Tech:NYC Digest: April 1

Tech:NYC Digest: April 1

April 01, 2022 • Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes

Friday, April 1, 2022  

Happy Friday (after much internal deliberation, the Tech:NYC team decided to spare you from any additional April Fools’ Day pranks in this newsletter). In today’s digest, New York delays ending mask mandate for youngest children, more free test kits are coming to New Yorkers, and how Pursuit is scaling job training programs beyond the pandemic.

  • And Ramadan Mubarak to all who celebrate!

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By the numbers:  

  • New positive cases statewide: 3.882    

    • New positive cases, NYC: 1,488

  • NYC Positivity Rate: 2.0 percent (+0.1 percent)

  • NYC Hospitalizations: 255 (+3)

  • Statewide Vaccine Progress: 

    • New Yorkers with at least one dose: 89.6 percent

    • New Yorkers who are fully vaccinated: 76.2 percent  

In today’s latest:

  • Amid rising COVID cases, Mayor Adams today announced the city would distribute 6.3 million free, at-home test kits. The mayor also called on Congress to provide $15 billion in COVID-19 emergency funding. (Staten Island Live)

    • The NYC Test & Trace Corps will oversee the distribution of the kits, along with over 2,500 community-based organizations.

  • NYC will delay its plan to end the mask mandate for children under 5 in schools and daycare centers, citing a rise in Omicron subvariant cases. (Bloomberg) The city also plans to challenge a Staten Island judge’s ruling from earlier today to end the mask mandate. (ABC New York) 

  • Just as New York voters were getting familiar with potential changes following redistricting, a state judge ruled that the newly-drawn district lines were void and must be redrawn. (City & State) But the decision is expected to be appealed, allowing candidates to proceed with the current maps going into election season.

  • And if you haven’t been fooled yet, here’s some of this year’s best NYC April Fools’ jokes. 

In other reading:

  • A New Wave of COVID-19 Is Coming. Here’s How to Prepare. (New York Times)

  • New Yorkers Plan to Cut Time Spent in the Office by Half, Survey Finds (Bloomberg)

  • How Brooklyn Startup Propel is building better tech for people receiving public benefits (Crain’s New York)

Reskilling and upskilling programs have exploded during the pandemic, and there’s no indication the demand will go away. The Great Resignation put the labor market at center stage, but even when the pandemic subsides, support for long-term career and economic mobility will remain important as ever.

Pursuit, a social impact organization founded in Queens to provide pathways for low-income individuals into tech careers, is at the forefront of that need. The company announced a new Pursuit Bond 2.0 program to scale its workforce training programs into a self-sustaining resource.

The backstory: Pursuit’s founder Jukay Hsu was thinking about these ideas in 2013, almost a decade before we started worrying about the “Great Resignation.” 

In 2016, the organization launched Pursuit Bond, a pilot program using income share agreements (ISA) to help participants get trained, hired, and retained — and to financially sustain the program’s future.

  • Under Pursuit Bond’s ISA model, once a participant completes the training and lands a well-paying job, they repay Pursuit a percentage of their new increased salaries.

  • Only those who earn above the set salary threshold have to make the payments. Those who don’t get a job or earn less than the threshold pay nothing.

The pilot (“Bond 1.0”) was highly successful, and Pursuit says it’s the first organization to deliver full returns on the investment into the ISA model:

  • During Bond 1.0’s four-year period, more than 100 participants enrolled, and 86 percent had a program completion rate (82 percent expected).

  • 88 percent were hired (70 percent expected), and on average, participants went from an annual salary of $12,389 to $85,967.

With Bond 2.0, Pursuit expects it will reach an additional 1,000 low-income New Yorkers and create $1 billion in new lifetime earnings — all while creating a self-sustaining market for job training.

In other reading:

  • 5 things first-time founders must remember when working with VCs (TechCrunch)

  • Tech hiring isn’t hard if you know what to offer (Protocol)

  • For Gen Z, the future of work must be flexible (Fast Company)

  • Cross River, a NYC and Fort Lee, NJ-based technology infrastructure provider for financial service companies, raised $620 million in funding. Eldridge and Andreessen Horowitz co-led the round and were joined by T. Rowe Price Investment Management, Whale Rock, Hanaco Ventures, and others. (Insider)

  • Glean, a NYC-based self-service data insights and visualization tool, raised $7 million in seed funding. Matrix Partners led the round and was joined by a group of angels. (TechCrunch) 

  • Prizeout, a NYC-based adtech startup focused on digital gift cards, raised $25 million in Series B funding. Participating investors include Precept Capital, Mark Cuban, Continental Investment Partners, Astralis Capital, RiverPark Ventures, and Anchor Capital. (Newswire)

  • April 5: Virtual: What’s Next Summit 2022, with Bolt CEO Ryan Breslow, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield, Accenture CEO Julie Sweet, and others. Hosted by Axios. Register here.

  • April 6: Virtual: Data Science Day 2022, with White House Director of Science and Technology Policy Alondra Nelson and IBM Research AI vice president Sriram Raghavan. Hosted by the Data Science Institute at Columbia University. Register here.

  • April 7: In-person: New York Product Conference, with Squarespace VP of product Natalie Gibralter, 1stdibs chief product officer Xiaodi Zhang, Noom VP of product Raj Krishnan, and others. Hosted by Product Collective. Use code TechNYC to save 20 percent off any pass by registering here.

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