Companies to Watch: Responding to the COVID-19 Pandemic
Innovation and adaptability define New York’s tech community. That culture inspired a rapid call to action from entrepreneurs, engineers, and creatives alike, when they saw New Yorkers hurting during the coronavirus pandemic. Whether by helping our hospitals, schools, small businesses, or our most vulnerable communities, New York’s tech sector has been at the forefront of the city’s response.
Here, we’re profiling New York startups using their tools to support New York — and the entire country — over these difficult months. Check back here weekly for new conversations with the founders lending a hand.
SHINE
What does your company do?
Shine cofounders and co-CEOs Marah Lidey and Naomi Hirabayashi: Shine is the leading self-care app and community. We’re on a mission to make caring for your mental and emotional health easier, more representative, and more inclusive.
Why did you found your company in NYC?
We started Shine because we needed it. We didn’t see ourselves — a Black woman and a half-Japanese woman — and our experiences represented in mainstream “wellness.” Our bodies, our skin color, our financial access, our past traumas — it all often felt otherized.
We were lucky enough to meet as coworkers, and the support we found in each other changed everything. We came to understand that our experiences with stress, anxiety, and other mental health challenges all had a unique intersection with our identity and our past experiences — and that we needed daily support that recognized that. And we knew we had to help more people cope, process, and heal on a daily basis in a way that worked for them.
What brought you to New York?
ML: The idea of being exposed to a city and way of life that would challenge and shape me like no other place could — and an internship with MTV Networks.
When the outbreak began, not only did companies have to very quickly figure out how to close down operations and shift their workforces to remote, but employees had to very quickly adapt to work from home. That certainly can be stressful. What sort of wellness trends have you seen come up in those transitions?
ML: One of the most hopeful trends we’ve seen is that a side effect of the collective anxiety around the pandemic is that Shine members have found themselves opening up more to friends and family about their mental health. The pandemic is actually destigmatizing the conversation around mental health.
Since the pandemic began, 52% of people said they’re talking about their mental health more with others, citing the fact that knowing “other people are also struggling” is the top reason why. There’s also a strong correlation between Shine members who are talking about their mental health and those who are turning to self-compassion to navigate this pandemic. 73% of Shine members said they are feeling more grateful since the pandemic began — with food, shelter, family, and healthcare and essential workers taking the top spots for what people are most appreciative about.
When the pandemic hit, you iterated some core Shine features to launch VirusAnxiety.com. Why is it important to address anxiety and self-care specifically in the context of COVID-19? What’s different about this moment?
NH: The shift in culture we’re experiencing, as a result of a global pandemic, and the global uprising against systemic racism, has resulted in feelings of uncertainty, anger, and heaviness that we’ve never experienced before as a collective. What we need right now is mental health content that addresses what’s happening in the world, and offers timely, accessible, and specific support on how to take care of yourself.
From the launch of VirusAnxiety.com, to the launch of The Daily Shine podcast, a podcast meets meditation that helps you struggle less with stress and anxiety, to launching meditations specific to Black wellbeing — we are directly confronting what’s happening in the world to better meet the needs of the times, and the experiences of our members. What we’ve heard from our community is that they feel more seen and supported because of the timeliness of our content — versus evergreen meditation content that doesn’t reflect what’s happening in the world.
When we think of a resource like Shine, we do think of those meditation apps and other mindfulness platforms, but Shine is also about creating a self-care community. How are you keeping people connected while everyone remains isolated for the foreseeable future
NH: A core way the Shine community stays connected is through the Daily Discussion feature in-app — think of it as the space where our users digitally congregate to share advice, insights, and reflections in response to The Daily Shine theme of the day. Where The Daily Shine is what we refer to as the daily secular sermon, the Daily Discussion is like the breakout group where people can share personally what they’re going through, offer support to each other through post engagement, and to help our community feel less alone in what they’re struggling with.
What will be the most dramatic change you think workers should expect in their professional lives when they’re able to return to the office?
ML: As much as some folks may be hoping for a return to normalcy, I don’t believe that we will ever go back to it as a culture. And that can be a really great thing. It will mean more flexibility in work hours and location. It will (it should) mean less tolerance for racism and exclusionary workplace practices and policies. It will mean more of a focus on impact-driven work — because we also know that consumers are tired of anything less.
And it will mean more opportunities to get creative as an employee, as a manager, and as a leader about the place our businesses have in a world that has dramatically shifted as the result of a pandemic, a global uprising to systemic racism, and whatever else is to come before in-person office culture re-enters the public conversation.
Are there any projects Shine put on hold when the outbreak began? What are you most looking forward to devoting more time to when the pandemic ends?
NH: The pandemic, the fight for Black lives by fighting for Black mental health, and adjusting to working fully remote has made us hyper-aware of our limited mental and emotional energy each day. The result is, as a team, we’re focused on what will drive the most impact each day with the hours we have to support the mental health of our community, especially Shine’s Black members who are dealing with compounding grief and trauma.
In terms of what we’re looking forward to devoting more time to when the pandemic ends — honestly, it’s hard to think about that right now. This time has taught us an important lesson in presence and plans — right now we’re focused on how we can support our community in this incredibly intense time socially, how we can fight the injustices that are impacting our community right now, and how we can find ways to take care of ourselves each day to stay in it for the long-haul.
Where do you get your favorite pizza slice?
NH: 99 cent pizza all the way!
ML: Artichoke!
Where do you get your favorite bagel?
NH: Bergen Bagels.
ML: +1 to Bergen!
What is the best New York waterfront?
NH: Looking at the Brooklyn Bridge from Brooklyn Heights or DUMBO – I love that view. Feels like you’re taking in a deep breath in of the city and all the energy it brings.
ML: I’ve always loved South Street Seaport. The stone streets and the docked boats always gave a romantic view of New York by the water, to me. Plus, in my early 20s, I lived at the Frying Pan.
What’s the best place in New York for a coffee or lunch meeting (remember in-person meetings)?
ML: We were both big fans of LPQ, and often would meet there before work (at our old jobs) to mastermind about what Shine could be. The one in Flatiron had a great hidden balcony in the back that paired well with their amazing rosé happy hour special and New York summer nights.
NH: In-person meetings feel like a long time ago but my favorite was Paper Coffee on 29th Street near our office.
What’s your favorite remote work office hack?
ML: Cooking breaks! In the beginning of the pandemic, I gravitated toward making scrambled eggs a lot for lunch. I don’t even really like eggs that much, but the slow hum of stirring them offered a much-needed slow down to my day. Now I just cook whatever’s around. But it is such a perk to have access to my kitchen, a place of peace for me, to break up my work day.
NH: When I need some time to work through something in the evening, I’ll put a movie on, pour some wine, and do work at my in-home set up. It feels like a nice balance of catching up on work, but in a chill, relaxing kind of way. For a more personal hack or new routine, now that I don’t have the commute in the morning, I have more time with my two year old, so we have a breakfast date every morning, and that’s been really joy-inducing.
What’s one new thing your team is doing to stay connected while everyone works from afar?
ML: We’ve kept our most important tradition of “weekly reflection” at the end of every week where we share one thing we’re proud of (a lot of times it’s people shouting out other team members for great work they’ve done), one learning from the week, and your focus for the week ahead. As a team that’s dedicated to supporting our community in taking care of their emotional and mental health, it’s really important that we practice what we preach. Being intentional about reflection time, honoring our progress, and keeping the most meaningful traditions of our office culture while we’re remote has been key.
SUZY
What does your company do?
Suzy founder and CEO Matt Britton: Suzy is a real-time market research platform that combines advanced research tools with the highest quality audience to deliver trusted insights in minutes. Some of the biggest brands in the world use Suzy to deliver breakthrough products and experiences backed by data-driven decisions.
Why did you found your company in NYC?
MB: A decade ago, we built a company that helped organizations create value for their consumers through meaningful social content and transformative ideas. Since then, the collective voice of consumers has spawned unicorns and crippled industries — rewarding companies who put customers first, and destroying those who don’t. We wanted a way for brands to have the voice of their consumer at the table with them while making each and every decision. Traditional research is slow, inefficient, and expensive; with Suzy, all that can change.
What brought you to New York?
MB: I moved to NYC in 2000 from Boston where I went to college after my first company was acquired by an agency in the Flatiron District. The minute I got here, I knew I was here to stay.
Together with Percent Pledge, you launched #NYTechCares, an initiative to support tech-related COVID-19 efforts in the city. How did you get the initiative off the ground and what are some of the projects it has taken on?
MB: I was reading this article about how many local kids still didn’t have the right hardware for virtual education, and I realized that there were newly remote companies like Suzy all across NYC with closets full of working laptops not being used. Rather than let them sit there collecting dust, we went right into action. We’d already been talking to Percent Pledge about creating ways for our employees to donate to various charities, so we brought our idea there first.
From there, we contacted others in our network — great New York companies like Via and Knotel — to see who’d be interested in coming on as “founding partners.” As you can imagine, that part was easy — they all said yes! We then worked with Percent Pledge to identify charities that would not only get these computers to the kids, but could also help us with the logistics. That was it at first, but when the George Floyd protests began a few weeks after #NYTechCare’s launch, we all felt it was worth expanding our reach to support organizations that also address racial inequality.
One of the most challenging adjustments NYC had to make was when all of its schools were forced to go remote, and there’s still a lot of uncertainty of what school will look like for students in the fall. If it’s still mostly remote (and it looks like it will have to be), how is the coalition stepping in to support students through it?
MB: We want to distribute as many computers, tables, monitors, and hotspots as we can to kids in our local community, and will continue to partner with other companies that want to pitch in. Wherever there’s a kid who needs a laptop, we want #NYTechCares to be able to provide one to them.
Right, there’s real concern extended remote-only instruction will just widen the “homework gap.” What are some steps you would suggest to city officials to help mitigate that issue and get all students connected?
MB: We’re lucky that NYC is home to so many of the world’s top tech companies. Each one is filled with talented people who want to support and help the community at large. I think a great place to start would be to leverage their skills and expertise to come up with new ways of improving the education system together.
Now to ask a couple questions related to your business: what is the most dramatic change we should expect in consumer behavior when we get to a post-pandemic place? Will any of the trends we’ve seen during the pandemic have staying power?
MB: We’ve seen a rapid shift in the relationship between consumers and brands. More and more, these companies are helping to shape the way people approach and deal with the ever-changing world around them — whether it’s by providing entertainment or valuable information about COVID-19.
Consumers are demanding more from brands now, too. They want brands to care about their community and the causes they believe in, or they will start to pick different products and services.
Are there any projects Suzy put on hold when the outbreak began? What are you most looking forward to devoting more time to when the pandemic ends?
MB: We initially put the breaks on our expansion plans because we were unsure how the market would react to the outbreak. Now, however, we’re confident that we’ve built a great product for helping the market during these difficult times. Going forward, it’s all about scale. We have some aggressive goals for hiring, sales, and product — like releasing more product updates, expanding into new verticals, and pouring gasoline into the fire of our now-proven formula.
Where do you get your favorite pizza slice?
MB: Front Street Pizza in Brooklyn.
Where do you get your favorite bagel?
MB: I love the bagel dish at Sadelle’s in SoHo.
What is the best New York waterfront?
MB: DUMBO, where I live.
What’s your favorite New York building?
MB: Chelsea Market. It’s where my first NYC company grew up and I have great memories from that place.
What’s the best place in New York for a coffee or lunch meeting (remember in-person meetings)?
MB: Lure Fishbar. It’s my go-to spot for lunch meetings, and the food is great.
What’s your favorite remote work office hack?
MB: Zoom’s Breakout rooms are a tremendous tool to keep some level of serendipity while working remotely.
What’s one new thing your team is doing to stay connected while everyone works from afar?
MB: We hired NYC’s best personal trainer, Rico Wesley, to do remote training sessions for our company. It’s a great way for our employees to stay both connected and fit!
Adafruit Industries
What does your company do?
Adafruit Industries founder and CEO Limor Fried: Adafruit is an open-source educational electronics manufacturing company right here in SoHo, NYC!
Why did you found your company in NYC?
LF: There is no better place in the world to run a company. The people, the art, the inspiration of it all together — NYC is the center for so many things.
What brought you to New York?
LF: After I graduated from MIT, I received an art fellowship and moved to New York.
Back in early March, when the outbreak hit New York, almost all of the state’s businesses were ordered to close. Adafruit wasn’t one of them. How were you able to stay open, and what have you been working on through the pandemic?
LF: The Mayor's Office and the NYC Economic Development Corporation contacted us to ask if we could help make PPE. They needed face shields, and fast! During the COVID-19 outbreak, Adafruit Industries operated as an essential service and manufacturing business under the state’s Executive Order 202.6 to define what constitutes an “essential business,” making PPE and medical device components.
Are you still manufacturing PPE today — now four months later? How much is being produced every day? Is it all staying local or are you also shipping PPE out beyond New York?
LF: Thankfully, the need for face shields eventually tapered off. However, the demand for sensors, parts for medical equipment and devices has not. The orders are not as urgent as they were in April when we were hand-delivering components for fast-track FDA clearance testing, but we're still making and shipping critical components. We're well-stocked with PPE and shipping it all over the US now.
What’s been the experience of your employees through the pandemic — how have you been managing to work through it safely?
LF: We're radically transparent, always have been, and always will be. The team knew our challenges, what we needed to do, and worked up precise protocols to keep everyone safe. We met medical professionals at local hospitals who also had some excellent advice. From wearing masks from the start in March to having daily+ sanitation cycles, PPE for on-site and remote folks, we managed to have zero team members get sick. A bunch of us did the antibody testing — it's all come back negative. A lot of this is about providing all the information, at all times, and having open communications with each other. We've shared our protocols and more here.
That firsthand experience of keeping a workplace running through all of this could shed a lot of light for those still thinking about their own return-to-office plans. What will be the most dramatic change you think workers should expect in their professional lives when they’re able to return to the office?
LF: The most dramatic change is that it’s not over: there will be starts and stops. There will be daily ups and downs. The only consistency is that things are inconsistent. One day there's a lot of good news, the next day, something comes up, or something happens that wipes that away. Things are (and can) get better, but it's not a straight line now.
You’ve also been serving on the City’s Small Business Sector Advisory Council to support NYC’s post-pandemic economic recovery efforts. What big challenges is the council discussing? What solutions can we rally around?
LF: The council has dedicated small business owners, it's inspiring and humbling. Collectively, we're all aware of the challenges of keeping employees and customers (retail/restaurants) safe — those tasks are accomplishable. The more significant challenge is that this pandemic and social injustice did not create the problems we hear about now — it revealed them. We have a broken system for so many people, so while we can work on outdoor seating for restaurants, equality for our communities is just as essential and urgent. For solutions to rally around, start at your workplace: can you support minority and woman-owned businesses? And in the New York area? Together we have a lot of purchasing power, helping these businesses. Purchasing and hiring is something everyone can do as we restart together.
Are there any projects Adafruit put on hold when the outbreak began? What are you most looking forward to devoting more time to when the pandemic ends?
LF: We have a quarterly subscription service for kids that helps teach them coding and electronics called ADABOX — we ship out thousands of these every three months, and we had to pause on it until now. We're finally shipping it out this week. Once it's out, we do dozens of projects with the kids online, on video, and on our learning system. We're looking forward to that again, for sure!
Favorite place for a bicycle ride in New York?
LF: Up and down Hudson River Park.
Favorite place that is/was on pause that you're going to when it reopens?
LF: Tonight I am going to the re-opening of the High Line. You can sign up for timed entry to keep good social distance, it opens tonight!
What’s your favorite New York building?
LF: Going to go with One World Trade Center because our first Adafruit location was a tiny apartment a few blocks from One World Trade — as it was built, I built my company; we grew up together. It's a reminder that we can come back from anything.
What's the last place you went to in New York for a coffee or lunch meeting before the pause in March?
LF: Urban Vegan Kitchen is a few blocks from Adafruit, and the good news is they are open and have outdoor dining now!
What’s your favorite remote work office hack?
LF: There are many meetings — setting alarms one minute before the video conference seems to help. Webcam and audio never work on the first try; even with calendar reminders, time moves in different ways now. Once I started doing that, it was easier to be right on time.
What’s one new thing your team is doing to stay connected while everyone works from afar?
LF: We used to do an in-person all company meeting each week for 30 mins called "State of the Fruit.” That's not possible now, or even anytime soon, so we've moved it to a recorded video/virtual meeting for folks who can tune in live or watch it later. It's helped bring everyone together and get a lot of useful info out to each other, too.
StrongArm Tech
What does your company do?
StrongArm Tech founder and CEO Sean Petterson: StrongArm Tech is the world’s leading safety science company, founded on the mission of keeping the world’s Industrial Athletes™ Proud, Protected and Productive.
Why did you found your company in NYC?
SP: New York is home.
With New York’s reopening ongoing, companies are, of course, thinking about when — and how — to bring their employees back to the workplace. StrongArm has been providing some guidance on that with Newlab’s Return to Work Studio. What is the studio working on, and what insights have you gathered already?
SP: Newlab is an incredible incubator space that’s home to more than 800 entrepreneurs, many of whom were considered essential in the midst of the COVID pandemic. We’re the founding member of Newlab, so when we enhanced our FUSE Risk Management Platform to include COVID response capabilities, it felt only right that we’d team up with them to help their most critical workers get back to work quickly and safely.
By placing our FUSE Sensor on-body at New Lab, we saw proximity-related alerts — that is, instances of two or more workers getting within six feet of each other — decrease by more than 95 percent in just 10 days.
New technologies — many that may not have been necessary or expected in office settings pre-pandemic — could be useful moving forward. What are some of those tools?
SP: A main reason we were able to deploy COVID capabilities to our wearable sensor — physical distancing alerts, contact tracing capabilities and customized daily reports chief among them — is because our existing risk management platform already supported it. So, for it, the COVID response wasn’t a pivot; it was an essential enhancement to a technology designed to keep workers safe on the job. As the profile of industrial risk changes — as it did so dramatically with the advent of COVID-19 — our technology evolves in lockstep. It’s the only way we adhere to our mission, day in and day out, of keeping the world’s Industrial Athletes™ proud, protected and productive.
What will be the most dramatic change you think workers should expect in their professional lives when they’re able to return to the office?
SP: Every workplace is different, industrial or otherwise. In terms of change, I think workers should expect COVID precautions to be in place, “dramatic” or not. One major advantage we see in the deployment of our wearable FUSE Sensor is that it’s easy to check in and out and super lightweight and unobtrusive on the body. Basically, it’s a COVID Guardian Angel you won’t know is there until your safety comes into question.
Are there any projects StrongArm put on hold when the outbreak began? What are you most looking forward to devoting more time to when the pandemic ends?
SP: Our platform was focused on reducing ergonomic injury in the workplace — back injuries being a main pain point for companies. We’re still doing that with our existing clients (some major Fortune 100s among them) and have no plans of changing that. Our COVID response, as I’ve mentioned, was an enhancement to our offering rather than a pivot.
Where do you get your favorite pizza slice?
SP: Paulie Gee’s (though in a pinch, any dollar slice will generally do).
Where do you get your favorite bagel?
SP: Frankel’s or Ess-a-Bagel.
What is the best New York waterfront?
SP: We are, of course, partial to the Navy Yard, though we love DUMBO as well.
What’s your favorite New York building?
SP: New Lab, 77 Washington Ave. (It’s where the magic happens.)
What’s your favorite remote work office hack?
SP: Get yourself a dog — great for morale and the occasional distraction when needed.
What’s one new thing your team is doing to stay connected while everyone works from afar?
SP: Since COVID forced our office to start working remotely — so, 3+ months now — we’ve had an all-company standup meeting at the same time every morning, where we share what we’re working on and just generally check in and see everyone’s faces. It’s been a great way to stay connected and keep everything charging forward on the same path.
Lunchbox
What does your company do?
Lunchbox co-founder and CEO Nabeel Alamgir: Lunchbox enables restaurants of all sizes to deliver the best digital ordering experiences to their customers by simplifying the solution. By creating powerful omnichannel systems, restaurants are able to take back their digital real estate.
Why did you found your company in NYC?
NA: My co-founder Andrew Boryk and I grew up here in NYC — specifically Queens — and love the community and inspiration that this city supplies. It also helps being in the restaurant-tech space in the city that has the best collection of them in the world. There’s amazing food on every corner here!
What brought you to New York?
NA: My family immigrated from Kuwait when I was younger and we have lived and worked here in Queens, NYC since!
Help Main Street, a tool for connecting local businesses to cash support through COVID-19, came online at a pretty impressive speed at the outset of the pandemic. Why did you decide to build a tool like that, and how have you seen it grow over the last few months?
NA: It was definitely a weekend sprint. The idea for Help Main Street came into being when I had a discussion with Nihal Mehta of Eniac Ventures at the beginning of the outbreak when restaurants were mandated to close. From there we pulled together a team Saturday night and by the following Tuesday we had our first MVP live hosting over 100 businesses across New York City. Today we have over 125,000 locations live on the platform and have raised over $500k for local businesses.
What types of businesses are showing the most activity through the tool?
NA: On Lunchbox we service restaurants from all sectors of the industry. Fast Casual, Quick Service, and Full-Service/Sitdown have all been performing well across our platform! Our client Bareburger has actually been able to reclaim 54% of their digital ordering away from third-party sites since they’ve switched over to Lunchbox.
What plans do you have for the tool post-pandemic?
NA: In the early days of the pandemic, we launched Curbside Pickup for our clients to ensure they are empowered with the tools to help them succeed. Alongside that, we launched the ability to add contactless delivery for restaurants as well. As restaurants begin to reopen we are also exploring forms of Pocket Kiosk where guests will be able to use their phones to order when dining in!
When restaurants and bars are able to fully reopen, what will be the most dramatic change you think patrons should expect?
NA: I believe while guests will be eager to get back to restaurants they will look for how they can do it safely and feel comfortable. With NYC opening up outdoor dining recently I think we’ll get a really good picture on exactly what guests will expect from restaurants moving forward.
Are there any projects Lunchbox put on hold when the outbreak began? What are you most looking forward to devoting more time to when the pandemic ends?
NA: Originally we had an in-store kiosk in development but put that time into working on the Pocket Kiosk solution, helping to give guests a contactless way to order while dining in.
Where do you get your favorite bagel?
NA: New York Bagel and Coffee House here in Queens.
What is the best New York waterfront?
NA: Long Island City, Gentry Park, and Astoria Park.
What’s your favorite remote work office hack?
NA: Just got a standing desk a bit ago, amazing!
What’s one new thing your team is doing to stay connected while everyone works from afar?
NA: We have an “always” open chat room where everybody can join throughout the day to chat and hangout. The digital watercooler.
All illustrations by Elly Rodgers
Central Park aerial view...: by ST photography/Shutterstock.com