Tech:NYC Digest: January 12

Tech:NYC Digest: January 12

January 12, 2023 • Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes

Thursday, January 12, 2023

In today’s digest, bike parking is the MTA’s newest amenity, hope for cheaper rents in 2023, and why we won’t stop making up new terms about the future of work.

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  • The strike by roughly 7,000 nurses at two NYC hospitals ended this morning after a tentative deal was struck to improve pay and staffing rotation levels. (Gothamist)

  • The MTA announced plans to install bicycle racks at 37 subway stations, build or widen bike paths on some bridges, and put racks on the front of buses in an effort to better connect bike and e-scooter riders with the transit system. (THE CITY) 

    • In other transit news: Grand Central’s subway station — the system’s second-busiest — is getting new staircase and tunnel upgrades. (Crain’s New York Business)

  • Median rents in Manhattan and Brooklyn continued to dip in December, but barely enough to really notice. (Crain’s New York Business) But the trends are moving in the right direction: Manhattan rents have now fallen four times in the past five months from the record median rent of $4,150 in July.

  • The next licensed cannabis dispensary is set to open next month in Union Square, with 51% of its profits going to the Doe Fund, an organization providing work, housing, and career training assistance to people with histories of homelessness, incarceration, or substance abuse. (NBC New York)

In other reading:

  • Are Our Immune Systems Stuck in 2020? (The Atlantic)

  • The 14 New York Restaurants Up For Michelin Awards This Year (Eater NY)

It’s official: we left “quiet quitting” behind in 2022.

  • Workers want to take on more responsibility and get more communication with their bosses in 2023, according to new research. (MarketWatch)

  • Employee well-being and career growth opportunities were the two top priorities for workers going into the new year, but Offsyte CEO Emma Guo said those go hand-in-hand: If employers provide better support for their employees, they’ll want to pursue more opportunities within their own company instead of starting the search for their next role.

Quiet quitting was a lot less a universal trend than the hype made it out to be: Research released this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research said college-educated men were the primary quiet quitters during the pandemic. (Bloomberg)

Since it entered the workplace lexicon, we’ve already also seen it evolve into “quiet firing” and, most recently, “quiet hiring.” 

  • The term refers to the process of a company acquiring new skills or filling core business gaps without actually hiring new full-time employees, and future of work experts say it’s the trend to watch in 2023.

Our take: The one trend that will have some staying power: we’re going to keep making up words about work. Whether or not that’s useful, however, is still a much-debated question.

In other reading:

  • Canary, a NYC-based fintech that helps employers set up emergency relief funds for workers, raised $2.9 million in seed funding. Capital One Ventures led the round. (Axios)

  • Inflow, a NYC and London-based ADHD management app, raised $11 million in Series A funding. Octopus Ventures led the round and was joined by Hoxton Ventures and Route66. (TechCrunch)

  • Oula, a NYC-based maternity care startup, raised $19 million in Series A funding. 8VC led the round and was joined by Metrodora, the Female Founders Fund, Collaborative Fund, and Alumni Ventures. (Axios)

  • January 17: In-person: Web3 Investor and Founder Insights, with Union Square Ventures partner Nick Grossman, Dfns CEO Clarisse Hagege, Chainstarters co-founder Julie Dwyer, and Gamespad co-founder Constantin Kogan. Hosted by Techstars Web3 and Genesis Block. Register here.

  • January 17: In-person: Data Driven NYC, with BigID CEO Dimitri Sirota, Bloomberg head of ML Gideon Mann, and Meta research manager Melanie Kambadur. Hosted by FirstMark Capital. Register here.

  • January 18: In-person: Building a Marketplace: Advice for Founders and Product Teams, with AptDeco CEO Reham Fagiri, Grailed CEO Arun Gupta, and Transfix CTO Jonathan Salama. Hosted by Union Square Ventures and Stacklist. Register here.

  • January 23: In-person: Book Launch Party, with Women in Tech Chief Digital Advisor Lori Rodriguez, author of Hidden Lives of Women in STEM. Register here.

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