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Comment by iskander | Hacker News Reader

Breathless admiration of Miami as a "tech city" based on tweets by the disempowered mayor of the City of Miami (population bupkis) are a red flag that the author isn't thinking very seriously or speaking from direct experience, rather just regurgitating memes and shortcut thoughts.

If you have ever lived in Miami (the 3M person metropolis, whose mayor is not Francis Suarez), you know that techies goes there to party, vacation, or retire but the actual startup scene suffers from perennial brain drain with no end in sight.

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I grew up in Miami and left for California as soon as I could. Miami has a pretty facade, and if you visit for a week or two you might think it's great, but beneath the facade is a cesspool of stupidity, vanity, and corruption just like many other places. As a native Floridian, I hate to say that Florida is just such a strange place. It attracts a really weird mix of people. I think the VCs flocking there appreciate the shiny veneer and the fact that Miami worships rich people - intelligence is almost completely disregarded. The rich VCs can feel like popular kings and queens in their $20m Palm Beach mansions, but it's honestly one of the last places I'd want to be as an engineer.

As a transplant from Boston to California, every instance of “Miami” could be replaced with “California” in your comment and I’d be fine with it.

I worked in tech in Fort Lauderdale for around 10 years and you're right about all of that. The place has potential of being a tech hub if they could just attract and retain smart people. Year round warm weather, lots of outdoor stuff, if you like the ocean, zero state income taxes! But, instead of the Bay Area's smart, risk-taking wealth, optimistically (and naively) trying to "change the world with tech", South Florida is filled with dumb, idle "to hell with my neighbors" wealth. It's full of people who got rich running payday loan stores and used car lots, instead of people who got rich building ML models for selling kitty litter on the internet.

I remember a boat ride up the intracoastal, and there was a guy with a million-dollar mansion with a yacht docked next to his backyard that had a beautiful gigantic statue of a hand with a raised middle finger. That pretty much sums up South Florida's mindset.

The middle finger statue was removed in 2004 when the pornographer who owned it went bankrupt. Pretty funny though.

https://www.sun-sentinel.com/local/broward/fl-al-goldstein-b...

Wow it’s been that long, jeez. End of an era. I always thought that thing succinctly summed up the community, culture and zeitgeist of 2000s South Florida.

I'm here and I feel things are turning around. The brain drain has receded and turned into an influx. As a tech worker who grew up in this city and have a love/hate relationship with it I fail to see what the new migrants see in Miami.

If you grew up down here and know the history of South Florida it's just a history of tech failing to launch since WWII. We have a giant runway in the middle of the Everglades for supersonic jets and space craft, and that fizzled. We have a decommissioned rocket plant and missile silos in Everglades National Park. The IBM PC was invented here, but IBM shipped that whole division to North Carolina. Miami could have a been a Silicon Valley when the valley got created during the Cold War but we lacked the leadership and funding.

So here we are trying to become the capital of crypto which I feel still won't make us another Silicon Valley but another Las Vegas.

>I'm here and I feel things are turning around. The brain drain has receded and turned into an influx.

I moved to Miami in 2017, couldn't find any kind of interesting work in machine learning or genomics. I started the machine learning meetup, which did end up with an enthusiastic but inexperienced community. My friend also moved to Miami at the same time and the only interesting graphics related jobs in the whole area were in Magic Leap. The startup scene was anemic and superficial. People we met who had deep technical skills all had one foot out the door, bound for Austin, SF, Durham, New York, &c. Eventually we both left and now live in Durham.

It seems like Miami is currently a hotspot for VCs, particularly the social media influencer set, to relocate to. What actual well-known tech companies are currently located there? Even Magic Leap is based in Plantation, not Miami.

A bunch of cryptocurrency startups.

For a while now I've been wondering whether the cryptocurrency bust—which is inevitable in my view—will mean the end of these kinds of articles and the resurgence of the Bay Area. Many of the other up-and-coming tech areas, particularly Miami, are disproportionately composed of cryptocurrency ventures, which doesn't strike me as a sustainable tech scene.

I'm a local Miamian and I'm hoping the crypto scene in Miami is a beach head for other tech and not a white whale that sucks up all the capital and brainpower from other emerging technologies.

I met some of the crypto startups working out of co-working spaces around the city 2017-2019; maybe things have improved dramatically more recently but the startups I encountered were unimpressive.

The crypto/ICO/NFT/WEB3 scene is just so much hype right now it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s a scam. 2019 feels like a decade ago and things have changed so much in the last year. I’d consider a revisit.

The thing that's confusing to me about the Miami-tech-hub story is the lack of universities. Good universities + big companies + lots of money floating around, that's the holy trinity of tech/startup hubs, no? Miami has maybe 1.5-2 out of 3?

I worked for a year at a startup that had space in FIU's (Florida International University) startup accelerator program -- unshockingly called "StartupFIU".

When I moved down here, I was surprised. FIU is a massive and very nice school; University of Miami is also nice.

I had never even heard of FIU before I worked on campus there.

They're no Ivy League but I would say they're better than a lot of other schools.

As far as I can tell, Suarez is a joke. The county wields all the power, and the city itself is utterly reliant on the county.

Furthermore, Miami, like a lot of Florida, is mostly driven by real estate and money laundering of illicit money, not by any tech whatsoever. It's also become a playground of the uber-rich libertarian subset of the PayPal mafia, but otherwise, there is no startup activity out of Miami.

Using this as some sort of exemplar instantly diminishes the credibility of the article. Also, the comparison to Yahoo is weird. It has ceased to be a big name for the longest time, but as a mismanaged and dysfunctional company that missed the bus several times, it is second only to Hewlett-Packard. H-P is a far better analogue of what SV has become.

> It's also become a playground of the uber-rich libertarian subset of the PayPal mafia, but otherwise, there is no startup activity out of Miami.

This is really amusing to read on a site owned by Y Combinator.

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