Retrospective of South Florida’s startup community

As I drove home last night from Craig Agra­noff’s “Pizza Tweetup”, I took a stroll down mem­ory lane and thought of how far we’d come along as a com­mu­nity in three and a half years.

When I moved back to Miami, there were no new media mee­tups to speak of. I missed the Stormhoek geek din­ner in May 2006, which was a one-off, and judg­ing from the pic­tures, it looks like more jet-setters made it to the party than geeks.

Miami’s blog­gers, web devel­op­ers, design­ers and startup com­mu­nity in gen­eral mostly kept to them­selves. Soon after I moved back, I lamented (April 2006):

“The South Florida blog­ging scene seems very laid back, as you might expect with the mix of great weather, beach­ing and boat­ing … and per­haps a more con­ser­v­a­tive, “South­ern” lifestyle. Rel­a­tive to Paris, there seem to be fewer local blogs and no events to speak of”

As I look back now, that sin­gle blog post set off a chain of events in my life which led to the cre­ation of four main meetup groups and the devel­op­ment of our vibrant com­mu­nity of new media pro­fes­sion­als  (see Craig’s post: “South Florida has no tech com­mu­nity?”). These include Refresh­Mi­ami, Bar­Camp Miami, Mobile Mon­day Miami, and Social Media Club South Florida.

An hour or so after I lamented on my blog back then, Lori Leach Forster — a web designer I have not met and who has sub­se­quently moved to Geor­gia — com­mented on my post and intro­duced me online to Brian Bres­lin, with whom I co-organize Refresh­Mi­ami. I wanted to set up a reg­u­lar event and Brian spoke of cre­at­ing a local chap­ter of Refresh­ing Cities. Although I hadn’t heard of Refresh, hav­ing lived in Paris and Lon­don for the past decade, it sounded like a good fit.

After a few months and many long threads on Google Groups, five of us showed up for our first meetup at a Starbuck’s on South Beach; we should have known bet­ter than to sched­ule a meetup in Miami  at noon on a sunny Spring Sat­ur­day! From that inaus­pi­cious begin­ning, Brian and I grew the orga­ni­za­tion to its cur­rent mem­ber­ship of over 1,500 South Florida web pro­fes­sion­als and star­tups. Our monthly events gather 130 par­tic­i­pants, on aver­age, and have become a hub to meet new peo­ple, cre­ate friend­ships, and find job oppor­tu­ni­ties. Refresh­Mi­ami is held on the last Wednes­day of the month. If you’re in town, you’re wel­come to attend.

Five months later, I set the wheels in motion to develop Miami’s first  Bar­Camp. I had met Chris Messina at the first Bar­Camp in Paris and loved the expe­ri­ence and the con­cept of a “user-generated con­fer­ence,” where par­tic­i­pants cre­ate their own learn­ing expe­ri­ence. Pro­fes­sor Kim Grin­feder of the Uni­ver­sity of Miami School of Com­mu­ni­ca­tion helped secure space and spon­sor­ship, and we held the event in Feb­ru­ary 2007. About 60 peo­ple attended, 5 com­pa­nies spon­sored, 15 par­tic­i­pants pre­sented, and The Miami Her­ald wrote up a nice arti­cle about it (archived). I have since orga­nized two more Bar­Camps, one in Feb­ru­ary 2008, with  300 peo­ple, 15 spon­sors and 35 pre­sen­ta­tions, and this year’s event, which counted 600 par­tic­i­pants, 38 spon­sors and 70 pre­sen­ta­tions. The com­mu­nity has embraced the Bar­Camp­Mi­ami con­cept and sim­i­lar events have recently been held or are in the works, includ­ing Laid­Of­f­Camp Miami and REBar­Camp Miami (Real Estate).

After last year’s Bar­Camp, I started up a local chap­ter of  Mobile Mon­day Miami and invited Jeff Sass and Flo­rian Seroussi to the board. Why Mobile Mon­day? I had worked for a num­ber of years in mobile con­tent dis­tri­b­u­tion and had enjoyed attend­ing MoMo mee­tups in Paris. Although our first meetup in Miami was about as well attended as the first Refresh­Mi­ami meetup, we held three more club meet­ings that year, includ­ing an excel­lent evening at Nokia Latin America’s Head­quar­ters orga­nized by Michael Tange­man. Michael and I fired up the club again this year and legit­imized it by for­mally sign­ing with the inter­na­tional orga­ni­za­tion. We’ve had some great events this year and club mem­ber­ship is grow­ing. MoMo­Mi­ami mee­tups atten­dance aver­ages about 45 peo­ple. Start­ing in August, MoMo Miami will be held on the first Mon­day of the month, unless we sched­ule a meetup adja­cent to a local mobile con­fer­ence. We are still  dis­cov­er­ing our mobile ecosys­tem and are eager to meet you at one of our events.

Over the last few years, I had been talk­ing to and exchang­ing emails with Chris Heuer, Founder of  the national orga­ni­za­tion of Social Media Club, about found­ing a local chap­ter in South Florida. There had been two pre­vi­ous attempts to set up a Social Media Club locally, but they had not panned out. I was work­ing at Scrap­blog at the time and would run into Chris at var­i­ous web con­fer­ences, includ­ing Web 2.0 Expo in San Fran­cisco and Blo­gOr­lando. We shared an obvi­ous pas­sion for social media tech­nolo­gies and impli­ca­tions for business.

In the Fall of 2008, I founded the local chap­ter of the Social Media Club of South Florida and we started hold­ing our monthly mee­tups, which have grown from an aver­age of 30 peo­ple per event in the begin­ning to over 100 peo­ple recently.

Nearly a year later, the Social Media Club of South Florida is a dynamic com­mu­nity of pro­fes­sion­als from all types of busi­nesses who meet monthly to learn about social media best prac­tices and case stud­ies. Club mee­tups are sched­uled for the sec­ond Tues­days of the month and we’d love to see you there.

All of my work was social media related and I could see work­ing pro­fes­sion­als try­ing to under­stand the sub­ject. For exam­ple, Scrap­blog shared office space with one of the top 5 global pub­lic rela­tions firms; I could see the PR pro­fes­sion­als’ long-term pro­gres­sion in under­stand­ing social media, from ini­tial dis­missal to grudg­ing accep­tance to imple­ment­ing social media ini­tia­tives for clients. I saw the same thing at the uni­ver­sity, where I taught one of the first full-semester courses on the sub­ject in the nation, to Uni­ver­sity of Miami School of Com­mu­ni­ca­tion stu­dents major­ing in jour­nal­ism and in pub­lic rela­tions (and work­shops for pro­fes­sors). I had also co-founded a startup with Brian Bres­lin, StartPR, which pro­vides an online hosted ser­vice for social media track­ing and blog­ger relations.

As I stroll down mem­ory lane, my thoughts are on:

Serendip­ity — How a sin­gle blog post changed the course of my life and opened up a whole uni­verse of pos­si­bil­ity and opportunity.

Com­mu­nity — The unique sense of belong­ing that only comes from cre­at­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties for others.

Trans­for­ma­tion — Not only in terms of per­sonal growth, but in par­tic­u­lar I’m think­ing about the trans­for­ma­tion of the com­mu­nity into a more wel­com­ing region for tech­nol­o­gists and star­tups. We’re not there yet, but it’s a far cry from three years ago.

Grat­i­tutde –For the innu­mer­able peo­ple and resources that came into place at the right time to make these ini­tia­tives possible.

The future — We’ve only just started build­ing a viable tech­nol­ogy future for the region; there are many more chal­lenges on the way as we vie for the atten­tion of our local media, of the city, and of investors.

One step at a time.