Miami entrepreneur thinks booming tech sector can help tackle inflated living costs
Rodolfo Saccoman is one of the original faces in the Miami tech scene. He has built three companies in Miami-Dade, and is now on his fourth called CryptoLeague.
It’s a Web3-based investing platform. For now, he prefers to hold back some details as the company remains in “stealth” mode.
What he will say is that he is co-founding it with two entrepreneurs — Gleb Chuvpilo, a venture capitalist and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher, and Jeff Nuckols, a former Hewlett-Packard executive — new to Miami. Saccoman met them last year through the OnDeck entrepreneurship accelerator program, and they have already raised $2.2 million from investors including Florida Funders.
For longtime local founders like Saccoman, the promising environment for Miami tech — one that allowed a threesome like that to form in the Magic City — is unprecedented.
“It was a struggle for entrepreneurship to really be seen as something Miami could build,” he said.
Yet Saccoman, a native of South America now raising his family in Miami, also recognizes the biggest challenge that has come with the breakneck growth — namely, the increased cost of living. And he has an idea about how to solve it.
“It would be amazing if there was an organized association, where you have the main universities, the government, have several CEOs and founders maybe at different levels ... have everybody in a room trying to solve things that could be improved,” he said. “It would be interesting to pose to the ecosystem who wants to lead it.”
The pandemic helped spark a migrant tidal wave into Miami among tech professionals, many of them tired of their previous cities’ COVID-19 restrictions and in search of a welcoming business environment. Led by Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, the city has arguably become the most popular business destination on the East Coast.
But that booming demand has come with a price for Miami-Dade County residents. For instance, it’s reshaping the area’s real estate market and making it difficult for individuals and families even with six-figure incomes to meet their housing needs.
Saccoman has a proposition.
“My hope is that government and maybe some other well-funded venture capitalists, and companies themselves, can get involved in some kind of organized fashion to try to help the cons of all these higher paying jobs arriving, of those items that can affect everyone else,” he said.
Still, he said he would not trade this environment. As an example of the longtime disparate geography of Miami tech, Saccoman shared a photo of the office space off Lincoln Road in Miami Beach that he shared for years with Rokk3r Labs, then his companies’ chief funder.
“At one point there was fatigue of not seeing the potential come through in terms of — you had friends with startups building companies from Miami, and trips would be taken to New York and San Francisco,” he said.
“And always there’s a perception of, ‘You’re really trying to do this from Miami? Can you really build deep tech, get patents?’ There were all these questions. Some of it was valid, but there was a big issue of perception, and I don’t blame them. Miami did have some issues in terms of perception; there were not that many examples coming out of here.”
In 2012, Saccoman launched AdMobilize, an advertising analytics company, at an open mic event at The Lab Miami — sponsored by Refresh Miami, the first tech booster group in the city. He sold it and another company he’d founded, Matrix Labs, to Rokk3r for $19.5 million a year later.
“It’s incredible this was in Wynwood, too … a very different Wynwood,” Saccoman said.
He estimated it would have taken another decade for Miami to achieve what it has in the past two years. Having already closed its first investment round, CryptoLeague, his fourth startup, is already fielding inquiries about raising another one.
“For me, it’s an amazing moment in time to be building a Web3 company right from Miami, without having to go out of the city to raise money,” Saccoman said.
This story was originally published March 3, 2022 at 6:00 AM.
