Leigh-Ann Buchanan
It’s hard to pinpoint the moment when Leigh-Ann Buchanan adopted her personal motto: “Either live by intention or exist by default.” As a child, she wanted to be a lawyer, an objective that brought her to South Florida 17 years ago to attend law school at the University of Miami. For eight years, Buchanan worked as a commercial litigator. But in 2016, she shifted and founded Aire Ventures, a social impact venture studio that highlights racial equity, diversity, and inclusion in South Florida’s tech scene.
“I was looking to have a deeper impact in the community, but in a way that was more innovation-driven,” Buchanan recalls. “If I’m being honest, I didn’t know what ‘innovation’ was and struggled to see myself as an innovator even though people would look at what I’d done and say, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s so innovative.’”
During Buchanan’s seven-year tenure at Aire, the venture studio served more than 55,000 innovators (including 70 percent people of color and 49 percent women) and established more than a thousand national and global tech and entrepreneurial support partnerships. She oversaw projects like Tech Equity Miami, a $100 million funding consortium to expand connectivity, tech education programming, resources for small businesses, and tech employment opportunities for Miami-Dade residents.
“The through line of my work has been looking at how we can use tech and innovation as a tool for accelerating equity, opportunity, access,” Buchanan says, “and making sure that folks—women, people of color, people from different experiences and of different abilities—can actually see that they do have the power and can be empowered to create solutions to some of the most pressing challenges that exist in society and also in their everyday lives.”
Early last year, Buchanan became the president and CEO of the Miami-Dade Innovation Authority, a new nonprofit organization providing grants to start-ups tackling pressing local challenges like climate change, health, housing, and transit. In this way, it is bridging the gap between private-market solutions and the Miami-Dade County government, which has the ability to scale the impact of these solutions to make life better for its 2.7 million constituents.
When Buchanan reflects on her origins as an innovator, this new challenge feels like a natural progression. “I didn’t know what the specific platforms would be, but in hindsight I can see that the core mission was always the same.”
Claudia Duran
Claudia Duran always finds the silver lining. When her entrepreneur parents couldn’t attend after-school events, she saw their absence not as a personal slight but an indicator of their passion for their professional projects. When she moved to New York in 2008 to work in private wealth management for Deutsche Bank during the most severe economic crisis since the Great Depression, she took it as a challenge. “Within my first month of work I had to become very agile and resilient,” Duran recalls.
Her blend of optimism and tenacity positioned Duran to transition into the nonprofit world. In 2012, she became the managing director of Ashoka, a global organization supporting social entrepreneurs in São Paulo, Brazil. “I had to learn the language and learn how to navigate a market that I wasn’t familiar with,” she says. “Brazil is a very big country with a very big network of founders, but that market got me a lot of experience with entrepreneurs.”
It was a natural fit when, in 2019, she was named managing director of Endeavor Miami, a firm that helps local entrepreneurs scale their companies. “At first, I didn’t know the tech scene in Miami or that there even was one,” Duran says. “The ecosystem was pretty small with not that many growth founders. South Florida was pretty siloed and not a hub for technology.”
But by the end of 2020, the region’s tech scene skyrocketed as Miami Mayor Francis Suarez welcomed investors and innovators fleeing COVID-19 lockdowns in other states. Endeavor Miami became their landing pad. “We had to be very innovative, learning how to manage the network virtually and make connections between entrepreneurs, investors, and mentors,” Duran says. “For me it was like, ‘Here comes another challenge. Let me tackle it versus being a victim.’”
In 2022, Endeavor Miami’s entrepreneurs generated more than $800 million in revenue and employed more than 5,000 people. “More and more, we’re going to have these inspirational stories of entrepreneurs who chose South Florida as their home and scaled their companies here, hiring local talent and having a local impact in this community,” Duran says. “We’re in a very great moment for entrepreneurship in South Florida and it’s thriving.”
Melissa Medina Jiménez
As a little girl growing up in Miami, Melissa Medina Jiménez wanted to be a gymnast or an Olympic athlete. “I would not say I was heavy into tech,” she admits. But her father, Cuban-American businessman Manny Medina, is considered one of the city’s most successful entrepreneurs—and she inherited his business acumen and enterpreneurial spirit.
After college, Medina Jiménez began working for his company, Terremark, as it was transitioning from real estate to technology. Over the next decade, Terremark began providing cloud-based resources to some of the world’s largest companies and U.S. government agencies, hosting more than a dozen data centers and the Network Access Point of the Americas, through which all regional internet traffic is routed. The company was wildly successful—ultimately, it was sold for $1.4 billion to Verizon in 2017—but Medina Jiménez and her father at times felt limited by their location.
“Nobody was even using Miami and tech in the same sentence at that time,” Medina Jiménez recalls. “Recruiting and hiring talent wasn’t easy in Miami, and we would always get asked, ‘Why are you headquartered in Miami?!’”
But Medina Jiménez and her father were determined to bring the tech community to Miami, even if it meant nurturing it themselves; they launched eMerge Americas, a venture-backed platform dedicated to transforming South Florida into a global tech hub. “Many people … told us it didn’t make sense to do that here, that Miami is not a tech hub,” Medina Jiménez says.
But the pair studied the tech ecosystems in Silicon Valley, New York, Austin, and Boston and highlighted the variables that set Miami’s then-nascent tech scene apart: “our diversity, multiculturalism, and geography in connection to Latin America,” Medina Jiménez says.
Held in 2014, the first eMerge Americas conference drew 5,000 entrepreneurs, innovators, executives, government leaders, and academics to the Miami Beach Convention Center. Since then, growth has been exponential. At the 2023 conference, there were more than 20,000 attendees from more than 45 countries. But unlike other tech conferences, eMerge Americas’ audience reflects Miami’s diversity: 65 percent is multicultural and almost 50 percent are women.
“That’s unheard of for a tech conference and it makes me super proud,” Medina Jiménez says. “We are a predominately minority community and are one of the few metropolitan cities founded by a woman. We will continue to make sure that’s at the heart of what we do.”
Michelle Abbs
Michelle Abbs moved to Miami after college in 2006 and never left. But there was a time when she felt that she’d have to relocate west to thrive in the world of technology. “It just felt like everything was happening in Silicon Valley,” she says.
Still, Abbs was determined to forge forward. Her experience working with Teach for America Miami-Dade underscored the role of technology in education, especially in lower performing schools. “Access to devices and infrastructure and knowing how to use them really changes the course for kids,” Abbs says. “There are … really big gaps between the haves and have-nots, but if you are strategic about addressing the underlying causes you can minimize that gap.”
Since then, Abbs has led Babson College’s Miami Win Lab, an accelerator program dedicated to growing and scaling the ventures of female founders that raised more than $10 million in capital and created more than 60 tech jobs. Then, as the managing director of Mana Tech, she collaborated with entrepreneurs, founders, and innovators to foster a local tech hub. During Miami Art Week in December 2021, she organized an NFT conference that saw more than 4,000 attendees.
Soon, women began approaching Abbs with questions about NFTs, cryptocurrency, and the blockchain. “I noticed this trend of women saying that they don’t feel comfortable speaking up because they don’t want to sound stupid,” she recalls. “Unfortunately, there’s some imposter syndrome where women feel that if they didn’t go to MIT or have a background in computer science or engineering that they don’t belong in this space.”
In January 2022, Abbs founded Web3 Equity, an educational company seeking to onboard and empower women to engage in the tech scene. So far, more than 800 women have opened their first digital wallet to participate on the blockchain. “One of the biggest misconceptions is that women can only hold the more personal types of roles in marketing and strategy. But we’ve found that most of the women in our community who are working full-time in Web3 are on the technical side. They’re builders and helping to scale blockchain companies. It shows that when we give women opportunities and learning environments, they thrive.”
Maggie Vo
There is a stereotype that successful venture capitalists, investors, and founders tend to have a specific pedigree and gender: Ivy League–educated men. But Maggie Vo, the managing general partner at Fuel Venture Capital in Miami, knows better. “I can use myself as evidence because I don’t have any of those boxes checked,” she says. “I went to a school in Kentucky and didn’t go to New York to pursue an investment banking career.”
Before she was named as one of the top venture capitalists in Miami by Business Insider and earned South Florida Business Journal’s coveted 40 Under 40 award, Vo was a 17-year-old Vietnamese exchange student in upstate New York, studying for her TOEFL and SAT exams to apply for college in the United States before her senior year was over. “It a was a lot of culture shock and homesickness for sure,” she recalls. Vo was not only accepted and later graduated from Centre College, but she went on to pass all three of the Charter Financial Analyst (CFA) exams on her first try.
“I don’t wake up and think I have to ‘defy the odds,’ but I don’t let people say no to me,” Vo explains. “If I know I want to do something, I keep my head down and stay very focused.”
After working at Prudential Vietnam Fund Management in Vietnam and Prudential Property Investment Managers in Singapore, Vo returned to the United States and pivoted into the male-dominated world of venture capital. In 2018, she accepted the position as Fuel Venture Capital’s managing general partner in Miami. Under her leadership, its portfolio of tech start-ups has grown from four to 33 companies, with $500 million in assets under management. Vo credits their location in South Florida as being crucial to their success and differentiating them from other funds in New York or Silicon Valley.
“Miami is right above Latin America and very close to Europe and the UK,” Vo explains. “We didn’t want to be somewhere where it’s already pretty crowded but somewhere we can identify founders from different backgrounds and provide investors with a diversified choice.”
But it’s not just the thrill of venture capitalism that excites Vo; she’s drawn to the relationships she builds on all sides of the table, with investors, founders, and her team. It’s this intimacy that allows her, as an Asian woman, to reinforce the decisions that benefit women and minorities and address issues that keep the VC playing field so homogenous.
“As a woman sitting at the top, you want to do something that not just helps you but other people too,” Vo says. “I speak differently. I look different. But I don’t like to blend in, that’s not my personality. So I hope I stand out and I hope that I stand out in a good way.”
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