Posts from NYC

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.

Hot take: Everyone is wrong about the Metaverse.

here's my 3 part theory..

— Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) October 29, 2021

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:

Feels like every fourth bay area tech person I talk to is moving to New York.

— Sam Altman (@sama) September 26, 2021

2 mtngs yesterday w/ w coast crypto folks where they proclaimed NY the epicenter of crypto. I guess I've been feeling the activity, but didn't realize it was so conclusively here. if true & if crypto eats internet, there's a path to NY dethroning s valley as epicenter of tech.

— Jordan Cooper (@jordancooper) September 23, 2021

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.

I have written about my love for NYC’s Citibike service many times. This will be one more.

Yesterday I left the USV office at the end of the day and hopped onto a Citibike E-Bike at the brand new kiosk that has been installed in the “no cars” section of Broadway between 23rd and 21st.

I rode that E-bike all the way to Central Park West and 81st Street to get to the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. I was able to stay in a bike lane for that entire ride and it took me about twenty minutes.

There is no way I could have gotten from 21st and Broadway to the Delacorte Theater in less than twenty minutes any other way. Google Maps told me it would take 28 mins on the subway and I’d have to make at least one transfer. I did not check Uber, but given how Uber is working in NYC these days, it would have been at least a ten-minute wait just for the car to arrive. It would have likely taken twice as long in a car as a Citibike.

When the weather is good, like it has been in NYC the last few weeks, there is no better way to get around the city than Citibike. The subway is a close second, but there is something about being out and about, a breeze in your face, seeing the sights and sounds of NYC.

The addition of E-bikes has made longer rides, like the one I did yesterday evening, a good option. I generally take the regular bikes to commute to and from work (a roughly ten-minute ride), but the E-bike makes the 60 block trip, or a trip to Brooklyn or back, a decent option.

I do have a suggestion for Lyft, the owner of NYC’s Citibike service.

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.

The single biggest challenge with Citibike is the empty kiosk and the full kiosk. And the lack of E-Bikes in many kiosks is also a challenge.

If riders were rewarded financially for taking bikes and moving them to where they are most needed, the distribution of bikes would become more even. And there would be a “cottage industry” of people who ride Citibikes around the city for a living making sure that the bike distribution is optimal.

This would require the Citibike app to be like Venmo, with a wallet that builds up or down over time, and where balances can be transferred out.

That’s not very hard to build in this day and age, and would be a game-changer for the Citibike system.

I just backed this project to support a festival of street musicians in NYC in late October.

Street bands have been picking up the slack for the last year in NYC, performing for outside diners and more throughout the city. This festival celebrates them and puts them front and center.

Email readers can see the video here.

For as long as I can remember, Pier 76 on the west side of Manhattan has been home to the west side tow pound. Some of my worst moments as a NYC resident have been there retrieving a car or a scooter, something I’ve done more than I want to remember. It was pure misery to have to go there and I think that was intentional.

So over the last four months on my morning bike rides up the west side bike path, I have been watching the city tear down the west side tow pound and replace it with an urban park.

I believe Pier 76 opened last week and is hosting one of the outdoor locations for the Tribeca Film Festival which is going on in NYC right now.

So today on my morning ride, I took a slight detour and visited the new Pier 76.

It is so great to see the city making itself nicer. The entire west side park along the Hudson in Manhattan has been a slow but steady version of that and it just got a little bit nicer. Well done NYC.