A decade ago, Miami was known for its beaches and being a Latin American investment stronghold. Today, it's one of the fastest-growing tech hubs in the country, and my guest this week is one of the people who willed it into existence.
Melissa Medina is co-founder and CEO of eMerge Americas, the platform that has spent over a decade transforming Miami into a global technology hub. What began as a conversation with her father over lunch in the Florida Keys grew into a 20,000-person conference drawing founders, investors, and innovators from more than 50 countries. But eMerge isn't just an event; it's an ecosystem of accelerators, summits, and pitch competitions that has helped early-stage companies raise billions.
Melissa’s path to building eMerge started long before 2012. Her father, Manny Medina, is a Cuban immigrant and serial entrepreneur who founded Terremark in 1980, initially as a real estate development company. Through Terremark, he helped develop commercial and residential projects across South Florida, including CocoWalk and Grove Hill Towers in Coconut Grove, before transforming the company into a global technology and data infrastructure powerhouse. In the late 90s, he made a high-risk pivot into data centers, building the NAP of the Americas in Miami, a hurricane-proof, Fort Knox-style facility that became a critical hub for internet traffic across the Southeast U.S. and Latin America. The company, renamed Terremark Worldwide, sold to Verizon in 2011 for over $2 billion. That exit, and the conversation it sparked between Melissa and her father about what came next, became the seed for eMerge.
Melissa built it the hard way: deliberately, year after year, through a pandemic that nearly ended it, all while raising five kids and running an early-stage venture fund alongside eMerge.
How her father's leap from traditional real estate into data centers, built just weeks before 9/11, reshaped the family's business and set the tone for Melissa's own risk tolerance.
The origin story of eMerge Americas, born from a family lunch in the Keys shortly after the Terremark-Verizon sale.
Why 2019, eMerge's fifth year, was its breakout year, and how the 2020 pandemic nearly derailed an entirely in-person business model.
How Mayor Francis Suarez's viral tweet accelerated a wave of capital and company migration into South Florida that eMerge had already been building toward since 2012.
The scale of eMerge today: over 400 partners spanning startups, investors, global corporations, universities, and government, with partnerships including Google, JPMorgan Chase, and the U.S. Army.
How close to 1,200 companies have gone through eMerge’s accelerator programs, and why the fund grew directly out of the conference's founder network.
The economic footprint of eMerge’s work: over 10,000 jobs created and nearly $3 billion in economic impact across Florida.
How Melissa balances running eMerge, its accelerators, and Medina Ventures while raising five kids, and why she says the discipline it demands at home has made her sharper in business.
Why Melissa believes South Florida's tech rise isn't a moment but a long game, and what she tells founders considering the move.
For Melissa, the story of eMerge is inseparable from her family's story: a belief that Miami had the ingredients to become a tech hub long before the rest of the world caught on, and the patience to build toward that belief for over a decade before it paid off.
Be great,
Jay Roberts
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