Tech:NYC Digest: June 3

Tech:NYC Digest: June 3

June 03, 2022 • Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

Friday June 3, 2022 

It’s officially summer Friday season, so at the end of each workweek, we’ll be sending short, summer Friday editions of the Tech:NYC Digest, featuring our favorite highlights from the week. See our Friday Five below. Happy weekend! 

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Poll: New Yorkers’ Views on the Tech Industry (Tech:NYC)

  • We released new polling that found a majority of New York voters think the tech industry will increase in importance, becoming as critical as the finance, education, and entertainment industries to the future of the city’s economy. We also polled New Yorkers on everything from data privacy to remote work.

NYC Companies Are Opening Offices Where Their Workers Live: Brooklyn (New York Times)

  • Take the idea of the ”15-minute city” and add workplaces into the mix. What if tech companies rethought their headquarters and set up nodes of smaller, more local office spaces — perhaps even in multiple boroughs — near where their employees live and work? That type of RTO strategy is great for workers — and potentially even better for all small businesses that will get their new sources of support.

Index Ventures is opening shop in New York (TechCrunch)

  • The global VC firm founded in Switzerland opens a new office about once a decade, and it decided now is the right time to put a flag down in New York. When we talked to Shardul Shah and Martin Mignot, the Index partners moving to NYC to lead the charge, they pointed out that besides being a top global tech hub itself, NYC sits squarely in the middle of a ten-hour timezone that captures 70 percent of the world's top 30 startup ecosystems. In today’s distributed world of work, that’s huge.  

The Crypto Bros Are Snapping Up Manhattan Real Estate (New York Times)

  • Ok, we don’t love the headline. But at a time when the Manhattan office market is still very much in limbo, an industry doubling down on its commitment to New York with almost a million square feet of space is an undeniable investment in the city’s recovery.

Rally Enters Deal to Go Public with Americas Technology SPAC (MarketWatch)

  • What started as a bus rideshare in NYC and grew to a nationwide “Mass Mobility as a Service” startup announced this week it was going public via SPAC — even more impressive in a market that, you might have noticed, has become unusually quiet. (We remember talking to CEO Numaan Akram about his ideas on “crowd-powered travel” right before raising a seed round.) Congrats, Numaan!

PS: It’s National Gun Violence Awareness Day, and it isn’t too late to join us in participating in the

campaign.

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