteadyMD’s co-founder and CEO, in a statement.
BlocHealth, founded in 2017, is housed in the Rising Tide Innovation Center in downtown St. Petersburg. While 90% of BlocHealth is remote, Taylor believes in building a presence locally.
“It matters where we’re headquartered. We look at factors like, is it a good ecosystem? Are there supportive people?” he said.
While the Tampa Bay ecosystem has a stronghold in national attention, Taylor believes it can take a few notes from the larger Boston tech scene.
“If I wanted to pitch investors, I’d walk just down the road — but I think we can have the same ecosystem here,” he said. He believes there need to be weekly startup-focused events connecting Tampa and St. Pete across the bridge. “And we have to be able to get to a point where there is more knowledge being shared and more opportunities for guidance.”
He hopes to provide some of that guidance now that the exit is finalized. Taylor is open to serving as an investor for startups, admitting he’s partial to those in his medtech industry. There’s also potential for coaching, he said.
“I definitely want to get more involved; it’s been such a busy last five years, especially the last two with everything that came from the pandemic and subsequent growth,” he said. “Moving forward, I would love to be more involved in the ecosystem we’ve had here.”
