Spotlight on Entrepreneurship in Florida

We have done several spotlight posts on entrepreneurship in different parts of the world: Colorado, Utah, Czech Republic.

Today, we will turn the spotlight on Florida.

As usual, we start with a Unicorn: Modernizing Medicine. It’s a wonderful company from serial entrepreneur Daniel Cane. The HealthcareIT company has raised over $350 million in funding, has over $100 million in revenue, and is a legitimate unicorn.

Read: Equity Financing from Customers: Modernizing Medicine CEO Daniel Cane, Boca Raton, Florida

Also, Q Link Wireless is a fascinating company that bootstrapped to a $200 million business catering to poor people in the United States selling cellular phones and connections, and monetizing the data through advertising. In India, Reliance Jio has a similar strategy, by the way, for those interested in bottom-of-the-pyramid businesses.

Read: $200 Million in Revenue Catering to the Bottom of the Pyramid: Issa Asad, CEO of Q Link Wireless

I also like the trend that Latin American companies who want to come into the US often end up setting up their US presence in Florida. Read: Building a Global Technology Company from Colombia: Ricardo Villadiego, CEO of Easy Solutions We seldom see global technology companies being built out of Latin America, so what Ricardo and his team have been able to accomplish is very exciting. And to think that they are building a fraud prevention company out of Bogota, Colombia is truly impressive. And the journey continues through Florida as the front-end.

Our customary bootstrapping stories are no less inspiring:

Bootstrapping to $30 Million from Florida: SproutLoud CEO Jared Shusterman

Navigating the Microsoft Ecosystem to Build a 12 Million Dollar Company: Brian Knight, CEO of Pragmatic Works

Bootstrapping to $20 Million with Intelligent Financial Engineering: Tim Hentschel, CEO of Hotelplanner.com

Bootstrapping to Inflection: Dan Stewart, CEO of Happy Grasshopper

Bootstrapping Lessons: FairWarning CEO Kurt Long

Bootstrapping E-Commerce to 16 Million: Valerie Holstein, CEO ofCableorganizer.com

Managing Multiple Pivots While Scaling to $50 Million: MotionPoint CEO Will Fleming

Some Thought Leadership interviews:

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Tom Hogan, CEO of Kony

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Jim Swift, CEO of Cortera

As you can see, there’s a lot going on in Florida.

What is extremely encouraging is that so many tech startup eco-systems are achieving critical mass now.

I expect this trend to accelerate.

Photo credit: stu/Flickr.com.