The ‘most influential Latino in Silicon Valley’ has some advice for Miami parents
Kendall native Michael Sayman insists there’s nothing special about himself.
Once Facebook’s youngest employee at age 17, Sayman, now a 25-year-old senior product manager at the video game company Roblox, was at one point dubbed “the most influential Latino in Silicon Valley” and featured on Forbes’ 2019 30-under-30 list.
But in an interview with the Miami Herald, Sayman said his life story — which he shares in a new memoir, “App Kid: How A Child of
Immigrants Grabbed A Piece Of The American Dream” — shows that anyone could have taken the path he ended up carving out for himself.
“There’s nothing that makes me special or different or more capable as a person of creating the things I created,” said Sayman, who also had a stint at Google. “If anything, the only thing that was different, is I just spent all my time ignoring or otherwise rejecting any calls I had to stop me from my tracks.”
Born to Peruvian and Bolivian parents newly arrived in Miami in 1996, Sayman went on to attend Belen Jesuit Preparatory School. The hallmark of his childhood that nudged him into designing his first digital game app, he said, was isolation.
“I was the odd one out in many cases,” Sayman said.
“My path to tech was thanks to the Internet. We live in a world where it doesn’t matter where you’re located, you can explore anything. So I was diving into my own world.”
It was a world not even the prestigious Belen seemed to understand. After Sayman’s game, 4Snaps, became one of the most popular smartphone games in the world, his story caught the attention of Mark Zuckerberg, who invited him to California to meet him. But Belen’s administration initially prevented him doing so (he ended up going anyway).
Later, after his parents fell behind on payments to the school, it refused to grant Sayman a diploma. (When Belen finally called several years later saying he could pick up his diploma, Sayman turned them down).
“My relationship with my high school will always be complicated,” said Sayman, who skipped college.
Despite his experiences with traditional school, Sayman recommends other young Miamians stick with it — as long as schools are also reforming themselves.
Coding, for example, needs to be taught like typing or writing — and not viewed is a degree to be obtained in itself. Nor should it be taught in later years, Sayman said.
“Imagine if every computer only spoke Spanish,” he explained, “and we started teaching Spanish at 19, while maybe a couple students learned at 16. We’d be asking, ‘Why
didn’t you teach Spanish sooner?’”
He added, “If I had access to learn how to program in structured manner, I would have learned everything I know now so much faster.
Sayman moved back to Miami amid the pandemic — and to ride Miami’s current tech wave. He said Miami’s tech gospel is being successfully spread to the furthest reaches of South Florida through the leadership of Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava and Miami Mayor Francis Suarez.
“Their enthusiasm not only attracts talent from outside Miami, but generally promotes the culture within the city, and gets people to think about opportunities they may have here,”
Sayman said.
That leadership helps overcome the largest obstacle, which is evangelizing tech to parents from immigrant backgrounds who may be more enamored of more traditional career paths.
“A lot of parents here teach their kids to become a doctor, or lawyer, or architect — something that sounds legitimate, my parents did same for me.” he said.
“The No. 1 issue we had at Facebook with recruiting talent from diverse backgrounds, and Latinos, was the lack of exposure the kids had from their own families to whether careers in tech were viable careers at all.”
Sayman’s biggest lesson for other Miami youngsters: Get passionate early, and don’t let anything stand in your way.
“At the end of the day, it’s not about how smart you are, it’s about how crazy and determined and annoyingly persistent that defines whether you’ll succeed.”
Sayman will be appearing virtually in a conversation with Levine Cava on Sunday, Oct. 3 in an event produced by Books and Books. Register at booksandbooks.com.
AVenture Atlanta, among the largest venture capital investing conferences in the southeast
U.S., has selected five Miami startups to present at its Oct. 20-21 conference.
The startups selected out of more than 400:
8base, a digital platform for developing software products more efficiently
Athliance, a platform for college athletics departments to manage athletes’ name, likeness and image compliance
HealthSnap, a care for doctors to virtually manage care of patients
Ternary, which develops tools for managing Discord communities
Xendoo, an online bookkeeping platform
They will have the chance to win a $100,000 investment.
AAAAARob Wile’s “Tech Trail” column appears in The Miami Herald every Sunday. If you have tips, Rob can be reached at 312-806-6565. Twitter: @rjwile