Tech:NYC Digest: June 29

Tech:NYC Digest: June 29

June 29, 2021 • Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes

Tuesday, June 29, 2021

In today’s digest, ranked-choice voting tabulations turn the race for mayor into a nail-biter, lessons from the companies whose reopening days were a flop, and when you can get your ticket following Bezos to space. Stay cool out there!

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It’s been a week since Primary Day, and this afternoon, we got a fuller, but still far from final, picture of how the vote totals are shaking out. (New York Times)

The latest: Preliminary, in-person results from all the ranked choice preferences were released from voters who cast a ballot during early voting or on Election Day.

Current Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams maintained his lead in the race for mayor, but tallies catapulted former Dept. of Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia much closer, with the two candidates at 51.1 percent and 48.9 percent of the vote, respectively. Some 16,000 votes separate them at this stage. (POLITICO)

  • On Primary Day last week, we only knew first-choice tallies for in-person votes, and today’s release still doesn’t include at least 125,000 returned absentee ballots that have not yet been counted.

Let us try to explain what happened: RCV is a process of elimination. The candidate with the fewest first-choice votes is eliminated, and those votes are then reallocated to the candidates whom their voters ranked second. The process repeats with the next last-place candidate being eliminated, and so on. (New York Times) The process has wide favor: More than 75 percent of New York voters want to use RCV again, and 83 percent said they had ranked more than one candidate. (CBS New York)

  • Today’s release shows 11 rounds of RCV tabulation, resulting in the neck-and-neck race between Adams and Garcia. 

  • The RCV tallies for the Comptroller race also held current Council Member Brad Lander’s lead over current Council Speaker Corey Johnson, with 52 percent and 48 percent of the vote, respectively.

The takeaway: It’s all down to the absentees. A week from today, July 6, the Board of Elections will release new RCV tabulations that include absentee ballots. Those updated results will likely result in just slight shifts in the numbers, but given how close the races are, they could make all the difference.

Explore the results yourself: Use this tool to click through the results of each RCV round and get a sense of how the numbers changed through the process.

Tech companies have started a slow, selective drip of office returns so far. But as we look beyond the July 4 holiday, we expect to see the sector’s first, more-structured wave of returns among companies who had planned on mid-summer as their reopening target.

Yet, as we’ve perhaps anecdotally learned, that doesn’t mean the workers will actually flock back.

  • VMware reopened its headquarters in mid-June, but of its more than 5,000 employees, just 99 swiped in at the office on reopening day. (Protocol)

  • Adobe set up a similar reopening timeline and welcomed workers back, but when one of its executives popped in to see who was around, she found that almost nothing had changed since they left it in March 2020. It was still completely dead. (TechRepublic)

Adobe is taking that as employee feedback and pivoting their strategy. You can read more from this memo from the company’s CHRO, Gloria Chen:

  • The company will now lean into a “hybrid and digital-first” model. “Flexibility will be the default: Adobe employees will have the option to work from home approximately 50 percent of the time, and in the office the remainder of the time."

Both companies — and a much broader consensus of others — have acknowledged there’s no going back to the way people worked pre-pandemic, and it’s a missed opportunity to let the “reopening” moment pass without using it to roll out a redesigned workplace.

  • VMware is revamping its office — 70 percent individual desk stations, 30 percent collaboration space — and flipping those numbers. They’re also experimenting with virtual and augmented reality tools for team functions.

  • Adobe expects to double the size of its remote workforce over time, and is launching a smart digital campus app, Adobe Life, to power their newly hybrid workforce. 

In other reading:

  • Lower Rents? Check. Speakeasy? Check. How Office Landlords Are Enticing Tenants. (New York Times)

  • America’s workers are exhausted and burned out — and employers are taking notice (Washington Post)

  • The coworking space that does wellness as well as WiFi (Axios)

  • Bowery Valuation, a New York-based commercial real estate appraisal startup, raised $35 million in Series B funding. Goldman Sachs led, and was joined by Capital One Ventures and insiders including Builders VC, Fika Ventures, Navitas Capital, Camber Creek, Nine Four Ventures, Greenspring Associates, and Alpaca VC. (Pitchbook)

  • Gympass, a New York-based corporate well-being platform, raised $220 million at a $2.2 billion valuation from SoftBank, General Atlantic, Moore Strategic Ventures, Kaszek Ventures, and Valor Capital Group. (TechCrunch)

  • Harness Wealth, a New York-based wealth management platform, raised $15 million in Series A funding led by Jackson Square Ventures. (TechCrunch)

  • Toggle, a New York-based construction robotics startup, raised $8 million in Series A funding. Tribeca Venture Partners led, and was joined by Blackhorn Ventures, Point72 Ventures, New York State, and Twenty Seven Ventures. (TechCrunch)

  • Wellthy, a New York-based digital care concierge, raised $35 million in Series B funding. Rethink Impact led, and was joined by Hearst, Polaris Partners, and Eldridge. (Forbes)

  • July 8: Virtual: How to Pitch to VCs and Angel Investors, with New York Angels founder David S. Rose, Bread and Butter Ventures head of platform Stephanie Rich, AI Ventures managing partner Callum Bir, and others. Hosted by DownToDash. Register here.

Maybe we’re reading too much into it, but after Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson posted a pic on Instagram with Jeff Bezos to tease “a big announcement,” rumors are swirling that Johnson is the winner of the Blue Origin auction to fly with Bezos as a space tourist in a few weeks.

Our guess is less juicy: he’s partnering with Amazon Studios on a new movie. But maybe he (

) will be able to grab a ticket on the next rocket departing Earth.

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