A city can have plenty of ambition and still leave an aspiring founder wondering where to sit. In 2012, Wifredo Fernandez and his collaborators offered a fairly literal answer: desks made from shipping pallets and about $300 worth of wood. Their first LAB Miami occupied 700 square feet in Wynwood. The furniture budget would barely trouble a respectable office catalogue. The proposition behind it was considerably harder to price: give people somewhere to meet, and see what they can make together.
Fernandez is widely known as Wifi, a nickname a soccer coach gave him when he was ten. The name predates his career in technology. That small chronological joke suits a career in which the apparent detours often turn out to be preparation: teaching before entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship before law, local institution building before international government affairs. To understand the former LAB CEO, it helps to begin before the warehouse became a calling card.
Two old friends, one unfinished conversation
Fernandez and Daniel Lafuente knew each other at Ransom Everglades in Coconut Grove. At the University of Pennsylvania, they became roommates and fraternity brothers, continuing to discuss businesses they might start. When they returned to Miami, they encountered a young technology community with energy and a practical frustration. People had ideas, but opportunities to exchange them were uneven. A useful conversation still depended too much on already knowing the right people.
“We felt a certain energy that we hadn’t felt in our city before,” Fernandez said in 2013. Lafuente described a culture in which people guarded their ideas. The friends wanted a workplace that encouraged introductions and shared knowledge. The architecture of that ambition was deliberately ordinary: put different kinds of people within conversational distance, and give them reasons to return. Even an excellent business card needs somewhere to go after lunch.
Elisa Rodriguez-Vila joined as the third co-founder, helping give the concept its identity. Fernandez later explained LAB as Love, Art, Business. The combination mattered. They were making room for creativity and education alongside companies, with cultural programming in the mix. A designer, an artist and a programmer could all plausibly belong. The name made a small promise of experimentation; the calendar would have to keep it.
A bigger room needs more than desks
The founders spent time attending meetups and talking with potential participants before committing to the first space. They lost the Miami Herald Business Plan Challenge and continued anyway. Their initial room opened in summer 2012 and quickly filled with 20 members. Free evening workshops extended its usefulness beyond the people paying to work there. In a small office, after-hours generosity also meant making the same square footage do a second job.
Then came outside backing. A $650,000 funding round announced in December 2012 included $250,000 from Knight Foundation, with the balance from Florida investors. The money supported a move into a 10,000-square-foot campus. The plan included mentoring and courses in business, technology, art and design, open to the wider community. Fernandez described a place that could connect startups across the Americas. The teaching impulse was already built into the lease.
Including $250,000 from Knight Foundation
By September 2013, The LAB had 130 members representing 85 organizations. Its schedule ran to four or five events a week, and more than 9,500 visitors had passed through. Coding classes shared the programme with civic idea sessions and film screenings. Those numbers describe a working social arrangement: members could bring their own interests into the building, and the building could become useful to people who had never rented a desk.
Photographer Catalina Ayubi provided a particularly human example. Fernandez and Lafuente approached her about joining The LAB while she was working alone at home. Her People of Wynwood project documented the neighborhood’s different characters, from street artists to corporate lawyers. Here was a participant interested in the people around the startup scene as much as the startups themselves. For a venture called Love, Art, Business, that was a fairly good test of whether all three words belonged.
The next desk belonged to a student
In May 2014, Fernandez and Lafuente announced that they were stepping back from daily management. Fernandez would join the board. Leaving the operating role opened another way to use what he had learned: helping students develop businesses inside a college. By September, he was addressing Honors College students at Miami Dade College’s Wolfson Campus about the new Idea Center. The invitation now reached people whose first identification with the institution was as students.
One example from that period captures his practical contribution. Jordan Melnick had developed Sktchy, an app through which submitted photographs inspired artists to make paintings. He needed seed capital. Fernandez connected him with an investor, and a conversation began. The significance lies in the modest sequence: a specific person, a specific need, a useful introduction. A community becomes easier to understand when someone can name the person who helped.
At CREATE, the Idea Center’s 16-week accelerator, Fernandez worked with no more than ten participants at a time. The group met weekly; individual meetings followed during the week. One student was developing Direct Dialect, a language-learning application. Another was making waterproof toddler bibs under the Toppy Toddler name. There was also a plan for an outdoor music space. The projects required different advice, which made a single glamorous definition of entrepreneurship rather unhelpful.
For the bib business, the work included marketing, manufacturing and brand strategy. For the aspiring software founder, access to advisers and funding could complement the initiative he had already shown teaching himself to program. Fernandez emphasized discipline and leadership alongside commercial ambition. His job was to help students acquire tools for pursuing an idea. He subsequently helped develop a startup initiative at Florida International University, extending his work inside higher education.
“I hope to always be a resource and sounding board to founders and students.”
Wifredo Fernandez, on his hopes for Miami
A classroom, then a law library
Teaching had preceded The LAB. Fernandez served with Teach For America in Washington, D.C., while earning a master’s in teaching at American University. He taught Spanish, mathematics and social studies. He later credited a Teach For America technology bootcamp, including exposure to human-centered design at Stanford, with changing how he thought about problems he wanted to tackle. The route into startups ran through lesson planning and learning how other people learn.
His interest in computers went further back. His mother introduced him to MS-DOS; by eleven he had taught himself HTML and made a website. Years later, he would describe studying law as something that changed the way he understood the world. He entered the University of Miami School of Law in 2017 on a public-interest scholarship and graduated in 2020. His studies included work involving foster youth, startups and cyber civil rights. New institutions kept supplying new ways to approach familiar questions about participation.
Twitter offered a public-policy fellowship while he was in law school. Full-time policy work followed in 2020. In the same period he became a Lightspeed scout, gaining a way to invest after years of helping founders find support. He publicly thanked mentors including Mercedes Bent and Barry Eggers. The person making introductions was also learning from introductions of his own. Being useful to founders did not exempt him from having more to learn.
When the room becomes a public forum
The scale of his policy work widened. By 2023, Fernandez had risen to a leading United States government-affairs role at Twitter, by then operating as X. At a Canadian parliamentary hearing in October 2024, he introduced himself as the head of government affairs and public policy for the United States and Canada. He spoke about election-related conversation, account authenticity and Community Notes. His brief now concerned the conditions under which millions of strangers encounter each other online.
In February 2026, the Future of Privacy Forum listed him as xAI’s director of global government affairs for an AI governance panel in India. In March, he appeared before a British parliamentary committee examining social media, misinformation and harmful algorithms. MPs pressed him about manipulated media and enforcement. He outlined company policies; the questioning tested what those policies meant in practice. Inviting participation and answering for the rules governing participation are different responsibilities, and his later career places both in view.
An April 2026 letter to that committee carried his signature as director of global government affairs at X Corp. His more recent public profiles identify a SpaceXAI affiliation. These roles put the former coworking founder inside debates over platform accountability and artificial intelligence. The questions have become more consequential than who shares an office. People affected by a platform’s decisions have an interest in how its representatives explain them, and whether the explanations withstand scrutiny.
The meeting he did not have to organize
There is a quieter way to assess the original experiment. In a later public reflection, Fernandez noted that The LAB had hosted a Cursor community event while he was working at xAI and partnering with Cursor. He had played no part in organizing the gathering. Years earlier, he had wanted easy places for technical communities to meet. Here was one of those meetings happening without an invitation from him.
That is an appealing detail in a career full of introductions. A founder can spend years bringing people together and eventually find that the room knows how to do it by itself. Fernandez’s stated wish to remain a sounding board for founders and students fits that smaller, ongoing role. Someone arrives with an idea; someone else knows a person who might help. The first desks cost about $300 in wood. The interesting part was always what happened across them.