Miami, April 28, 2016– The Idea Center at Miami Dade College (MDC), in collaboration with Tel Aviv University, will host the inaugural Startup Nation Conference on Tuesday, May 17, at MDC’s Wolfson Campus in downtown Miami. The Startup Nation Conference is an opportunity to understand Israel’s unique tech entrepreneurial ecosystem, and will feature some of Israel’s wildly very successful entrepreneurs.
The Startup Nation Conference aims to explore the hows and whys of Israel’s global success and to connect Miami’s tech and innovation community with that of Tel Aviv’s—the world’s second most successful innovation ecosystem after Silicon Valley. Each session will reflect the four steps in every startup’s life cycle: ideation, launch, growth and exit. In addition, the conference will feature more than 20 speakers, including Maurice Ferre, former CEO & Chairman of Mako Surgical Corp sold for $1.65 billion in 2013, Jonathan Medved, Founder & CEO of OurCrowd, invested more than $16 million in 18 portfolio companies in just under six months, Ariel Beery of MobileODT; Nir Daube, Cimagine Media; Yaniv Levy, Change; Liat Sade Sternberg, Fusic; Itay Tayas Zamir, Woosh Water; Isaac Litman, Neteera; Dr. Arie Gutman, FineTech Pharmaceutical; Joshua Levinberg, Gillat Satellite Networks; Nuri Golan, EXO Technologies, and many more.
“The goal of the conference is to build a bridge between Tel Aviv and Miami’s own budding startup community,” said Matt Haggman, Program Director of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
The Startup Nation Conference was born from a recent Knight Foundation collaboration with Project Interchange, an educational institute of the American Jewish Committee. A delegation of twelve Miami entrepreneurs and tech community leaders, including The Idea Center’s Executive Director Leandro Finol, who traveled to Israel in March 2015 to learn from the country’s dynamic tech and innovation sector. Since this trip, The Idea Center and Tel Aviv University have partnered to bridge the two ecosystems through the Startup Nation Conference.
“During my visit to Israel, I had the opportunity to interact with some of the world’s best problem solvers. Miami will benefit from discovering their methods of coming up with creative solutions and succeeding at resolving the most unsolvable issues in our community,” Finol said.
For more information on the conference and updates on confirmed speakers, please visit www.StartupNationConference.com.