Tech:NYC Digest: January 5

Tech:NYC Digest: January 5

January 05, 2023 • Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes

Thursday, January 5, 2023

In today’s digest, the new public officials waiting to get to work, the inevitable future of AI in education, and why employers really mean it this time when it comes to RTO.

  • And ICYMI: our founder Julie Samuels shared this thread to respond to the national conversation on a tech downturn and how it's playing out in NYC. Have thoughts/reactions? Email us.

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  • New York’s 26 members of the US House of Representatives — including eight new freshmen — have now cycled through 10 unsuccessful rounds of the chamber’s attempt to elect the next speaker … and so they have yet to be sworn in.

    • As a result, none of them can begin providing constituent services, much less hold briefings or pass laws. (New York Times)

  • The NYC Dept. of Education announced it would block access to ChatGPT, the AI tool created by OpenAI, on education department devices and internet networks. (Chalkbeat)

  • NYC will add 925 electric vehicles to its municipal fleet, including pick-up and sanitation tricks and hybrid street sweepers, to replace gasoline-powered vehicles. The city plans to transition all of its roughly 30,000 municipal fleet to electric by 2040. (Gothamist)

In other reading:

  • How Worried Should We Be About the New XBB.1.5 Variant? (The Atlantic)

  • How to take advantage of tax breaks in the Inflation Reduction Act (Vox)

  • Is New York Turning Into Los Angeles? (New York Times)

Is 2023 the year tech employers put their foot down on RTO?

With the start of the new year, more and more companies are moving into the “enforcement phase” of their return-to-office policies, writes the Wall Street Journal.

  • Up until now, employers took a fairly soft approach to enforcing their policies, in an effort to accommodate ongoing worker preferences around remote work.

  • Surveys have shown, however, that most employees are willing to work in the office at least a few days a week and agree with the benefits of doing so. But they want to retain the flexibility of choosing what those days are based on personal and team preferences.

But 2023 won’t be a snap back to pre-pandemic norms: Shopify announced that, beginning this year, it was canceling all recurring company meetings of more than two people. (Forbes)

  • It’s also encouraging employees to opt out of large internal group chats in an effort to “refactor” its operational efficiency.

  • As Axios writer Eleanor Hawkins mentions, a rule her colleagues live by is: “No agenda, no attenda.” Translation: if your meeting doesn’t have a clear purpose and action items, then it's probably better suited for another channel of communication

Our takeaway: The tug of war that simmered between employers and employees in 2022 will heat back up in the first half of 2023. The compromises that come out of it — mandatory office minimums, team-level discretion, etc. — could finally set new long-term norms through the year and beyond.

In other reading:

  • 5 key skills new managers will need this year (Fast Company)

  • I ‘missed the watercooler talk’: 3 women on WFH, RTO, and finding the perfect work-life balance (CNBC)

  • An Office Is Wherever We Decide It Is (Curbed)

  • LinusBio, a NYC-based precision exposome sequencing startup, raised $16 million in Series A funding. GreatPoint Ventures and Bow Capital co-led the round.

Primary Venture Partners, an early-stage VC firm focused on New York startups, is accepting applications for its seventh NYC Founders Fellowship cohort. This cohort is focused exclusively on early-stage founders building in healthcare to participate in a free, part-time, no-equity program for feedback on developing a GTM strategy, raising money, scaling your team, and more. Learn more and apply by Jan. 8 here.URBAN-X is accepting applications for Cohort 12 of its accelerator program. The five-month program is focused on founders who have an MVP or advanced prototype and some initial traction on a business solving cities’ toughest challenges in areas such as: transit and mobility; food, waste, and water; and energy. Learn more and apply by Jan. 15 here.BX-XL, an early-stage startup accelerator program run by the Social Justice Fund and Visible Hands to support BIPOC founders, is accepting applications for its inaugural cohort. Selected founders will receive investments of up to $500,000, mentorship, company-building support, and more. Learn more and apply by Jan. 20 here.Interested in teaching the next generation of coders? Giant Machines is accepting applications for their Summer Teaching Fellows (formerly Upperline Code Fellows), as it pursues its mission of creating pathways to tech careers through computer science education. The program has partnerships with nonprofits like CSforAll, Break Through Tech, and SEO Scholars, along with Fortune 100 companies like Google and the sponsors of FinTech Focus. Apply by the Jan. 16 priority deadline here.The Transit Tech Lab is accepting applications for its 2023 challenges for the chance to pilot technology with some of New York’s leading public transit agencies, including the MTA, Port Authority, NJ TRANSIT, and NYC DOT. Solutions may include predictive models for maintenance or service disruption, tools to automate operations, talent sourcing and human resources innovation, and more. Learn more at the Jan. 19 info session here and apply by March 2 here.

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