Our family's public charity, Gotham Gives, along with Tech:NYC, puts on the Annual NYC Computer Science Fair with help from the broader tech community in NYC.
The Fair happened yesterday at the Armory in Washington Heights.
Our family's public charity, Gotham Gives, along with Tech:NYC, puts on the Annual NYC Computer Science Fair with help from the broader tech community in NYC.
The Fair happened yesterday at the Armory in Washington Heights.
Our family's public charity, Gotham Gives, along with Tech:NYC, puts on the Annual NYC Computer Science Fair with help from the broader tech community in NYC.
The Fair happened yesterday at the Armory in Washington Heights.
The Fair brings together about 2000 NYC public high school students who are studying computer science with about fifty tech companies and about twenty colleges and dozens of after-school CS programs. It was described to me yesterday as a "science fair meets a job fair" and that's exactly right.
The idea is to show NYC public school students, many of whom are from families with no connection to the tech sector, that they are candidates to work in tech if they take the right classes, work hard, and develop skills that make them employable.
We have been putting on the Fair since 2013 and even did two virtual fairs during the pandemic. The in-person ones are a lot better!
I had the pleasure of touring NYC School Chancellor David Banks around the Fair mid-morning. We stopped at about a dozen booths and rooms and met a bunch of students, teachers, tech companies, and non-profits working in CS Education.
That's the Chancellor doing a robotics project with some young women from Forest Hills who compete in a robotics tournament under the name Metro Joules.
My favorite moment of the tour was a visit to the Dream Machine which is a visual AI experience built by the Bright Moments DAO which is in the USV portfolio.
That's a student "prompting" the Dream Machine with a story about Spiderman playing pickup basketball. The students enjoyed coming up with dreams and prompting the Dream Machine to display them on the big screen. On the way out, the Chancellor and I discussed how technology like this could be used in helping students learn.
It gives me great pride and satisfaction that we can put on a day like this for the students of NYC. It could not happen without the leadership of Jennifer Klopp, who runs Gotham Gives, and the Tech:NYC team. And we are incredibly grateful for the financial support of our sponsors; Etsy, Justworks, Warby Parker, Kickstarter, Microsoft, Google, Coinbase, Uniswap, SoundCloud, Splice, Deloitte, Pilot Fiber and Primary VC. And huge thanks to all of the companies, universities and non-profits that had booths at the Fair this year.
A recent survey suggests that about 60mm Americans own crypto assets. That's almost 20% of the country. That's three times as many people as belong to unions. That is twenty times the number of Americans that own an electric vehicle.
Crypto holders/advocates should be a potent voting bloc in the US and hopefully we will see that in this election cycle.
The non-profit StandWithCrypto.org is all about activating the crypto voter.
Almost 400,000 individuals have joined StandWithCrypto, including yours truly, and I want to encourage all pro-crypto readers of this blog to join me in doing that.
You can do that by going here and click on "joint the fight."
I've also added a call to action to join StandWithCrypto to the top of this blog and will keep it there through this November's election and possibly beyond that.
I have been a T-Mobile customer for many years. I switched to T-Mobile back when they offered "bring your own phone" and ATT and Verizon were not doing the same. I like companies that let you do things your way.
But T-Mobile does not have great service in several important locations for me, like our home in NYC, our beach house, and our ski house. So I use wifi calling on T-Mobile in those locations and it works reasonably well. But it is not perfect.
I became a Helium Mobile customer last August and wrote about it then. Helium Mobile is the 5G cellular service offered by our portfolio company Nova Labs using the Helium hotspot network and backfill via T-Mobile.
And a month or so ago, I bought some of the new Helium Mobile hotspots and started installing them in our homes and offices. I did this to participate in the Helium network and earn Mobile token rewards.
However, I realized a fantastic side benefit which is that my second sim (a downloadable esim) on my phone has way better service when I am near a Helium Mobile hotspot than what I get using wifi calling on T-Mobile.
I've always thought of Helium as a way of participating in a network and earning rewards for doing so. But now Helium is also providing "single user utility" in the form of way better cellular service in locations that don't have that.
So if you live and/or work in a location where you don't get great cell service and if wifi calling doesn't completely solve that problem for you, trying signing up for Helium Mobile for $20/month, getting a second sim in your phone, and putting a Helium Mobile hotspot in that location. It works great for me.
The Fair brings together about 2000 NYC public high school students who are studying computer science with about fifty tech companies and about twenty colleges and dozens of after-school CS programs. It was described to me yesterday as a "science fair meets a job fair" and that's exactly right.
The idea is to show NYC public school students, many of whom are from families with no connection to the tech sector, that they are candidates to work in tech if they take the right classes, work hard, and develop skills that make them employable.
We have been putting on the Fair since 2013 and even did two virtual fairs during the pandemic. The in-person ones are a lot better!
I had the pleasure of touring NYC School Chancellor David Banks around the Fair mid-morning. We stopped at about a dozen booths and rooms and met a bunch of students, teachers, tech companies, and non-profits working in CS Education.
That's the Chancellor doing a robotics project with some young women from Forest Hills who compete in a robotics tournament under the name Metro Joules.
My favorite moment of the tour was a visit to the Dream Machine which is a visual AI experience built by the Bright Moments DAO which is in the USV portfolio.
That's a student "prompting" the Dream Machine with a story about Spiderman playing pickup basketball. The students enjoyed coming up with dreams and prompting the Dream Machine to display them on the big screen. On the way out, the Chancellor and I discussed how technology like this could be used in helping students learn.
It gives me great pride and satisfaction that we can put on a day like this for the students of NYC. It could not happen without the leadership of Jennifer Klopp, who runs Gotham Gives, and the Tech:NYC team. And we are incredibly grateful for the financial support of our sponsors; Etsy, Justworks, Warby Parker, Kickstarter, Microsoft, Google, Coinbase, Uniswap, SoundCloud, Splice, Deloitte, Pilot Fiber and Primary VC. And huge thanks to all of the companies, universities and non-profits that had booths at the Fair this year.
A recent survey suggests that about 60mm Americans own crypto assets. That's almost 20% of the country. That's three times as many people as belong to unions. That is twenty times the number of Americans that own an electric vehicle.
Crypto holders/advocates should be a potent voting bloc in the US and hopefully we will see that in this election cycle.
The non-profit StandWithCrypto.org is all about activating the crypto voter.
Almost 400,000 individuals have joined StandWithCrypto, including yours truly, and I want to encourage all pro-crypto readers of this blog to join me in doing that.
You can do that by going here and click on "joint the fight."
I've also added a call to action to join StandWithCrypto to the top of this blog and will keep it there through this November's election and possibly beyond that.
I have been a T-Mobile customer for many years. I switched to T-Mobile back when they offered "bring your own phone" and ATT and Verizon were not doing the same. I like companies that let you do things your way.
But T-Mobile does not have great service in several important locations for me, like our home in NYC, our beach house, and our ski house. So I use wifi calling on T-Mobile in those locations and it works reasonably well. But it is not perfect.
I became a Helium Mobile customer last August and wrote about it then. Helium Mobile is the 5G cellular service offered by our portfolio company Nova Labs using the Helium hotspot network and backfill via T-Mobile.
And a month or so ago, I bought some of the new Helium Mobile hotspots and started installing them in our homes and offices. I did this to participate in the Helium network and earn Mobile token rewards.
However, I realized a fantastic side benefit which is that my second sim (a downloadable esim) on my phone has way better service when I am near a Helium Mobile hotspot than what I get using wifi calling on T-Mobile.
I've always thought of Helium as a way of participating in a network and earning rewards for doing so. But now Helium is also providing "single user utility" in the form of way better cellular service in locations that don't have that.
So if you live and/or work in a location where you don't get great cell service and if wifi calling doesn't completely solve that problem for you, trying signing up for Helium Mobile for $20/month, getting a second sim in your phone, and putting a Helium Mobile hotspot in that location. It works great for me.
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