By: Debra K. Leibowitz
May 5, 2013

From left, Mark Meland, Peter Russin and Michael Budwick at the 20th anniversary celebration of their law firm.

More than 400 guests — including judges, attorneys and other community lead- ers — attended the 20th anniversary celebration of Miami-based law firm Meland, Russin and Bud- wick. The invite-only re- ception was held April 18 at the outdoor plaza at South-east Financial Center. Guests enjoyed cocktails, hors d’oeuvres and tours of MRB’s new 14,000-square- foot offices on the 32nd floor. The firm was foun- ded in 1993 by long-time Miami Beach residents Mark Meland and Peter Russin. Name partner Mi- chael Budwick joined the firm in 2002.

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By: James Cassel
May 13, 2013

At a cocktail party earlier this year, my friend’s daughter took the initiative to tell me about her new startup venture. Her story piqued my interest, so I did some homework and later decided to throw a little angel money into her San Francisco-based company, “FunLoop.”

Welcome to the world of “venture capital and angel investment” in South Florida.
Although we can credit the region for its progress in cultivating a venture capital (VC) community and nurturing startups, there’s no doubt the region continues to lag behind places like California, Massachusetts and New York City in terms of access to venture capital.

Think about it: Florida is the third-largest state in the country, and South Florida is the fifth-largest Designated Market Area (DMA), but we don’t have the third-largest or even the fifth-largest number of VC’s or VC-funded companies. The area has a huge gap in seed-stage capital, which happens to be the most important stage where business concepts are proved and growth strategies are developed. Although there are a significant number of angel investors in the region, they aren’t easily found unless you know what rocks to search under.

According to a recent MoneyTree Report published by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association, the Sunshine State dropped from No. 13 to No. 18 for VC dollars invested in 2012. Investment in Florida companies dropped $141 million, or 42 percent, from 2011.

There’s no doubt that institutions like The Knight Foundation, The Launch Pad at the University of Miami, the FIU Pino Entrepreneurship Center, the Venture Hive, among others, are making tremendous strides in promoting entrepreneurship and innovation. They must continue moving forward with their fine work, which is critical to our region’s success and future. The VC’s (not to be confused with angel investors) are a growing but still small group that includes Antares Capital, Medina Capital, HIG Ventures and Florida Growth Fund, to name a few. Angel groups and networks include New World Angels and Venture Architects Investor Network.

But the undeniable truth remains that we will not be able to reach California, Massachusetts or New York City status until we have access to more capital — or the reputation for being a prime venue for this sort of entrepreneurial activity. South Florida still simply lacks the big-name, high-quality VC funds that are commonly found in other regions.

So, how do you access venture capital? Unfortunately, there’s no magic pill. Success here will require a lot of research, networking, relationship-building and luck.

There are plenty of angel investors out there, but unfortunately there isn’t one clearinghouse to find them. More often than not, entrepreneurs are finding their angels the way my friend’s daughter found me — by luck at a cocktail party or networking event.

A good way to begin: Identify and attend the right networking events and conferences that have the most fertile ground. Let your contacts know what you’re trying to do, and ask if they know any potential investors who may be interested. Some websites might be of help. Investment bankers can always help too, but few work with startup or very early stage companies. We have posted a list of venture capital resources at http://casselsalpeter.com/knowledge/resources/

Reach out to the universities and determine what opportunities may exist for you. Florida International University, Florida Atlantic University, Nova Southeastern University and the University of Miami, for example, offer a broad range of opportunities, including everything from business plan competitions to access to funding.

Keep in mind that you may have to go find your money in other markets as well, which means you will have to travel and do lots of networking. Like it or not, you also may have to move to another city.
While we can’t ignore that VC-backed companies based in Florida, such as Citrix Systems, CBS Sportsline and Mako Surgical, have been acquired or gone public, we are still seeing many angel and VC’s investors requiring that entrepreneurs relocate to other areas before they will invest. Time and again, I’m seeing California VC’s saying: “You have to move to the valley.”

South Florida has come a very long way during the past decade. While the future looks bright, the promised land is still at least another decade away at the rate we’re going, and it will take a lot of hard work and joint effort to get there.

James S. Cassel is co-founder and chairman of Cassel Salpeter & Co., LLC, an investment-banking firm with headquarters in Miami that works with middle-market companies.www.casselsalpeter.com

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By Lindsey White
May 16, 2013

The rumor mill keeps churning about the looming sale of City National Bank of Florida. Recent reports suggest that Banco do Brasil SA is closing in on a purchase of Valencia, Spain-based Bankia’s Florida franchise.

On May 9, Bloomberg Television reported that Banco do Brasil is near a $900 million deal. Bloomberg originally identified Banco do Brasil as a bidder in April. On May 15, Dow Jones Newswires cited an unnamed banker as saying that the 1.18 trillion-Brazilian-real bank is in the “final stages” of acquiring Miami-based City National, in a transaction expected to close at the end of the month.

When contacted by SNL, Banco do Brasil declined to comment on its interest in growing in the Miami market — but some say the City National acquisition would make sense, given the Brazilian bank’s existing footprint in Florida.

Banco do Brasil acquired Coral Gables, Fla.-based EuroBank in early 2012. The acquisition is expected to contribute to Banco do Brasil’s expansion of business in the U.S., focusing on Brazilian and Hispanic customers, the Brazilian bank said in a first-quarter presentation.

EuroBank, renamed Banco do Brasil Americas, had $82.1 million in assets at March 31. The bank has three branches, including a recently opened location on Miami’s Brickell Avenue.

“I just couldn’t imagine them going into the Miami market and staying at less than $100 million in assets,” said Paula Johannsen, a managing director at Monroe Securities. “They didn’t come there just to buy two or three branches of a small community bank.”

James Cassel, chairman and co-founder of Miami-based investment banking firm Cassel Salpeter & Co., said it can be a wise strategy to dip a toe into the U.S. market before diving in fully. A bank that does so can put the regulatory approval process behind it before going after larger deals. If Banco do Brasil were to bid on City National, the fact that the Brazilian bank already has a charter in the U.S. could make the seller’s board more comfortable, he said.

Cassel pointed to the example of Spanish Banco de Sabadell SA, which bought Miami-based Transatlantic Holding Corp. in 2007, before further expanding with the purchase of Miami-based Mellon United National Bank. Sabadell is also among those rumored to be interested in buying City National, along with a number of other banks.

Benjamin Bishop Jr., chairman of Southeast-focused investment bank Allen C. Ewing & Co., said the Miami market is “one of the most dynamic in the country” and “very attractive” to foreign banks looking for a foothold in the U.S. “Miami had a huge number of unsold condominiums a couple years ago on Brickell Avenue,” he noted. Today, he said, many of those condos have sold as foreign nationals scooped up properties.

“A lot of the wealth in Central and South America is going to Miami, and if anything will probably be accelerating,” Bishop said.

Observers agree that if Banco do Brasil is looking to buy, City National is an attractive target. Cassel called City National a “wonderful franchise.” The bank has a long history, a network of 26 branches with good locations, a solid core group of employees and a loyal customer base that stuck with it when City National was last sold, he said. In 2008, Bankia’s Caja Madrid bought an 83% stake in City National Banc shares Inc. in a $927.0 million deal.

Observers noted that there are several banks in South Florida, but few of City National’s size and quality. The bank had $4.74 billion in assets as of March 31, and nonperforming assets totaled just 0.97% of total assets.

This could help City National fetch a good price. According to SNL data, live bank deals announced since Jan. 1, 2012, with Florida-based targets have had a median tangible book value of 100.7% and a mean value of 102.3%. Johannsen characterized pricing for recent Florida bank deals as “all over the board,” but said that many people expect City National will generate more of a premium.

“For the international-type banks that want to get in there, it’s the best quality right now,” Johannsen said.

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By: Nancy Dahlberg
May 9, 2013

Miami Finance Forum panel: Matt Haggman, Melissa Krinzman, Ben Wirz, Peter Kellner, Marco Giberti, Adam Smith.

A year ago, when the Knight Foundation sponsored a Miami Finance Forum discussion about building a startup ecosystem, it was as a test case to gauge interest locally, said its Miami program director, Matt Haggman.

Now with a host of co-working spaces and accelerators for entrepreneurs, Endeavor for high-impact entrepreneurs and the eMerge conference on the way, and recent news such as Open English’s Series D raise of $65 million, what a difference a year makes.

As we know, Knight has been sponsoring and funding many of these initiatives, and on Tuesday the foundation was back sponsoring another Miami Finance Forum event about the startup community, this one focused on investor groups.

The panel for “The CEO Power Breakfast: Meet Miami’s Newest Investor Groups” included Melissa Krinzman, managing director of Venture Architects, Ben Wirz, director of business consulting, Knight Enterprise Fund, Adam Smith, partner of Medina Capital Group, Peter Kellner, co-founder of Endeavor, Marco Giberti, angel investor with Accelerated Growth Partners, and Haggman.

There’s been a shift in the conversation of late, much less talk about what Miami lacks and more about what we have. This event was no exception.

Here’s a bit on what we do have, according to the panelists:

The new Venture Architects Investor Network -– Krinzman’s venture –is a private network where investors will be matched with entrepreneurs who fit their investment profile. The deals that come through the network have been vetted; the network draws on Venture Architects’ strong New York-Miami ties, “but we want to grow the Miami piece,” Krinzman said. Just since launching in January, there are already 20 angel investors and five funds in the network, she said.

Accelerated Growth Partners, a relatively new local angel group, in less than a year has invested $2 million plus ($25K to $250K or sometimes more) in early-stage companies, some locally and many from Latin America, as well as other U.S. and European companies that are open to moving offices here. “Our position is to find the best angel investors and find the best talent here or bring that talent here,” said Giberti.

Medina Capital, founded by Manny Medina, invests in later-stage early-stage companies in spaces like cyber security, big data, cloud and storage, Smith said. “We have made a couple of investments so far and we have a couple in our pipeline. What we try to do to fill this gap (between angels and large funds) for folks that need to go to the next level … That also led to eMerge Americas (the tech conference planned for next May). … We are a natural gateway to Latin America and we should use that to our advantage,” he said

Endeavor: The global nonprofit for high impact entrepreneurship, now in 15 countries, chose Miami for its first U.S. office, which is under development. “We look for entrepreneurs across all industries that will have a very significant impact. … We are a signaling organization so when we get set up here, we believe entrepreneurs will start coming out of the woodwork,” said Kellner. (See “the Endeavor Effect: on Endeavor.org here.)

Knight Enterprise Fund: Launched a year ago, the $10 million fund has made 12 or 13 seed and Series A investments to date, said Wirz. “We are looking at companies that reduce the distance between people and information.” He said Knight Enterprise Fund has invested in one local company, Gui.de, Freddie Laker’s venture that turns blogs and online news into TV, making information more fun and interesting to consume, and he said the fund is looking at a second company.

Opportunities for growth come with exposure. “One of the challenges is communicating the experience of the money here. We have a lot of talent here and we are going to have to shout about what that talent brings beyond the dollars,” said Krinzman. On all the family offices here, Giberti said family offices often don’t have experience in investing in tech “but when they try it, they do like it. I think family offices can play a vital role in this early-stage community… it will be interesting to syndicate more and better capital for statups.” Kellner added: “I see a flow that is not one way, I see an opportunity to bring companies from Europe and elsewhere to Miami. I have two companies interested, one in Swtizerland and one in the Netherlands, and I also think there is an opportunity to bring some of Silicon Valley’s brightest here.”

Audience members, largely executives and professionals, lawyers and others, also included some startups. “The panel was world-class and the discussion helped us all get a better grasp on the increasing availability of venture capital in the South Florida region,” said Nestor Villalobos, founder of Arctico and a Miami Herald Business Plan Challenge finalist this week (at left). He believes South Florida is quickly emerging as “the place to be for startups across the country looking to start or grow their businesses.”

Glen Surnamer, COO of Bookigee, (pictured at right) said he too thought the area is hitting an inflexion point. “I think the Miami early stage scene is becoming more comfortable being Miami, rather than trying to be the Bay, NY, Boston, Austin, etc. This is important because each of those scenes emerged organically out of very specific sociological, demographic and economic circumstances,” Surnamer said. “The point here is that Miami entrepreneur culture has to organically germinate out of the seeds that underpin us. This is clearly starting to happen.”

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By: Marcia Heroux Pounds
May 3, 2013

Motionpoint Co-Founder Adam Rubenstein, CEO Will Fleming and Chief Technology Officer Enrique Travieso with some of their 200 employees at their Coconut Creek headquarters. Motionpoint, a company that provides web translation services, is in the midst of expansion and plans on adding 100-150 more jobs over the next two to three years.

The Coconut Creek office of MotionPoint Corp., a website translation service company, resembles the United Nations, with employees from 40 countries including Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Korea, Spain, Russia and Zambia.

Most of these technology specialists hired in recent years came to South Florida to work for other companies, said Will Fleming, co-founder and chief executive of MotionPoint. Several were experienced workers downsized during the recession.

Now MotionPoint, which provides online translation services for major consumer brands like Best Buy and Ford Motor Co., plans to further expand. The company said this week it would hire 100 to 150 employees over the next three years.

The company’s growth is being driven by interest in the global marketplace.

“We see our business as helping companies penetrate new markets,” Fleming said. With the U.S. economy recovering, “companies are investing more aggressively, and the website is one of the areas where they tend to invest.”

As a result, technology workers are in demand.

Deborah Vazquez, chief executive of ProTech, a technology staffing specialist based in Boca Raton, said the technology job market is “very strong right now, with more jobs than people to fill them.”

ProTech’s February-March survey of South Florida employers found that 64 percent said they plan to increase their IT staff during 2013. The same high percentage of IT professionals said they had no plans to leave Florida — up from 54 percent in 2012.

“When companies were cutting back, they needed tech help to do that. When companies are beginning to grow, technology helps them do that,” she said.

For its expansion, MotionPoint is seeking IT specialists, software developers and web engineers, as well marketing, project management and sales people.

While the company hires some of its hard-to-find workers with special skills from other countries under the H-1b visa program, it primarily finds talent among workers already in the U.S., Fleming said.

MotionPoint was founded 13 years ago by Fleming and Adam Rubenstein. In the 1990s, the entrepreneurs built a prepaid calling card and wireless business, Convenience Products, which it sold to Conquest. The company eventually sold to AT&T.

While MotionPoint is private and doesn’t disclose annual sales, Fleming said the company has been growing at “an average of 50 percent” annually since 2004.

For Amtrak, for example, the company provided a train reservation and online ticket booking system in Spanish, French and German. Speakers of languages other than English “are able to conduct business in a language they understand,” Fleming said.

MotionPoint can translate from any language to any language, including all major European, Middle Eastern and Asian languages. The top five languages on the Internet are English, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese and Portuguese.

The company combines human translation with proprietary software, which makes translation less time-consuming and less expensive.

“We’re in a great business,” Fleming said. “We feel like we’re pretty well-positioned.”

Miami-based Norwegian Cruise Lines’ Rob Casas, vice president for e-commerce, said he chose MotionPoint to create a Spanish-language option on its website, NCL.com, because it involved minimal impact on its IT department and was cost-effective.

“We get a lot of interest from all over Latin America,” Casas said. “We get traffic from Mexico, Colombia and Puerto Rico, as well as a large segment [of Spanish speakers] in the U.S. who prefer the website in their language.”

Other local clients include AvMed, the Florida Lottery, the Fontainebleau resort in Miami Beach, Memorial Healthcare System, and several state and local government websites.

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By: Camira Powell

May 2, 2013

When trying to entice prospective students, colleges and universities encourage students for a visit to get a feel for the campus atmosphere. But not everyone has the ability to travel to their potential dream school, which is where YouVisit enters the picture.

Literally.

YouVisit offers virtual campus tours that go beyond what you would get by simply visiting a university’s homepage, a mix of film, photography and narration that mimics actual campus tours. But these virtual tours include stops that visitors normally don’t have access to, such as a residence hall or a high-tech lab.

“[Most] virtual tours are more a grouping of pictures, but the problem with that is that it doesn’t give students a good sense of life on campus,” said Abi Mandelbaum, co-founder of YouVisit, who started the site with Endri Tolka and Taher Baderkhan. “[It saves] students and their families a lot of time and money so that they can get a better feel for what it’s like to live and study at college campuses across the country from their homes.”

The trio met at Brandeis University as international students — from Colombia, Albania and Jordan, respectively — and came up with the idea for YouVisit when trying to find a way to show their families what their college looked like. YouVisit started as a Facebook app, later expanding to the Web and a mobile app as it grew in popularity, especially with teens.

While the virtual tours are free for students, YouVisit charges schools for its services and to be featured on the Web site.

However YouVisit is accessed, users can also search for schools based on factors like location, size and tuition price. With more than 400 tours to choose from, there is a wide variety, from well-known Ivies to smaller liberal arts colleges. But even with 4,000 colleges and universities in the U.S. alone, it’s far from all-encompassing.

“We have [tours] in multiple languages, like Mandarin or Spanish … one of the biggest things for a lot of our partner schools is that they’re trying to bring in international students,” said Tolka. This is a big plus for schools trying to recruit international students, he added, especially students from China.

There are several other sites that also offer virtual tours, of course, including CampusTours.com and eCampusTours.com. In addition, many schools, such as Stanford and Yale, already incorporate mobile devices to embellish tours, or have downloadable apps.

And while none will completely replace the traditional college tour anytime soon, it is an indicator of how colleges are adjusting to the digital age. So, even if you can’t set foot on campus, you can still see it for yourself.

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