Here’s who’s behind the new billboards asking Bay Area residents to move to Miami
Two billboards over the streets of San Francisco are urging Bay Area residents to come on down. And they didn’t cost Miami taxpayers a dime.
One takes the form of a mock tweet by Miami Mayor Francis Suarez. It reads: “Thinking about moving to Miami? DM [direct message] me” — encouraging users to send him a private message via Twitter.
The other billboard shows a picture of a laptop on a beach accompanied by the caption, “You might as well code from here.” It also says to message Suarez on Twitter.
Both billboards went live in downtown San Francisco Tuesday.
Miami finds itself in the grips of a tech mania as startup founders and venture capitalists turn to the Magic City for what they believe is a more welcoming business environment. For those who have made the move, Suarez’s outreach efforts on social media, many of them say, have played a critical role in their decision-making.
Though the city did not pay for the billboards, Suarez knew well in advance that they were coming. In an interview, he called the campaign an innovative way to get people’s attention and increase the migration volume the city has already seen.
“It’s another example of the hustle factor — that we’re not shy about what we’re trying to do,” he said.
The billboards were paid for by Shervin Pishevar, an early investor in Uber and Airbnb. Pishevar paid $17 million for a 13,000-square-foot Miami Beach home in 2018. The average cost for a four-week run on a San Francisco billboard is $2,744, according to AdQuick, the advertising technology firm that drew up and facilitated the billboards.
Reaction among some parts of San Francisco’s tech community to the billboards has been, surprisingly, positive.
“What Mayor Suarez’s billboards make abundantly clear is that Miami welcomes new residents and new businesses,” Jennifer Stojkovic, executive director of sf.citi, an advocacy group representing various San Francisco-based tech firms, said in a statement. “That will certainly be appealing to tech leaders and employees who have not experienced the same warm reception from policymakers in San Francisco.”
Stojkovic said that while San Francisco Mayor London Breed “has always shown leadership in her willingness to work with the business community, the same cannot be said of all of San Francisco’s elected officials.”
“Our hope at sf.citi is that they see what Mayor Suarez and many other leaders do — that tech companies and tech workers are a crucial part of the recovery and growth of our cities and communities,” Stojkovic said.
Gabe Bernstein, enterprise account executive at AdQuick, said he, Pishevar, Suarez and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian began discussing the campaign via email in December. Ohanian, an investor in AdQuick and a South Florida resident, is married to tennis legend Serena Williams.
“It was definitely one of the most interesting (email) threads I’ve been involved in,” Bernstein said.
Bernstein said the initial motivation for the campaign was to help venture capitalists like Pishevar convince other tech titans in the Bay Area to leave, capitalizing on the momentum created by a December tweet from Suarez asking relocation-minded tech giants ‘How can I help?’
The locations of the two billboards were purposefully chosen to have the maximum impact, and they ended up being placed near the headquarters of both Uber and Airbnb. Bernstein estimated the ads could reach as many as 4 million passersby over the course of the four-week campaign.
The group chose static billboards in tweet format for maximum online virality, he said. By Thursday, it seemed to be working: One vulgarity-laced tweet depicting the billboard, by a startup founder in Austin, had received nearly 3,000 “likes” along with more than 200 “retweets.”
“We wanted people to be able to take pictures of them and post them online,” Bernstein said.
Pishevar and Ohanian could not be immediately reached for comment.
Earlier this month, Pishevar listed his Miami Beach home for $35 million and is now seeking to purchase another local property for as much as $50 million. Both developments were first reported by The Real Deal.
Pishevar’s Miami move followed 2017 allegations of sexual misconduct, according to a Bloomberg News report. He subsequently resigned from Sherpa Capital, the San Francisco-based venture firm he had co-founded. He has denied the allegations. London police stated that a supposed police report outlining allegations against Pishevar in that city was falsified.
This story was originally published February 18, 2021 at 4:59 PM.
