At the March 2022 Media Roundtable (MRT) luncheon held at the 5-star cuisine downtown Sarasota restaurant Rosemary & Thyme, your editor was invited to give a talk about the entrepreneurship ecosystem on the Florida Gulf Coast. He felt a little like he was “preaching to the choir” in that most attendees were successful entrepreneurs in their own right.
The medium roundtable is a 72 year-old organization founded by George Allen in 1950 in New York City, and he continued the group when he retired to Sarasota in 1989. Over the years it has included active and retired media, television, radio, print, film, internet, theatre, authors, and public relations members.
A short 2-minutes video below will give a flavor of the topic. Florida is rated the fourth best state to start a new business enterprise right behind California, New York, and Georgia. When digital tech resources are factored into the equation, Florida and in particular its Central I-4 beltway is among the most desirable in the country. Three reasons are the Tampa hub of incubators and educational centers (U of Tampa, Hillsborough Community College), the Synapse innovation organization begun in 2018 to spur new companies, and the High Tech Corridor, a collaborative network of high-tech businesses, entrepreneurs, students, faculty and job seekers running west from Tampa through Orlando to Daytona Beach.
One would be hard pressed to find a more conducive geographic location to start a new venture than the Gulf Coast of Florida that includes two incubators each in St. Petersburg and Bradenton supported by Eckerd College and State College of Florida with its new 26 West Center providing entrepreneurs with seven different services, a TV studio, a digital collective, a coding academy, a collegiate nexus, student incubator, personal branding lab, and an entrepreneurship academy.
It is a special place to live apart from entrepreneurial opportunity. As they say in the South, “come see us”!
MRT2 – SD 480p ← Short Video