A COMMUNITY UNITED

On January 30, 2017, New York tech leaders came together to stand in opposition to President Trump’s executive orders suspending entry for citizens of certain countries and limiting the refugee program. More than 2,000 people in the Tech:NYC community signed our letter.

ENGADGET

"The collective argues that the ban, which covers both refugees as well as immigrants from several Muslim-majority countries, will both 'undermine' New York City's diverse tech community and "send a dangerous message" that immigrants aren't welcome. The town is defined by its immigrant culture, the group contends, and many tech giants were founded at least in part by immigrants (think Intel, Google and Tesla, for starters). Americans should be doing 'everything in our power' to attract these entrepreneurs, not giving them the boot."

TECHCRUNCH

"The note pulls together a wide range of top executives from tech companies, investment firms and the like, including Indiegogo, Greylock Partners, Casper, Birchbox, Foursquare, Warby Parker, LittleBits, Betaworks, Kickstarter, Lyft, Vine, Buzzfeed, Trello, Uber and Slack.“

VOX

"A lot of big technology companies were co-founded by immigrants, and virtually all of them have immigrant employees. That not only means that Trump’s immigration order could hurt their future recruitment, it also means these companies have a lot of current employees whose friends and family could be affected."

Our letter garnered national attention and was featured in dozens of news outlets including:

 Politico | Fortune | Axios | Fast Company | Forbes | Observer | Crain's NY | Mashable | Ad Age | amNY | CNET| Entrepreneur | Metro | NY Business Journal

We work closely with government to ensure a legislative and regulatory environment that allows our members to thrive and creates opportunity for all New Yorkers. Some of the issues we worked on this year were:

MARKETPLACE PROVIDER TAX

Tech:NYC played a significant role in defeating a proposed marketplace provider tax that would have hit internet marketplaces like Etsy, eBay, and Amazon. The New York tax would have been a first-in-the-nation tax on internet marketplaces. It would have created serious operational burdens and sent a message to internet marketplaces, and tech companies more broadly, that they were not welcome here. Working with a broad coalition of our members and others, we were able to convince Albany policymakers to kill this bad idea before it became law. You can read our Executive Director’s op-ed on the issue here.

Policy Briefs break down the issues we're working on behalf of our community in New York City, Albany, and Washington, D.C. 

IMMIGRATION/TRAVEL BAN EXECUTIVE ORDER

NEW YORK STATE MARKETPLACE PROVIDER TAX

H-1B IMMIGRATION VISA

PUBLIC SAFETY/PRIVACY ACT EXECUTIVE ORDER

PORTABLE BENEFITS

Homesharing

Government Access to Encrypted Data

We recently released our first policy white paper on government access to encrypted data. 

This is just the beginning and we will periodically release more in-depth white papers on a variety of topics that are important to our members and to all New Yorkers. Keep your eye on technyc.org/policy for more.

Our events bring together our communities across the city, everywhere from the Upper East Side to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. In doing so, we've been proud to host many of New York's leaders.

33 events with 2,800 participants from across our network