The New York City startup community is way more diverse than the other leading technology hubs in the US. According to a 2022 report from the Center for an Urban Future and Tech:NYC: Black and Hispanic New Yorkers make up 20.8% of New York’s tech sector workforce, compared to 8.5% in the San Francisco Bay Area and 9.7% in the Boston/Cambridge area. While this level of diversity represents a competitive advantage for New York over other tech hubs, it is still a far way off from New York’s overall demographic numbers.
So Tech:NYC, where I am the Chair, launched a program yesterday to tackle this head-on. They call it Startup:NYC and it builds upon the success of their
The New York City startup community is way more diverse than the other leading technology hubs in the US. According to a 2022 report from the Center for an Urban Future and Tech:NYC: Black and Hispanic New Yorkers make up 20.8% of New York’s tech sector workforce, compared to 8.5% in the San Francisco Bay Area and 9.7% in the Boston/Cambridge area. While this level of diversity represents a competitive advantage for New York over other tech hubs, it is still a far way off from New York’s overall demographic numbers.
So Tech:NYC, where I am the Chair, launched a program yesterday to tackle this head-on. They call it Startup:NYC and it builds upon the success of their
Founder House
, which launched in summer 2023 to give New York tech founders a space and programming to facilitate connection and collaboration with peers, investors, and industry experts. Over the first two cohorts of the program, Founder House has hosted 80+ founders, 63% of which are BIPOC-identified, and 46% identify as women.
Startup:NYC is about building a community of diverse founders who can together build the next generation of great startups in NYC. Go here to see the range of programming, events, and community that founders in NYC can access via Startup:NYC.
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.
Founder House
, which launched in summer 2023 to give New York tech founders a space and programming to facilitate connection and collaboration with peers, investors, and industry experts. Over the first two cohorts of the program, Founder House has hosted 80+ founders, 63% of which are BIPOC-identified, and 46% identify as women.
Startup:NYC is about building a community of diverse founders who can together build the next generation of great startups in NYC. Go here to see the range of programming, events, and community that founders in NYC can access via Startup:NYC.
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.
