In December 2020, a tech founder posted on Twitter (now X) suggesting that Silicon Valley should consider moving to Florida. I was mayor of Miami then, and I responded to the post with “How can I help?”
My reply went viral. My phone started ringing with calls from founders, venture capitalists, engineers, operators — people who had been quietly thinking about leaving San Francisco or New York or Boston — who wanted to learn more about relocating to Miami.
I have thought a lot since then about why the four words I posted hit so hard.
I realized that if you are building a company from the ground up, your default experience with government is that it does not help. City Hall is the place that slows you down. You experience a two-year permitting fight, unanswered emails, bureaucracy that treats your ambition like an inconvenience. So when someone in office showed up and asked “how can I help?” it resonated because it broke the pattern.
That moment taught me that the single greatest competitive advantage any region can offer ambitious people is not a tax incentive or a zoning variance. It is a culture that supports them and genuinely wants them to succeed.
That is why, when I recognized that same culture in the people behind “Ambition Accelerated,” I wanted to be a part of it.
Launched by The Florida Council of 100 and backed by Stephen Ross and Ken Griffin, the “Ambition Accelerated” campaign is a nationwide effort to reach CEOs, founders, investors and young, hungry, ambitious professionals with a simple message: Florida’s Gold Coast — Miami, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach — is the best place for the next generation of American business.
I joined as a Senior Advisor because this is an effort led by people who deeply care about Florida, who have experienced what Florida did for them, and who want to extend that opportunity to others. I recognized in them the same grassroots energy that animated my own approach as mayor. And I knew I could speak to the benefits of this region honestly, because I lived it.
My grandfather was a political prisoner under Fidel Castro. His brother died in a Cuban jail. In Florida, my family found freedom and opportunity. My father became the first Cuban-born mayor of a major American city. I went to a state school and then a state law school, built a career in real estate and corporate law, then became city commissioner. Eventually I became the 43rd Mayor of Miami — the first Miami-born mayor in the city’s history. Every step of that path happened here and was made possible by this special place.
Millions of people, immigrants and native-born alike, have come to South Florida across generations with the same basic impulse: find a place that will let you work hard and get ahead. That impulse built this region. The same conditions that made my family’s story possible — low barriers, real opportunity, a culture that rewards effort — are exactly what business builders are looking for today. And these conditions are fundamental to what the region is today.
The problem is that many of the people who would benefit most from what exists here do not yet know it exists. That is the gap the “Ambition Accelerated” campaign was designed to close.
Florida and the Gold Coast are not perfect. No region is. But what sets this place apart is not the absence of problems — it is the will to solve them. There is a culture here, in government, in the private sector, in the civic institutions, that treats problems as things to fix rather than things to accept. When I was mayor, we did not sit around waiting for permission. We picked up the phone. We showed up. We asked what people needed and then we went and did it. That same problem-solving energy runs through this entire region, and it is one of the reasons companies that relocate here tend to stay.
In December 2020, I asked “How can I help?” and dozens of companies chose to take me up on my offer. The “Ambition Accelerated” campaign is that same question, asked by the entire Gold Coast region, backed by real capital, and directed at every ambitious company in America that is ready to stop fighting headwinds and start building with tailwinds.
If you are weighing where to base your next operation, your next fund, your next headquarters, I want to have that conversation.
How can I help?
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
