More Than a Silicon Valley Dev Shop: Why I Brought It Home to South Florida

Let's get this out of the way: I never moved to Silicon Valley.

I worked for Silicon Valley companies. Built products used by millions. Led teams processing billions in transactions. But I did it all without ever paying $4,000 a month for a studio apartment in the Mission District.

People hear "SyncTech" and assume I'm another SF transplant who moved to Florida for the tax break. Nah. South Florida is home. SyncTech is here because I'm here, and I'm here because this is where the work needs to happen.

What I Built at Gusto

Before SyncTech, I spent two years at Gusto — the payroll and HR platform that serves hundreds of thousands of small businesses.

I wasn't just writing code. I was building products and leading teams:

Lead Engineer for Kiosk — Gusto's self-service product that's now generating over $20 million a year in revenue. I built the technical foundation for that thing. It's still running. Still making money.

Head of Engineering for Integrated Benefits — I led the team with direct reports, responsible for growing Gusto's benefits product from a $3 million line of business to $13 million by the time I left. Two years, 4x growth. That's not a vanity metric — that's revenue I can point to.

AI Adoption Pioneer — When I joined, Gusto was "talking about AI." By the time I left, 100% of my team was using AI in their daily workflow. I didn't write a memo about AI strategy. I just started using it, showed the results, and everyone followed.

Gusto's First Design System — My team built what I call "the Lovable for Gusto" — a component system where product teams could self-serve and build interfaces without waiting in a design queue. It changed how the entire company shipped product.

Before Gusto, I was at Symbiose Health, another Valley company, building healthcare tech. The caliber of engineering I brought to SyncTech didn't come from a bootcamp — it came from building real products at real scale.

The Gap Nobody's Talking About

South Florida is having a moment. Miami's tech scene blew up. Boca, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm — founders everywhere. Money is flowing in. Accelerators are popping up. The energy is real.

But here's the thing nobody wants to say out loud: where are those founders going when they need to build their product?

They're going offshore. They're hiring agencies in Eastern Europe or South Asia. They're finding enterprise-focused shops that do great work — for Fortune 500 companies with Fortune 500 budgets. Or they're cobbling together freelancers from Upwork and hoping for the best.

There's a massive gap in the middle. The startup-focused, move-fast, understand-the-grind, build-your-MLP kind of tech partner? That barely exists in South Florida.

I know because I looked. When I was launching my own products — UpWaste, TrustDots, all the ones before that — I would've killed for a local team that understood what it meant to build a startup product. Not an agency that wants a 6-month discovery phase and a 200-page requirements doc. A team that says "what's the idea?" and starts building.

So I built that team myself.

Why Local Matters

People ask where I'm from and I tell them: "I'm from my mother's uterus. I'm a citizen of the world."

I've lived places. I've worked everywhere. But South Florida is where I planted the flag, and here's why:

Founders want to look you in the eye. Especially first-time founders who are putting their savings, their reputation, their dream into a product. They want to sit across from you at a coffee shop in Boca and see that you get it. That you're not just another vendor. That you care about their thing as much as they do.

Time zones are real. When your dev team is 8 hours ahead, your feedback loop is measured in days, not hours. When they're down the street, you can hop on a call at 3 PM, hash it out, and ship by end of day.

"We can have a drink when we need to" isn't a limitation — it's an advantage. The best client relationships I have are the ones where we've sat across a table and talked through the hard stuff in person. Not every problem gets solved in a Zoom call.

Community compounds. When I help a founder in Delray Beach launch their product, and they tell their founder friend in Fort Lauderdale, and that person tells someone in Miami — that's how ecosystems grow. You can't build that from 3,000 miles away.

Understanding the market. South Florida isn't the Bay Area. The customer base is different. The business culture is different. The problems founders are solving here — in hospitality, real estate, logistics, healthcare, Latin American markets — require context that a team in San Francisco might not have.

The Team We've Built

Here's what "Silicon Valley caliber in South Florida" actually means: our engineers come from Google, Gusto, Meta, and companies you've definitely used. They're not junior devs learning on your dime. They're senior engineers who've built products at scale and chose to work with SyncTech because we do interesting work without the big-company bureaucracy.

The result is a team that punches way above its weight. We're not a 200-person agency. We're a tight crew of exceptional engineers who actually give a damn about the products we build.

A Love Letter to SoFlo Founders

I'm Haitian. I'm from here. South Florida is home. And I believe this region has everything it needs to be a serious tech hub — the founders, the capital, the diversity of ideas, the hunger.

What it's been missing is the infrastructure. The technical bench. The team that says "yes, we can build that, and we'll do it right."

We make the complex simple and the simple scalable. That's not just a motto. That's the actual experience. You come to us with a messy, ambitious idea, and we turn it into a clean, scalable product. Same engineers, same standards, same rigor as a top Valley company. But you're working with people who actually pick up the phone, who show up to your office when it matters, who care about your business beyond the SOW.

That's SyncTech. That's why I came home.

If you're a South Florida founder with an idea and the drive to make it real, let's talk. Not a sales pitch — a real conversation about what you're building and how to get it into people's hands.