What’s Good Podcast with Gil Dezer, Sunny Isles Builder with the Last Pepsi in the Desert

Six Trump towers. Porsche Design Tower. Armani Residences. Now Bentley Residences, rising on that same strip right now. I sat down with Gil Dezer for this week’s Good Company interview and covered a lot of ground. Here is what stuck.

Dezer put it plainly: “It’s amazing how people can drive by the same street all day long and think it’s junk, but another person can have a completely different vision.”

Interview with Dorsia Founder Marc Lotenberg, and co-founders Josh Stern & Gabriella Shteiman

Building Impeccable Taste Into Impeccable Infrastructure

I have known Marc Lotenberg for twenty years. Before Dorsia, before Surface, before the W days at Conde Nast, he was running 944 out of Miami and I was building my own thing on the other side of that same media world. Josh Stern I go back with too, through his I Know the Chef days, back when getting a table at Carbone meant knowing somebody who knew somebody. Gabriella Shteiman, a co-founder as well, is new to our crew and just weeks into Miami, but already fluent in the brand.

The three of them run Dorsia, the membership platform that has quietly become the reservation infrastructure for the world’s best restaurants and, increasingly, the operating system underneath the world’s most exclusive clubs, festivals, and experiences. We sat down for this week’s Good Company interview and covered a lot of ground. Here is what stuck.

New Series Alert: Life in Short Form w/ Zoli Honig, Miami Entrepreneurship, Technology, & Life from the Frontlines

COVID shut the world down and opened a door for me instead.

I arrived at Reef Technology, through a teams call, not knowing a soul, and Zoli Honig was on the other side of the line. Reef raised over two billion dollars and was the largest startup in Miami. Sixteen of us were on a Microsoft Teams call at 8am every morning trying to keep it standing. Zoli was the one person in the building who already knew short form video was going to change everything. He taught me how it’s was done. I returned the favor.

We are done keeping those conversations off the record. Life in Short Form is a new monthly series I am launching with Zoli, taped out of the What’s Good Studio at the Moore. No script. No polish. Two guys who met as employees, went out and built our own things, and stuck around long enough to watch this city change shape in real time.

We both thought we could get rich living inside someone else’s dream. Turns out, like most things worth having, you only get there by doing it yourself, risk and all. That is the path to the money. It is also the path to fulfillment, and we didn’t understand that until we were already on it.

Building a Small Business in Miami

Every transplant from New York says the same thing in year one. Nothing moves. Zoli calls it the Miami stupid tax. Nobody calls you back same day.

Zoli’s wife closed her first real estate deal here and the clients called her the best agent they’d ever worked with. She didn’t do anything extraordinary. She showed up on time. She answered her texts. As Woody Allen said “eighty percent of success is showing up.” In Miami, showing up puts you in the top ten percent.

That gap is the opportunity.

“Hustle plus insight plus AI, you should be hitting grand slams.”

Miami also runs twelve to eighteen months behind New York, LA, and San Francisco on execution speed, even while it exports culture faster than many of them. Put an understanding of AI on top showing and the math breaks wide open. You can do damage here with that combination, that is rarely possible anywhere.

The Origin Story

Zoli built three companies before Reef ever knew his name. One landed him on Shark Tank with a deal from Mr. Wonderful. Say those two words to him now and his eyes roll into the back of his head. He could split the atom tomorrow and Shark Tank would still be the only line anyone remembers.

Zoli left because I asked him one question. What do you want your life to look like in five years. What is that going to cost? We wrote the number down. We looked at it together. I asked if Reef was ever going to pay him that number. He said absolutely not. So I asked the only question left. So what are you doing here.

We had both spent years thinking the dream we were chasing belonged to somebody else’s company. It didn’t. It was ours the whole time, waiting on us to go build it ourselves.