One reason the tech ecosystem isn’t growing the way it could

Photo provided by United Way

By Alma Kadragic

Since arriving in Miami three years ago, I’ve been hearing about the developing technology ecosystem, spurred by eMerge Americas and bolstered by funding from the Knight Foundation.

I’ve been a believer, having attended the past three eMerge conferences, each year bigger with more entrepreneurs participating and tech companies sponsoring, and followed the growth of The Lab Miami, Venture Hive, WIN Lab Miami, Endeavor and other organizations dedicated to building the tech ecosystem here.

But Tuesday morning I attended a session of the Toqueville Society, a networking and fundraising arm of United Way where a group of corporate leaders invest a considerable amount to attend and hear significant speakers.

The speaker Tuesday was Jim McKelvey, co-founder of Square, and founder of the nonprofit LaunchCode. He came to talk about his challenges establishing LaunchCode in South Florida, which according to a recent survey is among the worst metropolitan areas in the U.S. for technology development.

Just three years ago, McKelvey founded LaunchCode in his hometown of St. Louis. He trained 400 people to code – a process that takes six months, he says - and was able to find what became permanent jobs for 40 or 10 percent of them by calling CEOs of companies like Boeing and Anheiser-Busch.

That same method hasn’t worked here. Somehow, McKelvey says due to his own mistake, LaunchCode became identified as a charity and instead of CEOs, he or Matt Mawhinney, the head of LaunchCode in Miami, are sent to HR departments and community relations officers, none of whom understand what LaunchCode has to offer and that some of those trained through LaunchCode could become top level IT employees even though they lack traditional credentials.

All this while, says McKelvey, at least 500 well-paying IT jobs go unfilled here. One reason is that traditional hires are based on academic record, graduation from a respectable institution of higher education, and so on. He has spent enough time in Silicon Valley where not only stars like Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates never completed college but also many top employees whose names we don’t know draw six figure salaries and stock options, sometimes going straight from high school to high tech employment.

Perhaps because the tech ecosystem is so new in South Florida, few people in a position to hire are ready for disruptive hires of people who never graduated from college or do not have a resume full of enlightened volunteer activities.

One of the reasons McKelvey came to the Toqueville Society was to ask the approximately 40 people there to each contact the CEO of a top organization in South Florida and tell that person what LaunchCode has to offer. Maybe this kind of indirect approach will work and help connect good jobs and trained coders.

For more information on LaunchCode, go to launchcode.org/Miami.

Alma Kadragic is president of Alcat Communications International and president of the Miami chapter of the National Association of Women Business Owners (NAWBO). Follow here on Twitter @almakad.