It was a night to remember. We’ve evolved, so let us reintroduce ourselves…but first:
On Thursday evening, August 27, we had the utmost privilege of working with Simisola Lawal of Simi Visuals, who coordinated and curated the very first Founder’s Experience event at Etaru, the Japanese robatayaki restaurant on the South Florida coast, gathering more than 100 guests. The occasion was the launch of the Founder’s Experience, presented in partnership with NeoBo|CREATIV™ Magazine, a new platform devoted to founders. The night honored its first featured visionary, Mr. Coleman of The Mr. Coleman Group.
Inside the CREATIV Magazine Founder’s Edition
The Founder’s Experience celebrates visionaries, innovators, and courageous leaders. Each one dared to turn an idea into something extraordinary. That is not a tagline; it is a commitment. By contrast, business events are full of quarterly numbers and funding announcements. What they too rarely capture is the human architecture underneath. The night a founder signed a lease with no guarantee anyone would walk through the door. The season when the vision outpaced the bank account. The stubborn conviction that kept the lights on. Above all, the Founder’s Experience exists to tell those stories with the care they deserve.
That is why Simi Visuals built this experience to go beyond business success. It uncovers the real stories behind the brands: the risks founders take, the obstacles they overcome, and the passion that keeps them moving forward. Every entrepreneur learns the same lesson: courage measures the distance between an idea and an institution. Yet no press release ever records it. The Founder’s Experience sits with founders long enough to hear about those acts. Then it frames them the way CREATIV Magazine frames a couture atelier or a chef’s tasting counter: as craft.
Mr. Coleman, the Inaugural Honoree
Mr. Coleman, the inaugural honoree, embodies exactly that standard. Thursday’s celebration was less a networking function than a portrait session in real time. Colleagues, family, and fellow entrepreneurs rose to acknowledge a builder whose achievements earned the room’s full attention. The turnout itself told the story. After all, more than a hundred people arrived on a Thursday night for one founder. That happens when a career touches more lives than a balance sheet can show.
Why Etaru Set the Stage
The setting carried its own meaning. Rainer Becker, the restaurateur behind Zuma and ROKA London, created Etaru around the robata grill. The tradition began with fishermen on Japan’s northern coast, who charcoal-grilled their catch at sea and shared it. In fact, the restaurant is itself the product of a founder’s leap across continents. Craft shared generously made a fitting stage for an evening about entrepreneurial courage. Meanwhile, plates moved from the open flame to the table as the Atlantic darkened outside. The room felt like the thesis of the new platform made visible: excellence, hospitality, and story in the same frame.
Where the CREATIV Magazine Founder’s Edition Goes Next
The launch also signals where Simi Visuals and CREATIV Magazine are headed together. The evening’s design made that vision tangible before a single word was spoken. Simi Visuals, with the sponsorship of Lotus Miami Experiences and Alejandria Flowers, arranged deep burgundy hydrangeas against dark purple calla lilies, airy white bell-shaped blooms, and delicate white trumpet flowers into bouquets that felt more like sculpture than centerpieces. She placed them strategically on branded pillars stationed both inside and outside the restaurant, so that guests moving between the oceanside dining room and the entrance walked through the same visual language: rich, layered, and unmistakably intentional.
She also curated the night’s sound, bringing in guitarist Teddy Derulo to serenade the room as guests arrived, his live set threading quietly beneath conversation the way a good soundtrack should. The burgundy-and-white palette echoed the night’s purpose, honoring a founder whose work carries the same texture of restraint and depth. This partnership treats fashion, visual art, culinary art, and performance as serious culture. The same goes for the technology reshaping all of them. The Founder’s Experience extends that lens to enterprise itself. For the Caribbean and Latin diaspora communities this collaboration serves, entrepreneurship is a cultural act. The founder who opens a studio, a label, a firm, or a restaurant does what the artist does. They make something exist that did not exist before, then ask a community to gather around it. Welcome to the first Founder’s Experience. Bold ideas meet powerful stories here, and the people building the future take center stage. Mr. Coleman’s full feature opens the series; the profiles that follow will keep the same promise. In the end, people with names, faces, and stories worth telling are building the future. Simi Visuals and CREATIV Magazine intend to tell them.
The Founder’s Experience Continues
As the last plates cleared and the guitar fell quiet, what remained was the thing we set out to create: proof that a founder’s story deserves the same care as a runway show or a tasting menu. Mr. Coleman opened this series not because his numbers were the biggest in the room, but because his path, like every founder’s, was paved with risks no spreadsheet will ever show. That is the standard the Founder’s Experience now carries forward. Future evenings will find new honorees, new rooms, new florals, and new music, but the premise stays fixed: the people building something from nothing are worth stopping for. We invite the next founder, and the next room full of guests willing to celebrate them, to keep proving it.
The distance between an idea and an institution is measured in acts of courage no press release ever mentions.
Photography by Sean Simpson