Companies to Watch: Starting 2021 on the Right Foot

Innovation and adaptability define New York’s tech community. That culture inspired a rapid call to action from entrepreneurs, engineers, and creatives alike to respond to the myriad of changes New Yorkers are experiencing in their work and home lives.

But as we leave behind a challenging year, New Yorkers are looking forward with optimism. We’re embarking on a 2021 where all New Yorkers have access to a vaccine — and when we can finally say the pandemic is over. Our New Year’s resolution is this: in 2021, we’ll get back to all the things we miss from before the pandemic, but also carry forward all the new norms we want to keep even with the pandemic ends.

Here, we’re profiling New York startups building tools that help do just that, whether it’s for your health, your career, your family, or any other part of your life. Check back here weekly for new conversations with the founders lending a hand.

Base

What does your company do?
Base founder and CEO Lola Priego: Base is an at-home lab testing and smart app combo empowering everyone to improve their sleep, stress, diet, and more with insights into their body’s data through key indicators: their blood and saliva. Members can either monitor the seasonal changes to their health or get to the root cause and fix symptoms with science-backed recommendations for your supplements, diet, and daily habits.

Why did you found your company in NYC?
LP: There are a few reasons why NYC made the most sense for me. In addition to the tech scene being healthier and more enjoyable, NYC would allow us to grow in the most sustainable way. There’s also a really strong creative industry here, that’s something I always felt was relevant and critical to what we’re doing at Base. Third, our team is extremely collaborative, so each hire has to be excellent at their work but also fit the group we've built. With our engineering team in Spain, things like time zones come into play. The team has to be supported to do their best work, and NYC made the most sense for that.

What brought you to New York?
LP: When you work in tech, specifically engineering, it’s easy to surround yourself with like-minded people. I really appreciate the diversity of NYC. And here, whether you work in tech or not, you’re surrounded by a variety of careers, cultures, and interests all the time. I made the decision to move to NYC after living and working in Seattle for a few years. I was visiting regularly and instantly connected to the energy this city has. I’m originally from Spain, and Madrid and NYC have a very similar vibe, which is why I think I was drawn here and decided to call it home.

As the founder of a wellness company, I’m sure you hear a lot about people’s New Year’s resolutions … and that, before the end of January, most people have already abandoned them When it comes to setting health goals, are resolutions even helpful, or is there a better strategy?
LP: Resolutions are BS. People are more motivated when they are given the tools to make a change. That has nothing to do with an arbitrary date on a calendar. Though, yes, resolutions do provide a "fresh start" energy. That said, I personally subscribe to Tim Ferriss's belief that resolutions aren't sustainable but a personal "review" is.

That same logic's built into our product. The strategy is simple: (1) identify what you want to change; (2) figure out the easiest way you can turn it into a habit; and (3) make sure you can see improvement  — real improvement — fast.  We lose motivation when we don't see progress. Base gives you inarguable proof that the changes you make — if you follow our app! — work.

Base helps its users track all kinds of areas — from diet to sleep to stress. How are you using technology to turn those issues into measurable data and make recommendations?
LP: Base puts your lab results in the context of your lifestyle to give you a plan for treating whatever it is you're focusing on. We use data science, mathematics, and predictive analysis to look at how your biomarkers impact your overall wellness.

Let's use the example of someone who wants to sleep better. They’re doing everything — they’ve Googled and started using a wearable to track their sleep. They’ve taken all this action, but still aren’t sleeping any better and don’t know the impact of anything they’ve done. They take one Base test. They get their initial melatonin panel, which digs into the hormone levels throughout the day. Their levels are out of the optimal range based on their medical profile (age, gender, etc). From their results, Base recommends they improve those levels and retest in a month after making small changes to their routine: eliminate screen time before bed, supplement with melatonin. The app explains all the science behind these recommendations, which are all sourced from clinical studies. Some members really love to dig into the details, but some people just want direction and to see results, so we designed our product to be just as valuable and easy to use no matter what level of information you find valuable.

Health and wellness has ballooned into a huge sector in recent years, and now especially through the COVID-19 pandemic, telehealth, or just being able to do more of our care from home, has very quickly become a real driver of the industry. Do you think those trends will shape the future of healthcare more long-term — even after the pandemic ends?
LP:  We’re looking at the changes to the health and wellness industry as building blocks that will continue to progress and change — things aren’t going back to how they used to be post-pandemic. People have started realizing that 1) telehealth and DTC health-focused startups are something they can trust, cautiously and through evidence; and 2) it’s more accessible and convenient for them. As these industries get better, it will be cheaper down the line, as well.

You started working on Base after spending time on the engineering teams at Instagram, Amazon, and other tech companies. What was it like to transition into the founder role? What key skills did you take from those jobs in building a new company?
LP: One of the biggest learnings I took with me from leading engineering at the big tech companies is to be absolutely customer obsessed. Everything we’re doing is for our members. We’re always making sure to create tools that are reliable, easy to use, and that support our members. I’m also always making sure we are leveraging the latest tools in data science and analytics.

What’s on the horizon in 2021? What projects are you planning to spend more time on this year?
LP: 2021 is the year where it's on us to help people understand there is a better way to work toward their goals. An easier way: to stop taking one-size-fits-all advice. As a company, that means prioritizing our product so it is the easiest, most valuable app they could download.

Okay, some rapid-fire questions. First: where do you get your favorite pizza slice?
LP: The frustrating keto experience that pushed me to create Base taught me that pizza needs to be a rare treat. Joe’s has gluten-free slices and lots of locations.

Where do you get your favorite bagel?
LP: If I liked bagels, it’d probably be Tompkins Square. It’s near a dog park for my Frenchie, they open early (I’m a morning person), and they make my actual favorite breakfast: a big omelet.

What’s the best place in New York for a coffee or lunch meeting (remember in-person meetings)?
LP: My favorite lunch meeting spot is L’Artusi!

What’s your favorite remote work office hack?
LP: Since we’re a relatively new team, we’ve really leveraged 2-3 hour working sessions with the team a couple times a week! It’s great for troubleshooting tough projects that have you blocked.

What’s one new thing your team is doing to stay connected while everyone works from afar?
LP: We started growing our team remotely, and establishing a strong team culture is really important to me. Something we’ve enjoyed doing to stay connected and get to know each other is weekly Mario Kart races. We play weekly, without fail, across 3-4 time zones!

Deed

What does your company do?
Deed founder and CEO Deevee Kashi: Deed builds technology that helps people do good deeds. Our first product was an app that makes volunteering easy and social. We then launched our enterprise platform last year designed to help companies engage their employees through social good. Employees can share their time, skills, and money with causes they care about, and employers can manage, track and measure the impact they generate.

Why did you found your company in NYC?
DK: New York’s hyper-urban nature is part of what makes it the greatest city in the world, but it’s also what leads to its extreme socio-economic disparity. Need is visible everywhere you turn. With Deed, we set out to harness the city’s tremendous human capital in order to help address that need through volunteering.

What brought you to New York?
DK: I was born and raised in New York but moved to Tel Aviv (where my family still lives) when I was 12. When I made my way back to New York to study philosophy at NYU, I finally felt at home again. I felt the sense of belonging and camaraderie all New Yorkers experience if they stay for long enough. Now more than ever, having experienced the lowest of lows during the pandemic, New York has had a bit of a renaissance. A true sense of community was formed due to the collective adversity we’ve faced. Community fridges are on every other corner in Brooklyn, bridge raves with every kind of person coming together to share music, restaurants turning into food pantries, are just some examples of how New Yorkers do it better.

Let’s start at the beginning. You were a nightlife promoter, and originally created Deed as a side project to make volunteering easier. What led you to want to build a platform to address that?
DK: I was lucky to grow up in a socially engaged family. But after ten years in nightlife, I had drifted from those values instilled in me at a young age and decided to give back to the community by volunteering — only to find the process incredibly antiquated and frustrating. I realized it was far easier to be selfish than to be selfless in the modern world, and it was then I had the idea of combining technology with my network of celebrities and influencers to make doing good deeds accessible and aspirational. I figured there must be a way to use the tools that traditionally promote consumption to instead encourage people to help one another.

Your platform was founded to connect individuals to social impact opportunities, but with the funding round you announced last month, you’re expanding to provide tools for whole companies and brands. What role do you think businesses have to play in advancing social change?
DK: Our focus on companies came about quite serendipitously. As our volunteer community grew, we started receiving inbound inquiries from their employers, asking if Deed offered an enterprise solution to help with employee volunteering programs. After speaking with more companies and researching the market further, we realized that many existing tools were clunky in ways that could not appeal to the consumer audience we were familiar with. Furthermore, it became apparent there was a growing and urgent need for modern companies to connect and communicate with employees around social impact. That became the impetus for us to design and create a whole new way to approach purpose-led employee engagement with consumer-grade design and UX — one which was informed by the feedback and success we had with consumers.

Given our nature, and the accessibility of information, we are becoming more and more aware of the need in our community and the world as a whole. As such, we expect the brands we consume from and the companies we work for to use some of their resources for the benefit of the world. I think we are at a turning point where profit and purpose have intersected and are now intertwined. Social impact is no longer a ‘nice to have’ but it’s a must have if you want to succeed as a business.

The gap between local, need-based nonprofits and big global companies can seem massive. How is Deed working to bridge that gap?
DK: Local community-driven nonprofits hold a special place in our hearts as they were the impetus behind why we started. Many times they don’t have the resources needed to properly fundraise, nor do they have the brand cache to attract large corporate donors. At Deed, we provide a free volunteer and donor management system for nonprofits. When local nonprofits sign up for Deed, they automatically gain access to our global database of individual and corporate, volunteers and donors, and can connect with employees at companies like Airbnb, Stripe, and Adidas.

We’ve been really struck at how many companies, tech or otherwise, have really stepped up to use their resources for good — be it responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, the racial injustice events last summer, and more. What causes/issues are you hearing employees are most excited to get mobilized on?
DK: We consider ourselves really lucky to be able to participate in delivering relief when timely causes arise. Our partners mobilized their employees in a big way throughout the pandemic, as well as the racial justice movement. Employees were really focused on activism leading up to the election and I don’t think that will die down now that it’s over. We work closely with our partners to identify their unique focus areas that best leverage the talents of their employees and align with their business goals. What we’ve seen work best is a hybrid approach having both employee-led as well as corporate-led CSR initiatives — that way the strategy aligns with your goals as a company while also empowering your employees to contribute to the causes they care about.

What’s your favorite project you’ve featured on the Deed platform?
DK: I can’t play favorites! But I really admire the ACLU and the great work they do to uphold human rights in the US. We’ve supported them with numerous fundraisers throughout the year.

What’s on the horizon in 2021? What issues do you hope we’re paying more attention to this year?
DK: Historically, CSR was a thing of large enterprises. However, with the rise of social consciousness and activism, people expect the brands they consume from, and the companies they work for, to align with their values. A CSR program is becoming table stakes for smaller enterprises and even mid size companies. In 2021, we believe this trend will continue to expand to smaller companies.

Okay, some rapid fire questions. First: where do you get your favorite pizza slice?
DK: Scarr’s has the best slice in the city, but Lucali does the best pie overall.

Where do you get your favorite bagel?
DK: Frankel’s over in Greenpoint.

What’s the best place in New York for a coffee or lunch meeting (remember in-person meetings)?
DK: The Ace Hotel lobby (before it became impossible to find a table)

What’s your favorite remote work office hack?
DK: Break up your day. Our team is distributed between three different time zones so at the beginning of lockdown, I was tempted to work through most of the day but I quickly realized that I would burn myself out.

What’s one new thing your team is doing to stay connected while everyone works from afar?
DK: We run weekly all-hands meetings and biweekly virtual happy hours where we play various virtual games to get to know each other better. More than 50 percent of our team has been onboarded remotely!

What's one thing that was new to you or your team in 2020 that you're definitely going to carry over in 2021?
DK: We started off as a remote company and transitioned to in-person once we raised our seed round. Once COVID hit we became remote once again. We value working from home but also value the collaboration that can only happen in-person. As such, we will adopt a hybrid model that leverages the best of both worlds once this mess is over.

MEDLEY

What does your company do?
Medley co-founder and CEO Jordan Taylor: Medley provides spaces for people to learn and grow with others. Our current offering drives members’ personal and professional growth through group experiences. Upon joining Medley, members are matched with seven other individuals and a dedicated coach, and groups meet monthly over the course of the year. Membership also includes unlimited access to workshops and conversations with more topical focus.

Why did you found your company in NYC?
JT: I love this city and have found my community here — not just with other founders, but friends who are doctors, lawyers, work in media, artists, investors, students. There’s a unique energy here that you can feel in the streets, and a freedom I feel in being able to explore the city. My perspective is constantly broadened living here. A ‘medley’ is a jumbled mixture of people or things — and NYC truly has a medley of perspectives and experiences.

There’s also the practical consideration that my mother and co-founder lives just outside the city in the suburbs. My dad is a teacher and they have been settled there for a while. So this was the natural place for us to build Medley.

What brought you to New York?
JT: I moved here after college. I had a job in consulting and in the recruiting process I knew I wanted to move here. I had the dreamy fantasy of what it was like to be a twenty-something in the city. While the ‘real world’ was nothing like what I expected, I love this place. Nearly 10 years later, my husband and I are both entrepreneurs (he’s the CEO of Pattern Brands) building businesses in NYC and we wouldn’t have it any other way.

Medley is working on building a personal and professional coaching community. There are lots of career support networks out there — what sets Medley apart from what we typically think of as “professional development”?
JT: Interestingly, not everyone joins with career advancement as their primary objective, and that’s not our focus. People join Medley because they are eager to get outside their bubble, excited to engage in an intentional community, and want to commit to consistently dedicating time to their growth.

Medley is a space where people can engage deeply with others and access the powerful practice of having a small group in your corner. Our coaches play a big role in facilitating the group dynamic. When matching groups, we focus on understanding the holistic person, versus a job title or seniority.

Our biggest differentiator is our inclusivity. I’m a black woman, as is my mother, and our shared experiences have helped us design Medley so that anyone can thrive and show up as they are. We pride ourselves on the richness of our community and even have sliding scale pricing to make Medley more financially accessible. Our application process simply serves as a matching tool and a way for us to make sure that potential members’ expectations are aligned with what we’re offering.

So Medley has a membership-based model. How do you describe the Medley community? Who are you hoping to add as members as the community grows?
JT: Everyone in the Medley community has a shared sense of curiosity and open-mindedness. At this stage, we speak with every potential medley member. Someone I spoke to in our last cohort said “I know I have just as much to learn from someone who is ten years older than me as I do from someone who is ten years younger than me”. He was a 40-something executive. This is very much the shared mindset of our community.

Because of our matching method, which incorporates research from group psychology, organizational behavior, and our own testing, we can create a custom experience for each member. Our community has members from 10+ countries and 20+ states in the US. We’ve been mindful of pacing our growth — we want to maintain the community’s diversity and continue to bring in people who are eager to be present and engage with their group and the Medley community over time. Our next cohort will start in March, and applications received by Feb 11th will be considered.

You officially launched Medley in July 2020 — by then, NYC was in the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic. But you’ve been working on building the company for a couple of years before. What changed, if anything, about your strategy between the initial idea and the launch date?
JT: We were originally planning on launching Medley as an in-person community in April 2020. Our research had shown that people viewed in-person experiences as higher quality and people were more willing to engage in person. In mid-March, we quickly pivoted the business, realizing that gathering in-person would be impossible for the foreseeable future. We put on several free group coaching sessions to help people process what was going on, and we saw that participants were willing and eager to engage with presence and vulnerability. We had people join the free sessions from around the world and saw that the power of perspective was even more compelling.

For people who are looking for the next step in their careers, 2020 presented a challenge – everything went virtual and the possibilities around networking changed drastically. How are you and the membership you’ve built so far thinking about that in this “new normal”?
JT: 2020 has been a challenging year for most. It felt like a rollercoaster. It’s forced me personally to reflect on what I value and cherish and want to create more of, especially in my relationships. While many of us are seemingly online all day, it is both harder to form new deeper relationships and have casual serendipitous meetings that you might have at a networking event.

At Medley, we’re giving space for people to articulate their values and stories which is valuable for anyone looking for the next step in their careers. We’ve been fortunate to be able to create experiences that help people get out of their bubble and form meaningful relationships with new people, and look forward to continuing expanding the Medley community.

Let’s talk about your co-founder: she’s your mother! What’s it been creating a company with someone who literally shared your genes?
JT: It has been the greatest joy of my life so far. I am very lucky. Not only do I get to spend time with my mom every day (either via Zoom or IRL), but I get to learn from an incredible leader who has impacted thousands of people. She has decades of experience building businesses and spent ten years running human capital management at Goldman Sachs, and now sits on the boards of Slack and Etsy. But what I’ve learned the most from her is not found in the external validators of her success, but in seeing how she treats everyone she interacts with with a deep respect and curiosity. I’ve become a better person.

In any co-founder relationship, trust is absolutely critical, and we are building Medley on a very strong foundation of trust. In moments of tension and uncertainty, we’ve had the difficult conversations that have strengthened our relationship and given us a vocabulary to communicate better outside of work. And of course there are the fun parts — sometimes we finish each other’s sentences in meetings and we both have a goofy side that comes out when we are together.

What’s on the horizon in 2021? What are you most looking forward to devoting more time to when the pandemic ends?
JT: For 2021 our big focus is expanding Medley as a platform to facilitate meaningful small group experiences, both online and IRL. Our existing membership is just the beginning and we see a great opportunity to bring the power of small groups to a broader audience. We can share more when we are closer to launch. When the pandemic ends, I’m most looking forward to having our team all in one room! We have been working remotely this entire time and miss seeing each other. Some of our newer team members haven’t met each other IRL yet.

Where do you get your favorite pizza slice?
JT: Paulie Gee's in Greenpoint.

Where do you get your favorite bagel?
JT: Bagel Pub on 7th Ave in Park Slope.

What’s your favorite New York landmark?
JT: There’s a small waterfront park, called Newtown Creek, in Greenpoint that’s always empty. I’ll run there and always pause to appreciate the moment of quiet. It feels like a secret spot.

What’s the best place in New York for a coffee or lunch meeting (remember in-person meetings)?
JT: Bourke Street Bakery in Nomad. It’s not too busy, great food and coffee options, and their bread is some of the best in NYC. I often get a loaf to go after a meeting.

What’s your favorite remote work office hack?
JT: Making time for deep thinking away from my computer. Earlier today I was working on a deck and found the 50 tabs on my Chrome extremely distracting. I shut my computer, put my phone away, and wrote out the slide titles by hand. I miss working with people on a whiteboard in a room — for me there’s something that feels more real writing it out on paper.

What’s one new thing your team is doing to stay connected while everyone works from afar?
JT: Play games. During our morning standup, we spend 15 minutes doing something fun that’s unrelated to Medley. Favorites have been the NYT crossword, online pictionary, and the card game SET.

What's one thing that was new to you or your team in 2020 that you're definitely going to carry over in 2021?
JT: Very simple, but going for walks outside every day. I will definitely keep the habit once we’re IRL again. I try to go for a walk at the start and end of the day, and will also step out some afternoons when I start to get Zoomed out. This year has been challenging in many ways but it’s forced me to dig deeper and understand. 

Queensboro Bridge, New York, USA: by niniferrari/Shutterstock.com