“The Opportunity Capital in Florida's Rocket Ship Economy” Miami entrepreneur Saif Ishoof of the Miami business development firm Lab22c shares a glimpse of what Florida could become in the future before a May 16, 2024 meeting of The Economic Club of Florida.

Show Notes (for complete Show Notes, please visit https://economic-club.com/podcasts-and-summaries/)

Mr. Ishoof told the Club that technological innovation and economic growth depend on human capital and developing that human capital. He quoted his late father, who said we honor the American Dream by helping others achieve it.

He pointed to the great changes in the state over the past 40-years by using the changing pronunciation of his city as a metaphor – Miam-uh, Meeahmi, and now Miami.

At 24, after graduating from law school, Mr. Ishoof decided to build his first software company in an office building near the University of Miami. Guy Kawasaki, Chief Marketing Officer for Steve Jobs and Apple, told him to move from Florida.

“And I disregarded what was the best worst piece of advice I ever had,” he said. “Because I believed that that Miam-uh, Meeahmi, Miami had something that was going to position us to win the second half of the 21st century. That very special element is human capital.”

Ishoof served as Executive Director for City Year Miami, an AmeriCorps national service program for young adults. As nothing was going on in downtown Miami in 2008, he decided to recruit young people to serve as tutors, mentors, and role models and to focus long-term on human capital. His ideas worked.

“We moved over 1.5 trillion of assets under management capital to Miami and Florida in the last 48 months. There's a global ranking called the GFCI which stands for Global Financial Center Index. It's a ranking of global financial centers. OECD and the World Bank put it out. Miami had never been on the list ever before. This year, we landed on the list for our first time at number 24. Dubai is 21.”

Ishoof said big companies are moving to Florida. “Blackstone, the largest institutional asset manager in the world, now has a massive strategic presence in Miami. Amazon is setting up 50,000 square feet of footprint in Miami, and Citadel, one of the largest hedge funds in the world headquartered in Miami. That's all part of the increase of assets under management in our region. We have to look at those assets as opportunity for human capital.”

He said he wants to work supporting people, institutions, founders, and builders that are trying to solve problems, and that will require developed people.

“We have to develop human capital in our K 12 system,” he said. “We have to make sure that we're supporting early learning, we have to be focusing on creating an actual pathway. So, from when a young person graduates from college, they can see their way to a meaningful career. Are you setting up everybody's child for this form of success? Are you enabling and creating those types of ecosystems in those environments?”

“Driving economic development and driving innovation is not about tech bros at coffee shops. It's about PhDs and postdocs sitting at labs that are actually creating bench science that can actually go to the market.”

His company, Lab22c, works with founders who are creating technologies that are the stuff of... (for the rest of the Show Notes, please visit https://economic-club.com/podcasts-and-summaries/) A TeleDirections podcast