I spent yesterday at the eMerge conference in Miami. While there was a nice list of speakers, I spent most of the day talking to the early stage companies exhibiting and catching up with people in the entrepreneurship community in Miami.
My takeaways from the conference:
- About ten of the companies exhibiting are working in the HR (human resources) space with all kinds of software and platform offerings. Not a space that interests me but apparently very popular.
- Despite the cluster emerging in early stage medical devices and healthcare in SFL, I saw very few such companies exhibiting.
- The portfolio companies of Medina Capital were the best looking collection of companies, with all of these companies reminding us what "high tech" means. Talking to these folks reminded me of discussions I used to have with people at MIT Media Lab.
- Several good looking companies were bootstrapping with no capital raising desired. They were characterized by a step by step caution in developing the business that is somewhat refreshing.