Tech:NYC Digest: August 16

Tech:NYC Digest: August 16

August 16, 2022 • Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes

Tuesday, August 16, 2022 

In today’s digest, COVID won’t get in the way of vacation, the MTA’s outlook in an era of uncertain ridership, and a new nonprofit wants to get CEOs behind the same mental health playbook.

  • Plus, a special congratulations to Tech:NYC member Rubicon, which today became the latest tech company to go public on the New York Stock Exchange! 🚀

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By the numbers:  

  • New positive cases statewide: 3,658    

    • New positive cases, NYC: 1,799  

  • NYC Positivity Rate (Daily): 3.9% 

    • NYC Positivity Rate (7-Day Average): 4.8%

In today’s latest: 

  • The perception of personal COVID-19 risk has fallen to a point that most Americans are no longer taking basic safety steps before going on vacation, according to the latest installment of the Axios/Ipsos Coronavirus Index. (Axios)

  • NYC health officials continue to record between 60 and 70 new monkeypox cases each day, but the pace of that climb appears to be slowing — New York added fewer than 400 cases in the last week, while those reported nationwide increased by 3,7000 during the same period. (Politico)

  • A second round of public hearings is taking place this week for New Yorkers to weigh in on recently proposed NYC Council district lines. (Gothamist)

    • Every decade, the city is required to draw the 51 district lines following the latest US census count, the most recent of which counted a population growth of 600,000 people.

    • You can see the preliminary maps being proposed here. 

  • The MTA revealed that it expects to face a $2.5 billion deficit in 2025. If the agency can’t plug its budget, some of the pandemic-era options, including service cuts, worker layoffs, and fares increases, will be revisited. (New York Times) 

In other reading:

  • The Odds of Getting COVID From Your Housemate Are ‘About a Coin Flip’ (The Atlantic)

  • What’s Going on With America’s Booster Plan? (New York Magazine)

  • We Ate at the Fancy Feast Restaurant for Humans (Grub Street)

At the start of the pandemic, employers were scrambling to find more mental health resources to offer employees thrown into the uncertainty and isolation caused by COVID-19. 

  • There was a lot to choose from: the number of apps exploded, telehealth services beefed up mental health offerings, and entirely new startups were launched dedicated to the mental health space.

The last two years have indicated the need for this support won’t slow down, even when we largely consider the pandemic to be “over.”

  • A new study by Asana looked at over 10,000 knowledge workers across seven countries and found approximately 70% of people experienced burnout in the last year. 

What’s new: Project Healthy Minds is a new NYC-based initiative building what it calls the “first direct-to-consumer digital mental health marketplace.” (Axios)

  • “We want to build an Expedia.com for mental health services,” said its founder and CEO Phillip Schermer. That will include tools for finding crisis hotlines, psychiatrists, substance abuse treatment programs, and other resources.

Beyond the product itself, Project Healthy Minds hopes to create national standards to guide companies’ mental health efforts — a sort of CEO playbook companies can use to execute proven strategies. 

  • A new poll from the American Psychological Association shows that 81% of employees would prefer to work for companies that provide support for mental health concerns, while a Project Healthy Minds survey found that 77% of next-generation workers would leave a job if it was harming their mental health. 

Schermer said Project Healthy Minds is compiling a centralized library of best practices in mental health programs, then using it to develop metrics by which companies can be assessed. Learn more here.

In other reading:

  • ‘No One Wants to Work Anymore’ Is a Complaint as Old as Work Itself (Bloomberg)

  • Why putting parents first could be the secret to a successful return-to-office (Washington Post)

  • ‘Boomerang’ employees are back in force. Why you should — or shouldn’t — try to get your old job back (CNBC)

  • Dr. B, a NYC-based vaccine and COVID treatment distribution startup, raised $8 million in new venture funding. Lerer Hippeau and Founders Fund co-led the round. (Axios)

  • Drifting in Space, a NYC-based provider of browser-based developer tools, raised $2.5 million in seed funding. Participating investors include Garage Capital, Soma Capital, Abstraction Capital, Rogue Capital, Wayfinder, Velocity, and YR Ventures, as well as a group of angels. (Drifting in Space)

  • Superblocks, a NYC-based platform for maintaining internal apps and tools, raised $37 million in new venture funding. Participating investors include Kleiner Perkins, Greenoaks, Spark, Meritech, and a group of individuals. (TechCrunch)

  • August 17: Virtual: Hormones and Female Health, with Elektra Health CEO Alessandra Henderson, Veracity CEO Allie Egan, Evvy CEO Priyanka Jain, and others. Register here.

  • August 18: Virtual: Reducing Recidivism through Technology, with Justice Through Code founder Aedan Macdonald, The Last Mile co-founder Chris Redlitz, and others. Hosted by Axios. Register here.

  • September 21 – 24: In-person and virtual: Unfinished Live 2022, with Circle chief strategy officer Dante Disparte, Future\Perfect Ventures managing partner Jalak Jobanputra, Protocol Labs general counsel Marta Belcher, and others. Register here.

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