Delian Asparouhov was an unlikely origin for an unlikely movement. An MIT dropout, he’s worked for a little over three years at the venture capital firm Founders Fund, led by Peter Thiel and Keith Rabois—two deities of the tech world. Asparouhov, who in 2020 lived in San Francisco, was unconvinced that other U.S. cities could build up the venture capital and entrepreneurial infrastructure San Francisco had accumulated over decades. Thus, he was certain that the Bay Area would remain the undisputed heavyweight of tech. He viewed Miami (and a plethora of other cities touted as The Next Silicon Valley) as “more of a fad.”
However, COVID-19 changed things around San Francisco. Strict lockdown policies and an explosion in remote work started to shrivel the city’s geographic “ace in the hole”: the fact that in the Bay Area, all the people in tech were physically together. Distancing measures and the nearly ubiquitous transfer to virtual meetings dramatically reduced this advantage.
But it wasn’t the large-scale business restrictions that sparked the exodus to Miami. It was, instead, one simple irritant:
Delian Asparouhov could not eat outdoors.
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On a Friday evening, December 6, 2020, Asparouhov discovered that San Francisco would lock down all outdoor dining in the city within 48 hours. A mix of confusion and annoyance struck him—after all, the city government had provided no proof indicating that outdoor dining caused the spread of COVID—and outdoor dining was one of Asparouhov’s last remaining social outlets as he worked to incubate a new startup, Varda Space Industries, in one of America’s most locked-down locales.
About 15 minutes after getting the news, Asparouhov fired off a tweet: “ok guys hear me out, what if we move silicon valley to miami.” Speaking to The Politic, Asparouhov described the tweet as partially sarcastic. He was, at the time, still “relatively critical of the Miami movement.” But the response Asparouhov got changed his perspective. Francis Suarez, the Mayor of Miami, retweeted Asparouhov’s comment with a question: “How can I help?”
The mayor’s reply catalyzed a tremendous positive response from individuals throughout the country’s technology industry. Tech had found its public office champion after what they felt were years of neglect and even outright hostility by Bay Area officials. On one hand, tech leaders felt insulted by San Francisco’s refusal to acknowledge their contributions to the city. One particularly salient example was in 2020, when the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted to condemn the naming of the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, due to its association with Mark Zuckerberg, noted founder of Meta née Facebook. Zuckerberg had donated $75 million to the hospital, and his reward appeared to be a slap in the face, courtesy of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. On the other hand, wealthy tech entrepreneurs have increasingly faced steeper taxes—for example, San Francisco in 2020 approved an “Overpaid Executive Tax.” These entrepreneurs have had a difficult time attracting labor in the high-regulation, high-living-cost environment of the Bay Area.
The tech workers involved in the Miami exodus, like Asparouhov, felt slighted by the anti-tech posture that they felt within San Francisco city limits. But as for Miami, the technology community saw in the Mayor’s tweet a sense of respectfulness and authenticity that seemed to be missing from the attitude of San Francisco officials. This “how can I help” tweet became the tagline of Miami’s campaign to attract tech firms, and embodied what the technology industry saw as a refreshing new attitude of receptiveness.
Asparouhov, the accidental origin of this new movement, reconsidered his “long SF” view. He mused that “perhaps Miami was the better place to build a really large tech community in the next decade.” After the Mayor’s tweet, Twitter and the news media outlets lit up, and the hype firestorm began. One New York Times article sensationally declared “Join Us in Miami! Love, Masters of the Universe.” I, too, wrote an article on the nascent movement in April 2021, Silicon Valley Hits the Beach. Today, a new set of questions has emerged. What continues to attract people to Miami — and how does Miami aim to sustain this growth? Do the government of Miami and the incoming technology firms still hold firm in their declaration of love? Or has their one-night stand come to an end?
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Kevin Ruiz is a Senior Advisor of Business Development & Recruitment at Venture Miami, an initiative that acts as a “concierge” between technology companies and Miami, hoping to attract tech firms by advertising the city’s financial benefits and the promise of dedicated support for businesses.
Unlike the more recent spectators from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, Ruiz does not identify 2020 as the Miami tech movement’s year zero. Instead, he emphasizes that Miami’s resolve to attract technology firms started back in 2010. “A lot of people were building for a very long time, and I want to recognize that,” Ruiz says. It was only after the foundation was firmly established that “Mayor Suarez’s tweet . . . catalyzed everything.”
Jose Vargas, co-founder and president of Healthcare.com, agrees. Vargas, originally from Venezuela, went to school in Miami and has remained in the city for 26 years—working in technology for 20 of those years. Vargas believes that Miami is the “center of the world” – it’s within 6 hours of not only Silicon Valley on the West Coast, but also his own family in Europe and Latin America. Vargas also disagrees with the idea that Miami wasn’t an entrepreneurial town before the recent movement—his previous five successful startups demonstrate that the ability to innovate in Miami has been present for years. According to Vargas, similarly to Ruiz’s viewpoint, the tech growth in Miami has been a “slow change,” recently accelerated. Vargas considers Miami’s rise to prominence “a twenty-year overnight success.”
Ruiz believes that part of this success is the way Miami makes their pitch to companies considering relocation. Miami’s approach is vastly different from that of other major cities. “We try to have a conversation with someone,” he affirmed. In many cases, when cities try to attract businesses, “people read off a deck and talk at someone. We talk to someone. We say, what are you interested in? Let’s connect those dots for you.” Ruiz also noted that his team is primed to connect new arrivals to all aspects of the community, business or otherwise—whatever is most important for them: offices, nonprofits, and schools are all aspects of Miami life that Ruiz can speak on.
In fact, despite the strong economic incentives for a move to Miami —with city sales tax at 7% (lower than New York City, San Francisco, and Chicago), and personal income tax and state corporate tax at 0% and 5.50%, respectively (lower than New York, California, and Illinois)—Ruiz remarked that very few people actually ask him about taxes. Rather, they are more interested in the Miami tech community.
Tech companies in San Francisco, after all, had been stomaching high tax rates for years, but tolerated it because of the ability to interact with the Bay Area’s rich and dynamic community of peers. But once COVID measures they viewed as overly restrictive came into play, many in the tech industry were pushed over the edge. So, they went somewhere else to look for the network they so craved. Miami’s response to COVID differed greatly from San Francisco. Although Miami-Dade County’s COVID deaths per capita far outpace those in San Francisco, the area imposed far fewer restrictions on business and social interaction, allowing more connections to flourish. Ruiz makes it clear he believes that the main reason tech workers are moving to Miami is that “people are just looking for community, and for that receptive nature.” While the low tax rates no doubt help attract companies hoping to pad their bottom line, Ruiz is convinced that Miami’s ability to foster a sense of community in the midst of COVID, which San Francisco has struggled to do, is the main draw.
And Ruiz claims that new arrivals, no matter their origin, are destined to find a home in Miami. Ruiz told The Politic Miami doesn’t “have to try to be inclusive . . . we just are.” 58% of people living in the city are foreign-born, and 20% moved there from somewhere else domestically. What that variety of origin brings to Miami, Ruiz argued, is “a really good community of people who are motivated, that are open, that lend a helping hand – and that all ties together outside of tech, too.” As Vargas relates from firsthand experience, “it feels like everybody’s helping each other, and everybody feels part of a large and successful community.”
Miami’s tech community has been growing strong over the past year as the pandemic has faded. San Francisco, on the other hand, appears to be struggling to revive its network of technology workers. Companies like Meta and Google have only recently moved back into the office, and only in a hybrid format, at that. In contrast, tech companies in Miami, flying under Florida’s more laissez-faire COVID approach, have had few, if any, interruptions to in-person work for over a year.
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“How can I help” was not the beginning nor the end of Miami City Hall’s efforts to grow the tech community in the Magic City. Jose Vargas told The Politic that Mayor Suarez is still working hard to generate buzz around Miami’s technology industry. Vargas himself was in the Mayor’s offices just a few weeks ago at one of Mayor Suarez’s “Cafecito Talks” – conversations between the Mayor and members of the Miami community designed to spotlight businesses that are leading in Miami’s tech ecosystem. It’s a clever way for Miami to show both its citizens and the country at large that City Hall is serious about recognizing the technology community as a force for positive change. Other cities’ politicians, like those in San Francisco, have been reluctant to open their doors to tech tycoons, whose agendas sometimes clash with those of elected officials. This includes, for instance, San Francisco’s aforementioned restrictive approach to COVID regulations.
One of the recent San Francisco-Miami transplants, Zumper co-founder Taylor Glass-Moore, reflected, “It’s very strange what happened in San Francisco . . . it’s not just tech . . . [San Francisco’s] politics are just anti-business.” Yet despite his dissatisfaction, Glass-Moore never actually moved until the pandemic shut down the interactive entrepreneurial scene in San Francisco. When he decided to relocate, he found a great deal of support from Mayor Suarez’s office on everything from office expansion discussions to hiring new employees. “The help was there. It was real,” Glass-Moore said. “The Miami tech scene is here to stay. It’s a rising tide that lifts all boats.”
Whether this claim will hold up remains to be seen. As the “rising tide” phrase exemplifies, tech entrepreneurs who arrive in Miami feeling welcomed by the city often see more of the benefits their industry has to offer than its potential consequences. Of those in the tech industry interviewed, it was Jose Vargas, the 26-year Miami resident, who noted the “growing pains” wrought by the tech influx: traffic and the increase of real estate prices, for instance—new issues with which the local Miami populace has to grapple. The hope, though, is that the arrival of high-tech firms, along with the inflow of investment in these firms, will over time generate substantial net benefit for all of Miami’s citizens.
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Delian Asparouhov, the initial Miami skeptic, believes that despite these “growing pains,” Miami’s future is bright. He can see the proof just looking out his office window, where he points out the dozens of cranes on the skyline. Compared to San Francisco, Asparouhov sees in Miami an “absolutely insane” rate of growth—one that strongly signals Miami will overcome the temporary hike in living costs, and that the city is evolving into a competitive hub of industry.
Even more important to Asparouhov than the physical differences between Miami and Silicon Valley are the contrasts in attitude, in city personality. Asparouhov paints a picture of Miami as a distinctly more pro-America, pro-capitalism region than his former home. “There was not a single American flag in my old neighborhood,” Asparouhov muses, while in Miami, he sees red, white, and blue everywhere. People in Miami, according to Asparouhov, are “thrilled to be in a capitalistic, democratic republic.” In contrast, he believes San Francisco has proven that it “isn’t willing to grow with [the technology industry],” and thus has become disconnected from the spirit of free-market America. By Asparouhov’s estimation, this capitalistic sentiment will greatly contribute to Miami’s success—of course, it also creates an environment that stands to benefit the bottom line of entrepreneurs like Asparouhov, as well.
Mayor Francis Suarez, in an email to The Politic, spoke about City Hall’s actions to ensure Miami’s continued success alongside its burgeoning tech industry: “We’ve stuck to what we do best: keeping taxes low, funding our police, embracing innovation, investing in education, investing in quality of life.” The Mayor believes last year marked the period in which Miami became widely accepted as a hub of technology. Meanwhile, he calls this year “the year of utility and adoption.” Miami has, within the last year, become the adopted home of companies ranging from cryptocurrency startups to institutional investment firms. But, again, like Ruiz and Vargas, the Mayor notes that “this has been a 10 year process catalyzed by a confluence of factors we’ve all experienced throughout the last 2 years. We laid the foundation and put in the legwork and now it’s about executing on the strategy we’ve envisioned.” Asparouhov is grateful for the Mayor’s supportiveness: “he speaks highly of tech, comes to our events, socializes and convinces people to move here,” but aside from that, in line with the free-market paradigm, the Mayor “lets [the tech industry] do our job, and lets us build.”
Two years ago, Delian Asparouhov dismissed Miami as a fad. It’s been a long and unexpected journey for him, and many in the Miami tech community, since his tweet on a December evening in San Francisco. Today, Asparouhov is confident in Miami’s future, and declared the Magic City shows “no signs of slowing down.” In the Mayor’s words, that is the ultimate goal: “making a Miami that lasts forever and a Miami that works for everyone.”