The Mayor of Miami, Florida, Goes Live on Business as Usual

So what does Miami, Fla., have in common with Pittsburgh you might be asking? Quite a bit when it comes to building a competitive technology and innovation ecosystem!

We are excited to welcome City of Miami Mayor Francis Suarez to Business as Usual today to tell us more about his strategies to attract and grow tech businesses. He will also detail what is driving growth in Miami's tech ecosystem and how COVID-19 made an impact.

Join us to discover some of the innovative policies and incentives being deployed to make Miami a top choice for tech. It's more than just great weather and beaches as an attraction!

So good afternoon, everyone. Happy whatever day today is No, I'm kidding. Today's for 20. Everyone knows what day today is. And I'm Audrey Russo. I'm thrilled to be here. So excited to have the city of Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, who I will introduce in one moment. I'm very excited to have him on the show and to talk about all the things that he has been up to. Before we get started. I just want to give deep appreciation to Huntington bank for the work that they've done with us for over a year and just been amazing civic God stewards and ambassadors for all the work across the tech ecosystem and small businesses 40 by 80, the tech councils wholly own 501 c three, we're focused on apprenticeships and entrepreneurship. And at&t are longtime partners and friends and everything we do in terms of public policy and those elected officials in terms of how it affects the ecosystem around Southwestern Pennsylvania and across the nation. So we've muted your microphones. And we have an opportunity for chatting here. But we are going to jump right in. I am thrilled to have Mr. Mayor Francis Suarez, I am a long fan of yours. You might not know that, but I have been following you on Twitter writing to you and just cheering you on from everything from from your political Abdurrahman, to your civility to your humbleness, and just the stories of all that you've done, I can't be a bigger fan. Other than I don't think I'm moving to Miami. But you know, you never know, because people in Pittsburgh have deep love for Florida. And for Miami, we probably have more direct flights from Pittsburgh, to Miami than anywhere else, anywhere in Florida than anywhere else in the United States. So I'm going to be quiet, I'm going to welcome you, we're excited to just have a chance to connect with you the work that you are doing in terms of attracting tech companies, we are envious. We are competitive. And we want to make sure that we understand where you are coming from. So if you could set the stage for us, that would be just amazing.

Well, first of all, thank you, it's a huge honor to be invited to speak with all of you, you should be not so much envious, but you should be competitive about the environment that we're in, because we do live in a competitive world in a competitive environment. And so it's it is appropriate for you to feel that this is a moment of some level of competition. It's also an opportunity really, for all cities. And I'll begin with

giving you a mayor peduto quote, because as the mayor of the city of Miami, and as a mayor, who looks to be reelected in November, and hopefully that will go smoothly. President of the US Conference of Mayors in January, I look to my fellow mayors, whether they're Republican or Democrat. And we feel like we are sort of a support for each other, and kind of a family. And so I remember, at one point being on a call or on a zoom with Bill produto when he said to me, you know, Mr. Mayor, in America, there's three parties. I said, Really? What are the heels? There's Republicans, there's Democrats, and there's mayors. And he's right. He's right. There are three parties in America. And I think mayors are different because we often do not look at public policy through a partisan lens. We look at public policy through a problems solutions lens. And oftentimes, I feel that our country would be much better off. If we could sort of put those things that divide us in a drawer and have what somebody said to me this week, actually was a mayor of Columbia, South Carolina, who was a former president of the US conference, Amir radical pragmatism, if we were radically pragmatist, you know, about how do we solve problems and get things done? I think we'd be much better off. But this conversation in particular is about tech. And the question of why I've done what I've done, if you have to sort of rewind and go back to when, when I got elected, I first got elected in 2009. I was 32 years old, and I got elected to the city council. I realized then, the same thing I realized now that our world is being dominated by these things. Our world is dominated by the fact that look at what we're doing just a second. I'm here in this beautiful, amazing city with these palm trees flowing behind me and you guys are in Pittsburgh. I mean, you guys are watching this, you know from a variety of different geographical and physical locations. So that is only possible that level of efficiency is only possible with technology. And it became very apparent to me as the first generation that was born with cell phones and the first generation that was born with PCs, that technology is going to continue to dominate our life, not just our economy, our life, everything that we do. And so, mayors and cities, all of you have two choices. And that's all you have, you have two choices. choice number one is you embrace the inevitable future. choice number two is you don't, and you suffer the consequences. That's it. This is not about whether we like tech, or whether we don't like tech, this is not about whether, you know, tech censors people or doesn't censor people, or any sort of political or republican or democratic view on technology. This has nothing to do with that. This has to do exclusively, and entirely about the reality of the dominance of tech in our life. And it's going to get more involved, we're going to have artificial intelligence computers that monitor our sleep. Only, we already already monitor my sleep. But when you get up in the morning, it's going to tell you what kind of a workout you can do how much you can exert yourself, it's going to tell you what your body needs based on what you ate last night, it's going to tell and it's going to optimize it for you. It's gonna survey you know what you have in your pantry, and tell you what you need to order and probably order it for you if you allow it to. And the same with with some of the products that you use. I mean, I don't even go to CVS or Walgreens anymore, because I order everything online, everything that I use. So you know, for us, it's it's an inevitability that we need to embrace, and I've chosen to embrace it. What for me is a little bit strange, if you will, is why haven't other mayors, or why don't other public officials do it? Why haven't they done it? I think part of it is generational. And I don't mean to sound disrespectful in any way, shape, or form of the prior generation, I succeeded a mayor that is in his 70s my father 72, my father was the first Cuban mayor of Miami, he was the were the first father and son, he did a magnificent job in position Miami, to allow me to take the reins of leadership and build on it so that his generation accomplished a tremendous amount for our city. But every generation has its moment where it's it comes to time where you turn the page, and it will come for me as well. Right. And now is a moment where you have to invest in leaders that have the ability to see 1015 2030 years into the future, and plan and help cities build around them. So for us, obviously, we focus on creating the kind of economy where every single citizen in our city can thrive. And for us to do that, it's it's not easy. I'm not gonna sit here and tell you that, you know, it's something that that that can be done without having to make some tough choices. But for us, we focus on three fundamental truths. And we build off that, right, so fundamental truth number one, we believe that we should not tax you, or tax anyone $1 more than what is absolutely necessary. So as mayor, I reduced our millage rate, which is our only tax, we have no state income tax, we have no city income tax, we have a millage rate, which is the tax that you apply on the value of your home. That's your property tax, we lowered it to the second lowest level since the 1960s. And what happened when we did that? What happened was we got more investment, more people came to the city, our budget actually grew significantly after that happens. So it's sort of counter narrative and counterintuitive, you think, well, you lower taxes, you're gonna get less revenue. And what you actually see happening is the cities that continue to raise taxes are the ones that have the biggest budget deficits, and they have to continue to raise taxes to fill those budget deficits. So it ends it actually ends up becoming a vicious cycle, where you're growing government to the size and to the level where it reduces the marginal productivity, or the marginal desire to be productive in a city and people decide we're gonna go somewhere else, we're gonna go live in a place that's has more palm trees and has better weather. And that takes less of my money, so people can vote with their feet. The second thing that we decided to do is while many cities were talking about defunding their police, we actually increased funding in our police, we actually are grew our police force to the largest that it's ever been. And as a result of that, we saw a 25% reduction in crime from last year. And we had the year before that the lowest homicide rate since 1954. I mean, it's 2020. It's almost seven years. And that is not adjusted for population growth. So that's an aggregate Number we had, I believe it was, I want to say was 42 homicides in, you know, in a city of our size, which was the lowest level we've had since the 1950s. So you know, you know, we focused on creating the safest big city in America. And then the third thing that we did was focus on quality of life. There is no one in the world.

So many are, here we go. There's nobody in the world that has been able to figure out how to live yesterday, again, if anybody has, please let me know. Because I don't I don't think even Ilan Musk has figured that out yet. And since you can't live yesterday, again, that means that where you live today, and where you live tomorrow, are the most important decisions that you make in your life, right time is the only finite commodity you have, you can get you can make more money, you can do a lot of things, but you cannot expand the amount of time that you have with you know, without, without sort of, you know, obviously being healthy and all that. But so, so for us, we have focused on creating a premier city, we just got Formula One. So we focused on having being in which is by the way we want to second city in America has Formula One, we have all the sports offerings, we're in the process of finishing an MLS deal to bring an MLS team to Miami. So we'll have all the major franchises plus Formula One, I don't think there's any city in the world that has certainly Austin, which is your other Formula One city does not have all the other sports franchise. We have we're focusing on, we're focusing on having cultural facilities, we have a Museum of Science Arts Museum, we have, we have probably the best art festival in the world in our Basel, one of the most amazing private gallery collections of art anywhere in the world as well. Performing Arts Center, all the things that a major city would want to have from a cultural offerings perspective, we've invested in our parks, we realized that public spaces are unique places for people to enjoy their life when they're not working. And people actually don't work or want to work. So we focus a lot on creating $100 million linear park called the underlying which will rival the Highline in New York, the Atlanta beltway and the Millennium Park in Chicago. And then we focused on quality of life, things like homelessness. But we have in Miami 555, homeless, when you compare that to New York, which has 60,000, or San Francisco or Los Angeles that has 3040 50,000, homeless, we have reached functional zero in veteran homelessness we have there are no veterans in Miami that are homeless. And we want to get to functional zero and overall homelessness. And if I'm blessed to be elected, reelected, and be made president of the US Conference of Mayors in January, I'm slated to be I want to explore our homelessness solution and scale it nationally. So we can hopefully one day end urban homelessness in America, which is something that we should all strive to do. All cities are defined, and we're all defined by what we do for the least of our brothers and sisters in our community. And so for me, I take that as a real challenge that can be solved and something that can be scaled and supporting.

So we'll talk quickly though, just real real quickly, because what you're talking about is just amazing. But I want to talk about this whole, how can I help this whole tweet that started back in December? Okay, that caught my attention that got the world's attention. And that is tied to all the amazing movement that has occurred in the tech and Innovation Center in the crypto world in the FinTech. I mean, we can just go down the line. Can you just talk about what you did? And how do you harness that?

Right. So the How can I help tweet was actually, you know, it wasn't like I got up one day and said, Okay, guys, I'm going to send out a tweet that's going to change the world, right? I just happened to be home. And somebody tweeted out DeLeon asper off who's now who brought by the way the Founders Fund to Miami. And he put out a tweet saying, Hey, guys, what if we move Silicon Valley to Miami? And frankly, we had been trying to do that for 10 years. But we had been doing that we were a startup that never gotten any VC money. We've never gotten any any real investment. Right. And it's hard. It's hard for cities to just invent a tech ecosystem. It doesn't just happen. I mean, what happened to us is we got lightning in a bottle with that tweet, and we caught what I call a tsunami of macro factor wave. Right which is, you know, we had a you know, obviously people pushing people out of New York with Amazon. You had you had elected officials in San Francisco telling Ilan musk to go f himself. You know, you had you had a you know, like this Officials telling, putting a resolution that condemning the hospital for naming and after Mark Zuckerberg when he puts $75 million into the hospital, I mean things that are just absurd things that drive out innovation that drive out, and having been someone who came from a communist country, right. And in Cuba, my family, we just realized that that doesn't work. That's not that government is never going to be the answer. Government can be a facilitator. Government can be, you know, you can have good leaders in government, but it's not the answer to all to all the problems. So for us, you know, obviously putting having to how can I help tweet go out? I mean, if you would have told me on December 3, Mayor, tomorrow, you're gonna wake up and at some point in the day, you're gonna put out this tweet that 2.7 million people are going to see. And then you're going to tweet 800 more times in the month of December and 27 million people are going to see those tweets. And you're going to meet Ilan musk and Peter teal. And, and and you know, and Keith raboy. And they're going to bring the Founders Fund to Miami and Blackstone tech is going to go there, and Microsoft is going to go there. And you know, and all these things are going to happen, you know, a Citadel and Starwood, I would have told you, you're crazy. There's no you cannot come up with a fiction that could ever convince me that I'm going to meet the Winklevoss twins that created Facebook and Gemini and Bryan Armstrong and I just did Coinbase, the IPO on forever Sham, there's no way that I'm going to meet all these people have a 30 minute call with Elon Musk, that's not going to happen. I would have never believed anybody. So you know, a lot of it is is intentional, right? In the sense that you have to intentionally embrace these opportunities. And some of it is frankly providential from my perspective, right, because it's just too amazing to see these macro factors conspire. But I think what every city can do, what's Pittsburgh can do, what every city can do is, first of all, they can do those three things that I talked about, they can reduce taxes, they can increase, make their city safe, and they can focus on quality, right, those three things they can do. Yeah, but they but they can also go out there and tell their story. And I think what I learned in this process with my conferences, or TED Talks, I hope you've seen some of them is is that cities need to tell their story. I don't know what Pittsburgh story is, right. But there's something unique about Pittsburgh, just the fact that we connected. And the fact that you're interested enough in hearing my perspective of a mayor from a different city way, way far away. That means that there's something special going on in Pittsburgh, you have to tell that story. We need to I need to know that story. Everybody needs to know that story. And I think we forget, we get so caught up in our world in our day to day grind that we forget to tell our story, or we got to find a conduit to tell the story. And I found that conduit through the conference util tech talks I've had, you know, they've probably been viewed and took in their totality, you know, millions and millions of views. But I realized the power of telling your story. And that allows you to connect with people like we're connected right now and continue the process of building on that storytelling.

And you you you hit it that is just so articulate, and so spot on. They You know, there are a lot of ties to Pittsburgh. And I'm sad when I hear that people don't know the story. But you have really been it's been emblematic because this whole how I help How can I help campaign, you can now actually have like a little store online, that people can buy t shirts and you can have conversations, but you also did something else in the something else was, if someone tweeted you or dm jus, you responded. And then you put the also have a package that's put together that is not a canned package in terms of what is life like in Miami. So there are two things there that are set are remarkable and admirable. So can you talk about that, like how you pivoted just like an entrepreneur?

Yeah, well, first, I would tell you not to be discouraged about the fact that you're not telling your story because no one is telling your story. I think what I learned is no one is telling their story. And I didn't know that because we weren't even telling our story. And we're Miami, you know. So that's the first thing. The second thing is, you realize very quickly that this is a viral world, right? Where things that you do can go viral and that that that is its own sort of has its own gasoline to it. And pivoting in terms of virality is important. Right? And I see one of the questions here is about crypto crypto

gonna ask you that. Can you talk about that?

You know, that is a pivot that I made right as I and let me tell you why. tweeted 800 times in December I cleared 800 times in December because I found something special in Twitter. I found a portal in Twitter. Let me see. Let me get in the camera. I found a portal, which is a very small portal on Twitter. Okay. It's, it's, I call it the portal of positivity. It's a small portal in Twitter. You got to look really hard for it because it's there, but it's Is the heart hard portal to find the portal of positivity, because 80 to 90% of what's going on in Twitter is toxic and negative. But I found this portal. And once I found the portal, I didn't stop, I said, I found something special here. I'm the kind of person I don't know how you are motivated, but I'm motivated by positivity. I'm motivated by people who wake up in the morning, who want to do good, who think that the world can be a better place, we think that their particular influence on the world can make it better. Nobody who's an entrepreneur or business owner can get up in the morning and think I'm going to fail today. It just doesn't work. It's not a formula for success. And so once I found that portal, I realized that I needed to drive a truck through it. In that process, I found that there was some highways, right, like some highways and one of the highways was crypto. And every time I talked about crypto, I mean my my analytics would go off the charts. And I knew about crypto because I was on the Florida blockchain foundation. And on the Florida blockchain Task Force, I was named by the CFO, Florida to help the state deal with the regulatory aspects of crypto. So I already had a good foundation plus, I'm a finance major, and understand math. So I understood the concept for some people don't get it. And so I understood the concept. And I believe in the concept. And I think that for a city to change its reputation. I don't know if you guys, any of you guys have ever been on a cruise ship. But it's like turning a big cruise ship. It's slow, and it's cumbersome. We wanted to change our reputation fast and overnight. And so for us to do that you had to find issues, that you could get a huge bang for your buck a huge return on investment. And crypto for me was one of those issues that would allow Miami to be talking about as the next city, we can't recreate a Facebook or a Google or Microsoft overnight. But we can we can do is give the impression that the next Google and Facebook and Microsoft are going to be born in Miami, they're not going to be born in Seattle, they're not going to be born in Silicon Valley. They're not gonna be born in San Francisco or Los Angeles, or New York, they're gonna be born in Miami. And you do that when you start taking chances and get emerging into into emerging economies and emerging technologies that other people are afraid to get involved in. And so it was a risk, you know, as all things that have big rewards are. But it was a calculated risk. Because I knew a lot of the fundamentals of the technology, I believe in the technology. And I only think that the technology is going to get more and more adopted, and it's going to become more and more integrated into our life.

And so you're calling yourselves the capital of capital. Right? You've also embraced that tagline as well. And I think you now have one of your big arenas with a new name, FTS. Hmm. So it's, it's, it's unending. So you know, here's the thing. We are going to definitely envious. But we're not afraid to tell our story here in Pittsburgh. Right. One of the things that that really matters to the work that we've done in the tech community, is the issue of immigration and immigration reform. And I know that in Miami has been a tremendous leader in this arena. And as a result provides an array of people that not just come from South America from all over the world. That's right, you've been able to capitalize on that. And right, I mean, you've been able to capitalize that you have that in your leadership, you have that you also have a deep belief in private partnerships, driving. Can you just talk about that before we we sign off talk about the government role and you know, public, private versus private?

I do. Let me let me just take a step back and talk a little bit about immigration. And I can I do feel that this is one of those issues. Remember when I talked about radical pragmatism at the beginning, I talked about D politicizing issues? I think immigration is an issue that is ripe for D politicization. I don't know that the country is ready for that in terms of political parties of letting it go. But it has to be. This is an issue that affects our viability as an economy and affects our viability as a country. I don't know how it is in Pittsburgh, but I can tell you, Miami, we're struggling to find workers. We need good workers and immigrants have always been good workers, including ourselves who came to this country with very little and my dad was a nine to 14, my mother came at six years old. And you know, my we were able to work our way up in this country. And that's the beauty of this country. It's the American dream. This is a country of immigrants. We are a city of immigrants. We wouldn't be successful without immigrants. I think 70% of the people that live in the city of Miami were not born in the city of Miami. So that's that's just who we are. The second question, which was more second question.

The second question we talked about, we talked about immigrants. And we talked about what was the second question, Brian? I'm so excited to talk to him that I ships with the private sector. Yes, private sector. That's right.

So we feel that a lot of these societal problems, there's a misconception that either they get fixed by the public sector, or they get fixed by the private sector, there's not enough cross collaboration. And then there's a fourth component that needs to be introduced and will be introduced, I think, Frankie, but but my, my successor generation, which is, and keep an eye out for this, because I want you all to know this, this is an important thing for you all to know, you know, social impact, companies for profit, right? It's a huge, it's going to be a huge industry. In the future, it's going to be companies that are going to be born to solve a social problem for profit, right. And they're not necessarily nonprofit organizations, because nonprofit organizations oftentimes rely on philanthropy rely on government, you know, rely on this is a company that built a model that is profitable, and needs to be profitable, so it can sustain its employees, and it can, you know, and continue to perpetuate itself in existence. But we'll have a social mission. That is, for me, what true freedom and true capitalism and true, you know, individual liberty, that is the bedrock of it, right. And I think for us in Miami, we want to support those kinds of companies. But yes, we do have public private partnerships and affordable housing, I saw somebody who had an issue with affordable housing here, we have public private partnerships, almost all the affordable housing that's built is built by the private sector is managed by the private sector, and we become a part of the capital stack. And the beauty of it is we put in $1, sometimes we get up to $20, and leverage $25, on average, but we get other benefits in terms of restrictions on income, on on cost, and how much it can cost and how much so it's a win win for the community. And the product that's built by the private sector managed by the private sector, significantly better than anything at the public sector could have done the public sector public housing, in the 60s and 70s, and 40s. And 50s. It looked like it looked like an insane asylum, it looked like a prison. You know, it did. And you may have some of that product in your city, but it looks horrible. And it's even hard to renovate because it's so ugly, you know, so so it is so I think for us, it looks like a little bit prettier have an insane asylum money when it gets renovated. You know, one without bars me but but but it's it's it's it's these public private partnerships are important. And it is also important that you have leaders that are willing to collaborate and even call out the private sector at times, and and demand that it's that it's a private sector leaders, get involved, share their wealth, and do it in a way that creates equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome, not equality of outcome, but equality of opportunity in this country, because that is what we want to give every child in our city, we all have a moral obligation. Every single one of us has a moral obligation as a community to try to provide a framework where every child in our community has an opportunity to succeed. If we're not doing that we're falling short. And I think that's a it's a challenge. If it were easy to do, everybody would be doing it. Right. It would be easy. The reason why we're talking about it and struggling with it is because we have to find the mechanisms, the vehicles to do it. So that's going to be my lifelong passion. I love being with you all and I'm so honored to be here. I I can feel your energy right now. I

hope you do. I'm wearing my 412 t shirt. I wanted to make sure that you knew that. That's our, that's our area code. And I want it

if you send me one, if you send me one hour, I'll put it on my

time we will send money.

It's got to be graphic downwards. Right.

Okay. So here's the thing, here's what we're gonna do. And if you're okay with this, we're coming to visit you. We're gonna bring some company, some people, we're gonna come spend a lot of my life in South Florida. I love I love it. They're not necessarily in the summer, but I love it there. And that's for all New Yorkers go and I'm a native New Yorker. So I have a lot of love and a lot of family down there. And I've been blown away. I

used to say that Miami was a six broke it was

it was a six foot that's what we used to do.

And now New York is a borough of Miami. Things are gonna change a little bit really true.

We used to pack a big luggage is and go there for three weeks at a time and, and lived on Collins Avenue. So I just listen you What you hear from me and from the people on this call is true fashion. Rethink, there's a lot to learn, we're gonna come down and visit and and do whatever a mission a cause a vacation. Hopefully it's a time of year where there's amazing things going on. But I always count on that

means it's always amazing. And the things are not mutually exclusive. You can have fun and work hard at the same time. And we'd love to have you be my honor to host you here.

Great. Well, I can't thank you enough. I know there are a bunch of questions out there. But we've taken more time than we thought we would. But you are such a gentleman. Thank you for your civility. Thank you for your leadership and reminding us about storytelling. There's not too many stories that we can tell. There never are. So thank you, Mayor stay safe. And while we don't have palm trees, you can see our background here. It's a beautiful city.

Beautiful. Have a beautiful city and say hi to your mayor for me.

I we certainly will. Thank you so much. And Jonathan pass the baton to you to tell us what's on for tomorrow.

Tomorrow is gonna be hard to follow up this conversation. That's where we have Denise to sign in. Everyone knows from sea level but she also runs Steel City con which is pretty rad. That's happening on June 11. So we want to find out how this iconic Pittsburgh event is gonna be held safe and still have a ton of fun meeting out with folks like William Shatner for crying out loud Star Trek. here we come.

Thanks everyone. get vaccinated if you if you haven't, take care

Transcribed by https://otter.ai