Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:

• The Big Read: The schools where AI isn’t the enemy, but flaky startups are 

• The Top 5: What to wear for fall conference season

Plus: The fuhrer and the czar; the art of the swindle; and leave the gun, take the saltwater taffy.

A few weeks after tech’s love affair with Miami kicked off in late 2020, I visited the city for the first time. (Until then, it had existed largely in my mind through “The Birdcage” and “Dexter”—what a combination of men presenting themselves as people they’re not.) Over the next year and a half, I made nearly a dozen more trips to Miami, most of them for work. And when I joined The Information in 2022, my then-boss made an offhand remark: “Maybe you should move to Miami.”

Yet I haven’t set foot in the Magic City for more than a year now, and I had thought about that lately, wondering if it was just a reflection on me or whether the party in Miami had really quieted down. Then a news story arrived this week about some high-profile techies who recently moved to Miami but are now leaving: Andreessen Horowitz is closing its 8,300-square-foot Miami Beach office. 

Sure, that’s just one venture capital firm, but as Andreessen Horowitz is one of the most important and influential shops, its moves often signal broader tech-scape trends. So how seriously should we take its departure? I posed the question to the guy who really got the fun started in the first place, Founders Fund partner Delian Asparouhov. (It’s weird to say but of course true: His Dec. 2020 tweet to Mayor Francis Suarez is the origin point for much of this trend.)   

I could see him smirk a bit at the question as we spoke over Zoom. “All the [Andreessen Horowitz] GPs are still here,” he said from his office in Wynwood, the artsy, graffitied part of town. As Asparouhov understands it, the Andreessen Horowitz folks are all just working from their Miami homes now. “Katherine Boyle is here. Chris Lyons is here. They just led, like, a $20 million round into a company headquartered two blocks from me.” That would be EcoWatt, a thermal-energy startup, which also got money from Sam Altman in that fundraising.

Even if the Andreessen Horowitz office shuttering isn’t quite the death knell for Miami that it first appeared to be, it’s worth acknowledging the city’s current reality: It has a long way to go before it becomes a sizable tech city—on the scale of perhaps an Austin or a Los Angeles. (It’s quite hard to imagine it ever pushing ahead of New York, which, yes, remains a distant No. 2 to San Francisco.)

Asparouhov doesn’t dispute that. “You shouldn’t expect the ecosystem to overnight become something massive,” he said.

I asked him what he thought Miami was still missing. A main shortcoming: the city’s shallow pool of software engineering talent, Asparouhov said. I actually noticed a more profound problem when I spent time in Miami. The place had become a haven for financiers, investors and crypto hucksters—errr, crypto founders. Very few Miami-grown startups seemed to be peddling something other than a digital currency or a baffling blockchain concept. As for many of those investors, they seemed content to sun themselves in South Beach while they shoved money into companies located elsewhere. 

Asparouhov thinks that’s changing, and he had a fairly convincing data point: Miami startups received $155 million in seed funding in the first half of the year, according to Carta data, roughly 11% of what San Francisco startups brought in during the same period. That’s not bad when you consider that a few years ago that figure was basically zero. 

Presumably, many of those startups are a little more real than much of the crypto vapor that dominated the city during the boom-boom days of a few years ago. “The jokesters are mostly gone as far as I can tell. I see the crypto winter as more of a bull than a bear signal,” Asparouhov said. “They threw great parties. But, thankfully, now the best companies are not scams.”—Abram Brown 

The Push-Pull-Push Between Tech’s Political Factions 

When more of Silicon Valley’s elite started to flirt with the political right a few years ago, I made a list of their buzzwords: civilization, YIMBY, nuclear energy, fertility rates, multipolarity, acceleration, crypto, memetic theory. I had enough to fill several bingo cards. 

I should have brought some of those cards to Reboot, the tech-and-politics conference that took place this week in San Francisco. The speakers repeated many of those buzzwords and used some more traditional conservative language, like free markets and family values. But perhaps the term I heard the most onstage and off was “strange bedfellows.”

There were more Democrats and Republicans mixing together and talking about ideas than I had anticipated. And the headliners and sponsors were a mix—everyone from Y Combinator’s Garry Tan, a moderate Democrat, to conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Institute for Family Studies.

The topsy-turvy event was in many ways a perfect reflection of 2024’s surreal political landscape. There was Founders Fund’s Mike Solana asking Tan, “Is Lina Khan secretly biased?” and 23-year-old AI podcaster Dwarkesh Patel grilling Project 2025 architect Kevin Roberts on immigration. There was plenty of Trump touting, but there were also plenty of Democrats onstage, including Tan.

At the end of the day, many panelists seemed willing to put their differences aside and focus on areas where they could for the most part agree: More babies, more housing, good. Crypto regulation, California’s AI bill, big tech monopolies, bad. As these unlikely alliances continue to form, it’ll be interesting to see who needs to to compromise the most.—Julia Black

The Big Read 

AI Isn’t the Enemy for Some Schools Now—Flaky Startups Are

At the beginning of the AI boom, we heard a tremendous amount about how the technology was going to turn our kids’ brains into mush—giving them an easy way to cheat and cut corners. 

Perhaps it’s not as bad as all that. A growing number of schools across the country are adding AI-powered tools to their schools, allowing teachers to cut down on some of the more tedious parts of their jobs, which mirrors a trend I expect we’ll see far before any AI wins a screenwriting Oscar. As our Paris Martineau discovers, the biggest AI problem for many schools is actually fly-by-night AI startups that promise something grand and fail to deliver.

The Top 5

The Red-Hot Power Color for Tech Mogul Wardrobes

With summer over, the inevitable question is: What should we wear this fall as we hit that corporate crunch period full of events, which runs from just about now through to the holidays? Weekend contributor Antonina Jedrzejczak has some advice: Don’t give up on those whites just because summer has slipped away. In fact, double down on them and permanently delete the notion of wearing “no white after Labor Day” from your mind. 

Listening: His Majesty’s Mystery 

During the heart of World War II, in 1943, Bulgarian czar Boris III took a flight to meet with Adolf Hitler in Berlin. Within days of returning to Bulgaria, Boris died, the official cause of death a heart attack. But was that really it? Had Hitler ordered the assassination because Boris was resisting the Nazis’ efforts to eradicate Jews? Or was it the Soviets—or perhaps the Italians? “The Butterfly King,” a podcast hosted by former BBC veteran Becky Milligan, entertainingly probes for an answer, presenting a cross between your favorite true-crime pod and “The Crown.” (Boris was a cousin to the English royals, and by Jove, he and Prince William sure do share a family resemblance.) 

The pod’s title comes from Boris’ favorite pastime: collecting butterflies. He passed his love of the outdoors down to his two children, Marie Louise and Simeon. Both are still living and gave interviews to Milligan at their dilapidated palace outside Sofia, Bulgaria. “To this day,” Simeon tells Milligan, “we feel like we cannot really point our fingers at anybody or blame anybody, but yet we have this ghastly suspicion that something was wrong.”—A.B.

Reading: Thievery as an Art Form

Think the market you do business in is screwy? Ha! Just wait until you devour “All That Glitters” (Pantheon), an eyes-wide-open examination of the high-end art market. Author Orlando Whitfield, a former art dealer, has not much good to say about that world, a place built on “lies, one-upmanship, trophy-touting and greed.” Yeesh. 

In 2019, Whitfield met Inigo Philbrick—a fictional villain should have such a  maleficent name—and briefly struck a partnership with him before Philbrick went on the lam, leaving a trail of angry investors. (Sometimes he would sell an artwork to two people at once while pledging the piece as his own collateral to acquire something else.) Anyone trying to find Philbrick had their work cut out for them as he pingponged between three continents, making an eventual last stand on Vanuatu, an island in the South Pacific.—A.B.

Watching: An Underloved Underworld 

Over Labor Day weekend, I kept thinking about this Weekend piece on HBO’s “Industry,” which underscores how the series is a pretty unlikely flagship property. “Industry” is quite good, but in the past, HBO had many shows of a similar caliber, and they languished behind buzzier, flashier titles, like “Game of Thrones” and “Veep.” Today, though, HBO’s lineup isn’t as deep, and “Industry” has enjoyed a chance to catch some of the spotlight. 

It left me reflecting on other HBO shows that might’ve prospered further with the same treatment, and all of a sudden, I found myself several bourbons deep into a binge rewatch of “Boardwalk Empire,” a tale of Prohibition-era Atlantic City. 

Like “Industry,” “Boardwalk” had a real talent for giving character actors a chance at bigger parts—most notably series lead Steve Buscemi as Nucky Thompson, a bootlegger and would-be boardwalk emperor. (Oh, there’s Michael Shannon, Michael Kenneth Williams, Shea Wigham and Gretchen Mol, too.) Thompson is based on a real-life character by the same name, who ruled as New Jersey’s Republican boss. A sizable portion of “Boardwalk” involves the unseverable ties between politics and capitalism, and the interplay between the two forces certainly feels like a timely subject as November nears.—A.B.

Final Thought

The more you know.