Silicon Beach: Driving Innovation Across the Southeast
At Silicon Beach, our mission is to accelerate innovation across the Southeast by partnering with founders, organizations, and communities to foster growth.
We do this through three key pillars:
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Ecosystem & Pitch Events: We bring founders, investors, and partners together, hosting events that fuel collaboration and opportunity across the region.
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Advisory: We provide hands-on strategic guidance to help companies move from traction to scale, building pipelines, partnerships, and sustainable growth.
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Development: Collaborating with cities, counties, and the State of Florida, we drive strategic land and infrastructure projects—bridging innovation with lasting impact.
Through these pillars, Silicon Beach is shaping the future of the Southeast. Let’s build it together.
Our Founder
Jason Engelhardt
Founder
Jason Engelhardt
Jason’s path to founding Silicon Beach is the result of a career spent building at every level—creative, operational, commercial, and financial.
He began in the entertainment division of Gelfand, Rennert & Feldman (then part of Cooper & Lybrand), where he learned how ideas become marketable products and how talent, storytelling, and business intersect. He then moved into international finance leadership roles across multinational media and American Express, building a global operating lens that would later shape Silicon Beach’s platform approach.
Over more than 20 years on Wall Street, Jason deepened the “venture mechanics” of Silicon Beach—how to structure, launch, and scale real businesses. In senior roles at the Bank of New York and JPMorgan, he developed and launched dozens of financial products that produced $100M–$500M in annual recurring revenue and helped scale a $52B business.
His final institutional role as CFO of Wealth Management at TIAA sharpened his focus on growth systems, performance discipline, and scaling teams and distribution—core ingredients in Silicon Beach’s commercialization-first model.
In parallel, Jason built in the creative economy, reinforcing Silicon Beach’s belief that narrative, product, and distribution must move together. He founded Rockstarz, Inc., producing music education content featured on A&E, MTV, VH1, and developed television concepts that advanced to ABC’s upfronts. These ventures strengthened the storytelling and go-to-market instincts that now help founders cut through noise and earn market attention.
Since stepping away from institutional finance, Jason has applied these building blocks directly to startups—supporting fundraising for an NBA franchise acquisition and serving as President of multiple AI and FinTech companies.
Those operator years cemented Silicon Beach’s hybrid accelerator–venture studio stance: hands-on partnership once validation is real, GTM is urgent, and scale is in reach.
Today, as a founding partner of Silicon Beach, Jason brings the whole arc of his experience, product creation, commercialization, capital strategy, and scale, to co-build disruptive, technology-based ventures and help founders turn traction into enduring companies.
CTO - In Residence
Matisse VerDuyn
CTO in Residence
Matisse VerDuyn
With over 15 years of experience in software architecture and development, Matisse VerDuyn is the creator of PackageJS.Ai—a powerful low-code meta-framework that enables developers to build full-stack web and mobile applications in days rather than months.
Designed for flexibility and scale, PackageJS empowers startups to rapidly test and iterate on new ideas, while also offering on-premise deployment options for enterprises prioritizing security and compliance.
A seasoned entrepreneur, Matisse has founded and contributed to multiple successful startups, bringing deep expertise in both technology and venture building to the Silicon Beach community.
