Miami skyline photo by Matthew Paulson on Flickr.

This post has been updated.

Three years ago at Knight Foundation we made a new bet on Miami. We launched an effort focused on supporting and propelling Miami’s emerging community of entrepreneurs.

The aim is to help create an entrepreneurial ecosystem with the resources that best enable entrepreneurs to pursue the ideas of their choosing. We’ve made more than 160 investments to build this network. Examples range from conferences such as Sime MIA, which is underway today, to The Idea Center at Miami Dade College, Endeavor Miami and, most recently, Startupbootcamp Miami. Miami now consistently ranks as one of the nation’s most active startup communities. 

But, as this network has grown, we’ve consistently heard people ask for a guide to help them navigate this rapidly expanding ecosystem of resources that range from co-working spaces and weekly events, to angel investor groups and platforms to find talented workers.

So, in partnership with The New Tropic, today we’re launching startup.miami, an online guide aimed at helping to better understand the resources available to entrepreneurs, investors, the solely curious—everyone—in Miami’s startup community.

The guide is set up to help you find the answer to a specific question. For instance, where can you find funding and mentorship? Or, how can you connect with the startup community? Or, where can you find co-working and office space? Where can you find training and new skills? In each case, startup.miami provides a list of potential solutions.

A successful startup ecosystem must be interconnected and varied, providing different solutions for entrepreneurs with different problems to solve. It’s not meant to be linear. The journey of an entrepreneur is never a straight line, and a good ecosystem provides a network of resources for those different points in the journey.

Think of it like a good subway system, allowing for you to get where you need to go with many points of entry and exit. Of course, when riding the subway, a map can be helpful and that is where startup.miami can assist people navigating our innovation ecosystem. 

We encourage you to take a look. But, most of all, we highly encourage you to tell us what you think. In fact, we need your input. For this to work, it has to be helpful to users. Startup.miami is meant to be iterative and will change – indeed, change a lot – as a result of your feedback. What you see today is a starting point, not an end.

Throughout the site you will see a button “Share a story.” Please click that and tell us what you think. What resources are missing? How can the site be better organized? What is simply wrong? 

Whether you are an entrepreneur looking for a mentor, an investor looking for compelling local startups, a mid-career professional looking for new opportunities, or a newcomer who wants to plug into Miami’s startup scene, your opinion is important.

To be clear, this guide is meant to capture all useful resources, not just those funded by Knight Foundation. There are terrific new efforts funded by other sources – ranging from co-working spaces such as WeWork Miami Beach or the 10,000 Small Businesses entrepreneur support program funded by Goldman Sachs. Each is a key piece of Miami’s startup ecosystem. With this guide, we want to capture all important resources, whether or not Knight helped get them off the ground.

Over the past three years the growth in Miami’s startup community has been terrific. Our goal is to help make Miami more of a place where ideas are built. And the bet is that, if done, it will produce important community benefits including greater talent retention and attraction, expanded opportunities across Miami, and increased community engagement. There is evidence of progress on each score.

But the exciting part is we are just getting started. Startup.miami is an effort to continue this exciting momentum and help make Miami’s growing startup community easier to understand, and – most importantly – more helpful to you.

So, check out startup.miami and tell us what you think. We look forward to hearing from you.

Matt Haggman is Knight Foundation’s program director for Miami. Email him via [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @matthaggman.