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New York on Tech is helping under-resourced students become future tech leaders
Image: Getty Images/smartboy10/DigitalVision
Jessica Santana and Evin Robinson were riding the subway home from a college leadership conference when they realized they were getting off at the same stop. It turned out, they had grown up in the same neighborhood, no more than 5 blocks apart.
Years later, both Santana and Robinson were working six-figure jobs in the tech practices of elite corporations but were disheartened by the homogeneity of their surroundings.
The tech industry is the primary generator of new jobs in the US, but the inaccessibility of resources and practical education left students in neighborhoods like Jessica and Evin’s unprepared and unqualified in the eyes of recruiters.
So the pair met at a local Starbucks and on the back of a napkin, they outlined what would become New York on Tech (NYOT).
By offering comprehensive computational courses and a broad professional network, NYOT hopes to provide under-resourced students in New York City with the skills and infrastructure needed for a successful career in tech.
Real skills have led to real results
What began as a passion project with just 20 students has blossomed into an organization helping more than 1000 students across the city.
Unlike the higher-level computer science classes Santana and Robinson saw offered in schools, NYOT aims to focus on more functional skills that are applicable to the day-to-day work of tech professionals.
The program caters its curriculums specifically towards areas it believes are in high demand from today’s hiring managers, including front-end and back-end web development, mobile development and UX design.
Classes are located at the offices of corporate partners, where students get direct mentorship from engineers and observe how technical skills are actually implemented in various roles.
Graduates of NYOT are then given the opportunity to interview for internships at each partner organization, where they can gain practical experience and bolster resumes to be more competitive for future recruiting.
The organization points to successes both inside and outside the classroom, noting 100% of graduates in 2016 received admission into four-year colleges, many with scholarships to top engineering programs.
NYOT students have also landed paid internships and jobs with major companies that include Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, and others. And while the organization admits corporate partners were initially hard to come by, NYOT’s partnership roster now includes some of the most influential names in tech and business, such as Google, NBCUniversal and FactSet.
To date, NYOT has been built largely without city government sponsorship, funded mainly by corporate partnerships, schools, and philanthropic donations.
The company offers its programs for free and partners with schools in high poverty areas of New York City where 50% of students or more are eligible for free lunch.
But NYOT thinks of itself not just as a non-profit providing educational training but as a deep-impact talent accelerator, supplying already capable students with the key resources they lack.
“People automatically think these students are disconnected youth because we say low income and people of color. They think they’re uninterested in the technology industry”, said the founders. “That is not true. They come from areas that are low income or under-resourced but the population of students we work with is super smart, driven, hungry, and motivated.”
Offering more to more people
Going forward, the company plans to add curriculums that it believes fit the future needs of employers, including classes centered on cyber security, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.
On top of serving more students in the New York metropolitan area, Santana and Robinson hope they can bring what they’ve done in New York to a national scale and expand to communities across the country.
However, the founders emphasize that they will focus on slow effective scaling, crafting curriculums specific to each locality. “The work we do is really embedded in community. We’re not designing for that community but designing with it”, said Robinson.
Santana and Robinson’s broader goal is bigger than “diversity” and inclusion.”
“In the industry, we use words like diversity and inclusion. While we and our work value diversity and inclusion, this is about economic justice”, said Santana.
“Think about job automation and job displacement. If our students aren’t getting the most critical training, how can we expect them to compete for the jobs of today and tomorrow? This is not just about diversity or inclusion, it is about positioning our country’s talent strategy.”
NYOT is now seeing extremely high demand for slots in its programs. With more qualified applicants than they can actually accept, Santana and Robinson hope to bring on more volunteers to help them break down the barriers of access for as many kids as they can.
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Humbition is a new fund led by the Indiegogo’s Slava Rubin
Zocdoc founder Cyrus Massoumi and Indiegogo founder Slava Rubin have created a new $30 million fund called Humbition aimed at early stage, founder-led companies in New York.
“The fund is focused on connecting startups with investors and advisors experienced in building and growing successful businesses,” said Rubin.
“We are seeking to fill a void in NYC, where the vast majority of early stage investors have no significant experience building and scaling businesses,” he said. “The fund’s main areas of investment include marketplaces, consumer and health tech. But the primary criteria for investments is high quality founders. The fund is also seeking out mission-driven businesses because the companies that are socially responsible will be the most successful in the coming decades.”
The fund has brought on ClassPass founder Payal Kadakia, Warby Parker founder Neil Blumenthal, Charity: Water CEO and founder Scott Harrison, and Casper founder and CEO Philip Krim as advisors. They have already invested some of the $30 million raise in Burrow, a couch-on-demand service.
“New York City is home to a tremendous number of mission-driven startups that are simply not receiving the same level of support as their peers in the Bay Area. This void presents a unique opportunity for humbition to reach the incredible local talent who need the funding and guidance to build and grow their businesses in New York City,” said Rubin.
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New York City Council votes to cap licenses for ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft
The New York City Council has approved legislation that will halt the issuing of new licenses for ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft.
The stated goal of the policy is to give the city time to study the industry’s impact. During that time, ride-hailing companies would only be able to add new vehicles if they’re wheelchair accessible. The legislation also allows the city to set a minimum wage for drivers.
There were drivers demonstrating in favor of the bill package outside City Hall today, and the Independent Drivers Guild (which says it represents more than 60,000 drivers for ride-hailing apps in New York City) praised the decision.
“We hope this is the start of a more fair industry not only here in New York City, but all over the world,” said IDG founder Jim Conigliaro, Jr. in a statement. “We cannot allow the so-called ‘gig economy’ companies to exploit loopholes in the law in order to strip workers of their rights and protections.”
Uber and Lyft, meanwhile, had asked their riders to oppose the legislation, saying that it would result in fewer drivers and less reliable service. They also suggested there were other ways to address the underlying issues, and in fact proposed creating a $100 million “hardship fund” for drivers as an alternative.
Drivers demonstrating outside City Hall
In response to today’s news, Danielle Filson from Uber’s communications team provided the following statement:
The City’s 12-month pause on new vehicle licenses will threaten one of the few reliable transportation options while doing nothing to fix the subways or ease congestion. We take the Speaker at his word that the pause is not intended to reduce service for New Yorkers and we trust that he will hold the TLC accountable, ensuring that no New Yorker is left stranded. In the meantime, Uber will do whatever it takes to keep up with growing demand and we will not stop working with city and state leaders, including Speaker [Corey] Johnson, to pass real solutions like comprehensive congestion pricing.
The company plans to explore other strategies to keep up with demand. Those include recruiting drivers with licensed vehicles who aren’t currently working with Uber, or finding additional drivers who could drive licensed vehicles at times when they would otherwise be idle.
Lyft, meanwhile, sent this statement from its vice president of public policy Joseph Okpaku:
These sweeping cuts to transportation will bring New Yorkers back to an era of struggling to get a ride, particularly for communities of color and in the outer boroughs. We will never stop working to ensure New Yorkers have access to reliable and affordable transportation in every borough.
The New York Times reports that the cap will take effect as soon as Mayor Bill de Blasio signs the bill.
“Our city is directly confronting a crisis that is driving working New Yorkers into poverty and our streets into gridlock,” de Blasio tweeted. “The unchecked growth of app-based for-hire vehicle companies has demanded action – and now we have it.”
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Boston-area startups are on pace to overtake NYC venture totals
Joanna Glasner
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Boston has regained its longstanding place as the second-largest U.S. startup funding hub.
After years of trailing New York City in total annual venture investment, Massachusetts is taking the lead in 2018. Venture investment in the Boston metro area hit $5.2 billion so far this year, on track to be the highest annual total in years.
The Massachusetts numbers year-to-date are about 15 percent higher than the New York City total. That puts Boston’s biotech-heavy venture haul apparently second only to Silicon Valley among domestic locales thus far this year. And for New England VCs, the latest numbers also confirm already well-ingrained opinions about the superior talents of local entrepreneurs.
“Boston often gets dismissed as a has-been startup city. But the successes are often overlooked and don’t get the same attention as less successful, but more hypey companies in San Francisco,” Blake Bartlett, a partner at Boston-based venture firm OpenView, told Crunchbase News. He points to local success stories like online prescription service PillPack, which Amazon just snapped up for $1 billion, and online auto marketplace CarGurus, which went public in October and is now valued around $4.7 billion.
Meanwhile, fresh capital is piling up in the coffers of local startups with all the intensity of a New England snowstorm. In the chart below, we look at funding totals since 2012, along with reported round counts.
In the interest of rivalry, we are also showing how the Massachusetts startup ecosystem compares to New York over the past five years.
Who’s getting funded?
So what’s the reason for Boston’s 2018 successes? It’s impossible to pinpoint a single cause. The New England city’s startup scene is broad and has deep pockets of expertise in biotech, enterprise software, AI, consumer apps and other areas.
Still, we’d be remiss not to give biotech the lion’s share of the credit. So far this year, biotech and healthcare have led the New England dealmaking surge, accounting for the majority of invested capital. Once again, local investors are not surprised.
“Boston has been the center of the biotech universe forever,” said Dylan Morris, a partner at Boston and Silicon Valley-based VC firm CRV. That makes the city well-poised to be a leading hub in the sector’s latest funding and exit boom, which is capitalizing on a long-term shift toward more computational approaches to diagnosing and curing disease.
Moreover, it goes without saying that the home city of MIT has a particularly strong reputation for so-called deep tech — using really complicated technology to solve really hard problems. That’s reflected in the big funding rounds.
For instance, the largest Boston-based funding recipient of 2018, Moderna Therapeutics, is a developer of mRNA-based drugs that raised $625 million across two late-stage rounds. Besides Moderna, other big rounds for companies with a deep tech bent went to TCR2, which is focused on engineering T cells for cancer therapy, and Starry (based in both Boston and New York), which is deploying the world’s first millimeter wave band active phased array technology for consumer broadband.
Other sectors saw some jumbo-sized rounds too, including enterprise software, 3D printing and even apparel.
Boston also benefits from the rise of supergiant funding rounds. A plethora of rounds raised at $100 million or more fueled the city’s rise in the venture funding rankings. So far this year, at least 15 Massachusetts companies have raised rounds of that magnitude or more, compared to 12 in all of 2017.
Exits are happening, too
Boston companies are going public and getting acquired at a brisk pace too this year, and often for big sums.
At least seven metro-area startups have sold for $100 million or more in disclosed-price acquisitions this year, according to Crunchbase data. In the lead is online prescription drug service PillPack . The second-biggest deal was Kensho, a provider of analytics for big financial institutions that sold to S&P Global for $550 million.
IPOs are huge, too. A total of 17 Boston-area venture-backed companies have gone public so far this year, of which 15 are life science startups. The largest offering was for Rubius Therapeutics, a developer of red cell therapeutics, followed by cybersecurity provider Carbon Black.
Meanwhile, many local companies that went public in the past few years have since seen their values skyrocket. Bartlett points to examples including online retailer Wayfair (market cap of $10 billion), marketing platform HubSpot (market cap $4.8 billion) and enterprise software provider Demandware (sold to Salesforce for $2.8 billion).
New England heats up
Recollections of a frigid April sojourn in Massachusetts are too fresh for me to comfortably utter the phrase “Boston is hot.” However, speaking purely about startup funding, and putting weather aside, the Boston scene does appear to be seeing some real escalation in temperature.
Of course, it’s not just Boston. Supergiant venture funds are surging all over the place this year. Morris is even bullish on the arch-rival a few hours south: “New York and Boston love to hate each other. But New York’s doing some amazing things too,” he said, pointing to efforts to invigorate the biotech startup ecosystem.
Still, so far, it seems safe to say 2018 is shaping up as Boston’s year for startups.
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Through luck and grit, Datadog is fusing the culture of developers and operations
There used to be two cultures in the enterprise around technology. On one side were software engineers, who built out the applications needed by employees to conduct the business of their companies. On the other side were sysadmins, who were territorially protective of their hardware domain — the servers, switches, and storage boxes needed to power all of that software. Many a great comedy routine has been made at the interface of those two cultures, but they remained divergent.
That is, until the cloud changed everything. Suddenly, there was increasing overlap in the skills required for software engineering and operations, as well as a greater need for collaboration between the two sides to effectively deploy applications. Yet, while these two halves eventually became one whole, the software monitoring tools used by them were often entirely separate.
New York City-based Datadog was designed to bring these two cultures together to create a more nimble and collaborative software and operations culture. Founded in 2010 by Olivier Pomel and Alexis Lê-Quôc, the product offers monitoring and analytics for cloud-based workflows, allowing ops team to track and analyze deployments and developers to instrument their applications. Pomel said that “the root of all of this collaboration is to make sure that everyone has the same understanding of the problem.”
The company has had dizzying success. Pomel declined to disclose precise numbers, but says the company had “north of $100 million” of recurring revenue in the past twelve months, and “we have been doubling that every year so far.” The company, headquartered in the New York Times Building in Times Square, employs more than 600 people across its various worldwide offices. The company has raised nearly $150 million of venture capital according to Crunchbase, and is perennially on banker’s short lists for strong IPO prospects.
The real story though is just how much luck and happenstance can help put wind in the sails of a company.
Pomel first met Lê-Quôc while an undergraduate in France. He was working on running the campus network, and helped to discover that Lê-Quôc had hacked the network. Lê-Quôc was eventually disconnected, and Pomel would migrate to IBM’s upstate New York offices after graduation. After IBM, he led technology at Wireless Generation, a K-12 startup, where he ran into Lê-Quôc again, who was heading up ops for the company. The two cultures of develops and ops was glaring at the startup, where “we had developers who hated operations” and there was much “finger-pointing.”
Putting aside any lingering grievances from their undergrad days, the two began to explore how they could ameliorate the cultural differences they witnessed between their respective teams. “Bringing dev and ops together is not a feature, it is core,” Pomel explained. At the same time, they noticed that companies were increasingly talking about building on Amazon Web Services, which in 2009, was still a relatively new concept. They incorporated Datadog in 2010 as a cloud-first monitoring solution, and launched general availability for the product in 2012.
Luck didn’t just bring the founders together twice, it also defined the currents of their market. Datadog was among the first cloud-native monitoring solutions, and the superlative success of cloud infrastructure in penetrating the enterprise the past few years has benefitted the company enormously. We had “exactly the right product at the right time,” Pomel said, and “a lot of it was luck.” He continued, “It’s healthy to recognize that not everything comes from your genius, because what works once doesn’t always work a second time.”
While startups have been a feature in New York for decades, enterprise infrastructure was in many ways in a dark age when the company launched, which made early fundraising difficult. “None of the West Coast investors were listening,” Pomel said, and “East Coast investors didn’t understand the infrastructure space well enough to take risks.” Even when he could get a West Coast VC to chat with him, they “thought it was a form of mental impairment to start an infrastructure startup in New York.”
Those fundraising difficulties ended up proving a boon for Datadog, because it forced the company to connect with customers much earlier and more often than it might have otherwise. Pomel said, “it forced us to spend all of our time with customers and people who were related to the problem” and ultimately, “it grounded us in the customer problem.” Pomel believes that the company’s early DNA of deeply listening to customers has allowed it to continue to outcompete its rivals on the West Coast.
More success is likely to come as companies continue to move their infrastructure onto the cloud. Datadog used to have a roughly even mix of private and public cloud business, and now the balance is moving increasingly toward the public side. Even large financial institutions, which have been reticent in transitioning their infrastructures, have now started to aggressively embrace cloud as the future of computing in the industry, according to Pomel.
Datadog intends to continue to add new modules to its core monitoring toolkit and expand its team. As the company has grown, so has the need to put in place more processes as parts of the company break. Quoting his co-founder, Pomel said the message to employees is “don’t mind the rattling sound — it is a spaceship, not an airliner” and “things are going to break and change, and it is normal.”
Much as Datadog has bridged the gap between developers and ops, Pomel hopes to continue to give back to the New York startup ecosystem by bridging the gap between technical startups and venture capital. He has made a series of angel investments into local emerging enterprise and data startups, including Generable, Seva, and Windmill. Hard work and a lot of luck is propelling Datadog into the top echelon of enterprise startups, pulling New York along with it.
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Full-Metal Packet is hosting the future of cloud infrastructure
Cloud computing has been a revolution for the data center. Rather than investing in expensive hardware and managing a data center directly, companies are relying on public cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure to provide general-purpose and high-availability compute, storage, and networking resources in a highly flexible way.
Yet as workflows have moved to the cloud, companies are increasingly realizing that those abstracted resources can be enormously expensive compared to the hardware they used to own. Few companies want to go back to managing hardware directly themselves, but they also yearn to have the price-to-performance level they used to enjoy. Plus, they want to take advantage of a whole new ecosystem of customized and specialized hardware to process unique workflows — think Tensor Processing Units for machine learning applications.
That’s where Packet comes in. The New York City-based startup’s platform offers a highly-customizable infrastructure for running bare metal in the cloud. Rather than sharing an instance with other users, Packet’s customers “own” the hardware they select, so they can use all the resources of that hardware.
Even more interesting is that Packet will also deploy custom hardware to its data centers, which currently number eighteen around the world. So, for instance, if you want to deploy a quantum computing box redundantly in half of those centers, Packet will handle the logistics of installing those boxes, setting them up, and managing that infrastructure for you.
The company was founded in 2014 by Zac Smith, Jacob Smith, and Aaron Welch, and it has raised a total of $12 million in venture capital financing according to Crunchbase, with its last round led by Softbank. “I took the usual path, I went to Juilliard,” Zac Smith, who is CEO, said to me at his office, which overlooks the World Trade Center in downtown Manhattan. Double bass was a first love, but he found his way eventually into internet hosting, working as COO of New York-based Voxel.
At Voxel, Smith said that he grew up in hosting just as the cloud started taking off. “We saw this change in the user from essentially a sysadmin who cared about Tom’s Hardware, to a developer who had never opened a computer but who was suddenly orchestrating infrastructure,” he said.
Innovation is the lifeblood of developers, yet, public clouds were increasingly abstracting away any details of the underlying infrastructure from developers. Smith explained that “infrastructure was becoming increasingly proprietary, the land of few companies.” While he once thought about leaving the hosting world post-Voxel, he and his co-founders saw an opportunity to rethink cloud infrastructure from the metal up.
“Our customer is a millennial developer, 32 years old, and they have never opened an ATX case, and how could you possibly give them IT in the same way,” Smith asked. The idea of Packet was to bring back choice in infrastructure to these developers, while abstracting away the actual data center logistics that none of them wanted to work on. “You can choose your own opinion — we are hardware independent,” he said.
Giving developers more bare metal options is an interesting proposition, but it is Packet’s long-term vision that I think is most striking. In short, the company wants to completely change the model of hardware development worldwide.
VCs are increasingly investing in specialized chips and memory to handle unique processing loads, from machine learning to quantum computing applications. In some cases, these chips can process their workloads exponentially faster compared to general purpose chips, which at scale can save companies millions of dollars.
Packet’s mission is to encourage that ecosystem by essentially becoming a marketplace, connecting original equipment manufacturers with end-user developers. “We use the WeWork model a lot,” Smith said. What he means is that Packet allows you to rent space in its global network of data centers and handle all the logistics of installing and monitoring hardware boxes, much as WeWork allows companies to rent real estate while it handles the minutia like resetting the coffee filter.
In this vision, Packet would create more discerning and diverse buyers, allowing manufacturers to start targeting more specialized niches. Gone are the generic x86 processors from Intel driving nearly all cloud purchases, and in their place could be dozens of new hardware vendors who can build up their brands among developers and own segments of the compute and storage workload.
In this way, developers can hack their infrastructure much as an earlier generation may have tricked out their personal computer. They can now test new hardware more easily, and when they find a particular piece of hardware they like, they can get it running in the cloud in short order. Packet becomes not just the infrastructure operator — but the channel connecting buyers and sellers.
That’s Packet’s big vision. Realizing it will require that hardware manufacturers increasingly build differentiated chips. More importantly, companies will have to have unique workflows, be at a scale where optimizing those workflows is imperative, and realize that they can match those workflows to specific hardware to maximize their cost performance.
That may sound like a tall order, but Packet’s dream is to create exactly that kind of marketplace. If successful, it could transform how hardware and cloud vendors work together and ultimately, the innovation of any 32-year-old millennial developer who doesn’t like plugging a box in, but wants to plug in to innovation.
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Timescale is leading the next wave of NYC database tech
Data is the lifeblood of the modern corporation, yet acquiring, storing, processing, and analyzing it remains a remarkably challenging and expensive project. Every time data infrastructure finally catches up with the streams of information pouring in, another source and more demanding decision-making makes the existing technology obsolete.
Few cities rely on data the same way as New York City, nor has any other city so shaped the technology that underpins our data infrastructure. Back in the 1960s, banks and accounting firms helped to drive much of the original computation industry with their massive finance applications. Today, that industry has been supplanted by finance and advertising, both of which need to make microsecond decisions based on petabyte datasets and complex statistical models.
Unsurprisingly, the city’s hunger for data has led to waves of database companies finding their home in the city.
As web applications became increasingly popular in the mid-aughts, SQL databases came under increasing strain to scale, while also proving to be inflexible in terms of their data schemas for the fast-moving startups they served. That problem spawned Manhattan-based MongoDB, whose flexible “NoSQL” schemas and horizontal scaling capabilities made it the default choice for a generation of startups. The company would go on to raise $311 million according to Crunchbase, and debuted late last year on NASDAQ, trading today with a market cap of $2 billion.
At the same time that the NoSQL movement was hitting its stride, academic researchers and entrepreneurs were exploring how to evolve SQL to scale like its NoSQL competitors, while retaining the kinds of features (joining tables, transactions) that make SQL so convenient for developers.
One leading company in this next generation of database tech is New York-based Cockroach Labs, which was founded in 2015 by a trio of former Square, Viewfinder, and Google engineers. The company has gone on to raise more than $50 million according to Crunchbase from a luminary list of investors including Peter Fenton at Benchmark, Mike Volpi at Index, and Satish Dharmaraj at Redpoint, along with GV and Sequoia.
While web applications have their own peculiar data needs, the rise of the internet of things (IoT) created a whole new set of data challenges. How can streams of data from potentially millions of devices be stored in an easily analyzable manner? How could companies build real-time systems to respond to that data?
Mike Freedman and Ajay Kulkarni saw that problem increasingly manifesting itself in 2015. The two had been roommates at MIT in the late 90s, and then went on separate paths into academia and industry respectively. Freedman went to Stanford for a PhD in computer science, and nearly joined the spinout of Nicira, which sold to VMware in 2012 for $1.26 billion. Kulkarni joked that “Mike made the financially wise decision of not joining them,” and Freedman eventually went to Princeton as an assistant professor, and was awarded tenure in 2013. Kulkarni founded and worked at a variety of startups including GroupMe, as well as receiving an MBA from MIT.
The two had startup dreams, and tried building an IoT platform. As they started building it though, they realized they would need a real-time database to process the data streams coming in from devices. “There are a lot of time series databases, [so] let’s grab one off the shelf, and then we evaluated a few,” Kulkarni explained. They realized what they needed was a hybrid of SQL and NoSQL, and nothing they could find offered the feature set they required to power their platform. That challenge became the problem to be solved, and Timescale was born.
In many ways, Timescale is how you build a database in 2018. Rather than starting de novo, the team decided to build on top of Postgres, a popular open-source SQL database. “By building on top of Postgres, we became the more reliable option,” Kulkarni said of their thinking. In addition, the company opted to make the database fully open source. “In this day and age, in order to get wide adoption, you have to be an open source database company,” he said.
Since the project’s first public git commit on October 18, 2016, the company’s database has received nearly 4,500 stars on Github, and it has raised $16.1 million from Benchmark and NEA .
Far more important though are their customers, who are definitely not the typical tech startup roster and include companies from oil and gas, mining, and telecommunications. “You don’t think of them as early adopters, but they have a need, and because we built it on top of Postgres, it integrates into an ecosystem that they know,” Freedman explained. Kulkarni continued, “And the problem they have is that they have all of this time series data, and it isn’t sitting in the corner, it is integrated with their core service.”
New York has been a strong home for the two founders. Freedman continues to be a professor at Princeton, where he has built a pipeline of potential grads for the company. More widely, Kulkarni said, “Some of the most experienced people in databases are in the financial industry, and that’s here.” That’s evident in one of their investors, hedge fund Two Sigma. “Two Sigma had been the only venture firm that we talked to that already had built out their own time series database,” Kulkarni noted.
The two also benefit from paying customers. “I think the Bay Area is great for open source adoption, but a lot of Bay Area companies, they develop their own database tech, or they use an open source project and never pay for it,” Kulkarni said. Being in New York has meant closer collaboration with customers, and ultimately more revenues.
Open source plus revenues. It’s the database way, and the next wave of innovation in the NYC enterprise infrastructure ecosystem.
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Let’s meet at the March Micro-Meetup in New York!
In preparation for Disrupt New York in May I’m going to hold a few pitching workshops in New York for you all. We’ll listen to and critique ten pitches on March 13th at 7pm at the Knotel space at 22 West 38th Street, 3rd Floor. This is an informal pitch-off but the two best teams will get two tickets to Disrupt New York and the undying admiration of millions of people (actually… Read More
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How international startups are supporting New York City
Immigrants make up 13.3 percent of the population in the U.S., which is the highest percentage the country has seen in more than 100 years. Now let’s put this into perspective: Thirty-six percent of all top tech founders in the U.S. are immigrants — almost triple the percentage of immigrants in the country. Many immigrants are pushing innovation in the U.S, aiding the country… Read More
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Stowaway Cosmetic’s Chelsa Crowley on her “right size” makeup empire
Stowaway Cosmetics is a startup taking on the $60 billion makeup industry by selling pint-sized lipsticks, blushes and foundations direct to consumers. Chelsa Crowley and her co-founder Julie Fredrickson started the company after realizing they never used up all their makeup before it expired. Crowley had an extensive background in the cosmetics industry working for Mac and Bobbi Brown and… Read More
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