New community platform aims to make Jacksonville’s siloed business ecosystem more visible (Courtesy of the Jacksonville Business Journal) — Siloed.
That’s how one local technology entrepreneur sees Jacksonville’s innovation scene.
With different organizations and companies strewn around — across the physical and digital world alike — Florian Vlad created a new resource to draw people back together: the JAX Business Calendar.
Calendars aren’t a new idea. The problem, in Vlad’s eyes, is that North Florida has too many of them and they’re fragmented, lacking a centralized place for the innovation scene’s happenings.
“Jacksonville itself, as a city, is made of like small cities,” he said. “The business ecosystem is more like hubs, clusters, silos — call them whatever.”
From events at the link in Nocatee to the JAX Chamber or JSEB Entrepreneurship and Workforce Development Center, getting the region’s many organizations to collaborate isn’t something one man can do. But getting them to see one another, that’s what Vlad hopes the calendar can help do.
Functioning as a ‘smart yellow pages,’ of sorts, Vlad’s solution isn’t incredibly bleeding edge, and isn’t meant to be. Though he conceived and built the business calendar, Vlad insists it isn’t meant to belong to him.
Instead, it’s a community resource, he said, deliberately unaffiliated with the city, the chamber or any one organization — free for both users and event organizers.
Lost in the silos
A serial entrepreneur, Vlad spent 15 years with an advertising agency — “another life,” he called it — before jumping to the technology sector.
He immigrated to the U.S. from Romania in 2008 with his wife, spending their first five years in Naples, Florida, before moving up to Jacksonville.
The First Coast was a far cry from Bucharest — already a growing tech city at the time, even more so today. So, Vlad’s first few years in Jacksonville were spent flying up to Buffalo, New York, involved in their innovation accelerator and education scenes.
“That’s because here there was not much,” he said. “Then, things started to pop up but there was no way to see what’s going on.”
Vlad’s idea picked up steam in early 2025, growing legs in collaboration with the University of North Florida’s Coggin College of Business and other local tech leaders, namely Panda Technology.
But before there was a platform, there was legwork.
Most of last year was spent networking. Meeting founders. Having coffee. Fielding questions. Talking with organizers. Rinse. Repeat.
Rather than wait for institutions to coordinate individually, Vlad stitched the ecosystem together manually — appearing at JAX Chamber meetings, JAXUSA events, pitch competitions and more — listening and learning the layout.
It’s a grassroots approach symbiotic with the calendar’s core community-first premise. That became the backbone of the platform, which today is curated through both automated and manual input, growing each week.
For the community, by the community
The crux of Vlad’s creation is simple: help each part of the region better see one another, and collaborate — a “visibility umbrella,” he called it.
Reinforcing its neutrality, the platform is backed by an advisory board that draws from expertise across Jacksonville’s business and innovation scene.
To the tech entrepreneur, making the ecosystem visible will help Jacksonville’s disconnected clusters of activity see one another — a necessary step toward collaboration and sustained growth. Hence why it’s completely free, instead of selling advertising space or charging organizers.
“For consistent growth, all these hubs will need to collaborate with each other,” he said. “That is not in my power to do that. It’s me, myself and I, and I cannot do that.”
The platform was built by Vlad and his team at twinzAPP, a local company delivering end-to-end software development and analytics with a focus on startups, enterprises and health care. That operation really pays the bills.
For now, the JAX Business Calendar remains a work in progress, funded largely with Vlad’s own time and resources, and supported by a small team that believes in its mission.
There is no clear end state in mind, he said, but a hope that the platform becomes something the community grows to sustain and shape itself.
It’s not a solution to Jacksonville’s fragmentation, but infrastructure for its ecosystem to see itself and decide what it wants to become next.
Photo courtesy of Florian Vlad