Greetings from Tech:NYC! It’s been a great first month launching our organization and getting to know all of you. Have you joined us yet? We plan to send you these newsletters a couple times a month, but for more frequent updates, don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook.

What we’ve been up to:

We launched! Board co-chairs Tim Armstrong and Fred Wilson explained why and what here. And we were featured in the New York Times here.
We had a great time celebrating our launch at the Metrograph. Mayor Bill de Blasio, Senator Chuck Schumer, Comptroller Scott Stringer, and many of you all joined us to celebrate our growing community. Check out some photographs here.

Since our launch, more than 200 companies and organizations have joined our growing ranks (and we’ve heard from hundreds more). We’ve been hard at work getting you all on board and are working on plans to meet with each of you! We’ll be holding member “office hours” soon—watch this space for details. And if you’ve joined, look for your company’s logo on our member page here.
Along with CornellTech@Bloomberg, we hosted a wide-ranging conversation between Fred Wilson and Ron Conway about NYC and SF trends and how tech communities in each city are engaging in their home communities. We were lucky to hear from one of NYC’s most famous and successful entrepreneurs: Mike Bloomberg. You can read more about the event here.
Tech:NYC and CSNYC, along with leaders of the city's tech industry, wrote a letter to the leadership of New York State urging an extension of mayoral control of schools, which is necessary to support efforts to ensure NYC public school students get access to computer science education. You can read that letter here; the Daily News wrote about ithere. And our executive director Julie Samuels had an oped in Crain’s on the same subject last week.
We hosted Senator Schumer at AppNexus for an intimate event to talk about what’s working and what isn’t for tech companies in New York City.
Executive Director Julie Samuels wrote an op-ed in the Daily News urging a comprehensive solution to home-sharing in New York, instead of a hastily-passed myopic bill in response to a single company.

We need your help. If you’re getting this email, you’ve already signed up for our newsletter. (Thanks!) Will you please ask your co-workers, colleagues, and friends to do the same? We promise we won’t send you too many emails, but we want a way to reach as many people as possible when it’s important to meet a policy objective or reach out to an elected official. You can sign up on our homepage at technyc.org.

We’re hiring! Come join our growing team. We’re looking to hire a policy manager. Details on our website.

What we’re reading/watching/listening to:

Julie Samuels on the TechDirt podcast: The conversation around tech policy has traditionally happened at the federal level, but more recently we've seen a change in that trend, and some of the most interesting experiments—both good and bad—have started happening in state and municipal arenas.
Why Randi Zuckerberg Left Silicon Valley for New York City: “I was pleasantly surprised to find that, in 2016, the New York tech scene appeared to be entering an age of maturity and excitement, much as Silicon Valley was in the early 2000s.”
Stop Saying Big Companies Can’t Innovate: “In fact, a lot of big companies have proven they are better positioned than emergent firms to create and execute innovation, however on-fire a startup may be.”
To grow the economy, grow small businesses: Bloomberg & Buffett: “How can we increase the speed of job creation? A critical part of the answer lies with America’s small businesses, which create over 60% of net new private-sector jobs and employ nearly half of America’s workforce.”
LinkNYC: Everyday: “We asked New Yorkers across the 5 boroughs how they feel about free high-speed public Wi-Fi blanketing their City.”
Brooklyn Queens Connector: “The BQX will be New York City’s first new rail system since the subway began service more than a century ago.”
Want us to include a story in our next newsletter? Send it to info@technyc.org!

Tech:NYC in the news:

Thanks again for being part of our launch. Now let's get back to work.

—The Tech:NYC team

Tech:NYC Newsletter: June 16, 2016

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