Tech:NYC Digest: May 26

Tech:NYC Digest: May 26

May 26, 2022 • Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes

Thursday, May 26, 2022 

In today’s digest, straphangers are returning to the subway (without their masks), ways to respond to the Uvalde mass shooting, and why employees want more say in their companies’ social impact and philanthropy plans.

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By the numbers:  

  • New positive cases statewide: 9,172 

    • New positive cases, NYC: 4,229 

  • NYC Positivity Rate: 6.2 percent (-0.2 percent)

  • Statewide Vaccine Progress: 

    • New Yorkers with at least one dose: 90.5 percent

    • New Yorkers who are fully vaccinated: 77.3 percent  

In today’s latest: 

  • A new study of vaccinated people with breakthrough infections found just a modest 15 percent reduction in symptoms associated with long COVID, when compared to unvaccinated people who got COVID. (Wall Street Journal)

  • The White House today announced more steps to make the antiviral treatment Paxlovid more accessible across the US as it projects COVID-19 infections will continue to spread over the summer travel season. (AP) New federally-funded “test-to-treat” sites will be opened in NYC in the coming weeks.

  • Subway ridership has almost fully rebounded to pre-pandemic levels in some neighborhoods, reaching as high as 90 percent compared to 2019 figures at stations largely outside Manhattan. (amNY)

    • However, mask compliance among subway and bus riders has sunk to its lowest level since early in the pandemic. Just 64 percent of subway riders covered their faces correctly between April 4-15, according to MTA data. (THE CITY)

  • Here’s your guide to having the ultimate Memorial Day weekend in NYC.

  • And find two other guides here and here, if you’re looking for verified ways to help the Uvalde, Texas community or gun violence prevention efforts more broadly. 

In other reading:

  • Rebound COVID Is Just the Start of Paxlovid’s Mysteries (The Atlantic)

  • Why the Air at the Gym May Be More Likely to Spread COVID (New York Times)

  • The Most Exciting Affordable New Sushi Counters in NYC (Grub Street)

It’s been a tough week. A tough 2022, really. Just in the last few months, there’s a timeline to be traced on the social and political flashpoints where tech executives have offered a response. Employee groups, more than ever, are pushing their companies to catalyze action on these issues.

  • And there’s plenty to respond to: We’re three months into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the potential overturn of Roe v. Wade, the mass shooting in a Buffalo supermarket, and ten days later, yet another at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. 

Companies have been directing dollars to all of these efforts — Googlers just won a “peace prize” for the company’s $45 million in funding to Ukrainian relief efforts, and several other tech companies continue providing their own assistance. Tech companies of all sizes are putting money behind abortion resources for their employees and communities alike. 

Still, tech workers think their employers can do more. Among new survey data from charitable donations platform Benevity:

  • Eighty-five percent of employees say they frequently have no say in the organizations supported by their companies, while 86 percent believe that employees and customers should have more say in how corporate giving is allocated.

  • It influences retention: 78 percent of employees say they’re more likely to want to work for a company that provides transparency into how it allocates charitable donations.

In a reshuffled labor market, these issues aren’t going away: Long-term commitments on the issues tech workers care about — everything from pandemic recovery to racial justice to the climate crisis — are no longer a nice-to-have. They're an expectation of the next generation of tech workers if companies want to recruit and retain them.

What it means: The rise of the social impact lead will continue for the foreseeable future. And increasingly, tech companies are placing that role directly in the C-suite.

  • And beyond dedicated hires, corporate responsibility will become a larger part of the jobs of managers across HR/people, operations, culture, and other teams.

In other reading:

  • The 3 things Gen Z wants most in a return to office (Fast Company)

  • This founder gets nine hours of sleep each night. Here’s how. (Protocol)

  • Forget the Great Resignation. Get ready for the Great Resistance. (MarketWatch)

  • buywith, a NYC and Tel Aviv-based livestream shopping platform startup, raised $9.5 million in seed funding. igniteXL Ventures led the round and was joined by Fab Co-Creation Studio Ventures, Regah Ventures, Irani CVC, True Global Ventures, and a group of angels. (TechCrunch)

  • Code Ocean, a NYC computational research platform, raised $16.5 million in Series B funding. Battery Ventures and M12 co-led the round. (VentureBeat)

  • Common, a NYC-based community management platform for DAOs, raised $20 million in a new venture round. Investors include Spark Capital, Polychain, and others. (VentureBeat)

  • Flowcarbon, an NYC-based blockchain trading platform for carbon credits, raised $70 million in Series A funding. a16z Crypto led the round and was joined by General Catalyst, Samsung Next, Invesco Private Capital, 166 2nd, Sam and Ashley Levinson, Kevin Turen, RSE Ventures, and Allegory Labs. Other participants in the token sale include Fifth Wall, Box Group, and the Celo Foundation. (Businesswire)

  • ShardSecure, a NYC-based cloud-based data security and privacy company, raised $11 million in Series A funding. Grotech Ventures led the round and was joined by Gula Tech Adventures, KPMG, Tom Noonan, EPIC Ventures, and Industrifonden. (Newswire)

  • May 27: Virtual: AAPI Heritage Month: Visibility & Vulnerability, with NYC Councilmember Shahana Hanif, actor Tamlyn Tomita, and others. Hosted by Axios. Register here.

  • June 7: Virtual: Thriving in the New Normal, with Audible CFO Cynthia Chu, Flex CFO Paul Lundstrom, Accenture CFO KC McClure, and others. Hosted by Bloomberg. Register here.

  • June 9: Virtual: Assessing the gaps in your company’s family benefits, with Maven SVP of People Karsten Vagner and Director of Global Health Equity Dawn Godbolt. Hosted by Maven. Register here.

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