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Why I invested in Caffeine Spaces to help build a Startup Community

Last week, my partners and I in The CISO Group invested as lifetime members in Caffeine Spaces, a new co-working space that opened in the Florida Atlantic University (FAU) R&D Park here in Boca Raton, Florida. Caffeine Spaces is the brainchild of Mark Laymon, who is seeking to build a strong startup community here in South Florida.

My friend Brad Feld has spent a good chunk of his time for the last few years advocating for startup communities around the world. His Startup Revolution site is the place to learn about and participate in building startup communities. Brad is the person who started me in blogging 8 or 9 years ago. I have been watching what he has done in Boulder (my previous company that I helped found, StillSecure, was based in Boulder and Brad was a board member and Mobius VC was and still is lead investor), with TechStars and with Startup Communities closely for years. I really wanted to see if I could help foster that kind of critical mass of entrepreneurship here in my area.

Caffeine Spaces seems like the perfect place. With a major University like FAU as an anchor, next door to the FAU incubator space, Caffeine Spaces seems well situated. I have spoken to Mark about his vision for Caffeine Spaces, as well as several of the folks I have met in my several visits there. Mark would like to build Caffeine Spaces throughout the area (to start) and really foster the community across the entire South Florida landscape. I think that is great, but I would like to see us start by seeing if we can build a critical mass right here in Boca Raton and then go from there. By the same token I would like to see critical masses form in Ft Lauderdale, Miami, and West Palm Beach, and then have them all come together into a super cluster.
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