For years, people had a question for Jason Inasi: Why Miami? If he wanted to build technology companies, surely Silicon Valley, New York or Singapore made more sense.
He stayed. More than 25 years later, the city has changed enough that the question feels like a time capsule. Inasi is still doing what brought him here: finding the next shift in technology and building something around it.
“Miami has a really unique rhythm to it,” Jason Inasi told Refresh Miami.
That rhythm suited someone who grew up between Trinidad, England and Europe, then studied in Southern California. After working at agencies in the United States and Europe, he made Miami home. Its mix of cultures and ties to Latin America and the Caribbean offered a base for the kind of work he wanted to do.
“I think because of our multicultural makeup and our entrepreneurial makeup, Miami entrepreneurs approach challenges differently,” he said.
A friend had shown him the World Wide Web in the early 1990s. He was hooked on its promise of communication and connection. In 1998, he founded The Factory Interactive, helping businesses move into the digital world.
Building a digital agency in Miami came with problems. Finding programmers and designers was hard. The talent pool was smaller, and the city’s tech identity kept changing, from Silicon Beach to its later crypto chapter.
Today, he sees more talent, more creativity and younger founders willing to put time and money behind their ideas. He also sees costs that can get lost in the pitch for moving south: housing, transportation and schools.
For Inasi, a tech scene depends on whether people can build lives here, alongside their companies. It also means giving local founders more attention and access to funding.
“We are often overshadowed by larger corporations or flashy stories and companies that are coming in from other states,” he said.
His work has moved from websites to mobile apps and now AI. At DigitalDNA Labs, Inasi’s team develops products in areas including education and health. One project led to another: while launching products, he saw a gap in how businesses could assess their presence in AI answers.
That became ReadableIQ, which helps companies assess how AI systems understand and recommend them. The question behind it is: when someone asks an AI assistant for help, does your business enter the conversation?
His example was an air conditioning company. Calling yourself number one means little if customers are asking who can fix a broken AC after hours. The work starts with understanding their questions.
It’s a version of a problem Inasi has spent decades working through: helping businesses adjust when technology changes how people connect.
But his interest keeps returning to who gets to take part. “I love building projects that I think bring value to communities,” he said, adding that he particularly enjoys making AI tools accessible to small businesses and making learning more engaging for children.
After a quarter century in Miami, his next project starts with a question about the people around him: What could he build that would make their lives work better?
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