Melissa Medina’s parents left Cuba on two very different journeys. Her mother was six and a half years old when she boarded a plane, her thin gold bracelet with little pearls stripped from her wrist at the checkpoint. Her grandmother refused to undress in front of her daughter when the guards demanded a search. They removed the little girl from the room for a few minutes. These are the details Melissa grew up hearing. She carries them still.

Her father’s journey was longer. He was 13 years old in 1965 when Castro briefly allowed families already in South Florida to send boats to Cuba to bring relatives out. Her father’s uncle made that crossing — but arrived just as a hurricane was bearing down. Everyone was turned back. Her father, her grandparents, and her aunt were stranded for nearly two months in a tent city, waiting. Finally, a larger boat came as part of the Camarioca boatlift. He was 13 years old. He left behind cousins, aunts, and uncles he would never live near again.

Those stories were not occasional. They were constant. They were the household air. Melissa absorbed every detail — not as history, but as identity. Even though she didn’t live it, she says, it is in her DNA.

She graduated Magna Cum Laude from the University of Florida with a Bachelor’s in Business Administration and a Master’s in International Business, including studies at ESADE Business School in Barcelona. She then spent nearly a decade at Terremark Worldwide — a global data infrastructure company her father built from a South Florida real estate firm into a NASDAQ-traded cloud computing powerhouse acquired by Verizon in 2011 for $2 billion. She worked alongside him from research assistant to financial analyst, learning the business from the inside. Then she co-founded something of her own.

In 2014, she launched eMerge Americas — born from two emotions she names precisely: frustration that the world wasn’t recognizing South Florida as a tech hub, and a passion for this community too deep to leave. The annual conference at the Miami Beach Convention Center now draws over 20,000 entrepreneurs, investors, and innovators from more than 60 countries, recognized as one of the most influential technology events in the Western Hemisphere. The platform has supported more than 1,100 startups that have collectively raised over $3 billion, created more than 10,000 high-wage jobs, and generated an estimated $2.6 billion in economic impact for Florida. She is also a Partner at Medina Ventures, an early-stage fund focused on AI and quantum computing.

At one eMerge conference, a Cuban entrepreneur from the island showed up with a laptop. She asked where he got it. “I made it,” he said — assembled from parts stripped out of a washer and dryer. She thought: that is resourcefulness with no other option. That is the same spirit that got her family here. And it is the same spirit she is building with every day.