Ken Griffin made a $3 BILLION gift to Carnegie Mellon University, the largest individual gift in American higher education history and for a Miami, Florida campus!!! And the centerpiece is extraordinary: $2 BILLION to build a new 35-acre Carnegie Mellon campus in Miami. CMU Miami is expected to ultimately serve 3,500+ students, nearly 300 faculty and 600+ staff, with graduate students arriving as early as 2028. For those who don’t know @CarnegieMellon Carnegie Mellon is one of the great technology universities on Earth. Computer science. Artificial intelligence. Robotics. Engineering. Design. Advanced manufacturing. CMU has spent decades sitting at the intersection of science + technology + entrepreneurship + the real economy. And that’s why this matters so much. Miami’s next chapter cannot simply be measured by how many companies relocate here. The real measure is whether we build the institutions that continuously produce talent, research, intellectual property, founders and entirely new industries. CMU Miami can become one of those institutions. The planned campus will focus on enormous real-world challenges including AI, human health, national security, energy, climate resilience and industrial innovation, with research labs and venture studios designed to connect academia, industry and government. Think about the economic flywheel this can create: Talent → Research → IP → Startups → Venture Capital → Companies → Jobs → More Talent. And this doesn’t happen in isolation. Miami already has extraordinary higher-ed anchors. @univmiami brings world-class research, medicine and scholarship. @FIU has become one of America’s most consequential large public research universities and an enormous engine of upward mobility and talent. @MDCollege is arguably one of the most important workforce and access institutions anywhere in the country. CMU doesn’t replace that ecosystem. It makes the ecosystem more powerful. Imagine the collaborations. Joint research. Faculty networks. Shared talent. Startup formation. Industry partnerships. National-security innovation. AI commercialization. Students moving between classrooms, laboratories, companies and venture studios across South Florida. That is how regional economies compound. And we should also acknowledge something important: This will be a journey. Buildings don’t create innovation ecosystems. People do. It will take years of recruiting extraordinary faculty, attracting students, connecting with existing institutions, earning trust in the community and translating research into companies and jobs. But today the ceiling of what Miami can become just moved higher. For years we’ve talked and worked on Miami becoming one of the world’s great centers for technology, entrepreneurship and innovation. Increasingly, the institutional infrastructure is catching up with the ambition. And perhaps the most exciting part: This isn’t simply a Miami story. It’s a Florida story. A world-class technology university planting a major flag here strengthens Florida’s ability to compete for the scientists, engineers, founders, companies and industries that will define the next 50 years. Capital moves fast. Companies move fast. But universities build civilizations. CMU coming to Miami is a very, very big deal.

@ndahlberg —> refreshmiami.com/news/carneg…

Congrats to Dr. Jignesh Patel, founding dean and VP of @CarnegieMellon Miami!! Four startups. Four acquisitions. Now he gets to help build Miami’s next generation of founders. That’s a hell of a person to put at the helm. Excited to catch up again in a few weeks at CMU with Jignesh. @refreshmiami article 👇🏽

People ask me about Miami founders. I wish I could introduce every one of them to @jeffnoelspeaks. I met Jeff when he was a student at @FIU. Today he is a: Founder. Professor. Published author. Keynote speaker. Community leader. All at once. Jeff has that ability to build, learn, pivot, regain focus and execute. There’s something about a relentless founder who brings joy into the room. That’s my friend Jeff. That’s Miami, too.

Florida’s next billion-dollar company could start with a professor who has never pitched a VC. I want that company built here. Hiring here. Creating wealth here. Take a look at my dear friend Dr. Arif Sarwat in this photo. His work at @FIU sits at the intersection of energy, power and intelligent systems. The FIU–FPL Solar Research Center he leads has sent more than 100+ alumni into Florida’s energy sector. Spend time with people like Arif and you start thinking differently about where to look for the next great company. Across Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach, four universities reported more than $1 BILLION in R&D spending in FY2024: University of Miami: $559M. FIU: $326M. Florida Atlantic: $88M. Nova Southeastern: $61M. Think about the decades of expertise behind those dollars. The experiments. The discoveries. The graduate students who know how something works before the rest of the world knows it exists. That’s fertile ground for @AmbitionAccel. And @FIU deserves serious attention. 55 U.S. utility patents awarded in 2024, spanning inventions in cybersecurity, antennas, medicine and infrastructure. StartUP FIU helping faculty explore commercialization. I spent years there. I wish every investor in South Florida could spend a week seeing what I saw behind those campus doors. @univmiami has extraordinary depth, too. U Innovation and the Coulter Center help researchers move discoveries toward commercial application. UM supported me early as a founder. I know what an open university door can mean to someone trying to build. Add UF, USF, UCF and FSU statewide, and the opportunity gets bigger. We’re still emerging as a commercialization ecosystem. Building the relationships, specialized capital and experienced teams takes sustained work. Research spending measures effort. Turning discoveries into companies takes another set of capabilities. Here’s where I’d put serious energy: • Put operators in labs before the pitch deck exists. Find the customer problem worth building around. • Fund prototypes and validation. Give promising discoveries a chance to become investable. • Make licensing understandable. Clear terms, timelines and people empowered to move. • Recruit first customers. A utility, hospital or manufacturer willing to run a pilot can unlock the next chapter. • Build the workforce from the beginning. That last point is why @MDCollege belongs at the center of this conversation. Applied AI pathways from certificates through a bachelor’s degree. Industry partnerships. Practical training for businesses and working professionals. @mdcpresident and people like @AntonioDelgad9 are building the capacity to put new technology to work across our economy. And that talent pipeline starts early. K–12 pathways matter. Leaders like Commissioner @HenmackIII driving this conversation and convergence. A founder should know which professor to call. A researcher should know which operator to call. A student should see a future here. I want the introduction to a professor to become as routine as the introduction to an investor. The next great Florida company deserves that introduction.

Bet against Miami if you like. Just know you’re betting against America. Ken Griffin’s $2B Carnegie Mellon commitment puts a national question in Wynwood: Can America still build new engines of invention? Check out my @refreshmiami piece 👇🏽 refreshmiami.com/news/americ…

Praying for everyone in the path of Hurricane Isaias.

Your follower count isn’t a business model. My son @nabs_labs built an audience of 500K+ on YouTube. In his first Substack post Nabs challenges the idea that everyone needs a personal brand.

Loved joining @TimPadgett2 on @wlrn’s ‘South Florida Roundup’ to talk about what @CarnegieMellon coming to Miami means for our city. Give it a listen. 👇🏽 wlrn.org/podcast/the-south-f…

This is the America I’m betting on. Last week on Narragansett Bay, I watched a founder’s dream literally take flight. @regentcraft Viceroy seaglider completed its fifth flight in front of 600+ investors, customers, government and defense leaders. We were out on ferries watching these extraordinary machines float, foil and fly. Proud to be an early investor and advisor to REGENT along with @gazi2a. @billythalheimer and this team including our good friend, Adam are world class. There’s something deeply personal about backing a founder early and then standing there as their vision lifts off the water. You’re cheering for the machine, sure. But you’re really cheering for the people who made it possible. What a moment for this crew. What a privilege to witness it. Onwards to production.

Miami doesn’t host rooms like this by accident. My friend and mentor, Chip Paucek brought @ProAthleteCom home again this week. PAC Proximity. A ballroom full of pros who already won on the field, now getting serious about what they build off it. Philanthropy. Business. The next chapter. Chip and Kaleb’s obsession with putting great people around great athletes and letting the work compound. I’ve been in these rooms since the earliest combines. This weekend I was inspired deeply in the small group sessions and hearing how passionate these men and women are about building sustaining impact. Grateful every time Chip finds a way to bring it back to the 305.

I remember meeting @0xSigil in SF like 4 years ago. He was maybe 17 or 18 yo and had this boundless founder energy mixed with a relentless focus on actually building things. It also stood out that he was infused with a sense of joyfulness in the difficult and at times solitary task of building hard things. My own son @nabs_labs who was 14 at the time and also a young builder wanted to connect and Sigil was there to be a resource to a fellow crazy early builder. (Nabs is now 18 and in that same builder zen frenzy mode) No one is surprised to see that @khoslaventures @a16z @svangel and a who’s who of venture is backing this builder. You can just do things…

Before Miami tech was a hashtag, @rabovitz was building unicorns here. Cafecito today with one of my favorite people in all of tech and a dear friend. For the last quarter century, Rony has been one of Florida’s most consequential founders, pushing the frontier, building multiple unicorns and now going again with @SynthBee Headlines can accelerate an ecosystem. Founders make one. Human capital is the infrastructure that matters most.

My entire adult life, I've listened to people explain what Miami isn't. Not serious. Not technical. A party town. A punchline. “The Miami thing is over." Yesterday Ken Griffin committed $3 billion to bring @CarnegieMellon to Miami. The largest individual gift in the history of American higher education. Not to Boston. Not to Palo Alto. To Wynwood. Some history for the skeptics: 1873: Johns Hopkins leaves $7M to Baltimore. People shrug it off. It invents the American research university. 1891: The Stanfords plant $40M in orchard country. Fifty quiet years. Then Terman. Then HP. Then Fairchild. The Valley of Heart's Delight becomes Silicon Valley. 1900: Carnegie builds a school for millworkers' kids. Steel dies. The school doesn't. It gives Pittsburgh robotics, Google, a second century and America a place in the geopolitical fight for the frontier. Those places which have driven American innovation didn’t just spring out of nowhere, it took visionary philanthropy and the long slow toil of faculty, students and communities. Stanford waited half a century and two world wars before its national moment. Miami and Florida’s moment is already here. AI. Defense. Energy. Hemispheric capital and so much more. And we're not starting in orchards. UM, FIU, MDC already produce talent and knowledge at scale. CMU isn't replacing our home universities. It's pouring accelerant on our region. The haters judged Miami on a news cycle. Cities are judged in centuries. Welcome to Miami's next hundred years. We're just getting started.

Today’s launch event for @CarnegieMellon Miami campus made possible by the investment of $3B from Ken Griffin was a shining moment for our state and country. What stood out, was the intentionality of CMU Pres. Jahanian’s team in reaching out to such a broad range of Miami stakeholders from all of the local universities, MDC/FIU/UM + electeds + community and private sectors groups. I spoke with students & faculty members like Dr. Jignesh Patel and also research scientists who all want to work collaboratively with our community in addressing the grand challenges we know that face our region and world. It came full circle when I saw one of my son @nabs_labs, closest friends who is a Freshman at the CMU Griffin School of Computer Science. Seeing a Miami kid back at home for this announcement was a harbinger of the impact and opportunity that will come from an R1 Research juggernaut setting up a campus in our Miami. The idea that a Miami kid like that and so many others could soon build/thrive and grow our ecosystem arising from this catalytic event is a sign of how much uplift is possible in our future.