Yahoo Finance Miami Parties Through Tech Downturn: 'I Choose Rich Every Time'
(Bloomberg) -- It was not a good quarter for Miami startups. Venture investment in the area plunged 92% during the first three months of 2023 compared to the year before, according to PitchBook. The drop was caused in part by a slowdown in the scandal-plagued cryptocurrency industry — which was once so robust here that the city installed a laser-eyed-version of Wall Street’s charging bull statue downtown. For comparison: Funding to Silicon Valley-based startups dropped just 53% during the same period.
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Still, this week the tech downturn was hardly noticeable in Miami. On one recent night, three police cars, lights flashing, pulled up to the launch party of Jely.ai, held at a private home in the city. They tried to disperse the cluster of Ubers that were blocking the residential street. Inside, a DJ mixed house music while guests sipped cocktails by the pool. Attendees took turns riding an elevator to the rooftop hot tub and taking selfies in front of a neon sign that read, “I choose rich every time!”
This is Miami Tech Week, a loosely organized mix of talks, networking events and blowout parties. The events have drawn thousands of investors and tech workers to the balmy locale — which is holding onto an unusual niche in the startup ecosystem, despite the recent blow to local venture funding.
In response to the downturn, many Miami tech workers have shifted their focus. This year’s Tech Week events have put less emphasis on crypto and non-fungible tokens, and instead devoted more attention to artificial intelligence. Other topics in the spotlight include defense, hardware and manufacturing-related technology.
“Last year there were gatherings every night for NFT art galleries and everyone stood around looking at holograms of apes. It was horrible,” said Jai Malik, general partner at Countdown Capital, which backs startups that focus on the physical world. “This year, crypto isn’t even being mentioned. It’s all hard tech.”
At one event hosted by venture firm Craft Ventures, the topics were as serious as the attire was casual — with bikinis and loungewear on display in the crowd. AI founders chatted onstage alongside venture investors on the ground floor of the Annex, a space that once served as the Solana Embassy, a store and educational space sponsored by FTX, but which now sells sustainable clothing. Attendees discussed AI in the context of war, competition with China and the likelihood of dystopian AI scenarios.
Similarly weighty topics dominated an event hosted by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, held at the Faena Forum. There, senior executives from Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and defense startup Anduril spoke, as did NASA Kennedy Space Center Director Janet Petro. A theme was collaboration between the private tech sector and the government. Anduril Chief Revenue Officer Matt Steckman described the collaboration as a “3-D game of chess.”
Founders Fund Partner Keith Rabois also spent about an hour on stage with Miami Mayor Francis Suarez and Northeastern University President Joseph Aoun, gushing about the city’s culture and the growth that could come with the opening of the university’s new Miami campus this fall.
Later, in an interview with Bloomberg television, Rabois brushed off statistics about the city’s dire quarter for startup funding. “I don’t look at quarter-by-quarter numbers,” he said. “This year, companies in Miami are going to raise a ton of money. There’s phenomenal companies here.”
In recent years, crypto has been all-but-unavoidable in the city. Suarez explicitly courted the digital-asset industry, luring scores of entrepreneurs and helping inject Bitcoin into the municipal economy through nightclubs and mortgages. FTX splashed its logo on Miami’s waterfront basketball arena where the Miami Heat play, and the city did everything from hosting Bitcoin conferences to installing its robo-bull statue. But as crypto plunged and FTX spiraled into bankruptcy, so did Miami's ambitions to be the crypto capital of the world.
Many in the city have already pivoted. This week, one millennial techie sporting a beard and Hawaiian shirt, said he abandoned a crypto project he’d been working on to build something new in AI because it was more interesting. “That’s where the action is. Of course I’m going to focus on it,” he said, pulling out his phone to show off an AI chatbot he built earlier this month for a dating site. “Why wouldn’t I focus on the most interesting thing in tech right now?”
--With assistance from Felipe Marques.
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