Tech:NYC Digest: June 21

Tech:NYC Digest: June 21

June 21, 2022 • Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes

Tuesday, June 21, 2022 

Welcome back! In today’s digest, the youngest New Yorkers to become eligible for the vax, early voting kicks off, and our vision for revamping internships for the next generation of tech talent.

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By the numbers:  

  • New positive cases statewide: 3,700

    • New positive cases, NYC: 2,217

  • NYC Positivity Rate: 4.7 percent (no change)

  • Statewide Vaccine Progress:

    • New Yorkers with at least one dose: 90.9 percent

    • New Yorkers who are fully vaccinated: 77.6 percent 

In today’s latest: 

  • The CDC signed off on administering the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines to children under five years old, and NYC will begin distributing vaccines for that age group on Wednesday. (New York Times)

    • Starting today, parents can use the city’s Vaccine Finder website to schedule an appointment at several kinds of locations. 

    • Clinics that have already been serving children five and older will begin also vaccinating younger children, and major pharmacy chains, including Walgreens and CVS, are now scheduling COVID vaccines for children three years of age or older in New York State.

    • Ten vaccine hubs, including sites in Times Square, the Queens Center Mall, and the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, will offer the Moderna vaccine for young children. The Pfizer vaccine will also be available at other locations.

  • NYC is making a push to give city workers fired earlier this year for not getting the COVID-19 vaccine a chance to get their old jobs back — if they get fully vaccinated. (ABC New York)

  • Broadway theaters will be allowed to drop their mask mandates beginning July 1, at which point there will be a “mask optional” policy that will be reevaluated monthly. (New York Times)

  • Early voting is underway in New York for the June 28 primary. (NY1) Early voting poll sites and hours may be different from election day sites — look up details about your site and ballot here.

  • Lastly, one tip: Nearly 80,000 of the state’s original COVID-19 Excelsior passes are set to expire on June 30. To keep your proof of vaccination on your mobile app, be sure to update to get the latest version of the app, Excelsior Pass Plus. (Times Union)

In other reading:

  • How to get treated for long COVID in NY and NJ (Gothamist)

  • Need to Find a Bathroom in New York City? Try TikTok. (New York Times)

NYC’s position as a global magnet for tech talent is now a given (Startup Genome’s annual report, for a fifth year in a row, confirmed as much). But the workforce of the future will require we reimagine how to prepare young New Yorkers for high-growth tech jobs.

Our solution: Revamp internships.

Tech:NYC, together with Girls Who Code, the NYC Mayor’s Office of Youth Employment, and other city leaders are launching Tech Year NYC, a pilot program that reimagines traditional summer internship programs in favor of real, project-based work experience for youth interested in tech careers.

Our own Jason Myles Clark and Girls Who Code CEO Dr. Tarika Barrett shared more about our plans in today’s New York Daily News: 

  • “The issue is not a lack of interest in tech jobs. Instead, internships remain largely inaccessible to the most marginalized, and even those able to secure coveted internships are rarely given the tools they need to succeed.”

  • Despite the fact that roughly 66 percent of kids in NYC public schools identify as Black or Hispanic, only 17 percent of the city's tech workers do, and only 23 percent of local tech workers are women.

The talent of the future will define the future of work: As employees demand flexibility, remote and hybrid work options are here to stay.

  • “Thus far, traditional internships have been slow to adapt. People from lower-income communities, who are often juggling part-time jobs and caregiving responsibilities, and who are most in need of flexible internships, are the most impacted [...] Just as our economy and the tech industry continue to evolve, so too must our models to prepare workers. It is not enough to simply provide tech skills training. We must also connect aspiring tech workers with flexible project-based learning experiences that will help them launch careers in the field.”

Our new initiative will replace the internship model of menial, unpaid tasks with year-round, paid experiences that provide deeper investments in career exploration and professional development.

  • The core of the model is a “consultancy” in which tech industry employers will present teams of youth with problems in practice. 

  • For example, past employer participants in a summer pilot run by Tech:NYC have included Etsy, which challenged students to explore a TikTok marketing strategy, and Union Square Ventures, which guided students to research climate tech startups for consideration as a possible investment.

Our takeaway: “Tech Year NYC is the beginning of thinking differently — about our workforce, our city and our access to the greatest career opportunities. Our city has proudly stood as a cultural, industrial and political leader for centuries. Now it’s time for us to take the lead on deciding what the future of tech should be.”

If your company would like to be involved in Tech Year NYC, learn more here and let us know you’re interested here so we can follow up!

In other reading:

  • Stop Slacking me: How to set digital boundaries for chatty co-workers (Washington Post)

  • If You’re Thinking of Taking Fridays Off This Summer, You’re Not Alone (Bloomberg)

  • As Some Office Workers Return, Happy Hour Sees a Wobbly Comeback (New York Times)

  • Aidoc, the NYC and Tel Aviv-based provider of healthcare AI solutions, raised $110 million in Series D funding. TCV and Alpha Intelligence Capital (AIC) co-led the round and were joined by AIC’s co-investor CDIB Capital. (Wall Street Journal)

  • Auxilius, a NYC-based financial planning and analysis platform for clinical trials, raised $10 million in Series A funding. Renegade Partners led the round and was joined by insiders Bain Capital Ventures and XYZ VC. (TechCrunch)

  • CEIPAL, a New York-based talent acquisition platform, raised $16.5 million in Series B funding. Camden Partners led the round and was joined by investors including Topmark Partners, Evergreen Mountain Equity Partners, Mistral Venture Partners, and Resolve Growth Partners. (FinSMEs)

  • Lightning AI, a NYC-based provider of AI developer tools, raised $40 million in Series B funding. Coatue led the round and was joined by Index Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, Mantis VC, and First Minute Capital. (TechCrunch)

  • Nibble Health, a NYC-based B2B health care payments company, raised $8.5 million in seed funding. Wing Venture Capital and Tiger Global Management co-led the round and were joined by A* Capital and Expa. (Newswire)

  • June 21 – 23: In-person: NFT.NYC 2022, with Snark.art cofounder Andy Alekhin, Slow Ventures partner Clay Robbins, Offchain Labs co-founder Ed Felten, and others. Hosted by NFT.NYC. Register here.

  • June 22: In-person: Spotlight: An NFT Exhibition, presented by 1stdibs and powered by Infinite Objects. Register here. 

  • June 29: In-person: AMA with Primetime Partners co-founder and chairperson Alan Patricof, with Betaworks CEO John Borthwick. Hosted by Beatworks Studios. Register here.

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