A new Endeavor: Why we chose Miami from Knight Foundation on Vimeo.

Endeavor Miami is celebrating a big milestone: We’re adding our first Endeavor Miami Entrepreneurs to the Endeavor Global family. Panelists selected My Ceviche and KidoZen last week during the Endeavor Global 51st International Selection Panel in Dubai. The two businesses will join our network of entrepreneurs and will receive support and advice from world-class business leaders and mentors.

Founded in 1997, Endeavor has a proven track record with targeted mentorship and services to entrepreneurs. We help them scale up and as a result drive economic development and build entrepreneurial ecosystems in their communities. We provide expert advice to more than 800 high-impact companies in 19 countries around the world. These entrepreneurs cumulatively generate about $6 billion in revenue and have created 225,000 jobs.

It was a rigorous selection process for our first Endeavor Miami Candidates, and they were selected unanimously. My Ceviche, founded in 2012 by Sam Gorenstein and Roger Duarte, is a seafood restaurant that has been luring South Florida customers with a fresh take on fast casual dining. It offers healthy food with an affordable range of ceviches, salads, tacos, burritos and stone crabs. KidoZen, founded in 2012 by Jesus Rodriguez, is an enterprise mobile platform that provides secure and scalable middleware to integrate backend and line of business capabilities into companies’ mobile apps.  

We launched Endeavor Miami in September thanks to the support of Knight Foundation and other leaders of the community who are now part of an extraordinarily engaged board of directors. I am lucky and privileged enough to lead Endeavor Miami, which is Endeavor’s first U.S. affiliate; in other words, this is the first time that entrepreneurs from the United States are able to benefit from the Endeavor model. Our mission, which is the same as other affiliates in 18 different countries around the world, is to build an entrepreneurial ecosystem and transform our local community. At Endeavor Miami we trust that selected entrepreneurs will inspire others, and become role models, mentors and/or investors for other entrepreneurs, while we provide them with targeted services to help them grow.

I am confident this is the right time for Endeavor in Miami and that we will be able to help build a diverse entrepreneurial ecosystem. We are working nonstop to find and choose high-impact firms from all industries to become the next Endeavor Entrepreneurs.

To learn more about Endeavor go to www.endeavormiami.org.