St. Pete tech entrepreneur launches Uber Eats — but on Jet Skis

For many years John Bonaccorso was a garden variety Florida transplant. He moved from Syracuse, New York in his 20s and began his career in tech. He eventually sold his first company, e.Port Information Network, to Apple in the late 1990s. He was living in Melbourne with his sights on moving to Tampa Bay when his then-mostly standard story nearly came to an end: he was broadsided by a bus in January 2022 in Melbourne. It left him completely paralyzed for 18 months. 

“I couldn’t do anything,” Bonaccorso recalls, describing the gilded cage he was confined to at the time. But instead of despair, he opted to build a company from scratch. Then, in 2023, when he was finally ready to move, both physically and metaphorically, he had a new company, BoatBites: an ecommerce platform that delivers meals and goods to boaters via Jet Ski. The St. Pete-based company has been self-funded so far; Bonaccorso declines to comment on how much he's invested into the business.