New Series Alert: Life in Short Form w/ Zoli Honig, Miami Entrepreneurship, Technology, & Life from the Frontlines

New Series Alert: Life in Short Form w/ Zoli Honig, Miami Entrepreneurship, Technology, & Life from the FrontlinesCOVID shut the world down and opened a door for me instead.I arrived at Reef Technology, through a teams call, not knowing a soul, and Zoli Honig was on the other side of the line. Reef raised over two billion dollars and was the largest startup in Miami. Sixteen of us were on a Microsoft Teams call at 8am every morning trying to keep it standing. Zoli was the one person in the building who already knew short form video was going to change everything. He taught me how it’s was done. I returned the favor.We are done keeping those conversations off the record. Life in Short Form is a new monthly series I am launching with Zoli, taped out of the What’s Good Studio at the Moore. No script. No polish. Two guys who met as employees, went out and built our own things, and stuck around long enough to watch this city change shape in real time.We both thought we could get rich living inside someone else’s dream. Turns out, like most things worth having, you only get there by doing it yourself, risk and all. That is the path to the money. It is also the path to fulfillment, and we didn’t understand that until we were already on it.Building a Small Business in MiamiEvery transplant from New York says the same thing in year one. Nothing moves. Zoli calls it the Miami stupid tax. Nobody calls you back same day.Zoli’s wife closed her first real estate deal here and the clients called her the best agent they’d ever worked with. She didn’t do anything extraordinary. She showed up on time. She answered her texts. As Woody Allen said “eighty percent of success is showing up.” In Miami, showing up puts you in the top ten percent.That gap is the opportunity.“Hustle plus insight plus AI, you should be hitting grand slams.”Miami also runs twelve to eighteen months behind New York, LA, and San Francisco on execution speed, even while it exports culture faster than many of them. Put an understanding of AI on top showing and the math breaks wide open. You can do damage here with that combination, that is rarely possible anywhere.The Origin StoryZoli built three companies before Reef ever knew his name. One landed him on Shark Tank with a deal from Mr. Wonderful. Say those two words to him now and his eyes roll into the back of his head. He could split the atom tomorrow and Shark Tank would still be the only line anyone remembers.Zoli left because I asked him one question. What do you want your life to look like in five years. What is that going to cost? We wrote the number down. We looked at it together. I asked if Reef was ever going to pay him that number. He said absolutely not. So I asked the only question left. So what are you doing here.We had both spent years thinking the dream we were chasing belonged to somebody else’s company. It didn’t. It was ours the whole time, waiting on us to go build it ourselves.