Synapse Summit a celebration of Sunshine State startup innovation

South Florida startups EVQLV and Xendoo were big winners at the conference

By Nancy Dahlberg

Calling the Synapse Summit a “SuperBowl of Innovation,” Brian Kornfeld, the organization’s CEO and co-founder, says Synapse’s the mission has always been to “celebrate, discover and engage.” There was a lot of all three going at this week’s Synapse Summit held at Tampa’s Amelie Arena. The Summit attracted more than 6,000 attendees, 800 investors, 300 exhibitors and 150 speakers.

The Synapse team’s goal is to connect people from across the state, through its conferences and community leadership. “It’s not just Tampa, it’s not just Orlando, it’s not just Miami. It’s also about Pensacola, Jacksonville, Gainesville because that opens doors of opportunity for everybody,” said Kornfeld. Later he urged to the crowd: “Stop calling us an emerging tech community, we are a tech community.”

Much of the programming on Tuesday was focused on emerging technologies .In total, the summit hosted over 40 panels that explored advancements in defense security, blockchain and environmental sustainability.  Perhaps not surprisingly, artificial intelligence dominated much of the talk in hallways and on these stages throughout the daylong conference.

On center stage during the kickoff of the conference, Kornfeld  took ChatGPT for a spin, asking why Synapse was awesome as if it was written by Edgar Allan Poe. The app responded with a poem (and it wasn’t bad…) Midday on one of the upper floors of the conference, it was an overflowing, standing room-only crowd for a panel on AI. Beth Harrison of  St. Petersburg’s Dalí Museum, shared how the museum’s popular DALL-E app creates art based on descriptions of users’ dreams.

Then back on the main stage, keynote speaker Cathie Wood, founder and CEO of Ark Invest, said ChatGPS may not be the killer app but it points to the massive potential.

“I think this time around the killer opportunity is productivity,” she said. “Already, we’re seeing coders becoming twice as efficient within the last three to six months, and we think that’s going to 10 times more over the next five to 10 years because of this technology. The productivity gains are going to be mindblowing.”

In other parts of the moderated conversation, she said she was “delighted” by the “amazing” work by Elon Musk at Twitter. Using AI to help him cut costs, she said, “he’s really restructuring and showing other companies the way.” She believes he is “looking at Twitter as a Super App much like WeChat became in China.”

Synapse also puts the spotlight on founders from all over the state, and startup booths ran up and down two floors of the Amelie Arena where the conference was held. There were pitches and awards, too – with cash prizes.

Two of the biggest winners of the day were from South Florida.  Lil Roberts, CEO of Xendoo of Fort Lauderdale, a digital accounting platform used by about 1,000 businesses, represented one of 10 companies and organizations honored and took home the top Innovation Prize, and with it $50,000.

Then, three finalist companies pitched to judges on the main stage for a chance to win a $150,000 investment by DeepWork Capital, Las Olas Venture Capital and Tesseract Venture Fund. The big winner was Andrew Satz, CEO of EVQLV, a Miami area startup that aims to leverage advances in artificial intelligence to revolutionize the discovery and design of therapeutic antibodies for biopharma.

Another South Florida native, Ally Love [pictured at top of post], Peloton instructor and Love Squad founder who grew up in Miami and attended New World School of the Arts, shared her story and gave an inspirational keynote talk about her “Three Cs” – Curiosity, Cultivation and Creativity.

“In order to really listen and truly create real change, your teacup has to be half full,” she said. “There has to be space for curiosity, new ways to innovate cultivation within your community and a way for innovation and creativity to occur in a capacity to solve real problems,” Love said.

Steve Case, founder of AOL and Rise of the Rest, closed out the conference, with a conversation moderated by Roberts, who was awarded a Rise of the Rest investment in 2019 when he visited Miami, Tampa Bay, Orlando and the Space Coast during the organization’s bus tour. He said he senses there is more of a sense of hope and possibility today, but there’s still work to do to level the playing field because a big majority of venture capital still goes to three states: California, New York and Massachusetts.

Case shared that he spends a lot of time with mayors and governors, encouraging them to shift some of their focus on economic development from attracting big companies to nurturing new companies. He said when Amazon was searching for a second headquarters, and 230 cities applied, he tried to make the case: “If you spend even half the amount of time … and half the amount of money you’re spending to lure Amazon, and instead focus it on your startup community, you might create the next Amazon…. The real job creation comes from new companies under five years old. If you’re not focusing on that sector, you’re not going to see your community rise.”

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Nancy Dahlberg