Tech:NYC Digest: February 15

Tech:NYC Digest: February 15

February 15, 2022 • Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes

Tuesday, February 15, 2022

In today’s digest, NYC fires unvaccinated municipal workers, Mayor Adams announces 100,000 summer jobs for NYC youth, and Warby Parker co-founder and co-CEO Neil Blumenthal on the future of work.

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By the numbers:  

  • New positive cases statewide: 2,317

    • New positive cases, NYC: 712

  • NYC Positivity Rate: 1.9 percent (-0.1 percent)

  • NYC Hospitalizations: 1,330 (-32)

  • Statewide Vaccine Progress: 

    • Percentage of all New Yorkers with least one dose: 88.4 percent

    • Percentage of all New Yorkers who are fully vaccinated: 75.0 percent

Today’s latest: 

  • New York City fired 1,430 municipal workers Friday for failing to comply with its vaccine mandate. Representing less than one percent of the city’s workforce, the firings are likely the nation’s largest mass termination of municipal employees in response to a COVID vaccine mandate. (New York Times)

  • A third of Americans who believe in coronavirus vaccine misinformation are aware that they're in disagreement with scientists and medical experts, according to a new survey by the COVID States Project. (Axios)

  • Mayor Eric Adams has promised 150 miles of new bus lanes in NYC in an effort to reduce congestion on some of the state’s busiest streets. But some worry the bus lanes will worsen congestion by taking away travel lanes and parking spots and push traffic to surrounding streets. (New York Times)

  • NYC is guaranteeing specific funding for Fair Fares, which offers MetroCards at a 50 percent discount to low-income New Yorkers. $75 million will be allocated to the program in the upcoming 2023 budget. (Gothamist)  

  • Mayor Adams announced today that the city’s Summer Youth Employment Program will receive $79 million in funding and be expanded to offer 100,000 jobs, the largest amount since its inception. (Patch NYC)

In other reading:

  • The Era of Pandemic Restrictions Is Fast Coming to an End (Bloomberg)

  • How NYC students feel about school mask mandates (Chalkbeat)

  • The coronavirus is here to stay. We now have a toolkit to live with it. (Washington Post)

One opportunity for early-stage startups: Tech:NYC is proud to partner with WeWork to launch Growth Campus NYC, a new initiative investing $25 million in subsidized office space to support startup teams and boost economic recovery citywide. With the main hub at WeWork Gotham Center in LIC, WeWork Growth Campus gives startups the pick of more than 500 offices across the city, as well as mentorship, networking, and other resources. Learn more about eligibility rules and apply here.

Like many other tech leaders, Warby Parker co-founder and co-CEO Neil Blumenthal found himself in unfamiliar territory at the start of the pandemic.

He and his staff had to figure out how to manage tens of thousands of employees, both in its corporate HQs and its retail stores nationwide. And like every other company, as the pandemic progressed and new variants emerged, plans had to be adjusted on the fly.

  • “Over the past few years, a lot of CEOs have really had to become armchair epidemiologists,” he said in an interview with The Washington Post. “When the pandemic hit, the framing of health and safety quickly jumped to the top” of the priority list.

Business leaders suddenly found themselves on the forefront of public health debates, all while navigating how to sustain their businesses with stores and offices closed. Blumenthal said outside expertise was key:

  • Warby Parker enlisted health experts to make sure the company was making informed decisions. “My piece of advice is always find the best experts, and find them early,” he said.

That guidance has led Blumenthal to believe the future of work is going to be more self-directed and flexible, and the typical five-day workweek may not be the standard moving forward.

  • The company’s RTO plan differs among corporate employees. Workplace operations and facilities teams are in-person five days a week, but the company also has a hybrid structure where employees are expected in the office Tuesday through Thursday and remote on Mondays and Fridays.

  • The company also has an option where employees can WFH for up to four weeks over the course of the year, but fully remote options have been limited because “we do think that the culture of being in office is so critical,” Blumenthal said.

Going forward, Blumenthal said the biggest challenges operating in this environment are really around uncertainty: “You never know when another variant is going to come and how that may drastically change how team members are able to show up to work or how our customers are going to shop.”

In other reading: 

  • Are Virtual Reality And The Metaverse Ready To Support Collaborative Work? (Forbes)

  • Office Lobbies Get Security Makeover, but Not One You Will See (New York Times)

  • Is it time to kill the office happy hour? (Protocol)

  • Kallyope, a New York-based gut-brain biotech company, raised $236 million in Series D funding. Mubadala and The Column Group co-led the round and were joined by DNS Capital, Hartford Healthcare Endowment, Parkwood, Tao Capital, as well as insiders Alexandria Venture Investments, Bill Gates, Casdin Capital, Euclidean Capital, Illumina, Lux Capital, Polaris Partners, Two Sigma Ventures, and StepStone Group. (Businesswire)

  • Mundi, a New York-based fintech startup focused on cross-border trade, raised $16 million in Series A funding. Union Square Ventures led the round. (TechCrunch)

  • RapidRatings, a New York-based provider of financial health data and analytics, raised $200 million in growth funding. Spectrum Equity led the round and was joined by 22C Capital. (Businesswire)

  • Veho, a New York-based next-day package delivery startup, raised $170 million in Series B funding at a $1.5 billion valuation. Tiger Global led the round and was joined by SoftBank, as well as insiders General Catalyst, Bling Capital, Construct Capital, Industry Ventures, and Origin Ventures. (TechCrunch)

  • February 17: Virtual: Web3 Video and the Future of Content Ownership, with Glass.xyz founder Dayo Adeosun. Hosted by Betaworks Studios. Register here.

  • February 22: Virtual: Investor Series, with Greycroft co-founder Alan Patricof. Hosted by New York Venture Partners. Register here.

  • March 4: Virtual: Sharing America’s Role in a Post-Pandemic World, with Meetup CEO David Siegel, Bolster co-founder and CEO Matt Blumberg, and others. Hosted by 8W8 Global Business Builders. Register here.

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