Posts from NYC

It is Earth Day, a day to celebrate our planet and rededicate ourselves to saving it. I plan to walk and ride my bike, avoid cars, and enjoy being out and about in NYC today.

But I’d also like to talk about something that is bothering me.

The New York State Assembly and Senate are working to pass a bill that would put a two-year moratorium on “proof of work” cryptocurrency mining. Here is the most important part of the bill:

1. For the period commencing on the effective date of this section and
    25  ending two years after such date,  the  department,  after  consultation
    26  with  the department of public service, shall not approve a new applica-
    27  tion for or issue a new permit pursuant  to  this  article,  or  article
    28  seventy  of  this  chapter,  for  an  electric  generating facility that
    29  utilizes a carbon-based fuel and that provides, in  whole  or  in  part,
    30  behind-the-meter  electric energy consumed or utilized by cryptocurrency
    31  mining operations that use proof-of-work authentication methods to vali-
    32  date blockchain transactions.
    33    2. For the period commencing on the effective date of  this    section
    34  and  ending  two years after such date, the department shall not approve
    35  an application to renew an existing permit or  issue  a  renewal  permit
    36  pursuant  to  this  article  for  an  electric  generating facility that
    37  utilizes a carbon-based fuel and that provides, in  whole  or  in  part,
    38  behind-the-meter electric energy consumed or utilized by a cryptocurren-
    39  cy  mining  operation  that uses proof-of-work authentication methods to
    40  validate blockchain transactions if the  renewal  application  seeks  to
    41  increase  or  will allow or result in an increase in the amount of elec-
    42  tric energy consumed or utilized by a  cryptocurrency  mining  operation
    43  that  uses  proof-of-work  authentication methods to validate blockchain
    44  transactions.

I believe this bill resulted from an application to fire up an old coal-powered electric plan to power a Bitcoin mining facility and I will be the first to admit that is a horrible idea. We should not be firing up old fossil fuel plants for any sort of economic activity. It is time to retire fossil fuel-powered plants and replace them with nuclear, hydro, wind, solar, and other clean energy sources.

But the idea of targeting a specific industry for this moratorium and leaving all other economic activity in NYS free to use fossil fuel is just absurd. Is it OK to use fossil fuels to power bowling alleys, movie theaters, car washes, sports stadiums, data centers, banks, homes, cars, etc, etc? Is it just not OK to use fossil fuel to power a network that secures our next-generation technology stack?

And at the same time New York State is doing this, the State of California is preparing an Executive Order that will be extremely friendly to the emerging crypto/web3 industry. New York State is already fighting an uphill battle with the crypto/web3 industry with its god awful BitLicense law and now they want to do this.

New York State should just put signs up on the Holland Tunnel, the Lincoln Tunnel, the George Washington Bridge, the Peace Bridge, and everywhere else people arrive in New York State that says “Web3 Is Not Welcome Here.” And save themselves the time and energy of doing nonsense like this.

We get the message loud and clear.

Six years ago this month Julie Samuels got together with a group of technology leaders in NYC and we decided to form an industry group for the growing tech sector in NYC. I agreed to co-chair the organization and have been in the chair role since then. We called it Tech:NYC and I first wrote about it here at AVC in March of 2016.

Last year, after more than five years at the helm, Julie decided it was time to pass the baton to a new leader and she and I and a group of board members spent the fall talking to lots of people and we found a fantastic new leader named Jason Clark. Jason starts as the Executive Director of Tech:NYC next week.

Jason takes over an organization of 800+ member companies, from the largest names in tech to the three-person startup you have yet to hear of. Tech:NYC has succeeded in getting tech “at the table” in Albany and City Hall and helping to make the tech sector more civic-minded and more integrated into the city and state. Julie and her team have done a tremendous job of taking an idea and making it a reality and I am incredibly grateful for her leadership.

The tech sector finds itself at an interesting moment in NYC. It is quickly becoming the largest employer in NYC and is bringing much-needed innovation to the city, state, and world. We have new leaders in Eric Adams and Kathy Hochul who are eager to work closely with the tech sector to do new things and move the region forward. But with great success comes great responsibility and the tech sector needs to employ a broader and more diverse group of NYers, it needs to be more civic-minded, it needs to be more philanthropic, and it needs to think beyond Manhattan out to the five boroughs and on to New York State and the NY Metropolitan region.

And Jason is the perfect leader to take Tech:NYC in those directions. Jason is a born and bred NYer, from southern Queens, a product of the NYC public schools, a lawyer who has started a law firm and worked in the Attorney General’s office in Harlem, and a former candidate for public office for the City Council seat in his home neighborhood in southeast Queens. Jason has the relationships, the lived experiences, and the mindset to lead NYC’s tech sector in the directions it must go as it becomes the leading industry and employer in the city and state.

I welcome Jason to Tech:NYC and look forward to working closely with him and the city and state leaders to step up to the opportunity that is in front of us. It is an exciting time.

Also, Jason is already on the hunt for a strong policy director with lots of tech experience. If you would like to fill that role or know someone great, please visit this job spec with instructions on how to get into the process.

The second week of December every year is Computer Science Education Week. It is a week to celebrate efforts to get computer science education into the K12 system around the world, and it is also a week in which schools do events, like The Hour of Code, to encourage students and teachers to get excited about learning computer science.

Most AVC readers know that my passion project for the last decade has been getting computer science education broadly available in the NYC public school system. I have also been involved in efforts to get computer science education adopted around the US and around the world. But my primary focus has been NYC.

This Computer Science Education Week, I celebrated by meeting with a very large employer in NYC and talking about getting that company’s employees deeply engaged with computer science education in the NYC schools and supporting the CS4All Capital Campaign, which I Chair. CS4All is NYC’s ten-year effort to get computer science classes into every school building in NYC by training 5,000 NYC public school teachers to deliver computer science classes. The CS4All Capital Campaign is a $40mm fundraising effort to support CS4All. We are now within spitting distance of the $40mm goal as we are in our seventh year of the campaign and program. If you know any individuals or non-profits or companies that would like to support the capital campaign, reply to this email or hit me up on Twitter and I would love to talk to them.

I also participated in an event at Hunter College last night to discuss their effort to provide computer science certification courses to NYC teachers. This is a program that has run for two years now, led by my friend Mike Zamansky, who I like to call “the godfather of CS education in NYC.” The Hunter computer science certification program is supported by our public charity Gotham Gives and Google. We provide scholarships to high-performing teachers who want to get NYS certified as computer science teachers. If you know individuals, non-profits, or companies that would like to join Gotham Gives and Google supporting this effort, reply to this email or hit me up on Twitter.

My one regret about this computer science education week is that I did not make it into a school building. This is the second year in a row that has been the case and I miss seeing teachers and students working together on projects and problems. My best moments over the years in this work have always been in the schools.

This photo of incoming mayor Eric Adams and former Chancellor Richard Carranza was taken by me at PS24 in Sunset Park Brooklyn during CS Education Week in 2018. I wrote about that visit here.

Computer science is the first new subject to be taught in K12 in 50+ years. Getting it broadly available in schools is hard work and requires commitment and persistence and a massive investment of time and money. But it is all worth it. Seeing the kids get excited about coding brings a big smile to my face every time.

Are you a New Yorker doing something amazing and could use $200,000 to support your work?

If so, you should apply for a David Prize. I have written about this program before so you might remember. But for those who haven’t heard about it, here’s the deal:

Here are the most recent cohort of David Prize winners:

●     Cesar Vargas: Fighting for immigrants in the armed forces and their right to stay in the U.S.

●     Fela Barclift: Sparking academic excellence and positive self-esteem among NYC’s youngest learners (this video is amazing)

●     Felicia Wilson: Inspiring foster care alumni to support young people “aging out”

●     Mr. Five Mualimm-ak: Creating essential community for justice-impacted youth serving supervision sentences

●     Jaime-Jin Lewis: Envisioning a childcare system where providers, families, and children can thrive

The folks behind the David Prize are looking for broader representation from the “the tech / science / invention circles” which describes many AVC readers.

If you want to apply for a David Prize, you can do so here. Applications are due by December 21st.

I’ve been hearing the term Metaverse for at least twenty years and I have always struggled with it. As I told my colleagues last week “I like the real world, I don’t want to live in a video game.”

My colleagues explained to me that I am thinking about it incorrectly. They said that as digitally mediated experiences have become a more important part of our everyday lives, we are already living in the metaverse.

I’ve started thinking about it that way and it has helped me to be more enthusiastic about these digitally mediated experiences.

I read this tweet stream yesterday and I found it very helpful in this new understanding I am developing.

But then I was passing by the Bright Moments NFT Gallery in Soho yesterday and there was literally a line around the block to get into the Bored Apes Yacht Club event. It seemed like there were thousands of Bored Apes NFT owners standing in line for hours to be able to hang out together in person. I texted my colleagues “I guess this metaverse thing is overrated”.

That’s mostly me amusing myself.

But it does suggest to me that hanging out together online is still not quite as much fun as hanging out together in person.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about NYC’s Tech Resurgence. I observed that NYC continues to develop as one of the world’s leading centers of tech innovation.

And then yesterday, I saw this tweet:

NYC startups are getting funded at 2/3 the rate of Silicon Valley startups. That’s a huge change from where NYC was even two or three years ago.

It wasn’t that long ago that a NYC-based startup had to agree to move to Silicon Valley to get money from the VCs out there. I think that was still a thing into the latter part of the 2000s. Now a decade and a half later, we see NYC startups raising capital almost as much as Silicon Valley startups.

Wow.

Early in the pandemic, we were all deluged with stories of tech workers, companies, and founders leaving Silicon Valley for Miami and Austin. And that was true. But from my personal experience, they also left for many other places too, including Los Angeles and New York City.

I met with a founder last week who has left the bay area for good and now splits his time between homes in LA and NYC. It is hard to know what cities have been the biggest beneficiaries of the great relocation but I am certain that NYC is one of them.

Here are some tweets I’ve seen in recent weeks talking about this:

I am not proclaiming the death of Silicon Valley. It is alive and well and will continue to be the epicenter of tech in the US for as far as I can see. What it has lost is the power to hold onto people who don’t really want to be there. One of the most important things the covid pandemic has done to work in the US, particularly tech work, is to make it so that people can work for great companies wherever they want to live. That’s a huge shift and I believe it is permanent.

But that’s not the only thing that’s driving NYC’s tech resurgence. As yesterday’s IPO of Warby Parker reminds us, NYC is now home to a growing number of large entrepreneurial companies that are now public and will remain independent and growing in NYC. They may employ people all around the world, but they are HQ’d in NYC and will continue to be.

And Jordan is correct in the tweet above that NYC is particularly strong in Web3 because of its roots in trading, speculating, DeFi, etc and because of large Web3 software players like Consensys that have been operating here for many years now. And as Web3 is now exploding into the creative class via things like NFTs, DAOs, gaming and more, we will only see NYC’s strengths come to the front and center in the most important new sector in tech.

It’s a great time to be working in tech in NYC. You get all of the benefits of living in this amazing city without the hassles of the commute every day.

I’ll end with a plug for a startup competition that Google, Tech:NYC, and Cornell Tech are putting on called the “NYC Recovery Challenge”.

The challenge will bring together startup entrepreneurs from across the five boroughs to pitch tech solutions for New York’s recovery to a panel of business, economic, and policy experts with the chance of winning cash prizes, technical mentorship, and more.

The top three founders and their teams will be recognized as “NYC RecoveryFellows” and will receive cash awards from a prize fund totaling $150,000. The first-place founder and their team will receive a non-dilutive cash award of $100,000, and two runners-up will each receive non-dilutive cash awards of $25,000. Seven other entrants will be recognized as “Founders to Watch” and will participate, along with the three cash award recipients, in a month-long, equity-free mentorship program — dubbed the “NYC Accelerator” — led by Cornell Tech, Google for Startups, and Tech:NYC advisers. 

If you and your startup want to apply, you can do so here.

I used to ride a Vespa around NYC. I rode it to work and back for about ten years, from roughly 2003 to 2013. I stopped riding it when Bloomberg’s Traffic Enforcement people starting towing it when it was parked between cars on the street (something I had been doing since I started riding it). A few visits to the tow pound will do that to you.

Since then, I’ve been Citibiking to and from work when it is nice out and subwaying when it is not. That has worked fine.

A few weeks ago, I had breakfast with my friend Alex Ljung, who co-founded our portfolio company SoundCloud with his friend Eric Wahlforss. Alex and Eric are back at it with a new company called Dance which makes a beautiful e-bike that is sold via a subscription service, currently only in Berlin, but coming to your city sometime in the future.

I told Alex that I was nervous about riding e-bikes. He told me to get over it and get on one. So I have been doing that, using Citibike’s e-bikes, for the last few weeks.

Alex was right. I love riding e-bikes around NYC. I can see riding them out to Brooklyn and back for meetings, using the new Brooklyn Bridge bike lane.

I still like riding my traditional bike for exercise, something I do three mornings a week, and something I will do when I finish this post.

But for getting around NYC, in the awesome bike lanes that have been created all around our amazing city, I think e-bikes are the way to go. I put in an order for one this weekend.

I’m sold.

Yesterday I wrote about NYC’s Citibike system, which I love, and said this:

There should be financial rewards for taking a bike from a kiosk that is completely full or nearly full and returning to a kiosk that is empty or nearly empty. There should also be a financial reward for docking an E-Bike in a kiosk where there are no E-Bikes or very few.

I got a ton of feedback via email and Twitter that Citibike already offers this via a program called Bike Angels that rewards riders for doing things like this. I know about that program but there are three big problems with Bike Angels that Lyft, the owner of Citibike, needs to fix.

1/ Bike Angels is not part of the core service, available to everyone by default.

2/ The rewards are too small. They need to be increased significantly.

3/ Angels is not a cash rewards program and you cannot take cash out of the system. It needs to be like Venmo.

Basically Angels sucks, but it is directionally correct.

If Lyft fixed all of this and offered attractive cash rewards for moving bikes and E-bikes around the system, it would be a game changer. But Bike Angels is not that. It is not even close to that.