It is labor day weekend. The unofficial end of summer.
I’m curious how we all celebrate the long weekend.
We are spending it in NYC, after spending much of August at the beach.
How are you spending the long weekend?
In Matt Turck‘s recent blog post about the state of NYC’s tech sector, he wrote:
The New York data and AI community, in particular, keeps getting stronger. Facebook’s AI department is anchored in New York by Yann LeCun, one of the fathers of deep learning. IBM Watson’s global headquarter is in NYC. When Slack decided to ramp up its effort in data, it hired NYC-based Noah Weiss, former VP of Product at Foursquare, to head its Search Learning and Intelligence Group. NYU has a strong Center for Data Science (also started by LeCun). Ron Brachman, the new director of the Technion-Cornell Insititute, is an internationally recognized authority on artificial intelligence. Columbia has a Data Science Institute. NYC has many data startups, prominent data scientists and great communities (such as our very own Data Driven NYC!).
And now NYC has our very own AI accelerator program based at NYU’s Tandon Engineering School Accelerator, called The AI Nexus Lab.
The 4 month program will immerse early stage AI companies from around the world with NYU AI resources, computing resources at the Data Future Lab, two full time technical staff members, and a student fellow for each company. Unlike a traditional accelerator, they are recruiting only 5 companies with the goal of market entry and sustainability for all 5. They won’t have a Demo Day, the program will end with a day long AI conference celebrating AI entrepreneurs, researchers, innovators and funders during which which they will announce the 5 companies. Companies will get a net $75,000 for joining the program.
If you have an early stage AI company and want to join this program, you can apply here.
Matt Turck has penned a “State Of The City” post about where the NYC tech ecosystem is right now. I get asked this question all the time and I haven’t been doing a great job of answering it. I will use some of Matt’s work the next time that happens.
Here’s some of my favorite points from Matt’s post. If you live and work in the NYC tech ecosystem, or care about it, you should go read the whole thing.
NYC as a leading AI Center:
The New York data and AI community, in particular, keeps getting stronger. Facebook’s AI department is anchored in New York by Yann LeCun, one of the fathers of deep learning. IBM Watson’s global headquarter is in NYC. When Slack decided to ramp up its effort in data, it hired NYC-based Noah Weiss, former VP of Product at Foursquare, to head its Search Learning and Intelligence Group. NYU has a strong Center for Data Science (also started by LeCun). Ron Brachman, the new director of the Technion-Cornell Insititute, is an internationally recognized authority on artificial intelligence. Columbia has a Data Science Institute. NYC has many data startups, prominent data scientists and great communities (such as our very own Data Driven NYC!).
NYC as a home to “deep tech”:
Finally, one trend I’m personally particularly excited about: the emergence of deep tech startups in New York. By “deep tech”, I mean startups focusing on solving hard technical problems, either in infrastructure or applications – the type of companies where virtually every early employee is an engineer (or a data scientist).
For a long time, MongoDB was pretty much the lone deep tech startup in NYC. There are many more now. A few of those are in my portfolio at FirstMark: ActionIQ, Cockroach Labs, HyperScience and x.ai. But there’s a lot of others, big and small, including for example: 1010Data (Advance), BetterCloud, Clarifai, Datadog, Dataminr, Dextro, Digital Ocean, Enigma, Geometric Intelligence, Jethro, Placemeter, Security ScoreCard, SiSense, Syncsort or YHat – and a few others.
The Diversification and Broadening of NYC’s Tech Ecosystem:
One way of thinking about New York’s tech history is one of gradual layers, perhaps something like this:
Certainly, the areas that put NYC on the map in the first place continue to be strong. New York is the epicenter of the redefinition of media (Buzzfeed, Vice, Business Insider, Mic, Mashable, Bustle, etc.), and also home to many great companies in adtech (AppNexus, Tapad, Mediamath, Moat, YieldMo, etc.), marketing (Outbrain, Taboola, etc) and commerce (BarkBox, Birchbox, Harry’s, Warby Parker, etc.).
But New York has seen explosive entrepreneurial activity across a much broader cross-section of verticals and horizontals, including for example:
I like the NYC 3.0 moniker. It’s a very different place to start and invest in tech companies than it was even five years ago. Bigger, deeper, broader, and scaling nicely. Just like the companies themselves.
One of Michael Bloomberg’s most important accomplishments as Mayor of NYC was taking control of the NYC school system. In the decade since he did that, NYC public schools have improved significantly including increased high school graduation and college readiness rates. The public school system remains a work in progress and there is much more to do. The system has improved but not nearly enough.
So it concerns me greatly that politics in Albany are playing around with mayoral control of the schools. Mayoral control of the NYC public schools is set to expire on June 30th and there are signs that the Governor and state legislature are thinking about not renewing it.
This would be a colossal mistake. Organizations require accountability to succeed. The Mayor must be able to hire and fire the school chancellor and drive the necessary changes in the system. We tried the other way for many years and it was a disaster. I urge the elected officials in Albany to come to their senses and renew Mayoral control, not just for another year, but for at least the next five years. Longer would be even better.
I am doing not one, but two, appearances at Disrupt NYC today.
The first appearance will be at 9:05am est which is a chat with Jordan Crook. We did not discuss what we are going to talk about in advance (I hate doing that), but I did send her this list of things I think are interesting to talk about:
The second appearance will be from 2pm to 2:20pm est. Tim Armstrong and I will talk about Tech:NYC which I blogged about last week.
I believe the entire conference is being livestreamed on the Disrupt website. So in theory you can watch these two appearances from your desk. That’s great.
Yesterday was the launch of a new organization in NYC that I have been working on since last fall. This new organization is called Tech:NYC and will be led by Julie Samuels. It will be co-chaired by Tim Armstrong and me.
For years the tech sector has been represented in the city and state and with local civic organizations by a loose and informal group of well known entrepreneurs, CEOs, VCs, and engaged members of the tech sector. I have been one of them.
Lately, as the tech sector has grown in importance in the local economy, this approach has become unsustainable. The same small group of people keep showing up at meeting after meeting.
We need a formal mechanism that allows the entire tech sector to be engaged with local government and civic organizations and we need to get the right people to the right meetings instead of the same small group meeting after meeting.
Tim and I explained all of this in a blog post that aired yesterday on Tech:NYC’s website.
Tech:NYC will be member supported. We would like every tech company, large and small, to join and be represented and engaged. Membership details are here and startups with less than 20 employees can join for free.
If you run a company in NYC, we hope you will sign your company up to be a member of Tech:NYC. If you work at a company in NYC, we hope you will encourage your leaders to join Tech:NYC.
Bond Street, a startup company that makes small business loans, has started a podcast to tell stories about small business entrepreneurs and the companies they create and run. They call it the Nitty Gritty Podcast.
The first episode features an entrepreneur who is also a friend of ours, Gabe Stulman.
Gabe is a restaurant operator in the west village of Manhattan, where we live. We started our relationship with Gabe as regulars at his first restaurant and we have gone on to be investors in all of his current restaurants, as well as good friends with him.
Here is Gabe’s story. It’s a good one.
In 1996, Jerry Colonna and I decided to call our venture capital firm Flatiron Partners (it was code named Acme Ventures). We named it after the Flatiron Building and decided to locate in the neighborhood with the same name. We moved down there a bit later and I immediately was smitten with the neighborhood. I have made my office there ever since. It’s twenty years now.
The thing I immediately noticed about the Flatiron district upon moving there was that it was unlike midtown manhattan, where I had worked for the previous ten years. The Flatiron district was about half residential and half business. And the businesses ranged from small photo studios to fledgling internet companies to accounting firms and therapist offices. The building that USV is now located in was full of photo studios in 1996. I don’t think there is a single one left.
The other thing that I love about the neighborhood is that it stays open late. The streets are full of restaurants, cafes, and bars. I can leave my office at 11pm and wander into any one of the local spots and they are still humming. That was true when we arrived in 1996 and it remains true today.
Working in the Flatiron district is like working in a residential neighborhood. You have grocery stores, dry cleaners, bodegas, and preschools. When you walk the streets, you see strollers and couples holding hands.
I thought of the Flatiron district when I read this MIT Technology Review article about a follow up study to Jane Jacobs’ seminal work on the vitality of cities by some University of Toronto researchers. The new work is called The Death and Life of Great Italian Cities: A Mobile Phone Data Perspective. These University of Toronto researchers used mobile phone data supplied by our portfolio company Foursquare and a few other data sources to study the vitality of a number of Italian cities.
Jane Jacobs says that for cities to thrive they need four conditions:
The first is that city districts must serve more than two functions so that they attract people with different purposes at different times of the day and night. Second, city blocks must be small with dense intersections that give pedestrians many opportunities to interact. The third condition is that buildings must be diverse in terms of age and form to support a mix of low-rent and high-rent tenants. Finally, a district must have a sufficient density of people and buildings.
The Flatiron district is the perfect example of Jane’s four conditions. I bump into people I know and don’t but should literally every day on the streets of the Flatiron district. It’s a mixed use neighborhood and though it has been gentrified a lot in the past twenty years (rents have gone from $15/sf to $75/sf in some buildings over those twenty years), it remains as vital today as when we arrived. I’d like to see the Foursquare data on the Flatiron district. I suspect it would be off the charts on the Jane Jacobs score!
Three years ago, I co-founded the nonprofit organization CSNYC to address the extreme scarcity of computer science education in the NYC public schools. I am proud to say that we are now reaching nearly 10% of the city’s schools and more than 12,000 students. But our mission is to reach every school and every student.
In September 2015, Mayor de Blasio and I announced Computer Science For All (CS4All), a 10-year, $81 million plan to bring computer science education to every student in New York City public schools. The costs of CS4All will be shared equally between the city and private philanthropy, and CSNYC and Robin Hood have each committed $5 million to get the initiative off the ground.
As leaders in the local technology community, we collectively have the potential to support what will be the largest scaling of access to computer science education in the country. Early, meaningful access to computer science can change students’ educational lives and create pathways to future educational and career opportunities. These students are our future employees.
I am reaching out to NYC tech companies to help fund CSNYC’s ongoing efforts by committing to an annual membership of between $5,000 and $25,000. As a CSNYC Founding Partner, you will support our work in the schools and enable us to connect your company to employee engagement opportunities, internship programs, and more.
Please consider joining this distinguished group of companies: About.com, AppNexus, Bitly, Clarifai, Contour Ventures, Etsy, Facebook, HyperScience, Insight Venture Partners, Justworks, Kickstarter, MongoDB, Nestio, Postlight, Resy, Return Path, Simulmedia, Tapad, Techstars, Tusk Ventures, Warby Parker, and Yext. I am hopeful that we can add your company to this list.
If you are interested in joining as a CSNYC Founding Partner email us and we will follow up with you directly, or you can simply fill out our online membership form.
On April 7th at the Armory inWashington Heights, we will host the third annual CS Opportunity Fair which exposes career opportunities in computer science and software engineering in NYC to over 2,000 NYC high school students who are studying computer science this year.
If you work at or run a tech company in NYC, we want your company represented at the fair. We want you to host a booth and bring colleagues so that the students can see and talk to people working in tech companies in NYC. We have over fifty NYC tech companies already committed to come but we need a lot more. It’s a five hour commitment, 9:30-2:30, but it will make a big difference in our ongoing effort to open up tech jobs to a much broader range of talent and bring much needed diversity to the tech sector in NYC and around the US.
The CS Fair also showcases colleges from around the region and the country where students can continue their computer science education as well as extra curricular programs students can enroll in to further their studies.
I hope I have convinced you to get involved in this fantastic event. If so, here are the links you need.
To email for more information on the fair
To email for information on becoming a sponsor
I plan to be at the fair for the entire event and I hope I will see you and your colleagues there.
And props to AVC regular Kirk Love for his work on the CS Fair artwork and website. Thanks Kirk.
