America’s Wunderkind Mayor On Miami 2.0, ‘Silicon Beach’ And His Own Political Ambitions

As the legend now goes, it all started with fourteen infamous characters on Twitter.

On December 4th, 2020 at 5:41 p.m PDT, tech entrepreneur and Founders Fund Principal Delian Asparouhov tweeted from San Francisco, “ok guys hear me out, what if we move silicon valley to miami?”

At home putting his kids to bed 3,200 hundred miles away, 43-year old Miami mayor Francis Suarez fired back two minutes later: “How can I help?”.

By 10:00 p.m. EDT, Asparouhov’s thread was going viral. When Suarez woke up the next morning, the venture capital intelligentsia from Menlo Park to Austin to Boston were calling it the “tweet heard round the tech world” (it now has more than 2.5 million impressions and counting).

More importantly, they all wanted to know: How can you help?

In the thrusting spotlight afterwards, Miami’s now standard-bearing, marketer-in-chief didn't waste a minute answering the question.

Mayor Suarez printed T-shirts with the phrase, “How Can I Help?”, started a YouTube talk show, appointed a ‘Venture Capitalist-In-Residence’, pledged to hire the city’s first chief concierge technology officer, began showing up at fancy, invite-only get-togethers with tech’s powerbrokers around the country, and started appearing on national news segments including Fox and CNBC promoting Miami as the next global technology “capitol of capital.”

“We all knew that this was the time to take Miami’s ‘moment’ as a result of the pandemic and turn it into a movement. All of a sudden everyone’s eyes were on us,” says Saurez. “The goal now is to make the movement unstoppable.”  

Suarez is a fitting, well-timed front man for America’s next great city: a fast-talking, Cuban-descended, crisply-dressed, unapologetically right of center, law and order champion whose family has been involved in local, pro-business politics for two generations (and who also happens to be a real estate attorney on the side).

The problem with Miami, Suarez tells me, is that it’s been repeatedly out-flanked by other cities like San Francisco, Seattle, Austin, and Boston when it comes to attracting tech talent and start-up companies. Yet, thanks to the Mayor’s recent national charm offensive, that balance of power is rapidly shifting.

Fast forward four months, the sharp-jawed, home-grown politician (he was elected with 86% of the vote in 2017) all of a sudden has some pretty fancy, needle-moving friends, including Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Jack Dorsey. When Suarez now walks into a meeting to entice companies to relocate to Miami, most people already know the pitch. He talks up the high paying innovation jobs pouring in, the nationally award-winning primary and secondary schools, South Florida’s world-class healthcare systems and renowned universities, and the hundreds of billionaires and business titans who have switched their driver’s licenses permanently to Florida and now spend their summers in the Hamptons instead of the other way around.

Not surprisingly, Suarez has also not so quietly helped to bring some big deals home. FTX Crypto Derivatives Exchange CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried recently said Suarez’s efforts convinced him to pursue his pending $135 million branding rights deal for the Miami Heat basketball arena. Softbank’s recent $100M commitment to seed Miami’s tech start-up scene, also in large part due to Suarez’s efforts, is no small long-term investment either.

As for the “Why now?” of it all, Suarez is careful not to give COVID-19 too much credit for Miami’s re-Renaissance.

A self-described conservative Republican, Miami’s 2.0 ‘now’ moment, he says, has far less to do with how the pandemic scrambled America’s real estate market and far more to do with the fact that Miami as a start-up ecosystem is becoming known for being everything that Manhattan and San Francisco are not.

“While New York public officials are pushing Amazon away, and public officials in California are criticizing a hospital for being named after Mark Zuckerberg who donated $75 million to it, they're creating a business climate that's anti-innovation and anti-entrepreneurial,” says Suarez of nurturing Miami’s welcoming, pro-business approach. “In Miami, we’re offering an alternative. There are two basic things that people who are creating great companies want while simultaneously creating thriving communities: They don't want to be taxed any more than they have to, because they often know that that money is not being spent effectively. And secondly, they want to feel welcome. They don't want community leadership and politicians to think that they're somehow responsible for the things that government often fails to solve like homelessness, infrastructure, and income inequality.”

Miami and Florida’s long-standing low-tax, low regulation structural advantages notwithstanding, Suarez doesn’t discount that serendipity due to the pandemic was key to kickstarting the city’s 2.0 boom.   

“A lot of things recently have conspired in Miami’s favor to make this moment happen,” he concedes. “From COVID, the new world of remote work, and Florida being open during the pandemic and allowing people to come here and enjoy a reasonable quality of life while other cities and states were locking down, all of these things created a tipping point that’s now bringing people and great companies to Miami in numbers like we’ve never seen before.”

More importantly, says Suarez, that ‘tipping point’ translates into economic diversification and stability, which is something that Miami hasn’t quite been able to get its finger on for decades.

“Miami has always been a city of booms and busts. But it's always been around two basic industries: real estate and tourism. What’s different this time around is that other macro factors have conspired to push entrepreneurs and companies away from historic concentrations of innovation to Miami, which means that we’re growing the long-term jobs and start-ups that other innovation cities are losing.”

At the same time, the post-pandemic new normal is also helping to accelerate Miami’s metamorphosis into a more globally recognized epicenter.

“Miami was always traditionally known as America’s gateway to Latin America. But now in part due to the pandemic we’re becoming recognized a truly global hub of innovation, ideas, and commerce like Hong Kong or Dubai,” says Suarez. “There’s nobody in Spain saying, ‘Hey, I'm getting on a flight tomorrow to Austin.’ Nobody in Colombia, Argentina, or Brazil is saying that either. In places like Qatar, however, everyone’s talking about Miami as the next global tech hub now—not New York, LA, or San Francisco.”

To that end, Suarez remains laser focused on shaping Miami 2.0 into a place that’s irresistible to businesses, entrepreneurs, newly remote workers, and retirees fleeing high-tax, high-regulation blue states, which at this point appears likely to outlive the pandemic.

“We have a simple formula here in Miami,” Suarez says. “First, we want to reduce taxes to the lowest point possible. Second, we want to increase police funding, not decrease it. And third we want to have the best quality of life of any city in the world. That means focusing on urban parks, getting urban homelessness down to zero, building a thriving local economy, and expanding cultural, arts, and sports opportunities like getting Formula One back here in 2022. We also want to focus on equality of opportunity, not equality of outcomes. And that begins and ends with education and high-paying jobs. But we're never going to mandate outcomes like you see in communist countries or socialist countries.”

Notwithstanding Miami’s 2.0 hype, the growth that’s expected to follow isn’t all sunny beaches and happy, job-generating billionaires. In Miami’s case specifically, says Saurez, infrastructure, education, affordable housing, and climate mitigation must be top priorities.

“Miami’s biggest problems are a lot of the same problems that every city has. And I think there's a huge role for the private sector to play, which is why it’s great that so many companies are moving here. I don't think the private sector is responsible for the things that government hasn’t done or can’t do. But I believe that private sector companies can and should innovate where there are opportunities that benefit everyone. We can do public-private partnerships, for example, on affordable housing. We can also innovate on transportation and climate mitigation, and not just be carbon neutral but also carbon positive with the help of private companies. There are so many opportunities to innovate on electric and autonomous vehicles as well as sustainable transportation and all of these initiatives can solve pervasive urban problems around the world that we can home grow and export from right here in Miami.”

In his grandest vision, what Saurez ultimately sees 5, 10, 20 years from now for ‘Magic City’ is a business, technology, and financial ecosystem that looks a lot like Silicon Valley today, but is far more connected to the world.

“Miami is poised to be the next capitol of capital,” says Suarez. “There's never been a place in the history of humanity where the private equity firms, the hedge funds and the investment banks have converged with venture capitalists and start-up founders and entrepreneurs. They've always been segregated on two different sides of the country—in Manhattan and Silicon Valley. But now they’re all coming here to Miami. What that means in the coming years is that the next generation of game-changing companies—the next Googles, Facebooks and Microsofts—are going to be born here in Miami. The ones that innovate in cryptocurrencies and in data mining and artificial intelligence and deep machine learning—they will be based here in Miami. The companies pioneering electric vehicles, and batteries, and carbon sequestration and climate technologies will all lay their roots in Miami. That's not just how I feel about this. All of the evidence shows that’s going to happen.”

Of his now infamous tweet storm with Asparouhov, Suarez remains steadfast that his goal for Miami 2.0 has always been to grow the city’s new ecosystem organically no matter how long that takes. Twitter and COVID-19  just happened to converge into the lightning in the bottle.

“Nothing about that first response to Asparouhov was plotted at all,” recalls Suarez. “I didn’t know who Delian Asparouhov was. I didn’t even know what the Founders Fund was. (My tweet) was a simple reaction to a simple question that's been a passion project for me for a decade. As a public servant, ‘How can I help you?” should be in every politician’s DNA. But it was somehow seen as an abnormal reaction from an elected official in the tech community. If you would've told me on December 3^rd that everything was about to change here, I would have told you that we’ve been working hard to create a new tech and entrepreneurial ecosystem here in Miami for years. But the pandemic provided that catalytic moment that could synthesize all these macro forces into a vision for the future that everyone else would understand.”

Given Miami’s current real estate market super-boom, it’s pretty clear that Suarez’s strategy so far is paying off, and that the “moment-to-movement” momentum he’s helped to empower is unlikely to decelerate any time soon.

As for the Mayor’s political ambitions, he says he’s still focused on the present while playing coy on the future. “My only political ambition is becoming a two-term Mayor of the City of Miami and being the best Mayor I can be for my residents.”

For some reason at this rate, though, it feels distinctly like Mayor Suarez’s political future could look a lot more like Pete Buttigeig’s or Barak Obama’s far faster than anyone expects—himself included.