From Will Weinraub, CEO of LiveNinja
Dear Mayor Levine,
This week you shed a spotlight on the Miami Beach startup community and spoke on its behalf to a nationwide audience.
Unfortunately, the comments you made are inaccurate and completely contradict the immense efforts and progress many of your city’s residents have made to make South Florida, a place where early stage technology companies could be built.
The first issue, I and many of my peers have with your comments, is that you carved out and isolated Miami Beach as its own community in the tech scene.
That’s not how it works when it comes to establishing a “hub” or a collective community where entrepreneurial activity can flourish.
If you look at all the work that’s been put in these past couple of years to make South Florida a place where technology companies today are built - it’s not about an individual city, or a territory in particular, but about the collective efforts of like-minded people, and the most successful technology regions in the country think similarly.
San Francisco, San Jose, Palo Alto, Mountain View, and Menlo Park represent a unified community called Silicon Valley. That’s the model. Cities band together and when the people who are active in pushing forward our community talk about Miami as a startup scene, we do not think in territories or in individual cities. In the future, when speaking about the technology community here, I respectfully request that you do the same and represent us accurately.
In the minds of the community, our scene stretches from Miami Beach to Miami, Wynwood to Brickell/Downtown, Coral Gables to Coconut Grove...and the list goes on.
Effectively, your words just deterred all of those prospective Washington Post readers (a nationwide audience) outside of Miami (who are not able differentiate between Miami and Miami Beach) from considering South Florida as a viable and attractive place to start a tech company.
The problem is only locals understand that difference of municipality, while many folks who live outside of Florida do not. To many across the world, Miami/Miami Beach is thought of as the same city.
Heck, the national media still thinks that LeBron James and the Miami Heat play in SouthBeach!
The fact of the matter is, your comments go directly against what many passionate people in both Miami and Miami Beach have worked tirelessly to achieve, such as non-profit Refresh Miami and The Knight Foundation. We have been acting this entire time as one community and we will continue to do so.