Earlier this month, the Infobip DevRel team set off on a meetup tour for developers and startups in North America. This time, we’ve reached Miami, New York City, and Toronto. We had inspiring talks and panels with local experts including VCs, startups, and developers. The turnout was amazing, and more than 200 people attended our events! 

This is a recap of the tour up the East Coast of North America, covering what happened and where. Maybe you’ll want to join us at our next event after reading about these?

Miami

The first event on our tour was held in Miami on November 2. Generally, Miami in the past couple of years has become a global tech hub. Lots of tech events are organized there, especially during the Miami Tech Month happening in April. We are happy that Infobip is also taking part in building a tech community in Miami. Earlier this year, in May, we organized there our first Shift Conference outside of Croatia. You can read about the event and the amazing line-up we were lucky to attract in this blog post (spoiler alert! The Doom creator, John Romero was one of them). Prior to the Shifrt Miami, we also organized an Infobip Connect meetup in Fort Lauderdale this April.

Now back to our meetup. The event took place in The Lab Miami, located in the Wynwood Arts District in Miami, known for its vibrant tech community. We kicked off our event with a fireside chat with Allan Tito, Founder at Grammerhub. Allan is a passionate tech community builder and it was great to hear his insights and reflections about the fast-growing Miami tech ecosystem.

After chatting with Allan followed the keynote presentation from Priscilla Parodi, Principal Developer Advocate at Elastic. Priscilla become our regular speaker in Miami since she spoke at our previous meetup in Fort Lauderdale and also at the Shift Miami Conference. It’s always a pleasure to hear from Priscilla about innovative solutions from Elastic. We wrapped our meetup in Miami with Chad Metcalf, Head of Strategy at Daytona. This startup co-founded by Ivan Burazin, ex Chief of the Developer Experience Department at Infobip, has  recenty raised $2 million in pre-seed funding.

We are very happy that our volunteers from the Shift Conference attended and actively participated in the meetup. Dania Hernandez, Kiyanna Gayle, Kris McNair, Christian Ocampo you rock! 🙂 During the meetup, Nikola Radisic on behalf of the Shift Team announced the second edition of the Shift Miami Conference which will be held on April 23, 2024. We can’t wait for that!

New York City

The second stop on our North America tour this November was the Big Apple. Nice co-working and events venue – The Farm Soho was a place for our meetup held on November 7. The turnout at this meetup was amazing! The venue was too small for all the attendees and even some people had to stand during the event. But it was for sure worth it since we had an amazing speaker line-up. 

We kicked off with the panel with Beth Ferreira, Venture Investor, formerly a General Partner at FirstMark Capital, Patrick McGinnis, International Venture Capitalist, Creator and host of FOMO Sapiens, and Filip Sasic, CEO and Founder of Entrepreneurs for Global Change. The panel was about opportunities and challenges in the New York & US startup ecosystem. Renowned and experienced speakers shared tips for startups on how to improve their businesses and how to reach investors. 

The panel was followed by an interesting keynote presentation from Adam Thomas, Principal at Approaching One & Product Management Coach. Adam’s keynote with the intriguing title „The 5 Deadly Sins of Strategy“ was very insightful and engaging. In this keynote, Adam put the accent on how quality strategy can guide a team to better decisions at their work. He concluded that those deadly sins that he spoke about are actually making strategies just pieces of paper. The final keynote of the day was delivered Mike Elsmore, Senior Developer Advocate at Infobip, who had an interesting talk about Conversational UI. 

Many thanks to everyone who took part in promoting our meetup in NYC, especially Filip Sasic, Iva Vukina, Managing Director at Goldman Sachs & ACAP – Association of Croatian American professionals in New York City.

Toronto

We wrapped our meetup tour in Toronto two days after the event in NYC. Our meetup there was hosted in the vibrant Clubhouse Toronto. On this meetup, we had also amazing turnout with a packed house!

We started our Toronto meetup with a keynote presentation from Laura Rodríguez, Staff Software Engineer at Okta, Inc. Laura talked about developer experience, what is it, why it’s important, and what things you can do to improve developer satisfaction. Laura’s keynote was followed by a panel discussion with  Yuri Navarro, Managing Partner at Kanata Ventures Roy Pereira, CEO and Co-founder at Unified, and Nikola Pavesic, Director of Startup Ecosystem & Developer Experience at Infobip. Panelists gave to the audience insightful overviews of actual trends in the startup ecosystem in Toronto and Canada. Panelists also offered useful pieces of advice for the many startup founders who were present at the meetup.

Posts on social media are giving insights into how some of the members of the Toronto tech community experienced the meetup. 

Kapil Shrestha: „Thank you Infobip for the exciting event the last night. It was an amazing experience listening to the panel including expertise from VC and startups, and having quality networking opportunities with startup enthusiasts.“

Daria Khrisanfova: „Thank you Infobip for reviving in-person events for the Tech community 🤩 Amazing set, super enthusiastic presenters and panel, engaging conversations!“

More to come

With the North America meetup tour we wrapped up together with the entire season of our Infobip Connect meetups we started in February. This year, we organized 19 meetups in 14 cities across 3 continents. Nairobi, Accra, Cairo, Casablanca, Berlin, Miami, Abidjan, Kampala, Amsterdam, London, New York City, Kigali, Lagos, and Toronto are the cities where we organized meetups in 2023.

In some of those places, we organized multiple events. More than 1,700 developers, startups, and tech enthusiasts attended our meetups. We saw that these in-person events are very impactful for the local developers and startups, so next year we are taking another step in building global tech communities as we plan to organize 40 meetups on 5 continents!

Stay tuned for the upcoming announcements!

We are just starting!