Early in the first pandemic summer, around the time California started requiring people to wear masks indoors, Jack Abraham booked a weeklong vacation to Miami. Four days into the trip, he tested positive for Covid-19. He canceled his return flight to San Francisco and, mildly sick, waited out his sniffles in an Airbnb. By the time he felt better, Abraham found, to his surprise, that he was in no rush to get back. The city was humming with energy, filled with street art and people lazily sipping cortaditos in Cuban cafés. “I thought, ‘Wow, this is actually an incredible place,’” he told me. “And I found I was being very productive.”
Abraham had moved to San Francisco in 2008, a baby-faced college dropout with a big startup idea. He sold that company for $75 million a few years later, then became one of Silicon Valley’s better-known angel investors, striking gold with early bets on Pinterest and Postmates. More recently, though, he had soured on the Bay Area. San Franciscans had elected a slate of progressive politicians who, as he saw it, left the place littered with homeless encampments and heroin needles, then blamed the mess on tech companies. The cost of living had gotten so high, he said, that entrepreneurs needed the backing of investors just to pay their rent. Even the region’s geography, which Abraham had always found beautiful, seemed increasingly hostile: In 2017, his house in Sonoma burned down in a wildfire.
Miami felt like a fresh start. Abraham closed on a house there in August and started inviting contacts in the Bay Area to visit him. “I just basically told them, ‘Look, here’s what I found,’” he said—good weather, good food, parked cars with their windows still intact. Once these associates spent a nice long weekend in Miami, “more than half” of them opted to stay, he told me.
In years past, when technologists got disenchanted with Silicon Valley, they might move to Silicon Beach (Los Angeles), Silicon Hills (Austin), Silicon Slopes (Salt Lake City), even Silicon Alley (New York). All those places made sense as tech hubs; Miami didn’t, at least not in the obvious ways. The region has no top-tier engineering schools and few notable tech companies—in other words, not much physical infrastructure and not much of a potential workforce. But at this particular moment, physical infrastructure was off-limits and the workforce was going remote. Suddenly, Miami was a contender.
In the fall, a friend invited Abraham to join Miami Tech Life, a messaging group on the encrypted chat app Telegram. All sorts of people gathered there—billionaires, startup CEOs, tech workers on the long leash of WFH, established residents who had built companies in town, native Floridians who had recently moved back, and Francis Suarez, Miami’s crypto-evangelist mayor. One early-stage investor told me that it reminded her of the early years of South by Southwest: Every few messages, someone would say, “I didn’t realize you were here.”
Soon, Abraham was joined by the likes of David Blumberg and David Sacks, high-profile VCs who made their fortunes sniffing out early hype. They each paid millions for waterfront homes in Miami Beach. Lucy Guo, a Thiel Fellow turned wunderkind investor, moved to Miami after seeing others do the same. (She had debated between Austin and Miami, but at the time only Miami had a Barry’s Bootcamp.) Keith Rabois, a partner at the investment firm Founders Fund, moved to Miami in December 2020 and promptly began to evangelize the city. “I felt a little bit like Noah’s ark,” he told me. “I was like, I need two angel investors, two VCs, two engineers, two founders.”
In software, “network effects” describe the way a product becomes more valuable as its user base grows. The more people sign up to be Airbnb hosts, the better the selection of homes; the more people own a cryptocurrency, the more each of them can buy with it. For half a century, network effects worked in the Bay Area’s favor: Talented people moved there because other talented people had moved there, starting with the shaggy-haired idealists who built what became the biggest companies in the world. Now another city seemed to be on the upswing.
What was it about Miami that felt so different? The freedom? The novelty? The ease of a rebound relationship after things with San Francisco had gotten so bad? Rabois liked to brag that he could leave his Prada bag in his car without anyone breaking in. There was no income tax on people and next to none on companies. There was no threat of wealth-shaming. “In San Francisco, nobody’s driving a Lamborghini because it would be like, ‘Oh, they’re out of touch,’” says Delian Asparouhov, a principal at Founders Fund, who moved to Miami in April 2021 and mostly drives a Vespa. “Here it’s like, ‘I’m buying half an island and building a house on it.’”
By the summer of 2021, Miami was like crypto: The more you heard people talk about it, the more you thought about buying in. For a certain kind of tech worker, it had become a cultural signifier, like owning Ethereum, driving a Tesla, and believing work is not a place for politics. A friend who works at a startup tried to get me to join him on a last-minute flight for Miami Tech Week, an impromptu series of gatherings triggered by a tweet from Asparouhov. “Everyone’s doing it because everyone’s doing it,” he said. Also, “Founders Fund is throwing a party.”
Oh, a party—I remembered those. In San Francisco, we were required to mask everywhere, even outdoors. Meanwhile, on Twitter, I saw photos of venture capitalists sweating together in the midtown Miami Barry’s Bootcamp. The gossip continued for months: Did you hear about the party at Peter Thiel’s house? The mayor’s meeting with the Winklevoss twins? How about the introduction of MiamiCoin, the city’s very own cryptocurrency? On Twitter, Rabois bragged that he had “met more new interesting people in Miami in three weeks than all of 2020 in the Bay Area.” The network effects were working: I felt left out.
Over the summer, as I was driving on the 101 freeway in San Francisco, a billboard caught my eye. It pictured a man sitting on a classic Lincoln Continental, palm trees and cerulean sky in the background, with a three-word command: “Move to Miami.” It listed the phone number for a real estate agent. I took it as a sign. Later that night, I booked a flight.
When I arrived in Miami, I half-expected to find bitcoin ATMs on every street corner. Instead, the city was more or less as I remembered from my last visit, a decade earlier—white-sand beaches, gleaming high-rises, the sound of reggaeton spilling out of bodegas. A tropical storm had just made landfall on Florida’s Gulf Coast, but the weather in Miami was clear and sticky-hot, making everything shimmer like a mirage.
I wasn’t sure where to find the techies, so I got on Telegram and joined Miami Tech Life. By then, the group had turned into a 700-odd-person assemblage of introductions, realtor recommendations, and invitations to meetups. Abraham had warned me that Miami felt like “the first week of freshman year of college,” but I had underestimated people’s willingness to host networking events in nightclubs. That first evening I decided to meet some people at a Marlins game.
The Shrimp Society, a community for early-stage startup founders, had rented out a deck at loanDepot Park for the occasion. The members wore name tags and referred to each other as “shrimps.” One of them, Kingsong Chen, had moved from Toronto a few months earlier. Chen had considered relocating to San Francisco, but he had been scared off in part by anecdotes he saw on Twitter of car break-ins and muggings. In May, after Miami Tech Week had overtaken his Twitter feed, he and his girlfriend flew to Florida. They liked it so much that they ended up staying. “Basically,” his girlfriend told me, “we got memed into moving.”
At first Chen didn’t know many techies in Miami, but that was changing fast. He pulled out his phone to show me the various WhatsApp groups he had joined since moving: Miami Tech Recruiting (for finding jobs), Miami Tech Real Estate (for finding an apartment), Miami Tech Sommeliers (for finding drinking buddies), and Miami Tech Mindfulness (for finding enlightenment).
Another shrimp, Kayra Yasa, had more history in Miami. Her family had moved to the city from Istanbul when she was in grade school. She had gone to Illinois for college but came back when her classes went remote. The timing was serendipitous, she said. Before the pandemic, Yasa didn’t see much opportunity for herself in Miami, but now it seemed like people were throwing themselves at her. She had landed a Pareto fellowship—a mentorship program for Miami founders, created by Shutterstock founder Jon Oringer and serial entrepreneur Edward Lando, who had both recently moved to Miami. Through the fellowship, Yasa had met a number of big names in investing, including Marcelo Claure, the CEO of SoftBank. Mayor Suarez had also invited Yasa on Cafecito Talks, his YouTube show, to discuss her ecommerce startup. The mayor gushed over her work, and they discussed how to make Miami the country’s capital for female founders.
Many of the shrimps seemed to be celebrating small wins—a round of funding closed, a new hire lured from San Francisco. Some of them complained that it was still hard to find engineering talent or startup lawyers in Florida. But at least it was easier than before for Miami-based founders to find investors: Startup funding in the region had more than doubled from the first to the second quarter of the year, according to one analysis. The city’s success stories included Lula, an insurance company founded by Miami natives, which had closed an $18 million Series A the week I arrived. The fintech startup Marco closed an $82 million round the following week, and blockchain startup Securitize raised a $48 million Series B.
Was Miami eating Silicon Valley’s lunch? Not quite. More VC money had begun landing there, certainly, but other cities—from Raleigh to Atlanta to Denver—were seeing influxes too. The Bay Area was set to attract less than a third of annual VC funding, its lowest level in more than a decade, but that didn’t make Miami the tech industry’s heir apparent.
What set the city apart, though, was that sudden crush of attention—sustained, in part, by the memes and the mayor. Whether Miami was, in fact, the new epicenter of fintech and crypto was less important than whether people believed it was. For some investors, the city was a speculative asset. If the startup scene boomed, it would make them seem prescient. If it didn’t, they could do what VCs do when their investments fail: cut their losses and move on.
Later in the week, I got in touch with Edward Lando, the entrepreneur-investor who started the Pareto fellowship. More than other VCs I’d talked to, Lando seemed committed to growing the Miami tech ecosystem now that he lived there. He invited me over to his house on North Bay Road, an expensive stretch of real estate in Miami Beach. He had just moved in, and the place was bare—except for the living room, which was furnished entirely in white. In the kitchen a dozen boxes of keto cookies sat on the counter. Lando explained that they were a startup investment. He offered me a cookie and a seat on the couch.
Lando started his career in Silicon Valley, living in the shadow of the tech giants. The environment was intoxicating, he said, but also limiting—the best of the Bay Area had already been made. Miami, on the other hand, was more of a blank canvas. When his friend and business partner Jon Oringer made the move, he figured it might be an opportunity to start something from the ground up. “There’s this debate about whether it’s hype,” he said. But “if enough people start agreeing to try it,” he went on, the hype “could be a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
Any city can produce entrepreneurs, but not every city can retain them. Historically, Miami has lost much of its talent, the prime example being Jeff Bezos, who went to high school there but started his billion-dollar business on the West Coast. Not every venture capitalist who moves to Miami is looking to invest there. But Lando said he was. He felt he had a chance to build Miami’s dominant startup—in part, I realized, because there were currently none to compete with.
In the afternoon, Lando and I took a walk down North Bay Road and gazed over the water back at the city of Miami. To him, a key argument for Miami’s success was that the people who’d moved there had something to prove. Lando paused to quote a passage from the apocalyptic novel Those Who Remain, by G. Michael Hopf: “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And weak men create hard times.” San Francisco was at the end of the cycle; for Miami, the good times were just beginning.
Lando’s real estate agent turned out to be Kevin Crego, the guy from the “Move to Miami” billboard. I called Crego and asked him to show me around, the way he did for his tech clients. He picked me up at my Airbnb in a black Porsche 911 convertible, looking exactly as he did on the billboard—except for a large contusion on his nose, which he attributed to a new puppy. “My wife was like, ‘You’re going to look terrible,’” he said apologetically as I got into the car.
Crego had moved to Miami six years earlier, the culmination of a lifelong dream to escape Rochester, New York. He conducted business mainly on Miami Beach. Lately, work had been nonstop. “People used to buy a condo as, like, a crash pad to come from New York. We didn’t generally see people coming from LA or San Francisco, ever,” Crego said. “Now we have an inventory problem.” Most of the houses he showed were on the market for less than a day. Even for rentals, he told me, clients sometimes got into bidding wars, and occasionally paid as much as a year’s rent up front.
For Crego’s recent clientele—“tech alphas,” as he put it—these had been minor inconveniences. “These guys, they’re profoundly efficient—they don’t want to have a lot of chit-chat,” he said. “Their time is very valuable.” Their homes were valuable too: Crego had closed deals on the islands in Biscayne Bay, where Thiel owns a palatial property that once served as the group house in The Real World: Miami.
As Crego drove down a waterfront stretch of Mediterranean Revival mansions, I wondered how everyone else was faring. Mayor Suarez had promised that an influx of technologists would bolster the local economy, in a rising-tide-lifts-all-boats way. Instead, the actual tide was rising every year, and so were rents. Even before the pandemic, more Miamians spent over 30 percent of their income on housing than did residents of any other city in the country. According to the National Association of Realtors, the cost of a single-family home there went up by 20 percent in 2021—about the same as in San Francisco and New York.
So a housing crunch had already set in before the tech migrants arrived. But Ken Russell, a Miami city commissioner, isn’t letting them off the hook. “Every major city where tech has found a big home, it’s left a wake of homelessness and affordable housing crises,” he told me. Russell has worked with Suarez to come up with affordable-housing programs and economic initiatives. By one local nonprofit’s estimate, Miami-Dade County would need at least 210,000 more units to meet its housing gap.
Russell, who used to sell surfboards for a living, is also heading up a Tech Equity Task Force—to “ensure that a wave of tech investment in our city will be ridden by all.” He said he’s working with a few Miamians to lead the charge, including Felecia Hatcher, cofounder of the Center for Black Innovation. But when I asked Hatcher what she and the commissioner had planned, she seemed surprised. “I didn’t know that was still happening,” she told me.
Hatcher was concerned about the talk of Miami’s tech renaissance. “It’s very easy to put on the dinner or the party at the mansion on South Beach,” she said. “But the actual economic shift that’s supposed to come as a result of a stronger innovation economy in South Florida? We’re not seeing that.” The city of Miami wasn’t even necessarily benefiting from the sudden rush of millionaire residents. Many of them paid property taxes in Miami Beach—an entirely separate city.
Toward the end of my time in Miami, I met Suarez at City Hall. His office decor is studiously mayoral—a Miami Heat jersey, photographs of his family, books on digital politics, and, on one shelf, an image of Jesus. As a politician, he is famously approachable. He has been handing out his cell phone number to prospective voters since he first ran for office in 2009, promising to personally hear out their grievances. In 2021 he maintained the same kind of open door on Twitter, replying to techies who tweeted about Miami. (This inspired another billboard in San Francisco: “Thinking about moving to Miami? DM me.”) One founder I met, Amanda Goetz, had tweeted a joke about moving to Miami early in 2021. The mayor materialized in her DMs and asked how he could help. By the summer, she had rented a place in midtown and relocated her entire family.
Suarez, who is 44, has been phenomenally successful in remaking Miami’s image as a tech city, and in making his own as America’s most crypto-friendly politician. He has proposed offering tax concessions to bitcoin miners, scaling back regulations for crypto companies moving to Miami, and letting city residents pay their taxes in crypto-currency. He believes that crypto will be a cornerstone of the modern tech economy. The fact that other cities remain wary of it is part of the appeal. “When you’re David versus Goliath, you have to differentiate yourself,” he told me.
But the playbook seemed familiar to me. In 2011, America’s most tech-friendly politician was Ed Lee, the mayor of San Francisco, who promised to bring a cohort of startups to depressed areas of the city. Lee introduced generous tax breaks for tech companies that had offices in the Mid-Market neighborhood. And it worked: Twitter, Square, Uber, Slack, Airbnb, Dropbox, and Yelp were all headquartered in the area within a few years, encouraging more startups to spring up nearby.
Under Lee’s tenure, the number of jobs in San Francisco grew and the city’s annual budget recovered from its post-recession slump. But the benefits of the tech arrivals have not been evenly distributed. As more tech workers moved into the surrounding neighborhoods, rental prices skyrocketed, affordable restaurants in the area were forced to close, and the rate of homelessness shot up. The new jobs provided higher wages for thousands of people, but largely not for the people who already lived there. Nearly a decade later, under new leadership, San Francisco decided the only way to solve the gaping inequality was to reverse course and tax the tech companies.
It was a mistake, Suarez said, for cities to “push tech out.” He thought it would alienate the techies and jeopardize the tax base. He invoked the favorite bogeyman of conservative politicians in South Florida—Cuba, where his parents are from. “Cuba is a great example of what happens when all the people who are productive and wealthy leave a country,” he told me. “What’s left behind is a government that controls everything, and the government basically drives it into the ground.”
Suarez’s belief in limited government may be ideological, but it’s also practical. Under Miami’s city charter, the mayor holds veto power but no vote on the City Commission. Suarez’s main contribution, then, was his personality. By acting as Miami’s greatest hype man, he’d driven up the city’s value, like a trader pumping the next altcoin. It wasn’t clear who was served most by all of that hype—the city of Miami or Suarez himself. In November he won reelection by a landslide, with hundreds of thousands of dollars in political donations from tech investors such as Chamath Palihapitiya, Michael Komaransky, and Jon Oringer. In 2021, Fortune listed him among its World’s 50 Greatest Leaders, above Malala Yousafzai.
On my last day in Miami, I wandered through Wynwood, a neighborhood in the center of the city where several tech companies have chosen to open offices. It bore few reminders of its previous tenants—the laborers who had worked in garment factories there in the 1920s, the Puerto Rican immigrants who had refashioned it as Little San Juan in the ’50s, the drug dealers who had made it one of Miami’s most dangerous areas in the ’80s. These communities formed and reformed through network effects, people following other people in and then out. When art collectors moved there in the ’90s, the area got galleries and murals. The graffitied buildings, once a sign of Wynwood’s disrepair, were reclaimed.
By the time I visited, many of the galleries had been replaced by high-priced brunch spots and bars, coworking spaces, and yoga studios. Abraham later told me the neighborhood’s energy was one of the reasons he’d seen potential in Miami. His investment studio, Atomic, and Founders Fund had leased office space in the same building. On their block, there’s a hipster coffee shop, an overpriced taqueria, and a Warby Parker store. Call it Little San Francisco.
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