This past week, over a series of events, the New York tech community celebrated the 30th anniversary of a nebulous idea described as “Silicon Alley”, the catch-all term for our greater collective of creators and collaborators, founders and funders, inventors and investors, educators and entrepreneurs and electeds, activists and architects and artists. Some of the parties or mixers have been typical industry affairs, the usual glad-handing about deal-making and pleasantries. But a lot have been deeper, reflecting on what’s special and meaningful about the community we’ve built in New York. Steven Rosenbaum’s reflection on the anniversary captures this well from someone who’s been there, and Leo Schwartz’s piece for Fortune covers the more conventional business angle.
Beyond the celebrations, though, I wanted to reflect on a number of the deeper conversations I’ve had over these last few days. These are conversations grounded in the reality of where our country and city are today, far beyond spaces where wealthy techies are going to parties and celebrating each other. The hard questions raised in these conversations are the ones that determine where this community goes in the future, and they’re the ones that every tech community is going to face in the current moment.
I know what the New York City tech community has been; there was a time when I was one of its most prominent voices. The question now is what it will be in the future. Because we are at a profound crossroads.
What community can be
Nobody better exemplifies the best of what New York tech has been than Aaron Swartz. As I’d written about recently, he was brilliant and delightfully impossible. At an incredibly young age, he led our community in the battle to push back against a pair of ill-considered bills that threatened free expression on the Internet. (These bills would have done to the web what the current administration has done to broadcast television, having a chilling effect on free speech and putting large swaths of content under government control.) As we stood outside Chuck Schumer’s office and demanded that big business take their hands off our internet, we got our first glimpse of the immense power that our community could wield. And we won, at least for a while.
My own path within the New York tech community was nowhere near as dramatic, but I was just as motivated in wanting to serve the community. When I became the first person elected to the board of the New York Tech Meetup (later the New York Tech Alliance), it was the largest member-led organization of tech industry workers in the country. By the time it reached its peak, we were over 100,000 members strong, and could sell out one of our monthly events (at a venue of over 1000 attendees) in minutes. The collective power and impact of that cohort was immense. So, when I say “community”, I mean community. I’m not talking about the contemporary usage of the word, when people call their TikTok followers a “community”. I mean people who care about each other and show up for each other so that they can achieve meaningful things.
New York tech demonstrated its values time and again, and not just in organizing around policy that served its self-interest. When the city was still reeling from 9/11, these were people who not only chose to stay in the city, or who simply talked about how New York ought to rebuild, but actually took the risk and rebuilt the economy of the city — the majority of the economic regrowth and new jobs in New York City in the quarter-century since the attacks of 9/11 have happened thanks to the technology sector.
When Hurricane Sandy hit, these were people who were amongst the first to step up to help their neighbors dig out. When our city began to open up its data, the community responded in kind by building an entire ecosystem of new tools that laid the groundwork for the tech we now take for granted when navigating around our neighborhoods. There was no reluctance to talk about the importance of diversity and inclusion, and no apology in saying that tech was failing to do its job in hiring and promoting equitably, because we know how much talent is available in our city. Hackers would come to meetups to show off their startups, sure, but just as often to show off how they’d built cool new technology to help make sure our neighbors in public housing had heat in the winter. This was New York-style tech.
What’s more, the work of this community happened with remarkable solidarity; the SOPA/PIPA protests that Aaron Swartz spoke at had him standing next to some of the most powerful venture capitalists in the city. When it was time to take action, a number of the most influential tech CEOs in New York took Amtrak down to Washington, D.C. to talk to elected officials and their staffers about the importance of defending free expression online, advocating for the same issue that had been so important to the broke college kids who’d been at the rally just a few days earlier. People had actually gathered around principles. I don’t say this as a Pollyanna who thinks everything was perfect, or that things would have always stayed so idealistically aligned, but simply to point out that this did happen. I don’t have to assert that it is theoretically possible, because I have already seen a community which functions in this way.
From bottoms-up to big business
But things have changed in recent years for New York’s tech community. What used to often be about extending a hand to neighbors has, much of the time, become about simply focusing on who’s getting funded to chase the trends defined by Silicon Valley. The vibrancy of the New York Tech Meetup took a huge hit from covid, preventing the ability for the community to gather in person, and the organization’s evolution from a Meetup to an Alliance to being part of Civic Hall shifted its focus in recent years, though there has been a recent push to revitalize its signature events. In its place, much of the public narrative for the community is led by Tech:NYC, which has active and able leadership, but is a far more conventional trade group. There's a focus on pragmatic tools like job listings (their email newsletter is excellent), but they're unlikely to lead a rally in front of a Senator's office. An organization whose founding members include Google and Meta is necessarily going to be different than one with 100,000 individual members.
When I spoke to the Wall Street Journal back in 2013 about the political and social power of our community, at a far different time, I called out the breadth of who our community includes:
The tech constituency encompasses a range of potential voters who remain unlikely to behave as a traditional bloc. "It's venture capitalists and 23-year-old graphic designers in Bushwick," Mr. Dash said. "It's labor and management. It's not traditional allies."
I wanted to make sure people understood that tech in New York is much broader than just, well, what the bosses and the big companies want. It is important to understand that New York is about founders, not just funders.
The distinction between these groups and their goals was never clearer to me than in the 2017 battle around Amazon’s proposed HQ2 headquarters. The public narrative was that Amazon was trying to make a few cities jump through hoops to make the best possible set of bribes to the company so that they would build a new headquarters complex in the host city. The reality was, New York City offered $1.5 billion dollars to the richest man in the world in order to open up an office in a city where the company was inevitably going to do business regardless, and the contract that Amazon would have to sign in exchange only obligated them to hire 500 new workers in the city — fewer people than their typical hiring plan would expect in that timeframe. In addition, the proposed plan would have taken over land intended for 6,000 homes, including 1500 affordable units, would have defunded the mass transit system through years of tax breaks for the company while putting massive additional burden on the transit system, and raised housing prices. (Amazon has since signed a lease for 335,000 square feet and hired over 1000 employees, without any subsidies.)
At the time, I was CEO of a company that two entrepreneurs had founded in 2000 and bootstrapped to success, leading to them spinning out multiple companies which would go on to exit for over $2.2 billion, providing over 500 jobs and creating dozens of millionaires out of the workers who joined the companies over the years. Several of the people who had worked at those companies went on to form their own companies, and those companies are now collectively worth over $5 billion. All of these companies, combined, have gotten a total of zero billion dollars from the state and city of New York. In addition, none of those companies have ever had working conditions anywhere close to those Amazon has been criticized for.
But the story of the time was that “New York tech wants HQ2!” Media like newspapers and TV were firmly convinced that techies were in support of Amazon getting a massive unnecessary handout, and I had genuinely struggled to figure out why for a long time. After a while, it became obvious. Everyone that they had spoken to, and all the voices that were considered canonical and credible when talking about “New York tech”, were investors or giant publicly-traded companies.
People who actually built things were no longer the voice of the community. Those who showed up when the power was out, or when the community was hurting, or when there was an issue that called for someone to bravely stand up and lead the crowd even if there was some social or political risk — they were not considered valid. People liked the myth of Aaron Swartz by then, but they would have ignored the fact that he almost certainly would have objected to corporate subsidy for the company.
New York tech today, and tomorrow
I am still proud of the New York tech community. But that’s because I get to see what happens in person. Last week, I was reminded at every one of the in-person commemorations of the community that there are so many generous, kind-hearted, thoughtful people who will fight to do the right thing. The challenge today, though, is that those are no longer the people who define the story of the community. That’s not who a new person thinks of when they’re introduced to our community.
When I talk to young people who are new to the industry, or people who are changing careers who are curious about tech, they have heard of things like Tech Week, or they read trade press. In those venues, a big name is generally not our home-grown founders, or even the “big” success stories of New York tech. That’s especially true as once high-flying New York tech companies like Tumblr and Foursquare and Kickstarter and Etsy and Buzzfeed either faded or got acquired, and newer successful startups are more prosaic and less attention-grabbing. Who’s left to tell them a story of what “tech” means in New York? Where will they find community?
One possible future is that they try to build a startup, doing everything you’re “supposed” to do. They pitch the VC firms in town, and the big name firms that they’ve heard of. If they’re looking for community, they go to the events that get the most promotion, which might be Tech Week events. And all of these paths lead the same way — the most prominent VC firm is Andreessen Horowitz, and they run Tech Week too, even though they’re not from NYC.
On that path, New York tech puts you across the table from the man who strangled my neighbor to death.
Another possible future is that we rebuild the kind of community that we used to have. We start to get together the people who actually make things, and show off what we’ve built for one another. It’s going to require re-centering the hundreds of thousands of people who create and invent, rather than the dozens of people who write checks. It’s going to mean that the stories start with New York City (and maybe even… in the outer boroughs!), rather than taking dictation from those in Silicon Valley who hate our city. And it’s going to require understanding that technology is a set of tools and tactics we can use in service of goals — ideally positive social goals — and not just an economic opportunity to be extracted from.
We would never talk about education by only talking to those who invest in making pencils. We’d never consider a story about a new movie to be complete if we only talked to those who funded the film. And certainly our policymakers would balk if we skipped speaking with them and instead aimed our policy questions directly at their financial backers, though that might result in more accurate responses. Yet somehow, with technology, we’ve given over the narrative entirely to the money men.
In New York, we’ve borne the brunt of that error. A tech community with heart and soul is in danger of being snuffed out by those who will only let its most base instincts survive. Even our investors here are more thoughtful than these stories would make it seem! But we can change it, and maybe even change the larger tech story, if we’re diligent in never letting the bad actors control the narrative of what tech is in the world.
Like so many good things, it can all start with New York City.
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