Can Mayor Francis Suarez Bring Silicon Valley to Miami?
As more tech execs and investors leave the San Francisco Bay Area permanently, one of the loudest siren calls is coming from Miami. The city’s mayor and several high-profile transplants have built up buzz, but numerous forces stand in their way.
Rumors about who might be moving to Miami to escape the supposed decline of the San Francisco Bay Area are spreading faster than the VC funding buzz around hot tech startups.
Someone who works with a person who knows Naval Ravikant, founder of tech investment site AngelList, said he heard Ravikant might be coming to Miami to “check it out.” (“I visited,” Ravikant told The Information, but he plans to remain in San Francisco for the time being.) Another person heard that Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, has a meeting with Miami’s mayor, Francis Suarez, who has quickly become a darling of longtime Silicon Valley figures for his evangelism of the city as a haven for tech execs. (Dorsey wouldn’t comment.) Someone else from the tech world is coming to Miami, but the name is so big that several new Miami residents didn’t want to say who it was because they “wouldn’t feel right” about giving away this crucial information. But rest assured that it’s a “huge, huge deal.”