Tech:NYC Digest: July 26

Tech:NYC Digest: July 26

July 26, 2022 • Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes

Tuesday, July 26, 2022 

In today’s digest, vax reluctance for the youngest New Yorkers, the surprise waiting in your lease renewal, and Carta’s new analysis of NYC tech salaries provides the pay transparency primer we’ve been waiting for.

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By the numbers:  

  • New positive cases statewide: 4,957 

    • New positive cases, NYC: 2,596

  • NYC Positivity Rate (Daily): 10.0%

    • NYC Positivity Rate (7-Day Average): 8.7%

In today’s latest: 

  • A new survey found that 43% of parents of children ages six months through four years don’t intend to get them vaccinated, and an additional 27% said they remain uncertain. (New York Times)

    • That age group is currently eligible for pediatric doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines in all City-run sites. More info here.

  • The polling sites have changed for more than 86,000 NYC residents in the time between the June primary last month and the upcoming second primary on August 23, potentially adding more confusion to the election cycle this year. (THE CITY)

    • One tip: double- and triple-check your polling site here. (And remember, early voting and Election Day sites may be different.)

  • About 44% of apartment units currently available in Manhattan come from tenants priced out of apartments they leased in 2020 and 2021 at a “COVID discount”, as landlords demand significant renewal rates for those units, according to a new StreetEasy report.

  • On weekends next month, New Yorkers can bike or stroll from East Harlem all the way down to the Brooklyn Bridge without dodging a single car, thanks to a new expansion of the popular "Summer Streets" program. Learn more.

  • Lastly, you can now order the “Velveeta Veltini” (a cheesy Velveeta martini) at a steakhouse in the Upper East Side. But surely we can all agree: just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

In other reading:

  • How to Live With Covid When You Are Tired of Living With Covid (New York Times) 

  • Could Genetics Be the Key to Never Getting the Coronavirus? (The Atlantic)

  • Melting Profits Threaten the NYC Ice Cream Man (New York Times)

We’ve written here before about the pay transparency law set to take effect in NYC on Nov. 1, 2022, that will require all employers to publish salary ranges for their open roles. In preparation, NYC startups leaders are faced with a new challenge: making sure their pay bands are competitive.

Carta, a compensation and equity management platform (and Tech:NYC member!), released three new datasets of NYC-specific salary and equity band levels for key tech roles.

  • The data shares the most recent pay band figures for three roles: engineering, product, and customer success. And each band identifies three salary figures: at the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles.

  • Each of the three roles are then broken out into eleven levels of seniority, from entry level all the way to C-suite.

  • And to go even deeper, all of that data is applied based on one of eight company valuation ranges, from as low as $1 million to $1 billion or greater.

  • All of the same variables are charted in an equity compensation dataset, as well.

Why it matters: It’s a lot of new data! Explore the interactive tool here.

It's the most up-to-date snapshot of where salary and equity benchmarks stand after two years of pandemic-forced labor competition and market uncertainty.

  • Taken as a whole, the dataset shows these numbers continue changing quickly. Median salary in all three job areas rose by at least 4% between late 2021 and May 2022.

Peter Walker, Carta’s director of insights, told us they wanted to use their Carta Total Comp software to make sure company leaders had an accurate picture of today’s NYC compensation market as they evaluate their own pay structures ahead of pay transparency law going into effect:

  • “Typical salaries for these three job areas comprise approximately 42% of a company’s total payroll spend, and we expect the equity side of this data will be perhaps even more revealing. Equity grants at small startups are notoriously difficult to benchmark, so we hope these data points can provide some guidance to founders and CFOs.”

Our takeaway: Holistic data like this is the best way to generate informed offers — for employers and employees alike. 

In other reading:

  • Balance, a NYC and Tel Aviv-based B2B marketplace and e-commerce payments company, raised $56 million in Series B funding. Forerunner led the round and was joined by Salesforce Ventures, Hubspot Ventures, Lyra Ventures, Gramercy Ventures, and other angels. (TechCrunch)

  • Hidden Door, a NYC-based AI-powered immersive entertainment startup, raised $7 million in seed funding. Makers Fund led the round and was joined by Northzone and Betaworks. (Hidden Door)

  • Pogo, a NYC-based consumer financial app, raised $14.8m in seed funding. Participating investors include Buckley Ventures, with Slow Ventures, Village Global, 20VC, Night Ventures, Hyper, Shrug, and a group of angels. (TechCrunch)

  • Reserv, a NYC-based claims adjusting software startup, raised $8m in seed funding. Altai Ventures and Bain Capital Ventures co-led the round and were joined by Arch Capital Group Ltd., AXIS Capital, Runyon, and a group of angels. (FinSMEs)

  • July 28: Virtual: How employers are adapting to a post-Roe America, with Maven founder and CEO Kate Ryder and chief medical officer Dr. Neel Shah. Hosted by Maven. Register here.

  • July 28: In-person: The Applied Urban Science Conference, with Numina co-founder and CEO Tara Pham, The GovLab co-founder Stefaan Verhulst, and others. Hosted by NYU Tandon’s Center for Urban Science + Progress. Register here.

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