Posts from NYC

The Partnership for NYC, alongside its partners at the MTA, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, NJ TRANSIT, and NYC Department of Transportation, launched a call for applications for the 6th annual Transit Tech Lab this week.

To kick off this year’s program, the Transit Tech Lab is seeking early and growth-stage tech companies with compelling solutions to one of three local transit system challenges:

• Customer Experience Challenge: How can we improve customer experience by better communicating service changes, reducing delays, and augment safety and cleanliness initiatives?
• Resilience Challenge: How can we build a more resilient and adaptive transit system? 
• NYCDOT’s Curb Activity Challenge: How can we maximize the city’s curb space to serve the multiple and varied needs of New Yorkers? 

 Representatives from each participating agency will evaluate applications based on the technology’s impact and the applicant’s product, team, and overall value proposition. Finalists will advance to conduct a proof-of-concept over an eight-week period; the companies demonstrating the most compelling technologies that align with the agencies’ objectives have the opportunity to secure a yearlong pilot.

Applications are due Wednesday, February 28.  Interested applicants are invited to attend an information session on February 1 at 1pm ET.

If you know of a company or emerging innovator that would be a good fit for this year’s Transit Tech Lab, please let us know about them via email or encourage them to apply here: https://transitinnovation.org. 

Last summer I sat down with Tom Secunda, who co-founded Bloomberg LP with Mike Bloomberg, to talk about areas of shared philanthropic interest. Tom told me that academic institutions do not have access to the kind of AI/ML infrastructure that the top tech companies have and he wanted to fix that. His idea was a consortium of Universities in New York State, the New York State Government, and philanthropic donors. His vision was a large shared facility in upstate NY with state-of-the-art AI/ML infrastructure that participating academic institutions could make available to their faculty for cutting-edge AI/ML research.

Tom is a convincing person. He convinced me that this was a good idea last summer and he went on to convince Governor Hochul and the top Universities in New York State and his fellow philanthropist Jim Simons.

I am glad Governor Hochul and her team were quick to recognize the promise of this idea. Today, Governor Hochul will announce Empire AI in her State of the State Address.

Empire AI will be a “state-of-the-art artificial intelligence computing center in Upstate New York to be used by New York’s leading institutions to promote responsible research and development, create jobs, and unlock AI opportunities focused on public good.”

Over $400mm of public and private funding has been committed over ten years to build and operate the Empire AI facility. New York State is contributing $275mm and over $125mm is coming from participating Universities and philanthropy.

I am excited to see New York State step up like this. Other states, like Massachusetts, have done something similar but this NYS effort is significantly larger. I expect more states will follow now. Cutting-edge AI/ML research should not be limited to large tech companies. We need our academic institutions to be on equal footing. This model, particularly if more states adopt it, can help make that possible.

New York is one of the leading AI centers in the US, along with California and Massachusetts. We see this every day as entrepreneurs building AI companies come knocking on our door. It is very encouraging to see our local government supporting and investing in this new area of economic development.

I want to congratulate Governor Hochul, the leaders of our academic institutions, and Tom Secunda, for their vision and initiative here. This is important.

NYC Tech Week is next week. It will be a week filled with events for the tech sector to engage and connect with each other.

A particularly great part of tech week is VC Open Office Hours.

There are over 100 VC investors signed up to participate next week.

Here is how it works:

1/ you select four investors (out of more than 100) that you want to meet

2/ you get up to four twenty minute meetings

3/ you discuss your idea with the investor in hopes of getting them interested enough to take another meeting

4/ nobody should expect to walk out with a commitment to invest

As of this moment (Thursday morning Oct 12th) about half of the available slots are still open. But if you want to participate, you probably should act fast as I think this will sell out by the end of today, certainly by the end of tomorrow.

Go here to participate.

The New York Times had a piece yesterday suggesting that tech will no longer be a growth engine for NYC and the surrounding metro area as it has been for the last twenty years. I am not going to link to the piece because it is behind a paywall but if you want to read it, you can google “Tech Firms Once Powered New York’s Economy. Now They’re Scaling Back.” I talked to one of the reporters who worked on the piece and told him that their angle was incorrect. But when a publication has their mind made up on the angle, there isn’t much you can do to convince them otherwise.

If you take a real estate angle, which is how the New York Times approached the story, it is true that technology companies, large and small, are cutting back on their space needs. But that is more a reflection of the era of remote/hybrid workforces than anything else.

Here is what I told the reporter working on the story:

1/ Office leases to tech companies are down. The tech sector has embraced remote and hybrid workforces and their office space needs reflect that.

2/ Rank and file tech workers in NYC are roughly flat as many workers have left the NYC metro area but just as many have come here from other locations.

3/ Top talent in tech has massively increased in NYC since the pandemic as people with in-demand skills can now work anywhere and don’t have to be in the Bay Area anymore. There are significantly more USV portfolio company leaders in NYC today than there were before the pandemic.

I saw a headline the other day that said that more than half of the top 50 AI companies are in the Bay Area and another 10% are in NYC and nowhere else has a significant number of them. So in many ways, not much has changed with respect to the centers of gravity of the technology sectors.

Technology is the growth sector of this century and new sectors like AI, renewable energy, web3, etc will power the economies of many regions around the world. NYC will be a significant beneficiary of this, as it has been for the last twenty years.

The idea that the tech sector will not be a growth engine for NYC anymore is laughable. But that won’t stop people from suggesting otherwise.

This is the second post in a row where I am bringing back an old tradition.

This time it is Fun Friday, something I haven’t done in about five years. Like last week, the catalyst is our portfolio company Blackbird Labs, which I posted about a few months ago.

Blackbird is a platform for the restaurant industry to build loyalty/membership and related business models on.

Upside Pizza, which makes some of the best slices in NYC, launched the Upside Pizza Club this week using the Blackbird platform.

While a free slice every day for a year is nothing to sneeze at, I am most excited about the idea of the private concert series that Upside is running at its Nolita location over the next five weeks. Pizza, beer, and live music on a summer evening is my idea of a great time. I suspect it is yours too.

So if you live in NYC, you might want to join the Upside Pizza Club and get access to these concerts. And a free slice every day for the next year too.

You can join here for $199.

It has been a long time since I did a Funding Friday here at AVC. I used to do them every Friday. We have funded a lot of bars, restaurants, coffee shops, and bakeries here over the years. Here are a few examples.

L’Appartement 4F

Land To Sea

There is a new wrinkle in crowdfunding restaurants, bars, coffee shops, bakeries, etc courtesy of USV portfolio company Blackbird, which I recently wrote about.

Blackbird is a loyalty/membership platform for the hospitality industry and it allows operators to issue memberships in-store (at check-in or check-out) or elsewhere. Although Blackbird did not imagine its platform being used for crowdfunding, operators have started to use it that way.

A great example is gertrude’s, a new restaurant in Prospect Heights Brooklyn which hopes to open next month.

gertrude’s is offering anyone the opportunity to become a member in advance of opening and there are three levels of membership:

The benefits of each membership ladder on top of each other and get better and better.

If you live in NYC, particularly if you live in our near Prospect Heights, you can help gertrude’s pay for the cost of opening the store and get your money back in the form of dining opportunities and long-term membership benefits.

This strikes me as a fantastic way for restaurant operators to defray (or ideally fully fund) the cost of opening a new venue. They give up less equity and spend less on raising it and their customers become VIPs and regulars and enjoy the benefits of that. A true win/win.

If you want to help gertrude’s get open, go here and become a member.

The first project launched this week on our portfolio company Blackbird‘s platform.

It is a friends and family program at a restaurant in Williamsburg Brooklyn called Gertie.

Blackbird wrote about it today on their excellent Supersonic blog:

Throughout, when you tap Gertie’s Blackbird-powered NFC chip (shown above), wonder awaits. On the first tap, a free cookie sourced from a nearby bakery comes your way. On the second, coffee is on the house. Over time, one-size-fits-many freebies give way to the kinds of perks you’d expect as a regular, like a personalized coffee mug that is always at the shop awaiting your arrival.

I also really love how Blackbird’s founder Ben Leventhal describes the company’s mission:

Blackbird is here to create meaningful connectivity between restaurants and their customers. By connectivity, we mean direct connectivity, where guests know that the more they show up, the better their experience is going to be. We hope to help restaurants think about benefits as a line of business, not just a bunch of random comps. If we can, restaurants will begin to deliver magic at scale, and get more profitable in the process. We’ll turn good restaurants into bonafide thrill rides — spontaneous, consistent, and compulsively enjoyable.

The Blackbird platform is a great example of what can be built on a web3 stack when most of the web3 stuff is under the hood, invisible to the users but powering things that can’t happen on a web2 stack. Some people call this “web 2.5” but I just call it awesome.

Blackbird will continue to introduce capabilities and develop its platform much further. So in the weeks, months, and years ahead, when you see this on the host stand when you walk into an establishment, you will be in for some of that awesomeness.

Tech:NYC is the industry association for NY’s tech sector. They play a number of important roles and one of them is to educate and inform about the impact of the tech sector in NY. To that end, they launched a valuable resource last month called Innovation Indicators.

Innovation Indicators is a dashboard that shows the latest data on the impact of the tech sector on the NY economy. Here is some of the data you will find there:

Innovation Indicators will be updated regularly and will be a valuable resource to entrepreneurs, academics, policymakers, journalists, and anyone else who is interested in the development and growth of the tech sector in NY.

Gotham Gives is a public charity that the Gotham Gal and I started one year ago to complement the family foundation that we have been using to make philanthropic gifts for over two decades.

A public charity allows us to raise capital from others in addition to our family’s philanthropic gifts. We use this public charity to put together syndicates of donors and raise more capital for our projects than would be possible on our own. It reminds me very much of the way early-stage venture capital works.

We started raising funds in addition to making gifts over a decade ago when we started our computer science education work in New York City and Gotham Gives takes that approach to philanthropy and allows us to use it in other areas.

This page shows the projects we have supported in our first year and who we have partnered with on them.

This page hosts videos we have recorded with some of the founders and operators of these projects and we plan to produce more videos in the coming months. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more videos as they come out.

You can also follow Gotham Gives on Twitter if you want to follow our activities on social media.

Gotham Gives is run by Jennifer Klopp and we are joined on the board by our long-time friend and philanthropic partner Sarah Holloway. The entire team is shown on this page.

Philanthropy is an incredibly rewarding way to invest in the change you want to see in the world. In our case, that is change we want to see in our home, New York City, and we are committed to investing in programs that leverage community, knowledge, and culture to drive positive change for New York City.