Crain's New York Business

‘I DO’ SEASON The return of weddings may not be enough to save caterers PAGE 2

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MARCH 22, 2021

BEST AND BRAVEST A look back on the 25 years since EMS and the FDNY merged PAGE 3 WORKPLACE

Cuomo allegations jump-start harassment discussions

BY BRIAN PASCUS

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BUCK ENNIS

A look at the enterprising, young business professionals helping New York recover from the pandemic Page 19

See WORKPLACE on page 7 VOL. 37, NO. 11

NEWSPAPER

s chief executive of Brown Harris Stevens, Bess Freedman is one of the few female executives in the male-dominated industry of New York real estate.

Her 18 years of experience as an agent and executive have given her insight on workplace sexual harassment.

Freedman recalled how a female agent told her in the early 2000s that a male photographer sexually harassed her during a photo shoot at an uptown property.

“It wasn’t flattering, like ‘This is a pretty dress.’ It was pervy,” Freedman said. “She told me how odd it was that a photographer would say those things. But she never made a complaint.”

Freedman said she believes the episode reflects a significant element of sexual harassment.

“I’m sure if this gentleman did this once, it happened many more times with others,” she said, adding that the photographer “got this reputation of women being uncomfortable around him.”

The sexual harassment allegations against Gov. Andrew Cuomo have jump-started conversations about workplace harassment in New York.

“I would say the problem is severe, and I would say the problem is pervasive,” said Gloria Allred, a leading women’s rights lawyer.

Allred, who practices in New York and California, said public allegations don’t fully capture the widespread nature of sexual harassment in society. Many credible allegations result in confidential settlements and pre-litigation

© 2021 CRAIN COMMUNICATIONS INC.

A CHEF OPENS A POP-UP TO KEEP HER SPIRITS UP PAGE 39

2021

A robust conversation about the future of real estate PAGE 5

HOSPITALITY

BY CARA EISENPRESS

C

ity caterers said the calls started coming from clients two weeks ago, mostly from couples looking to book small outdoor weddings.

Beginning last week, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said, venues could hold events at 50% of capacity, with a cap of 150 people attending, all of whom have to show negative Covid-19 test results or proof of immunization. Other regulations set out where attendees may stand, dance and eat, to keep people from crowding together.

“There are some very strict rules, but if the brides and grooms are OK with them, then we are happy to follow them as long as we can get back to work,” said Alice Garretti, a director at Acquolina Catering and Event Management, which provides food for parties in New York City and the Hamptons.

Yet as wedding bookings solidify, other events have failed to materialize, mostly because of uncertainty around regulations and insecurity about what partygoers expect from

safety measures.

Shaun Roberts, vice president of sales at catering company Great Performances, said, “2021 is the year of the wedding.” Great Performances worked at about 100 different venues before the pandemic.

Similar to the years after the Great Recession, Roberts said, this year will be “one of those with a depressed economy, where we will focus and lean on weddings over other events.”

Depressed revenue Although it’s nearly impossible to plan beyond early summer because regulations could change, many in the industry expect their total revenue for the second and third quarters to be no more than half of what they made before last year.

The catering industry all but shut down last March because of pandemic restrictions on gatherings.

Early on many in the industry expected last summer and fall to be back to normal. But in spite of many small events held during the summer, employment in the sector dropped by 75% in the third quarter,

to 2,491 from nearly 9,000 during the same period a year earlier.

Caterers tried branching out into prepared food delivery and dropoff catering, which kept staff employed, rent paid and customers engaged but was not profitable.

The federal American Rescue Plan counts caterers as restaurants, making financial assistance available to them that can make up lost profits from last year.

In a normal summer, Garetti said, Acquolina would hold around eight events each week, including large festivities and cocktail parties at people’s homes. Restrictions on the number of people who may gather at a home—25 outside and 10 indoors—has added uncertainty to planning weddings, which many hosts had assumed they could have in their yard, she said. But she hopes that as rules get more defined, people will grow more confident about planning.

At Great Performances, weddings postponed last year were piling onto this year’s nuptials to create a small boom for the company.

Concern that a new wave of

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150-person weddings this year are not likely to save the catering industry

Covid-19 could hit in the fall is pushing even more couples to book events for the summer. Still, Roberts said, he expects to do about half of spring and summer 2019’s catering business in the next two quarters. Great Performances had total revenue of $60 million in 2018.

Safety regulations are changing how caterers cook and arrange their parties.

“The role of health code compliance and food safety will be under a microscope,” said Austin Publicover, who consults on food safety for restaurants and food service. That means buffet-style meals are out.

Guests order cocktails brought by waitstaff instead of at bars. Menus

are replacing passed hors d’oeuvres, with additional sitdown courses.

“From our perspective, this is a unique benefit,” Roberts said. “We want them to sit down and enjoy the food.”

Great Performances is not charging more per guest for the updated format, he said, though the extra staff needed for serving and cleaning can increase costs.

Although the new regulation has been out for a month, some people are just not comfortable holding or attending parties, caterers and venue managers said—a fact that is hindering the comeback, especially as corporations and nonprofits hesitate to urge people to gather.

“Our clients are divided into two groups,” Garretti said, “the first group, who can’t wait and will show up 30 minutes before a party starts, and the second group, who still doesn’t feel comfortable.”

Unfortunately, she said, many in the first group have not yet come back to New York from Palm Beach. ■

LODGING

Lawmakers fear Trojan horse in Cuomo’s plan to collect sales tax on Airbnb listings

BY RYAN DEFFENBAUGH

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budget proposal from Gov. Andrew Cuomo to tax listings by Airbnb and other vacation-rental companies is facing opposition from city representatives, who call the plan a Trojan horse that would allow looser home-sharing rules.

Airbnb and its competitors would be required to collect sales tax and local hotel fees on all vacation-rental listings under Cuomo’s nearly $200 billion budget plan released this year. The governor said the tax would create a level playing field between home-sharing companies and hotels.

The measure was not included in either the Senate or Assembly budget proposals released March 14, however.

Although Cuomo’s proposal does not mention changing the state’s multiple-dwelling law—which bans rentals of fewer than 30 days in apartment buildings without the owner present—lawmakers said they fear that could come next.

State Sen. Liz Krueger of Manhattan, who chairs the finance committee, said the proposal represents a Trojan horse for home-sharing regulation.

Airbnb’s “strategy for almost a decade is to tell governments that they are eager to work with them to collect and remit taxes,” Krueger said via email. “Once a tax collection agreement is made, or a law passed allowing the platform to collect taxes, Airbnb then turns around and tells the same government that it has to fully legalize the activity being taxed.”

The debate over the tax is the latest in a feud between Airbnb and the city, which represents its most lucrative U.S. market. New York officials, including Mayor Bill de Blasio, have said the company reduces the housing supply and takes business from hotels without having to face the same regulations.

Legitimizing an industry “We oppose the govenor’s proposal because collecting these taxes would legitimize and shield the practice of illegal short-term hotel rentals that threaten the city’s affordable housing stock,” de Blasio said in a statement. “We are pleased the state Legislature agrees.”

The de Blasio administration in 2019 issued roughly 3,500 citations for alleged illegal hotel units. In May the city expects to receive data on Airbnb listings for the first time un-

der a legal settlement that was reached in June.

Airbnb, which debuted on the Nasdaq in December and has a market value approaching $120 billion, counters that its homes for rent are what tourists today want. Cities that don’t embrace home-sharing risk losing out on visitors and tax revenue, it argues. A recent company analysis estimated the city could collect about $75 million in annual tax revenue if it allowed and then taxed short-term rentals.

“Given the state of the economy and how central tourism is to the city, it makes sense in 2021 to solve this and update laws around hosting,” said Alex Dagg, the Northeast policy director for Airbnb.

When asked about the exclusion of the vacation rental tax by the Legislature, Freeman Klopott, a spokesman for the state Budget Division, said negotiations are ongoing.

With the governor engulfed by multiple sexual harassment accusations, the Legislature could dictate much more of the final budget, due March 31, than in past years under Cuomo.

Sen. James Skoufis, a Hudson Valley lawmaker who supports looser home-sharing regulation,

said the tax shouldn’t be ruled out while it is still included in one of the three budget plans.

“This was removed [from the Legislature’s budget plans] on the auspices of, frankly, a conspiracy theory,” Skoufis said. “That somehow this proposal to require sales tax collection was a backdoor legalization of illegal short-term rental units.”

Airbnb has reached voluntary tax

revenue agreements with 34 of New York’s 62 counties, including Westchester. The company said it remitted $3.3 million to those counties last year.

Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal, a Democrat representing the Upper West Side, said the fear is that the tax “would legitimize illegal activity. Airbnb could say, ‘It's fine, we are not doing anything wrong.

We are collecting taxes.’” ■

NOMINATIONS

DEADLINE TO NOMINATE: MARCH 26 This special feature within the May 24 issue of Crain’s New York Business as well as on CrainsNewYork.com will recognize men and women who serve in a senior-level marketing or public relations role. Nominations should demonstrate how the nominees have used their skills to deliver significant value to clients with an emphasis on the last 12 months. We are welcoming nominations to help us determine those who will be recognized in print and online.

Nominate now: CrainsNewYork.com/nominations

Vol. 37, No. 11, March 22, 2021—Crain’s New York Business (ISSN 8756-789X) is published weekly, except for bimonthly in January, July and August and the last issue in December, by Crain Communications Inc., 685 Third Ave., New York, NY 10017.

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2 | CRAIN’S NEW YORK BUSINESS | MARCH 22, 2021

BUCK ENNIS

HEALTH CARE

Officials look back at EMS merger with FDNY 25 years ago Despite gains in response times, union chief says further improvements can be made

BY SHUAN SIM

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ast week marked the 25th anniversary of the New York City Fire Department and Emergency Medical Services merging into a single agency. Operations have become more efficient since 1996, but there is still room for improvement, EMS' union president told Crain's.

Before the merger, EMS and its emergency medical technicians had fallen under the jurisdiction of NYC Health + Hospitals. The consolidation made the FDNY the largest department-based provider of emergency medical care in the country.

However, the effort was not well received at the start, said Oren Barzilay, president of FDNY EMS Local 2507, which represents the more than 4,000 members in the department. Barzilay joined EMS in July 1995.

“There was resentment from us and from the firefighters,” Barzilay said. EMS had been promised 70 stations across the city at the time of the merger, but that was never met, he said.

Frank Dwyer, deputy commis-

sioner of public information and external affairs for the FDNY, noted there are now 39 EMS stations citywide and two additional outpost locations. Under the FDNY, EMS headcount has grown from under 2,000 to over 4,000, Dwyer said.

“Simply put, there are more EMS members and resources on the streets of New York City today than at any point in the city’s history,” he said.

The merger has certainly resulted in better patient outcomes. Back in the 1990s, the response time for a high-priority call was between 10 and 15 minutes, and a low-priority call might be responded to in about 30 minutes, Barzilay said. Today the response time is about seven minutes for a high-priority call and about 10 minutes for a low-priority one.

“You don't want to be waiting around 15 minutes if you had a heart attack,” he said. “Every minute we’ve shaved off counts.”

With more than 10,000 firefighters and over 200 fire stations across the city, the training of firefighters as certified first responders after

the merger has helped save many lives, Barzilay said. The merger also made EMS training more rigorous, which helped improve standards.

“When I first joined, it was just six weeks of training. Now it’s three months to graduate the academy,” he said. Being part of the FDNY has required EMS trainees to be physically fit and agile, he added.

Within the Fire Department, the promotion path stops at paramedic, he said. The opportunity to be promoted to supervisor also has been restricted to paramedics, though EMTs previously were eligible. About 75% of EMS members are EMTs, and 25% are paramedics.

“FDNY provides a class of 60 to 90 people who can become paramedics each year, and that’s very little,” he said.

Dwyer said that the change was made to ensure that supervisors could operate at the highest level of certification, which for medical response in the department is as a paramedic.

EMTs’ wages also lag those of firefighters, Barzilay said.

“For some reason, we’re considered a civilian force, and whenever wages are negotiated, our uniformed counterparts get a few percentage points more than we do,” he said.

These issues collectively create a morale and turnover problem.

“We’re saving lives and not being properly respected and compensated,” Barzilay said.

“THERE ARE MORE EMS MEMBERS ON THE STREETS TODAY THAN AT ANY POINT” However, key issues remain to be addressed, Barzilay said. At first EMS staff felt their career paths had been disrupted as they departed NYC Health + Hospitals, he said.

Back then the usual career path an EMT could take was to become a paramedic and eventually a nurse or a doctor. “[NYC Health + Hospitals] provided us an educational route to becoming medical professionals, and that ended when we joined FDNY,” Barzilay said.

Over 3,000 EMS staff have left in the past five years, and only 100 workers with more than 20 years of experience are left.

“We need incentives for people to stay, and ultimately the ones who benefit are our patients,” he said.

Best and Bravest In response, Dwyer said wages and uniformed status are negotiated through collective bargaining with the city. He added that since the merger, the Fire Department has expanded and improved training for EMS staff, created a rescue medic program to respond to major incidents and opened three divisions of EMS citywide to handle increasing call volumes.

In recognition of the 25th anniversary, Fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro said in a statement: “Combining New York City’s ‘Best’ with New York City’s ‘Bravest’ transformed our agency. We reap the benefits of the health and medical expertise EMS embedded within the [Fire] Department every single day, especially in the last year, as our members have courageously battled the Covid-19 pandemic.” ■

MARCH 22, 2021 | CRAIN’S NEW YORK BUSINESS | 3

HEALTH CARE

Lower Manhattan health-tech startup reaches unicorn status with $1.6 billion valuation

BY RYAN DEFFENBAUGH

vulnerable by allowing organizations to better get them what they need,” said Esther Farkas, senior vice president of corporate development and chief legal officer at Unite Us. The company’s partners include the United Way, the states of North Carolina and Virginia, Humana, CVS and the Cleveland Clinic.

Unite Us expanded into 16 states last year, reaching 42 total.

M

anhattan-based Unite Us—which a company that uses technology to better connect health and social services providers—has raised $150 million in a Series C round, leading to a $1.6 billion valuation, the company announced last week.

With the deal, the startup becomes New York’s latest health care unicorn—the term for private companies valued at more than $1 billion. The funding round was led by Iconiq Growth, a firm whose previous investments include Uber, Airbnb and Zoom.

Founded in 2013, Unite Us provides software that connects community organizations and health care providers to coordinate ser-

Job openings The company’s workforce is growing too, with 176 job openings to boost its current staff of 385 spread across offices in Lower Manhattan, Los Angeles and Raleigh, N.C. The firm in late 2019 expanded to a larger corporate office on two floors at 217 Broadway in the Financial District.

Farkas said the company’s leadership is planning to return to the office when health conditions allow.

Unite Us has raised $195 million total in its eight years of operation, according to Crunchbase. When asked whether the company is headed toward a public offering or further fundraising, Farkas said Unite Us is focused on putting the Series C investment to work.

vices. Its goal is to give providers a more comprehensive way to track the social determinants of health— the way housing, employment, education and other factors affect a person’s physical well-being.

“We try to take the requirement to go seek help away from the most

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UNITE US HAS RAISED $195 MILLION TOTAL IN ITS EIGHT YEARS OF OPERATION

“Our hope with this money is to bring services to more people and expand across the country in a way we weren’t able to before,” she said.

“As far as future funding or exit plans, I don’t think there is any-

thing on the horizon. We all realize there is a lot of work still to do.”

Record year Health-focused technology startups raised a record $3.6 billion last

year, led by insurer Oscar Health, which debuted on the New York Stock Exchange this month. Unite Us joins Cedar, Cityblock Health and Ro among the health care unicorns in New York. ■

TRANSPORTATION

GOOGLE IMAGES

JetBlue might move jobs to Florida from Queens

BY AARON ELSTEIN

J

REAL ESTATE

City pays $3.2M for historic Brooklyn abolitionist site

BY WILLIAM JOHNSON

BLOOMBERG

etBlue Airways is considering moving corporate jobs from its Long Island City headquarters down to Florida.

“We are exploring a number of paths, including staying in Long Island City, moving to another space in New York City and/or shifting a to-be-determined number of [Long Island City] roles to existing support centers in Florida,” the airline said in an internal memo seen by Crain’s.

JetBlue’s lease for its Brewster Building office expires in 2023. The company, which bills itself as New York’s hometown airline, started out of Forest Hills in 2000 and moved west to Long Island City in 2012.

It had considered relocating to Orlando but decided to stay in Queens in return for a reported $30 million in tax breaks, investments and marketing programs from the state and the city, which said about 1,000 JetBlue employees would work in the 200,000-squarefoot Long Island City office near the Queensboro Bridge.

“JetBlue’s home, heart and soul

have always remained in New York,” its CEO said at the time.

‘Terrific options’ Times have changed, however.

Like all airlines, JetBlue has been devastated by the pandemic and has survived thanks to large dollops of government aid. It’s expected to be several years before tourist and business travel to the city recovers.

A JetBlue spokeswoman con-

4 | CRAIN’S NEW YORK BUSINESS | MARCH 22, 2021

firmed the contents of the internal memo and said the airline plans to finalize job-relocation decisions later this year.

“We are now reviewing our options in the current real estate market and considering how our space requirements may evolve in a hybrid work environment post-pandemic,” she said. “We have terrific options in both New York and Florida.” ■

NEW YORK CITY has paid $3.2 million for the former home of two Brooklyn abolitionists who harbored slaves traveling along the Underground Railroad.

“It’s a place where abolitionists risked their livelihoods and lives so that African people who were enslaved could travel safely to freedom,” the city’s first lady, Chirlane McCray, said last week.

The home, at 227 Duffield St. in Downtown Brooklyn, was owned

by Harriet and Thomas Truesdell, prominent abolitionists who har-

bored escaped slaves.

The building nearly was seized by eminent domain back in 2007 to make way for a park, before protests put a halt to the plan.

The city officially made the site a landmark last month, preventing developers from turning it into a high-rise apartment building, and Duffield Street was renamed Abolitionist Place.

No specific plans have been announced for the property, but Mayor Bill de Blasio did say the city will be “doing something special” to commemorate its role in the abolitionist movement. ■

REAL ESTATE

Skepticism surrounding real estate’s recovery still runs high among some execs

BY EDDIE SMALL

on building housing in general in recent years, he said.

“On the overall issue of affordable housing in New York, it was a crisis before the pandemic. It remains a crisis,” he said.

“One key reason for that crisis is we are simply not producing enough housing to meet the demand.”

O

ffice space is one of the many aspects of real estate that the pandemic has turned upside down, and its future is still up for debate, according to the executives on a recent Crain’s panel.

Helena Durst, principal at the Durst Organization, said she expects the city’s struggling office market to make a strong comeback, especially given the coaching and mentorship opportunities for young employees that come with working in the same location as

Peebles Corp. founder Don Peebles was more skeptical. He said he is raising a $450 million fund and has been able to do so from anywhere. The days of companies feeling as though they need to be in New York just because it’s New York are gone, he said.

Peebles and Durst spoke on Crain’s New York Now real estate panel along with Jim Whelan, president of the Real Estate Board of New York, and MAG Partners CEO MaryAnne Gilmartin. The panel discussed diversity in the industry, affordable housing, the upcoming mayoral race and other topics. The

“OFFICE SPACE IS IMPERATIVE TO THE PRODUCTIVITY OF YOUR EMPLOYEES” their more experienced counterparts.

“The address of New York City is so crucial,” Durst said. “The idea of office space is something that’s imperative to the productivity of your employees.”

Diversity issues DURST

PEEBLES

dramatic impact the Covid-19 pandemic is having on the sector underpinned virtually all aspects of the conversation.

The pandemic has led to significantly lower rents in New York—a sudden departure in a city that was getting more and more expensive.

Doing the math Gilmartin stressed that if people want developers to build more af-

GILMARTIN

WHELAN

fordable housing, it needs to be profitable for developers.

“It is not a business of philanthropy. It is a business of building,” she said. “There needs to be an incentive, an inducement to create that affordable housing.”

Whelan echoed her point, saying developers probably would not construct affordable housing unless the math works.

The city has not focused enough

The panelists also discussed the industry’s longstanding diversity problem. Peebles said it has “absurdly low barriers to entry,” but the opportunities simply are not there.

That is especially true when it comes to access to capital, he said.

“Just look at WeWork,” he said.

“Adam [Neumann] raised $8 billion before his company began to implode. Can you imagine a woman raising $8 billion for a concept that had failed?” ■

Developer moves Judge strikes down lawsuit against rent-stabilization laws forward with

plans for 23-story UWS tower

A

BY EDDIE SMALL

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lawsuit filed by five Manhattan landlords seeking to overturn the state’s 2019 rent laws has been struck down by a judge in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.

The property owners had sued the city, its Rent Guidelines Board and state housing Commissioner RuthAnne Visnauskas in February 2020, claiming that the rent-stabilization laws and the reforms enacted in 2019 by the state Legislature violated the Constitution.

But whether the laws eat into landlord profits or not, they’re here to stay, Judge Edgardo Ramos said in his March 8 decision.

“Plaintiffs … cannot argue that the 2019 amendments interfered with their reasonable investment-backed expectations,” Ramos wrote. “Rent regulation has existed in some form in the city for over 70 years, and rent stabilization, in particular, has existed for over 50 years.

Plaintiffs knowingly entered a highly regulated industry.”

Three of the landlords own buildings that include some rent-stabilized units at 335 and 337 W. 14th St., 226 W. 16th St. and 172 Prince St. The other two landlords represent buildings in Harlem at 699 E. 137th St. and 309 E. 110th St. containing only rent-regulated apartment.

Due to the 2019 laws, they’re unable to make a profit on their units, use their property as they wish or exit the market, they said in their complaint.

“In 2019 the state materially amended the rent-stabilization laws to create the most onerous rent-regulatory regime the state has ever seen,” they alleged in the complaint, adding that the new amendments were “egregious” and “draconian.”

Lost profits The updated regulations, which apply to about 1 million rent-stabilized apartments in the city, eliminated the program’s expiration date, limited how much could be spent on maintenance and improvements, made it illegal for landlords to reject tenants based

on legal issues with other landlords and made it harder to convert rent-stabilized units to condos or co-ops.

The owners of the mixed-rent buildings claimed they lost at least $227,000 in profits on their stabilized units in 2019. Another landlord said he made $900,000 less from selling his building after the laws were passed.

That doesn’t make the laws invalid, Ramos said.

“Loss of profit alone does not constitute a taking,” the judge said.

“Plaintiffs also have no constitutional right to an unregulated market.”

The rent laws do offer exemptions for landlords facing financial hardship, but none of the landlords in the suit claimed that, Ramos noted. ■

ments at 345 E. 94th St. in Yorkville, 125 W. 31st St. in NoMad and 561 10th Ave. in Hell’s Kitchen.

FETNER PROPERTIES is pushing ahead with its vision for a massive Slow year Upper West Side project.

The developer filed plans with the Last year was the slowest concity last Tuesday for a 23-story, 171- struction year in New York in alunit tower at 270 W. 96th St., be- most a decade, as the industry was tween Broadway and confronted with the West End Avenue. AcCovid-19 pandemcording to the plans, ic. Filings for new 270 W. 96TH ST the building will buildings spanned stand 235 feet tall and about 42.7 million span about 150,000 square feet in total, square feet, and it will down 28% from include space for a 2019 and the lowest community facility. total since the city The company is was emerging from looking to start conthe Great Recession struction during the in 2012, according fourth quarter of the to a report from the year and hopes to finReal Estate Board of ish it in about 28 New York. months.

Other significant “This project repprojects developers resents a true collaboration be- have filed plans for this year intween City Hall, [the Department of clude a 47-story, 453-unit tower at Housing Preservation and Develop- 550 10th Ave. from the Gotham Orment], the community and Fetner ganization; a 33-story, 121-unit Properties,” company President and building at 12 E. 37th St. from B&F CEO Hal Fetner said.

Management; and a 10-story, 50Fetner’s other projects in the city unit project from Minrav Developinclude luxury apartment develop- ment at 305 First Ave. ■ SLICE ARCHITECTS

BY NATALIE SACHMECHI

MARCH 22, 2021 | CRAIN’S NEW YORK BUSINESS | 5

FINANCE

Wall Street A-listers fled to Florida.

Many are now eyeing a return BLOOMBERG

T

LA GOULUE IN PALM BEACH BLOOMBERG

he Upper East Side cocktail at Italian restaurant Sant Ambroeus is just the same as in Manhattan; the carpaccio at Cipriani is as meaty red as on Wall Street.

Here is private-equity billionaire Stephen Schwarzman, on his way to La Goulue, the clubby French bistro popular with Park Avenue socialites. There is David Solomon, the Goldman Sachs Group chief, a team of financiers in tow.

The names and the money say New York, but the aquamarine pools, the swaying palms and the sultry Atlantic breezes say something else: Florida, the would-be Wall Street South.

For months now A-listers and lesser figures from the world of high finance have been traveling to the Sunshine State while riding out the Covid-19 pandemic. Hopeful locals see evidence that the area’s long-elusive dream of luring Big Finance for good might be coming true. Along Worth Avenue in Palm Beach, real estate agents count commissions from a pandemicinduced real estate boom. Private schools fantasize about attracting the Spence set.

The reality is more nuanced— much more.

Only a small percentage of Manhattanites moved permanently to Florida last year. And as vaccinations stir fresh hope that the pandemic’s end is near, ebullient talk of South Florida drawing Wall Streeters en masse is already beginning to fizzle.

Dan Sundheim, founder of New York–based hedge fund D1 Capital Partners, is likely to leave Palm Beach and return to his Park Avenue home, according to a person familiar with his plans.

David Tepper, who moved back to New Jersey from Miami last year, is staying in his home state for now, even though he and his wife just bought a $73 million Palm Beach mansion.

“The main problem with moving to Florida is that you have to live in Florida,” said Jason Mudrick, who

dealmakers, money managers and traders. Elliott Management, Citadel and Point72 Asset Management all announced plans to open offices in Florida, and Goldman was weighing whether to move some asset-management jobs there.

Doug Cifu, head of market-maker Virtu Financial, said he can’t wait for the six-minute commute in his Corvette when he moves to new offices in Palm Beach Gardens from New Jersey. Scott Shleifer, a top executive at Tiger Global Management, just bought a $132 million house in Palm Beach and plans to establish residency there.

Much of the narrative around the relocations centered on taxes and a business-friendly climate. Florida has no state income tax, while New York City’s is among the nation’s highest.

Yet U.S. Postal Service data paints a different picture: Last year 2,246 people filed for a permanent address change from Manhattan to Miami-Dade County, and 1,741 went to Palm Beach County.

Together they account for 9% of the out-of-state moves from the borough, up from 6% in 2019.

Still, even a small number of departures by the ultrawealthy can have an outsize impact. The top 1% of New Yorkers earned a combined $133.3 billion in 2018 and accounted for 42.5% of local income

“THE MAIN PROBLEM WITH MOVING TO FLORIDA IS YOU HAVE TO LIVE IN FLORIDA” oversees $3 billion at Mudrick Capital Management and has resided in Manhattan for more than two decades.

“New York has the smartest, most driven people, the best culture, the best restaurants and the best theaters,” Mudrick said. “Anyone moving to Florida to save a little money loses out on all of that.”

Outsize impact By late last year one might have been excused for thinking that Manhattan would soon be bereft of

6 | CRAIN’S NEW YORK BUSINESS | MARCH 22, 2021

2,246

the firm’s clients are. taxes collected, according Many executives have to the city’s Independent resisted relocating themBudget Office.

NUMBER of selves, according to one More Manhattanites Manhattanites senior manager. Older relocated to Jersey City who filed for employees who left and Hoboken in New Jera permanent Manhattan for Music sey, as well as Chicago, address change City complained about Los Angeles and Philadelto Miami-Dade uprooting their families, phia, than they did to County last year and finding high-quality either Miami or Palm talent proved harder in Beach. Except for PhilaNashville, the source delphia, the other destireported. nations are in some of the A representative for highest-taxed states.

PERCENTAGE by the firm said AllianceAlthough Elliott is movwhich attendance at Palm Beach Bernstein is “pleased ing its headquarters to Academy with our senior leaderFlorida, founder Paul reportedly has ship located in Nashville” Singer is staying in the risen in 18 and lauded “the great Northeast. New York will months local talent we have remain its biggest office, recruited.” and the firm’s new GreenOne hedge fund wich, Conn., outpost will be larger than the Florida hub, founder who spent the past six according to a person familiar with months in Miami is still deciding whether he’ll stay there. The forces the plans.

The main drivers for people to pulling him back are New York’s stay in New York are access to top dynamism and his children’s private schools and a bigger pool of school, which he likes better than young professionals to fill jobs, the one they’re attending now. according to interviews with sev- Either way, he said, he’ll keep his New York office—because many of eral hedge fund executives.

That’s similar to what Alliance- his employees with kids don’t want Bernstein Holding found when it to leave—as well as his place in the decided to move its headquarters Hamptons, because no one wants to Nashville from Manhattan in to be in South Florida in the 2018. Although more than 1,000 summer.

Parents leaning toward staying in jobs at the $688 billion money manager are transferring out of the city, Florida are finding that many of the high-profile positions such as pri- private schools are at or near vate wealth and portfolio manage- capacity.

Fanning Hearon, head of Palm ment stayed—a reflection of where

22%

Beach Day Academy, said enrollment rose 22%, to 480 students, in the past 18 months, and some classes already have waiting lists.

Other schools in the area report that they too have little room for more.

Meanwhile, New York’s elite private schools said enrollment has jumped and few students are leaving for Florida.

‘Roaring ’20s’ Cristobal Young, a sociology professor at Cornell University and the author of The Myth of Millionaire Tax Flight: How Place Still Matters for the Rich, predicts that relocation will remain minimal because wealthy people generally stay put.

“They live where they became successful, where they have industry connections, employees and customers, and where they sit on nonprofit boards,” he said. Young, who has studied the effects of tax increases in California and New Jersey, said they barely caused an uptick in interstate migration, which stands at about 2.4% per year among U.S.-based millionaires.

Then there is the lure of New York as everything starts to reopen.

“It will be like the Roaring ’20s— you’ll see a resurgence here like never before,” said Mudrick, who predicts some of his friends who moved to Miami will soon be back.

“You want to be buying New York and selling Florida—that’s the contrarian in me.” ■

“There’s overt and more subtle forms of harassment, and I think some things that might be common sense are not,” Freedman said.

“Anyone who is in a position of power must be very sensitive of that. It’s a different world today.”

Other observers—including Karen Altfest, an executive vice president at Altfest Personal Wealth Management, where she has worked for more than 35 years—say the nature of sexual harassment in the workplace has changed over time because different people mean different things when attempting to define harassment.

“Some people will cringe at anything,” Altfest said. “Someone notices I had a haircut. That makes some people very uncomfortable.

He isn’t saying anything out of the normality, but some women would cringe at that and say, ‘Why is he looking at my hair?’”

The difficult nature of defining sexual harassment, and even identifying it, has created different in-

FROM PAGE 1

filings that never see the light of day, she said.

“We’ve been doing this for 45 years, and it’s as prevalent now as it was previously,” she said. “Having said that, I also feel that it’s more likely that a victim will exercise her legal rights than she would’ve 35 years ago.”

Following the #MeToo movement, which brought newfound awareness to sexual harassment and sexual assault, New York amended its laws to uncap punitive damages and lower the standard for harassment allegations from “severe and pervasive” to any treatment that subjects “an individual to inferior terms” or what a reasonable victim would deem more than crass remarks.

Lawyer Damien Weinstein, who defends people accused of sexual harassment, says the pendulum has swung in a different direction.

“It is so easy to file a complaint against someone now,” he said. “I can make anything I want and file it. There’s no fact-checking at the courthouse door for filing.”

“Your intent might not be to harm them, but it did.”

Need for equality Some advocates say the confusion around sexual harassment will decrease if greater gender integration occurs in the workplace, with women earning the same pay and achieving an equal number of executive leadership roles as men enjoy.

“I believe it should be at least 50-50, if not more,” Allred said. “It is more likely women will be sexually harassed and become victimized if they do not enjoy equal power with men in the workplace.”

Freedman said increasing female leadership at firms can bring a culture change rooted in the sociology of gender differences and historical behavior patterns.

“When women are in positions of power, for the most part they are cautious, careful, sensitive,” she said. “They handle power safely. Look at history and men in the positions of power: the destruction, the rape, the killing. All

“WHEN WOMEN ARE IN POSITIONS OF POWER THEY ARE CAUTIOUS, CAREFUL”

More sensitivity terpretations of what constitutes a safe workplace.

“We’re human, and there’s always going to be a default to doing things that are not right, to use levity, to joke around,” Freedman said.

When talking to female executives, it’s clear that the new laws and a social justice movement more conscious of victim’s rights have shaken up traditional workplace protocols and dynamics.

ISTOCK

WORKPLACE

of the power has been in the hands of men.”

Altfest dismisses that line of thought, however. When power is on the line, she said, nothing should be taken for granted.

“You can’t just assume that a woman-run firm is better,” she said.

“I don’t think anything is a given.”

To some experts, workplace sexual harassment might be an intractable element of society, due to the way humans interact with one another.

“Regardless of whether there’s more women or not in positions of leadership, I honestly feel there will

always be sexual harassment so long as men and women are working in the same workplace,” said Douglas Wigdor, a leading sexual harassment lawyer.

Sexual harassment doesn’t always take place in the four corners of an office, Wigdor added. It can occur at off-site meetings and training sessions, during travel, and while at dinner and drinks.

“You can do all the training you want in the world, educate people,” he said. “But when people are out and about, and in a restaurant and bar, or at a training, there will be sexual harassment cases.” ■

REAL ESTATE

Bankrupt Martinique Hotel looking for buyers

BY NATALIE SACHMECHI

M

Redefining what you should expect from

GOOGLE IMAGES

idtown’s Martinique Hotel is up for sale months after its operators filed for bankruptcy in hopes of striking a deal with its landlord, its lender and its union-backed employees.

Herald Hotel Associates, the hotel operator that holds a 99-year ground lease on the 330,000-squarefoot building, is accepting offers for financing, broker Eric Anton said.

Alternatively, the hotel company is looking to sell the remaining 68 years on its ground lease at the property, located at 1260 Broadway, Anton said.

Seasons Affiliates owns the land beneath the hotel.

The property has received offers for both, but “it will take time to get any deal done, because we are in bankruptcy,” Anton said.

Management closed the 531room hotel last March and furloughed many of its 176 employees, except essential workers, Brad Thurman, vice president of the operating company, said in court papers.

The hotel will remain closed at least until Sept. 1, according to its website.

Currently branded as a Hilton, the Martinique is one of the city’s oldest hotels. It was built in 1897 to be a luxury draw to attract wealthy clients, but by 1970 its rooms were being rented out by the city and the

Red Cross to house the city’s homeless population.

It served as a welfare hotel for the next two decades before the last family was moved out and the building was renovated to become a Holiday Inn.

Getting a revamp The hotel later became a Radisson, but that partnership was an underperforming one, and Herald Hotel opted to work with Hilton instead—which required more than $40 million in renovations.

Due to construction interruptions during the pandemic, nonessential work was delayed, but the revamp should be completed by the fall, Anton said.

Record-low occupancy rates made matters worse, reaching as low as 35% in August and creeping up to nearly 40% in recent weeks.

The operators still owe Chase bank $14.2 million on a $65 million mortgage, Thurman said, but expect their $3.9 million federal Paycheck Protection Program loan to be forgiven.

He also blamed much of the hotel’s financial woes on the “onerous provisions of the [collective bargaining agreement] that represents those of the hotel’s union employees”—which are costing $3.5 million in severance pay.

Nearly 150 of the hotel’s 176 staff members are represented by the Hotel and Motel Trades Council. ■

your accountant. grassicpas.com

MARCH 22, 2021 | CRAIN’S NEW YORK BUSINESS | 7

chief executive officer K.C. Crain senior executive vice president Chris Crain

EDITORIAL

group publisher Jim Kirk publisher/executive editor

Let Cuomo investigations run their course

editor Robert Hordt

It’s unclear how long the Assembly’s investigation will last, but a vote to impeach the governor would require agreement of most members in the 150-seat chamber. Meanwhile, Attorney General Letitia James is overseeing another investigation into the harassment claims.

Cuomo’s fall from grace comes at an inopportune time. Not only is New York City scrambling to vaccinate millions of residents, it’s struggling to overcome the economic devastation brought on by the pandemic. Hundreds of thousands of jobs have vanished, and thousands of small businesses have closed their doors.

Against the backdrop of the pandemic and the city’s economic fragility, the most prudent course of action is to let the Cuomo investigations run their course. If the allegations against the governor prove true, he should be removed from office and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

Until then, Cuomo and the Legislature need to focus on the tasks at hand: making sure every New Yorker has the opportunity to be vaccinated against Covid-19 and reviving New York City and the rest of the state.

AS THE CITY EMERGES FROM THE PANDEMIC, LEADERSHIP WILL BE IN HIGH DEMAND Their argument was that Cuomo has lost the confidence of the public and the state Legislature, rendering him ineffective at a time when a governor’s leadership is much needed.

EDITORIAL

assistant managing editors Telisha Bryan,

Janon Fisher associate editor Lizeth Beltran art director Carolyn McClain photographer Buck Ennis senior reporters Cara Eisenpress,

Aaron Elstein, Eddie Small reporters Ryan Deffenbaugh, Brian Pascus, GOVERNORANDREWCUOMO/FLICKR

D

espite mounting pressure from political leaders, including those in his own party, Gov. Andrew Cuomo has made it clear that he has no intention to step down.

Cuomo has denied the multiple sexual-harassment allegations against him, though he acknowledged in an apology that some of his actions could have been “misinterpreted as unwanted flirtation.”

Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie of the Bronx last week named Davis Polk & Wardwell, an international law firm based in Manhattan, to lead an investigation into the allegations of sexual harassment and inappropriate sexual behavior.

A week earlier, more than 100 state lawmakers and most of New York’s congressional delegation called on the governor to resign.

Frederick P. Gabriel Jr.

Cuomo and his administration are under fire in another arena: They allegedly altered data to hide the size of the death toll among the state’s nursing home residents during the early days of the pandemic. The governor has acknowledged his administration was slow to release data regarding coronavirus deaths in nursing homes, but he has refuted claims that his administration deliberately hid such fatalities out of fear of criticism that its policies were flawed.

To be sure, it’s difficult to see how Cuomo will survive the allegations that surround him.

The governor’s approval rating hit its lowest point in a Siena

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about vaccinating billions of people. It would be easier to track who has been vaccinated, who wasn’t, who receives future booster shots to accommodate new variants and so forth. Plus, given the unfortunate rise in fake vaccines, such as the thousands seized in South Africa and China, a blockchain-based passport is the best way to verify individuals have received a real vaccine. This will be especially critical if tourism starts to ramp back up by the summer.

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Strongest link During the pandemic, many individuals and businesses have used 21st-century technology to work from home, yet proof of vaccination currently is a 19th-century piece of paper that can be lost. A digital vaccine passport on its own is not completely secure, but adding blockchain is a game changer that could save lives. More places are likely to require proof of vaccination as time goes on.

production and pre-press director

BLOOMBERG

I

www.crainsnewyork.com/staff

Christine Rozmanich, Laura Warren

Blockchain vaccine passports can go a long way to restore tourism t’s welcome news that New York state is piloting a vaccine passport at large-scale venues such as the Barclays Center to show proof of vaccine or negative Covid-19 test via mobile devices.

But let’s go one step further to protect the public by integrating blockchain technology into one secure source of truth: a vaccine passport. The added layer of blockchain—a digital, authentic and secure ledger—unique to the individual can easily be tracked to its source and prevent the type of large-scale hacks we saw during the height of the pandemic. Now it can help New York and other cities around the world recover quicker and safer.

The requirement of a blockchain-based platform for monitoring vaccine status can drastically reduce risk of virus transmission, especially because we are talking

to contact the newsroom:

senior account executive Kelly Maier

College poll conducted two weeks ago and released last week, with 43% of registered voters having a favorable view of him. That’s down from a high of 77% reached last year during the early days of the pandemic. Still, half of New York voters say Cuomo should not resign, according to the poll.

As the city emerges from the pandemic, leadership will be in high demand. New Yorkers, even those who do not believe Cuomo should resign, are unlikely to overlook the accusations of harassment and mismanagement that have been leveled against him. If he decides to run again, his re-election chances would be slim. ■

OP-ED

BY ALLEN ALISHAHI AND CHAO CHENG-SHORLAND

Natalie Sachmechi, Shuan Sim executive assistant Devin Cavallo

A blockchain-verified vaccine passport would help instill consumer confidence and trust, which in turn could encourage more people to go back into office buildings, into restaurants and to the city’s world-famous landmarks.

We also could use blockchain to track individual vaccines, to ensure not a single dose gets wasted.

The technology can track whether a vaccine has been properly stored,

CRAIN COMMUNICATIONS INC. chairman Keith E. Crain vice chairman Mary Kay Crain

is at the right temperature, was distributed to the right location and so forth.

Incorporating blockchain into vaccine passports and even the supply chain could help bring traces of normalcy back to our lives. ■

chief executive officer K.C. Crain

Allen Alishahi and Chao ChengShorland are co-founders of DocuWalk, a blockchain-based virtual negotiating platform.

chairman Mrs. G.D. Crain Jr. [1911-1996]

senior executive vice president Chris Crain secretary Lexie Crain Armstrong editor-in-chief emeritus Rance Crain chief financial officer Robert Recchia founder G.D. Crain Jr. [1885-1973]

8 | CRAIN’S NEW YORK BUSINESS | MARCH 22, 2021

P008_CN_20210322.indd 8

3/19/21 6:20 PM

OP-ED

Higher taxes won’t help New York City’s economic recovery

V

accines give us confidence that victory over Covid-19 is imminent, but the prospects for New York’s economic recovery are far less certain.

Restoration of the 625,000 private-sector jobs that have disappeared during the pandemic will not be easy or fast. A lot will depend on the results of state budget negotiations taking place during the next few weeks.

Advocates are pressing Albany lawmakers to raise taxes on individuals and corporations perceived as having done too well during the pandemic. This is not a new political push, but it has gained momentum because of the pronounced inequities of

it is not the way to restore jobs or retain talent. The tax proposals under discussion are more likely to drive away very large taxpayers rather than bring in sustainable revenues.

Covid-19 has demonstrated, for the first time, that our key global industries can operate successfully on a remote basis. They do not have to be in New York City, where the cost of living and the cost of doing business are exceptionally high.

Florida bound

Many families have been living and working outside New York for a year. They have resettled, primarily in Florida, which offers a warm welcome and has no income taxes. If the tax and political environments in New York are too hostile, remote workers may stay put, and their STATE DOES companies will follow.

NEED TO RAISE TAXES THIS YEAR, ultimately Inertia is no longer in New York’s KNOW IT AND THE favor.

In 2018 federal Covid-19, during which low-wage income taxes of New York’s highest workers disproportionately lost earners went up $12 billion a year their jobs, children without digital because a cap was imposed on state access lost a year of education, and and local tax deductibility. The Black and brown communities had Biden administration is threatening more than their share of death and to further increase federal income tax rates on high earners, meaning disease.

While the sentiment for raising many New Yorkers will be turning taxes on the rich is understandable, over 65% of their earned income to

NEW YORK

BLOOMBERG

BY KATHRYN WYLDE

NOT

TAXPAYERS

government. This is beyond the tipping point.

Finally, thanks to generous federal aid and better-than-expected tax revenue in 2020, New York state does not need to raise taxes this year, and the taxpayers know it.

State of competition Last month, Florida’s chief financial officer sent a letter to the New York Stock Exchange outlining the

advantages of moving to the Sunshine State. Miami is distributing promotional material comparing its quality-of-life metrics and taxes to New York City’s. While 5,000 New York City restaurants have closed, New York chefs—Marcus Samuelsson among them—are opening new eateries in Florida.

New York state is not a sovereign nation. We are in competition with states where governors are begging

our financial and tech professionals, entrepreneurs and investors to relocate permanently. If they go, their companies will follow. Taxes are not the prime motivator for an exodus of talent from New York, but they may be the proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back. ■ Kathryn Wylde is president and CEO of the Partnership for New York City.

OP-ED

BY TOM HARRIS

O

ur public spaces have consistently provided a breath of fresh air from the confines of quarantine. From outdoor dining to open streets and storefronts, our ability to be creative in the use of our streets and open spaces multiplied during the past year.

As we continue to recover, get vaccinated and create our new normal, it is critical we view our public spaces as positive assets for the city.

We need to plan and regulate them to reflect the critical role they play now and will continue to play.

That is why we at the Times Square Alliance recommend a new city position: deputy mayor for public spaces.

Times Square was the first neighborhood in New York to permanently pedestrianize multiple blocks, and we have seen the benefits firsthand. However, that change in use was not accompanied by a change in regulatory or management approach. There are now 82 pedestrianized public plazas, plus scores of streets turned into open spaces. Our current system of management is fragmented, though.

Multiple agencies separately control aspects of what happens in the spaces, without formal coordina-

tion happening at any level.

Take one block in Times Square, for example:

Red tape Vendors are licensed by the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, permitted by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and inspected by the Fire Department or Police Department.

Violations are adjudicated by the Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings.

Parking and deliveries are regulated by the Department of Transportation but enforced by the NYPD. Street construction is permitted by the DOT but completed by utilities, city contractors or private entities.

People in need, including the homeless, are contacted by subcontractors of the Department of Social Services, but many have mental health issues or substance-abuse challenges that should be addressed by the DOHMH. If everyone is responsible, then no one is accountable. What we need, especially at such a critical juncture, is one office accountable to the mayor wherein all activities impacting public spaces are coordinated and managed. This can help

neighborhoods recover faster.

Here are more key reasons why we need to create a deputy mayor for public spaces with direct oversight of all relevant agencies: There are too many cooks in the kitchen. Our current system of public-space management is disorganized, without centralized coordination.

We should help those in need.

The economic crisis has exacerbated the issues of mental health and substance abuse, impacting the quality of life in our neighborhoods.

This includes those experiencing homelessness needing shelter in public spaces around the city. Unfortunately, services are disaggregated: One agency oversees a shelter, another has access to drug or mental health treatment, another manages benefits. Connecting individuals to comprehensive resources they need is the only way to solve this complex issue.

Road relief can lead to business relief. We know the role our streets, sidewalks and plazas have played in providing places to socialize, sell goods and services, and dine out so we can keep commerce and businesses going. A deputy mayor for public spaces could streamline onerous regulations around the commercial use of public space

BLOOMBERG

New York needs a deputy mayor for public spaces

and help educate businesses and consumers on the regulations, all while protecting public access and enjoyment.

Space race Use Times Square as a pilot to innovate, because we have done it before. More than 12 years ago, the Bloomberg administration started the “public space race” when it shut Broadway between 42nd and 47th streets to cars and transformed those blocks into world-class public plazas. We believe we could pedestrianize more streets. Let’s think of innovative ways to maximize the use of public spaces in high de-

mand and transit areas across the city to reflect how people want to use streets and sidewalks in 2021, not 1951.

Prior to the pandemic, one of our biggest complaints was the congestion in our public spaces, caused largely by the disjointed management and inefficient uses and misuses of those spaces. We will recover. New Yorkers and visitors will be back. Now is the time to act so when the crowds return to Times Square, they can experience an iconic public space at its best. ■ Tom Harris is acting president of the Times Square Alliance.

MARCH 22, 2021 | CRAIN’S NEW YORK BUSINESS | 9

PEOPLE ON THE MOVE

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Pernod Ricard USA, the U.S. unit of the world’s second largest spirits and wine company, announced the appointment of Kristen Colonna as Vice President of Marketing Enablement, reporting to Chief Marketing Officer Pam Forbus. With over 15 years of experience, in her new role, Colonna will be responsible for leading the multidisciplinary, Center of Excellence, that will enable Pernod Ricard USA’s marketing, sales, and commercialization functions to drive forward the success of the company.

Keith Patterson has been appointed EVP and Chief Financial Officer at the Visiting Nurse Service of New York. A distinguished financial leader with more than 15 years’ experience directing organizational growth and integration, Mr. Patterson has guided financial strategy for healthcare business at Ready Responders, CoventryOne (Aetna), Optum (UnitedHealth Group), Advisory Board and J.P. Morgan. He will work closely with VNSNY President and CEO Dan Savitt to ensure continued financial strength.

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Hodgson Russ is pleased to announce that Monaliza Seepersaud has joined the firm as an Associate in its Labor & Employment Practice.

She represents management on all aspects of labor and employment law. Prior to joining Hodgson Russ, Mona was an Assistant Corporation Counsel at the New York City Law Department, where she worked on a broad range of employment litigation matters.

Mona is based in the firm’s New York City office.

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10 | CRAIN’S NEW YORK BUSINESS | MARCH 22, 2021

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3/18/21 6:08 PM

SPOTLIGHT ON

WESTCHESTER

Sleepy Hollow Lighthouse

W

elcome to your new home in Westchester County – a place that truly fits every need and desire. Westchester is strategically located just outside of New York City, but life here isn’t just about our big neighbor to the south. We are both a picturesque, green County, boasting beautiful views, parks and landscapes, and a vibrant County with bustling downtowns and business districts. We have faced the most challenging of times throughout the Covid-19 pandemic and still managed to come out on top, relying on our fiercely talented workforce to bring us back to solid ground.

We are home to a diverse corporate roster, which has allowed us to maintain our strong economy. From IBM, the first great multinational corporation, to financial services companies like Mastercard, to consumer products from PepsiCo, to the biotech and health care boom fostered by companies like Regeneron Pharmaceuticals and Acorda Therapeutics. Westchester has it all.

Our County is a wonderful place to visit and an even better place to live, but that doesn’t mean we are complacent. We still have much work to do. The pandemic has motivated us to look for new ways to improve life for our residents and our business community. We strive to be flexible, to grow and change with the times, and help our startups and small and mid-sized companies succeed. Our office of Economic Development has introduced a host of new programs to help our businesses thrive, and we are constantly working to coordinate better between our chambers of commerce in all the municipalities throughout Westchester, so they can learn from each other and ultimately share one larger spotlight.

Our perseverance, patience and strength may have been tested, but as we continue on our path to get through to the other side of the pandemic, I hope you’ll come explore all that Westchester has to offer. We’re glad you’re here.

George Latimer Westchester County Executive

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SPOTLIGHT on WESTCHESTER

Westchester Works on Its Workforce and biotech companies might need someone to work in finance, and both fields need people who can work in communications,” the Business Council’s Gordon says. “We are developing an environment where we can delve deeper into training people for all these jobs.”

Harold King, president of the Council of Industry, a manufacturers association for the Hudson Valley, says workforce development is always essential but particularly now.

“The pandemic accelerated trends that were already in place, and that’s especially true in manufacturing and especially in Westchester—many of the skilled workers are in their 50s or older and the pandemic accelerated retirement rates,” King explains. “This is creating a skills gap—there are immediate openings in jobs with real career paths—and the industries and regions that fix that will be ahead of the game.”

Because some skills take years to develop, King says, companies will need to recruit from outside their region to offset losses to retirement, but developing new generations is really crucial to long-term success.

Bantam Tools in Peekskill

T

he pandemic has closed businesses and left millions unemployed around the country, but in Westchester there are vital signs of new life and ambitious plans for a thriving future, building on the county’s formidable strengths with a strategic approach to workforce development that will benefit businesses and residents.

Most of these companies will not be large corporations.

“When I was 14 I asked my father what made Westchester so appealing, and he said, ‘It’s near New York City, but it’s not New York City,’” says County Executive George Latimer, adding that back then, the county was attracting major corporations, such as Texaco, IBM and Pepsi.

Today, greater numbers of small companies are taking root and developing. “Small is the new big,” Latimer says, “so we need to figure out how to create an environment for small businesses to grow.”

Westchester is already an enticing place, especially for health care, advanced manufacturing and especially biotech, says Marsha Gordon, the president and chief executive officer of the Business Council of Westchester. Gordon points to businesses such as MediSprout, a telehealth company in White Plains; Sapience Therapeutics, an ecology incubator in Harrison; and Packaging Technologies & Inspection, an advanced manufacturing company in Hawthorne, which just increased its space in the county.

But wait, there’s more, including a flurry of major moves during the pandemic.

S2 March 22, 2021 P011_018_CN_20210322.indd 12

During the fall, Clarapath, a medical robotics company that grew at the New York Genome Center in SoHo, signed an office lease for 7,000 square feet for a new corporate headquarters in the Robert Martin Company’s Mid-Westchester Executive Park in Hawthorne.

Clarapath creates robotic tools that act as the eye, hand and brain of a traditional lab technician to provide better quality biopsy slides, faster turnaround times and lower costs for laboratories. It is developing a technology called SectionStar in close concert with Northwell Health, which is an investor in the company. Clarapath will use the new space for the development and light manufacturing of its technology, CEO Eric Feinstein says.

“Westchester has all the tools,” he says.

Bridget Gibbons, Westchester’s director of economic development, agrees, which is why the county is bringing new focus to the issue.

“The county had been all over the place with workforce development,” Gibbon says. After researching the matter, she says, Westchester found data on where companies were heading and where the county could best put human and capital resources to help them expand their workforce.

As a result, the Office of Economic Development now has a “sector-based workforce development program” that focuses on four crucial areas. It is starting with biotech and advanced manufacturing, and it will soon expand to financial technology, known

colloquially as fintech, and clean energy.

“We really want to push and grow these sectors,” Gibbons says. “Those four sectors had two key elements.

They offer well-paying jobs, and they are resilient—they not only survived but thrived, even during the pandemic.”

Westchester’s business incubator, now in its third year, is giving strong preferences to these four key sectors, especially fintech, Gibbon says.

“We want to really connect the businesses that are here,” she says.

The county’s Office of Economic Development is establishing task forces in each sector, working with businesses in those fields, other local business leaders and workforce experts to spotlight what areas need the most attention and how to best serve those sectors.

“That will build awareness of our depth and help attract new businesses,” Gibbons says. “We are getting advice on the issues that are preventing the companies and the county overall from growing—the need to have certain positions filled. For instance, in advanced manufacturing we need

outward-facing element as well.

“We have a great story to tell— Westchester County is the largest biotech employer in the state—but we’ve recently learned that people think we’re full, that there isn’t space for offices and labs,” she says.

There is, of course, room for growth, as the recent moves by Clarapath and Regeneron clearly demonstrate.

“We are putting together a video to showcase our properties and to tell the story that we are open for business,” Gibbons says. “When we get on people’s radar, I believe the sky’s the limit.”

The plans for fintech and clean energy are still in the early stages, but they are ambitious too.

Gibbons says she believes that because New York City is such a center for fintech, Westchester can become a “fintech innovation hub,” behaving like an incubator and attracting startups that would benefit from being close to New York but need a less expensive or more spacious alternative. The energy focus will be on creating a workforce with the skills to work on wind energy, which is a priority for the state, she says.

“We want to really connect the businesses that are here.”

- Bridget Gibbons, Westchester’s director of economic development

more engineers and machinists. It’s about building out the ecosystems. We are going to roll up our sleeves and solve those problems.”

In addressing those issues, the Business Council’s Gordon says, the county’s colleges and universities can play a crucial role.

While much of the emphasis is on developing a new workforce in the county, Gibbons says, there is an

“The concept of a sector-based strategy for workforce development is a winning strategy,” the Council of Industry’s King says, adding that these clusters will “ripple out to produce a strong economy.”

Barry Kappel, founder and CEO of Sapience Therapeutics, agrees. Kappel, who sits on the Biosciences Taskforce, says that each segment has its issues.

(Continued on S4)

Regeneron Pharmaceuticals announced a new plan in February.

The company, which Latimer calls “the role model for taking something small and making it big in Westchester,” is the county’s most vital player in the biotech space, and it keeps growing.

The company proposed a 207,000-square-foot laboratory at its 250-acre Eastview campus in Greenburgh. The work there would include producing proteins used in research and production. Proteins were used in creating Regeneron’s Covid-19 monoclonal antibody cocktail.

But for companies such as these to succeed they need a well-trained, diverse workforce that cuts across various fields.

“For instance, health care companies need people to work in areas like electronic records management,

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SPOTLIGHT on WESTCHESTER with an interest in workforce issues to help it launch the Westchester Workforce Funders Collaborative. It aims to find solutions for employers while preparing people for jobs with a future.

“We want to take on the role that only philanthropy can,” says Laura Rossi, the foundation’s executive director. “We looked at best practices nationally to foster conversation locally. We want to bring employers into the job training process and engage them at the table, so they are invested in its success.”

Young leaders through the Westchester Community Foundation tour New Rochelle Water Treatment Plant to learn about state-of-the-art water filtration technology and environmental careers (February 2020) “We are a very specific industry,” Kappel says, “so we have different needs and require different incentives than the others.”

“The county will act as a concierge and connect companies to services,” King says. “For instance, Westchester County Community College has some tremendous programs not everyone knows about, so the county can help connect the dots.”

Kappel says the meetings have just begun, but there’s a sense of urgency, a desire to “get to concrete recommendations in short order.”

S4 March 22, 2021 P011_018_CN_20210322.indd 14

Latimer says all this will take years to come to fruition, but the county executive is confident that Westchester’s infrastructure will help build an effective workforce.

“It will take time to do it,” Kappel agrees, “but this is the time to start the process.”

It’s not just the county that’s working hard on developing the workforce, and the focus is not just on the highestpaying jobs.

Last year the Westchester Community Foundation brought together funders

In the past few years, the foundation has held meetings and brought together research and data. It has attracted funders and put out a request for proposals to find organizations to provide grants. The goal was to look at how the workforce ecosystem was functioning and how it could be done differently, Rossi says, “and it led to good solid proposals.”

“We are planting seeds that will work,” she says. “They will create better outcomes, and the data and research are as important as the dollars.”

The Collaborative’s 2020 Career Pathways grants of $100,000 each were awarded to young people in Yonkers, Mount Vernon and New Rochelle for programming. Westchester Community College is working with its training partner, Local 1199 of

the Service Employees International Union Funds, to recruit and train students in an 11-week boot camp for health care occupations. Graduates will have a four-week externship-job shadowing experience at a Montefiore hospital or health care facility and an opportunity to interview with employer partners Burke Rehabilitation Hospital, Montefiore Medical Center and Wartburg, a retirement community and nursing home.

Meanwhile, through a comprehensive community development approach, Westhab, a nonprofit housing agency based in Yonkers that works to break the cycle of poverty, is training 90 people for construction careers. Participants will receive industry-recognized certifications and advanced training once they are employed. Employer partners are L+M Development Partners and Queen City Recycling Center & FDL Management.

Rossi says that after the pandemic outbreak last year, she asked all the recipients to modify their plans for remote learning.

“They made the changes,” she says, “and it heightened their sense of commitment.”

The Foundation has long tackled problems with an equity lens even

beyond the scope of these grants.

It focuses on barriers facing job seekers like limited public transit access, housing affordability, and access to quality childcare. “We do a lot of policy work in those areas, fostering conversations between different groups,” Rossi says, “so that for instance, when a bus system is being redesigned, the people doing the work hear the voices of the home health care workers who ride the bus. These quality of life issues are vital.”

H

After the pandemic revealed deep inequities and after the protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd, “we began having those conversations again, but in new ways.

For instance, in the IT sector, we had focused our workforce development on gender equity but now we are renewing our focus to ensure that people of color also have access in this field.”

In the coming months the organization will take stock of the existing grants and the impact they have had. It will then meet with its funders—and new funders are always welcome, Rossi says—to map out the future.

“We are very committed,” she says.

“We need to grow in this area now more than ever.”

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“I see a lot of cranes in Yonkers, White Plains and New Rochelle,” Westchester County Executive George Latimer says. “There are a lot of construction projects, especially in the southern parts of the county, and what I see on the books is that we will have a market that will support it.”

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“2020 was an enormously challenging year in almost every regard, yet the pandemic had almost no impact on economic development,” says New Rochelle Mayor Noam Bramson, whose city has more than 30 approved projects that will within the next few years add 12,000-15,000 residents to the city of 80,000.

“No one pulled out of any of our ongoing construction deals, and some construction even continued throughout the year. Some are leasing up right now.”

While all that construction represents a hopeful future, the year of the pandemic has—in real estate terms— been a boon for Westchester.

“Housing sales were robust and apartments at all price levels were moving quickly,” says Marsha Gordon, the president and chief executive officer of the Business Council of Westchester. In recent years the county was fortunate, with development and the housing market, to be ahead of the curve, Gordon says.

Much of the county’s growth has come from people leaving New York City, where the density has felt dangerous since the first days of the pandemic.

Low interest rates and a strong stock market also were major contributors to the dramatic shift.

In Westchester, where housing construction had been lagging before the pandemic, supply has actually had a tough time keeping pace with demand across the board. Bridget Gibbons, the county’s director of economic development, says the residential market has been “on fire.”

(Continued on S6)

March 22, 2021 S5 3/18/21 9:21 AM

SPOTLIGHT on WESTCHESTER “People are buying houses sight unseen, and the rental market is also very competitive, with apartments sometimes not staying on the market for even a day,” Gibbons says. “I keep hearing Realtors say, ‘I wish we had more.’”

That’s true in the county’s largest cities and in its small towns.

Ken Wray, the mayor of Sleepy Hollow, says he’s hearing the same comments

“It seems like every home that does come on the market in Sleepy Hollow sold in five days or started a bidding war,” Wray says.

many seniors took advantage of the opportunity of a booming market to downsize out of their large homes and move into nearby apartments.

A study from the county’s major real estate firm, Houlihan Lawrence, found that 2020 featured year-to-year growth of 13.6% in homes sold, with the median sale price climbing 11.5%, to $947,000. The Douglas Elliman real estate brokerage reported recently that the busiest bracket has been for

The end-of-the-year growth was particularly sharp after a solid first quarter, but one that was largely pandemic free, and a second quarter in which people were locked down for much of the time, causing a steep yearto-year drop in sales of more than 20%.

The biggest numbers came in the fourth quarter, with sales climbing by more than 50% and the average price jumping by nearly 20%. Significantly, with people expecting to work from home into the future, the study showed that northern Westchester, with a more forbidding commute to Manhattan than from the south, experienced some of the highest increases in home purchases.

The biggest question, of course, is whether the residential surge might recede as life returns to normal, especially in New York City with its offices and endless cultural attractions and restaurants.

Kayaking in New Rochelle

from brokers about how there just isn’t enough product in the town to satisfy all the house hunters.

houses priced between $1 million and $2 million. Not everyone who sold moved away, Gordon says, noting that

Gordon of the Business Council says some of the renters in apartments may be temporary, but all of the buyers “are new residents who are here to stay.”

As to whether the pace will continue, Latimer acknowledges it likely will

slow, but he says that even before the pandemic, the skyrocketing costs in Manhattan and Brooklyn were boosting suburbs such as Westchester.

He expects that as the city’s real estate market bounces back, that trend will continue.

“The jury is still out on how much of this is a permanent shift in preferences and practices,” New Rochelle’s Bramson says. But the mayor says that even if the jump in sales last year was outsized, people will continue to look for housing.

“I’m confident in the appeal of our housing markets assets,” he says.

Gibbons says that the construction boom will not slow down. “Even before the pandemic there was a need for housing in the county—for many years there had not been a lot of construction and we were just getting going before the pandemic, so when the economy starts roaring back after this, I expect more,” the economic development director says.

The new construction and all this growth are vital to individual towns, the county and beyond, Bramson says. “If the New York metropolitan region is to remain competitive in the marketplace,” the mayor says, “it’s not reasonable to expect the five boroughs to support all the necessary growth.”

But while Gibbons adds that many city-based companies may move part or all of their workforce out of the city as America moves toward a more flexible workplace life, everyone emphasizes that Westchester’s growth will not—indeed cannot—come at the expense of a successful Gotham.

“I do think large cities will recover, and that’s a good thing,” Bramson says.

“We move in connection with, not in counterpoint to, New York City.”

“The vibrancy of New York City matters to the whole region,” Latimer agrees. “Westchester cannot succeed unless New York City succeeds.”

While climbing prices are good for sellers and a sign of confidence in Westchester’s future, Latimer wants the county to keep its eye on the bigger picture.

“We have a lot of work to do on affordable housing,” the county executive says, explaining that maintaining socioeconomic diversity is essential.

Countywide, Latimer’s push represents a marked change from the previous administration, which fought against affordable housing in the courts and lost. The 1,400 units happening now nearly double the

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entire total of Latimer’s predecessor, but Latimer says that’s not enough — a recent study shows the county needs 11,000 new affordable housing units.

Affordable housing is one area where the coronavirus had a negative impact, the county executive says, making it tougher to put together financing packages for projects. The pandemic came on top of years in which affordable housing in the suburbs came under attack from President Donald Trump.

“That [criticism] just showed Trump’s lack of knowledge about life in the suburbs—we have teachers, nurses and firefighters who can’t afford marketrate housing here,” Latimer says.

“Affordable” housing still ain’t cheap— it’s mostly at 80% of the county’s median income, which is quite high.

Latimer would like to build affordable housing aimed at families earning 50% or less of the median income.

The county executive hopes that state and, with the recent change of administrations in Washington, federal money can help make more units a reality.

That is “absolutely essential,” the Business Council’s Gordon says. “We need housing at all different levels

for the workforce that is here and for more people.”

While commercial real estate has been very quiet, Gibbons says, the housing boom will have an impact on business in Westchester in a different way, providing more customers for stores, restaurants and cultural attractions, although the economic development director says that while she expects outdoor cultural attractions to thrive during the summer, indoor attractions will lag a bit.

“There are very positive signs for hospitality and retail,” Gordon agrees.

“Many young families are coming in and want to be part of the community as it reopens, and that’s very good news for restaurants and shopping, the sectors that suffered the most during the pandemic.”

Bramson says tower construction is always ahead of street level activity but that has been exacerbated by the pandemic, which closed many restaurants and halted potential openings. Still, the New Rochelle mayor thinks the combination of housing and retail, services and restaurants will ultimately have a huge impact on the composition of his city’s downtown.

All these changes are not just happening in New Rochelle, Yonkers

and White Plains, Latimer says, they are happening throughout the county, in municipalities large and small. While smaller villages may not want to build high-rises that would feel out of character, he says, many are taking alternate routes to adding housing stock, such as converting old warehouses into lofts.

In the northwestern corner of the county, Cortlandt has a population of almost 40,000. The town includes the incorporated villages of Buchanan and Croton-on-Hudson and several hamlets. The town’s largest taxpayer and employer, the Indian Point nuclear power plant, is on the verge of closing.

That will take a big bite from the municipal and school district budgets, Cortlandt Supervisor Linda Puglisi says. But the town is surviving and adapting, developing opportunities for retail, green energy and other jobgenerating avenues, Puglisi says. In addition, she says, there’s a new indoor soccer facility and talk of an indoor skating rink to appeal to families drawn to the area’s open space.

going to overlook traffic studies or environmental impact [studies], but we want to fast-track projects and make the town user-friendly.”

Puglisi points to Pondview Commons, a soon-to-open development of 60 rental apartments next to a shopping center (on the former site of some bungalows) and a new proposal for 200 units near the train station as signs that Cortlandt’s future looks bright.

In Sleepy Hollow, meanwhile, the Edgeon-Hudson project will add about 2,500 people to the town when it is finished in four years, Wray says.

“In a town of 10,000 people,” the mayor says, “that’s a big jump.”

“This fall we will start issuing certificates of occupancy for townhouses and we’ll see the first rentals and it will start to grow quickly,” Wray says, adding that the school system in Sleepy Hollow and Tarrytown anticipated the growth and has rebuilt the middle and high schools.

The town’s public works agency is building a facility, the mayor says, and it has just started a “soup-to-nuts study of public works” that will ensure best practices for manageable growth.

“We are in good shape,” Wray says.

Croton streetscape

Credit: Bill Powers/ PowersPR

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“Our housing market is still pretty good,” Puglisi says. “We amended our zoning code, including making the Town Board the lead agent on requests, to shorten the time [for] approval for developers. We’re not

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SPOTLIGHT on WESTCHESTER

Westchester Opens its Doors With Open Spaces

The campaign proved to be perfectly timed—and not because the pandemic was worse than anyone feared.

Beyond Expectations was built around highlighting Westchester’s natural beauty and stunning vistas, its nearly 50,000 acres of open space and parkland. The campaign, in other words, centered on a tourist setting designed for safe fun and social distancing.

“The outdoors is what makes Westchester special as a getaway for New Yorkers or for people visiting the city,” says Natasha Caputo, director of the county Tourism and Film Office.

“This [the campaign] also illustrates our quality of life and makes people want to come and live here.”

“Our parks are being cherished,” adds Bridget Gibbons, the county’s director of economic development. Since the pandemic, she says, they’ve been “a lifeline for a lot of people.”

Of course, Westchester still has plenty of other attractions, from

Rye Playland, Grand Prix New York Racing & Entertainment in Mount Kisco and the Legoland Discovery Center in Yonkers to historic mansions, such as Lyndhurst (the Jay Gould Estate) and Kykuit (the John D. Rockefeller estate). There are places for live music (the Capitol Theatre, the Caramoor Center for Music and Arts), live theater (Arc Stages, the Axial Theatre, the Hudson Stage Company) and art-house films (the Jacob Burns Film Center, the Pelham Picture House and the Bedford Playhouse).

Those attractions were all ingredients in making tourism a $2 billion industry for the county, with 2019 being a record-setting year. But for the past 18 months the emphasis has been on all that outdoor beauty, from the Untermyer Gardens Conservancy to the Mianus River Gorge Preserve to Croton Gorge Park.

Gibbons adds that the county has embraced restoring funds to the Hilltop Hanover Farm and Environmental Center. The county helps run the farm and center, which is dedicated to the development and advancement of sustainable agriculture and environmental stewardship.

With the county being home to a beef farm and an alpaca farm, Caputo says, she is introducing a Westchester Makers component to promote local tourism.

organizations pledge a commitment to smart and safe practices and protocols.

“This is the new way of doing business,” Caputo says.

County Executive George Latimer says Westchester plays up its place as part of the Hudson Valley region, which includes the attractions in neighboring counties.

Doing business in bringing people to Westchester involves doing business.

Caputo is working to bring back the meetings and events that, prepandemic, drew large groups to hotels and generated a notable economic impact.

“If you want to get away from New York for the weekend,” Latimer says, “we have a lot to offer, and the Hudson Valley region is the way people see us, not ending things along the dotted lines of a county.”

Caputo expects tourism numbers to rebound during the spring and summer.

The first step is creating a public reminder that Westchester awaits.

In June the nationally televised Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show will move to an outdoor location

at the historic Lyndhurst Estate in Tarrytown. In August the United States Golf Association’s Women’s Amateur tournament will be held at the Westchester Country Club.

Film production also is returning to the county, Caputo says, specifically to the Lionsgate sound stages in Yonkers and sound stages in Tarrytown and Mount Vernon.

“Film generated $45 million in 2019,” Caputo says, adding the comeback has already begun with productions such as “Succession” and “City On a Hill.”

“This is big business for us,” she says.

“We expect a slow and steady recovery, with waves of improvement in terms of visitors as vaccine numbers grow and confidence returns,” she says.

Caputo foresees locals, their friends and family returning to the county first, then people taking local road trips to avoid quarantine issues.

“There is a pent-up demand,” she says.

The county has launched a new initiative, Westchester with Care, in which local businesses and

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MARCH 22, 2021 | CRAIN’S NEW YORK BUSINESS | 19

“

I MADE MYSELF PROMISE THAT NEVER AGAIN WOULD I REGRET A SINGLE MOMENT OF MY LIFE. I HAD TO PUSH MYSELF TOWARD OPPORTUNITIES AND GO FOR THINGS”

Andrew Rigie, 38 Executive director, New York City Hospitality Alliance

P

eople travel from all corners of the world to get a taste of New York City’s dining scene. When restaurants all but disappeared in March 2020 amid the pandemic, Andrew Rigie gave them a voice.

As the head of the New York City Hospitality Alliance, he’s spent the last year advocating, educating and supporting the industry while participating in Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Covid-19 advisory committees on the best ways to help small businesses get through the crisis.

That includes pushing for the outdoor dining program and capping fees from third-party delivery services as well as providing education and training on matters such as labor law and food safety compliance.

“I answer a lot of questions, especially now,” Rigie said. “I call myself a restaurateur-therapist.”

Through forced closures, limited capacity and a difficult winter, the industry has taken a beating.

More than 90% of the city’s restaurants were unable to pay full rent in December, and employment fell by 43% during 2020.

Rigie was born into the food business. “It’s in my DNA,” he said. His great-grandparents owned bakeries and cafes in Brooklyn and Queens called Duval’s and the Sugarbun Bakeshop, respectively.

“When I was 5 years old, I remember going into the bakery at 4:30 a.m. with my grandfather to roll rugelach,” Rigie said, adding that he often took naps on big bags of flour.

“The restaurant industry is vital to the economic, social and cultural fabric of the city,” he said. “It’s why people come — NATALIE SACHMECHI here.”

“

Tiffany Pham, 34 Founder and CEO, Mogul

W

hile working in business development for CBS and producing films as a 27-year-old in 2014, Tiffany Pham imagined a professional networking platform for women. She didn’t have the resources to hire an engineering team, so she taught herself to code and launched the initial version of her vision on her own.

“After weeks I had the first—very ugly—version of Mogul,” Pham said. “But I was so proud because I built it with my own two hands.”

Today the company is a diversity-focused recruiting platform. Pham said it has helped fill positions for more than 400 corporate partners including Amazon, Hearst, IBM and Nike. SoftBank, the largest technology investor in the world, invested in Mogul last year.

To expand the firm from her vision into the global platform it is today required “a willingness to move into areas and challenges that are not as comfortable but where I could grow,” Pham said.

Since starting the company, Pham has written two books, You Are a Mogul and Girl Mogul.

Her willingness to move into unfamiliar territory comes from her experience growing up often feeling like an outsider, she said. She spent her early childhood in Vietnam and Paris before moving to Plano, Texas, not knowing any English. She excelled in her studies and went on to attend Yale and then Harvard Business School.

She initially was reserved while attending Yale, she said, and missed out on opportunities because of it—something she has vowed not to let happen during her professional life.

“I made myself promise that never again would I regret a single moment of my life,” she said. “I had to push myself toward opportunities and go for things.”

— RYAN DEFFENBAUGH

20 | CRAIN’S NEW YORK BUSINESS | MARCH 22, 2021

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Nancy Wu, 27 Economist, StreetEasy

A

s an economist at StreetEasy, the online real estate marketplace, Nancy Wu is a gatekeeper to some of the most important industry information in New York City.

When the pandemic hit and landlords and residents were in a frenzy, Wu was analyzing the numbers and putting out detailed reports to bring transparency to the market.

“It’s been an extremely interesting time to be an economist,” Wu said. "The pandemic has spurred so many questions about the real estate market, and it’s been exciting to use data to fill that void.”

One of her early reports highlighted the impact of Covid-19 on inequality in the city. She discovered that rents were falling more in upscale neighborhoods that were less impacted by the virus. They were rising in lower-income areas that had more cases, because those residents had fewer opportunities to leave the city, she found.

Wu has been able to use real-time StreetEasy data to help the mayor’s office plan the city’s recovery and assist landlords and tenants.

Born in Shenyang, China, Wu immigrated with her parents when she was 6. Prior to joining StreetEasy in 2018, she worked in Nera Economic Consulting’s finance practice, and she had an internship at the White House.

The pandemic has illustrated how powerful data can be for storytelling, she said, adding that she’d like to continue using economic data to show trends in neighborhoods that tend to get overlooked.

Brian Long, 36

— NATALIE SACHMECHI

CEO and co-founder, Attentive

S

even years ago Brian Long sold his first ad-tech venture for a reported $100 million. Investors value his latest startup at 20 times that.

Long is the leader of Attentive, which Coach, Urban Outfitters and hundreds of other retailers rely on to reach customers by text. The business grew rapidly in 2020 as the pandemic pushed retailers to seek new ways of making digital sales. The Flatiron District–based firm raised $340 million from investors in three separate deals in 2020; the final round valued it at $2.2 billion. The company hired two-thirds of its 550 employees last year, with the company operating remotely.

This is the second act of entrepreneurship from Long. He sold his first startup, TapCommerce, to Twitter for a reported $100 million in 2014. He was named a senior director at the social media company and left two years later for Attentive.

“Twitter is a great company,” Long said, “but I wanted to get back to where I could build new things.”

The company gave Long the chance to work again with members of his team from TapCommerce, including Andrew Jones, his co-founder and the product leader at both TapCommerce and Attentive.

Long saw through Twitter that people sought to receive messages from brands directly, but he recognized that text messaging offered a much larger reach than social media. Texts are especially effective ads because customers must opt in to receive them. (Federal law prohibits unsolicited text advertising.)

The firm launched in 2017. Long was unsure if customers of its first client, e-retailer BustedTees, would sign up for the messaging.

“We were blown away when just an incredible amount of people signed up and were clicking, interacting, messaging,” Long said. “I remember turning to our team and saying, ‘Well, I guess it works.’ ” — RYAN DEFFENBAUGH

Jessica Santana, 32 Co-founder and CEO, America on Tech

J

essica Santana was just 16 when she became a tech entrepreneur, customizing MySpace pages for her friends—and charging them $20 for the service.

Fast-forward to today and she is building a pathway into the tech industry for others like herself who grew up in communities with little access to technology, much less careers in tech. The 32-year-old, who grew up in public housing, is the daughter of Puerto Rican parents and a product of the New York City public school system.

Her ultimate goal: to help reduce the wealth gap between low-income Black and Hispanic communities— and the rest of America.

“I felt that if I could bridge the gap with what it takes to get a job in tech, then more people would be eligible for these types of positions,” said Santana, who after college and graduate school worked as a tech consultant at Deloitte and Accenture. “The talent is there—the opportunity is not.”

The Brooklyn native launched her nonprofit, tuition-free training program in 2014 as New York on Tech and went national in 2019. She now serves as the co-founder and chief executive of America on Tech.

Today, with 15 full-time employees and 30 contract workers, AOT trains high school students and young adults in three tech programs, including a six-week summer boot camp. The money comes from foundations and corporations, including The New York Community Trust, Robinhood, Capital One and NBC Universal.

Of the more than 3,000 high schoolers and young adults who have gone through AOT’s programs, more than 85% have embarked upon two- or four-year programs majoring in computer science or information systems, Santana said.

Santana, a Tedx speaker and the recipient of numerous awards for her work with AOT, envisions a world in which tech skills are considered as basic as reading and math.

“The one thing we really want to make sure we do is create a national talent strategy ensuring that digital skills are at the forefront of every young person’s education,” she said.

— JUDY MESSINA

22 | CRAIN’S NEW YORK BUSINESS | MARCH 22, 2021

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— TAGLINE

Dr. Alexi Nazem, 38 Co-founder and CEO, Nomad Health

T

he traditional way health care providers were matched with temporary positions was an incredibly frustrating one, said Dr. Alexi Nazem, co-founder and CEO of Nomad Health, which helps hospitals find qualified nurses for short-term assignments.

Medical staffing agencies cold-called individuals, hoping someone would be available, then they had to verify credentials.

Nazem’s own experience was dismal. “I had to turn in a 94-page application, and this was for a three-day job,” he said. “That didn’t make sense in the modern world. There’s no way the future of this sector didn’t involve a tech solution.”

Nazem and his co-founders realized a tech marketplace that verified qualified providers was an obvious solution. Within weeks of getting together in 2015, they founded Nomad.

Looking back, it was no surprise the health care staffing sector had been slow to adapt to change. “Rapid change is not something you hear often in this area,” he explained.

Nomad’s embrace of marketplace technology has allowed cost savings that can be passed on to the nurses on its platform, Nazem said. “By becoming more efficient than our people-powered competitors, we can pay our nurses more, and they’re the most important stakeholder for us,” he said.

But there are plenty of nooks and crannies in this industry that can be transformed by technology, Nazem said. “Onboarding, scheduling and management—all these could use an infusion of tech. There’s plenty of wood left to be chopped.”

—SHUAN SIM

Robert S. Harvey, 31

“

Chief academic officer, East Harlem Tutorial Program; superintendent, East Harlem Scholars Academies

I FELT THAT IF I COULD BRIDGE THE GAP WITH WHAT IT TAKES TO GET A JOB IN TECH, THEN MORE PEOPLE WOULD BE ELIGIBLE FOR THESE TYPES OF POSITIONS”

R

obert S. Harvey describes the rationale for what he is trying to accomplish as an educator as “radical humanity.”

“That has become the marching order of every job I’ve had,” Harvey said. “How will it better humanity? If the answer is ambiguous, nuanced or vague, I don’t pursue it.”

Harvey is superintendent of East Harlem Scholars Academies, a network of five charter schools with 1,500-plus students from kindergarten to high school, and chief academic officer of its founding organization, the East Harlem Tutorial Program. Since he joined East Harlem two years ago, he and his team have increased enrollment by 15%, overhauled the curriculum, tripled the number of early childhood sections, doubled the size of the East Harlem teaching residency for young educators and launched a high school on a model that Harvey describes as “love, liberate and heal.”

“We’re taking a novel approach,” Harvey said. “We have built an entire high school at the intersection of racial justice, project-based learning and liberatory education.”

The teacher, minister, author and educator previously headed Star Academy Preparatory School in Memphis, and he was chief operating officer of Simmons College of Kentucky. At both institutions, he grew enrollment and philanthropy.

The multitalented Harvey once considered going to medical school. He was accepted at Dartmouth, but education won out as he thought about “the greatest impact I could have in the world and where I felt most alive.”

In addition to his work at East Harlem, he is on the boards of the Hope Center, the National Black Theater and the Black Center for Equity and Justice. He is a member of the youth and education and housing committees of Manhattan Community Board 11.

His book, Abolitionist Leadership in Schools: Undoing Systemic Injustice Through Communally Conscious Education (Routledge), is due out in April.

On his to-do list: “We want to serve 25% of all students in East Harlem by 2025.”

— JUDY MESSINA MARCH 22, 2021 | CRAIN’S NEW YORK BUSINESS | 23

“

IF I FEEL LIKE I HAVE A SOLUTION, I’M EXCITED TO USE MY HANDS AND BUILD IT”

Carlina Rivera, 37 Member, City Council

C Brynn Putnam, 37 Founder and CEO, Mirror

B

rynn Putnam, a former New York City Ballet dancer with a Russian literature degree from Harvard, has an ace student’s curiosity and a ballerina’s focus and discipline. That turned out to be what she needed to launch Mirror, an interactive fitness system that provides workout classes through a 52-inch-by-21-inch

mirror.

Putnam built the product and the company from the ground up and sold it last year to Lululemon for $500 million. She now runs it as a subsidiary of the sportswear powerhouse.

“I really didn’t set out to become an entrepreneur,” Putnam said. “But I’m definitely someone who always sees problems—and if I feel like I have a solution, I’m excited to use my hands and build it.”

The problem she saw was how to provide the biggest variety of fitness classes in the smallest possible space. Putnam already had a prototype—a fitness studio mini chain she founded in 2010. It used a compact weights-and-pulleys system she designed herself that could be folded up when not in use.

In 2016 Putnam was pregnant and suffering from morning sickness. She needed to work out at home—and realized a mirror could provide the ultimate compact venue for everything from boxing to yoga lessons.

She created a demo using an LCD screen behind one-way glass—and signed the term sheet for Mirror’s first funding round the day she gave birth to her son, George.

Mirror’s revenue topped $150 million last year.

“She’s excelled at everything she’s ever done,” said angel investor David Tisch, whose BoxGroup was among Mirror’s first backers. “The demo unit she built was one of the single best demos I’ve seen. She did it with limited resources and a limited team, and it was — MATTHEW FLAMM magical.”

24 | CRAIN’S NEW YORK BUSINESS | MARCH 22, 2021

arlina Rivera is a Lower East Side success story. After she and her sister grew up in Section 8 housing with their single mother, she began volunteering for community development campaigns on Delancey Street when she was fresh out of college.

Rivera joined the community board and organized for tenant rights in Alphabet City. Then she served as director of legislation for Rosie Méndez, her predecessor in the 2nd council district. At age 33, she won a six-way Democratic primary with 61% of the vote to represent the neighborhood she calls home.

“I’ve pretty much spent my entire life south of 14th Street,” Rivera said. “I know my community, and I know the issues.”

Besides the Lower East Side, her district encompasses Gramercy, Union Square, the Flatiron District, the East Village and Murray Hill.

Rivera has fought for issues as diverse as safe routes for cyclists, a busway across 14th Street and Open Streets legislation for small businesses.

She has supported bills to make sexual harassment a recognized form of discrimination; to regulate short-term rentals, which limit the city’s housing stock; and to create privacy rooms in workplaces for pregnant women and new mothers.

“I’m hoping to build on some of my accomplishments,” she said.

As chairwoman of the council’s hospitals committee, Rivera said she is aiming to craft a five-borough resiliency plan that increases the city’s defenses against natural disasters and pandemics.

“It’s PPE supplies, a standard contact-tracing plan and making sure our community health facilities have what they need,” she said. “All the things we wish we had done to prepare us for Covid-19.”

— BRIAN PASCUS

Haas Khalfan, 31 President, Signs & Decal Corp.

A

business with no sign is a sign of no business. That’s where Haas Khalfan comes in.

He’s president of Signs & Decal Corp., a company whose work directs you to your gate at LaGuardia Airport and to the subway underneath the World Trade Center, among others.

“We work on the largest projects in New York and across the country,” Khalfan said. “Developers and contractors know who we are.”

Khalfan was born into the business. His family ran a company in Tanzania that painted license plates by hand before immigrating in the 1970s. As a 5-year-old, Khalfan would sit on a stool in the corner of the factory in Williamsburg and watch his father work with an estimator to prepare bids.

His father, who left school in Africa when his family could no longer afford to pay the nuns, figured the youngest of his four sons was ready to take over the family business when he turned 18. But Khalfan insisted he go to college first.

“I’m a perfectionist,” he said. “I told dad, ‘I can’t run this without a formal education.’ ” In 2017 he assumed the helm. Today the firm employs 65 people and generates revenue in the eight figures.

The company, which does a lot of work for the city’s public schools, has sailed through the pandemic, but not all its work survived. An attractive edge-lit sign made for the Neiman Marcus store in Hudson Yards came down after the retailer closed.

Khalfan said he is looking forward to people visiting his firm’s signs atop the One Vanderbilt Place observatory.

“They’re illuminated using acrylic and aluminum,” he said. “Really attractive and easy on the eyes.”

— AARON ELSTEIN

We Congratulate Our Friend and Colleague

Linton Mann III on His Recognition Among Crain’s “40 Under 40” N E W YOR K

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MARCH 22, 2021 | CRAIN’S NEW YORK BUSINESS | 25

Paul Suhey, 29 Chief operating officer, Revel

T

he youngest of four children, Paul Suhey has fond memories of riding around Brooklyn on the back of his brother’s Vespa during college breaks. Those outings sparked his fascination with mopeds—which grew during his travels abroad.

In 2018 Suhey co-founded Revel, a moped-sharing company that now operates 6,000 electric vehicles across the U.S. At the time, he was finishing a job in Gerson Lehrman’s energy group, where he was focused on investment strategies in the clean-transportation sector. He had planned to get a doctorate in chemical engineering. But when the idea for an electric-vehicle startup came to him, he shifted gears.

“I was talking about next steps with [Revel co-founder] Frank Reig, and he brought me this idea of a moped-sharing business,” Suhey said. “Six months later we had vehicles on the road.”

The company began with a small pilot of 68 mopeds in Brooklyn, where Revel is based. Through the Revel app, users rent mopeds and find fast-charging stations. Revel currently has 3,000 scooters in four New York boroughs. The other 3,000 are in Miami, Washington and the Bay Area in California.

Revel hit a speed bump last year when three of its riders died in collisions. It suspended operations for about a month while it upgraded safety protocols, but the company is still facing several lawsuits and city officials are considering imposing new moped regulations.

Suhey designed Revel to run independent of the gig economy. The company’s infrastructure and operations are in-house, including tech support, customer service, field operations and a team of mechanics. Revel has raised $60 million.

“We are on the edge of a transformation,” Suhey said. “It’s happening a lot faster than people think. I am excited to see how the city adopts electric transportation in the next two years—not 10 years.”

— DIANE HESS

Laura Fruitman, 36 General manager, The Right to Shower; entrepreneur in residence, Unilever

G

rowing up in New York, Laura Fruitman was used to seeing homeless people on the street and in the shelters where she did community service. But it was when she was working at Unilever as senior brand manager for Dove cleansing products that her social-entrepreneurial instincts kicked in.

“I thought about the transformative experience of a shower and what can it do for your sense of selfworth,” Fruitman said. “We think about food and shelter if someone is living on the street, but how do you go to a job interview and have a sense of dignity if you don’t have a shower?”

Thus was born Fruitman’s idea for Unilever’s first social-enterprise brand, The Right to Shower.

Launched in 2019, The Right to Shower is a line of bar soaps and body washes whose profits help homeless people attend to their health and reclaim some dignity. Right to Shower products are sold by Amazon and at CVS, Whole Foods and other retailers. The brand works with organizations including San Francisco’s Lava Mae—which provides mobile showers and hand-washing stations—and 30% of its profits go to such initiatives.

Fruitman is leading the creation of new Unilever brands and business models in beauty and personal care. She also is working, she said, on a sustainability project and has grown passionate about harnessing brands to help drive change.

“If we can take something like a soap purchase and help make an impact on the world, we should do — JUDY MESSINA all of that,” she said. “I’m here to help leave the world a better place than I found it.”

Shivani Poddar, 37 Litigation partner, Herrick, Feinstein

S

hivani Poddar loves to solve complex legal problems for her clients in her role as a litigation partner at Herrick, Feinstein.

Poddar currently represents 95 individuals and institutions in a case involving now-defunct hedge funds. The plaintiffs invested $95 million and have named the funds’ auditors and administrator as defendants. The plaintiffs are claiming breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty and negligence.

“Each matter poses a unique challenge,” Poddar said, “and it’s very exciting to tackle them all.”

Poddar cut her teeth doing commercial litigation at Brown Rudnick before arriving at Herrick almost five years ago. Since then, she has expanded her practice to include employment and real estate litigation.

In each case, Poddar said, she considers her client’s business strategy and goals.

“I think about whether or not they want to be in a long litigation or resolve the case quickly,” she said. “I always have my business hat on.”

Poddar moved to the United States from India when she was 6. Her family’s close-knit structure has helped her in life, she

26 | CRAIN’S NEW YORK BUSINESS | MARCH 22, 2021

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illian Rose joined Hospital for Special surgery as a coordinator for lupus support and education 16 years ago, but she started her path as a champion for diversity and equity on day one.

During her orientation, Rose expressed concern that the sessions could have been more inclusive. The human resources department approached her afterward.

“I thought, Oh, no, I’m in trouble now, and I only just joined this organization,” she recalled. But the HR person welcomed her suggestions and offered Rose a part in shaping inclusivity competency at the hospital.

Rose also works to ensure patients’ voices are heard. She remembers a case in which a clinician wanted to put a patient on steroidal injections rather than rehabilitation, because the patient had been habitually late for the sessions. But Rose spoke with the patient and learned she worked two jobs and had to care for her daughter, which made attending sessions on time difficult.

The patient said she would refuse to take the injections because of a bad experience with them, Rose recalled.

“Doctors need to be invested in the treatment plan so it doesn’t fall apart 15 minutes after the patient leaves the room,” she said.

Five years ago Rose transitioned into her current role, tasked with collecting data on diversity and implementing programming on equity. Leaders at all levels—all the way up to the CEO and chief medical officer—are taking part. Rose emphasizes that health equity is achieved when everyone assumes leadership.

“I might be at the helm as one leader, but it’s the work of all of us,” she said.

— SHUAN SIM

“

ick Gropper’s career in real estate has taken him from an internship at L+M Development Partners to co-founding his own company. But he still describes his initial entry into the industry as an accident.

He was doing fundraising work for Yale University and would regularly take the train back and forth from New Haven to New York City. He happened to sit next to the director of Columbia University’s real estate development program on one ride and was intrigued by what he was working on.

“I ended up applying and getting in without having any idea of what I was getting myself into,” Gropper said of the program, “other than that it sounded cool.”

After graduating with a master’s degree from Columbia, he landed an internship at L+M in 2008 and then co-founded Camber Property Group at the beginning of 2016 with his business partner, Andrew Moelis. The company specializes in developing multifamily affordable housing.

“I really liked the opportunity to do something entrepreneurial and to build a company from the ground up,” Gropper said. “I definitely could have stayed at L+M. It’s a great place. I learned tons of stuff there, but I was ready for a new challenge.”

Camber’s projects include a 136-unit affordable-housing complex at 11 W. 118th St. in Manhattan, a 162-unit affordable-housing complex at 960 Tiffany St. in the Bronx and a 132-unit mixed-income complex at 18-81 Starr St. in Queens. The firm also just completed a major rehabilitation project with L+M and MBD Community Housing Corp. at NYCHA’s Baychester and Murphy Houses in the Bronx.

The company has increased its focus on providing broadband and wireless internet to its tenants amid the pandemic, and despite the widespread impact the virus has had on real estate, Camber still had a good 2020, Gropper said.

“We had one of our best years in terms of transactions and transaction volume,” he noted, “so we were able to continue providing affordable housing, continue creating opportunities for people and families in New York City to live in a quality apartment and pay an affordable rent.”

— EDDIE SMALL — TAGLINE

“

I REALLY LIKED THE OPPORTUNITY TO DO SOMETHING ENTREPRENEURIAL AND TO BUILD A COMPANY FROM THE GROUND UP”

I WANT TO WORK TOWARD DIVERSIFYING THE LEGAL INDUSTRY. DIFFERENT VIEWPOINTS ARE AN ASSET”

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“My family is very collaborative—which lent itself well to my legal career,” Poddar said. “It is how I run my cases. I want to hear a lot of voices.”

Outside her job, Poddar is committed to gender and racial diversity in the legal industry. She is part of the Herrick Women’s Initiative, which is focused on retention and recruitment. She founded Ladies in Law New York to help female lawyers create peer networking opportunities and mentorships. Last year she was elected a Fellow of the Leadership Council on Legal Diversity.

“I want to work toward diversifying the legal industry,” Poddar said.

“Different viewpoints are an asset.”

— TAGLINE — DIANE HESS

MARCH 22, 2021 | CRAIN’S NEW YORK BUSINESS | 27

“

C MY REAL PASSION IS EDUCATING PEOPLE TO MAKE MORE MONEY FOR THEMSELVES”

Jonathan Vazcones, 32 Vice president, community reinvestment, M&T Bank

W

hen business takes Jonathan Vazcones to Connecticut, he sometimes acts like the proverbial in-your-face New Yorker.

“That’s a role I play,” he said.

Neighbors in his native Queens see Vazcones in a different light.

Among the many tragedies wrought by the pandemic, one of the saddest was when undocumented immigrants in crowded apartments did not notify authorities that someone died, leaving the deceased’s body abandoned for days. Vazcones arranged a $50,000 grant to advocacy group Make the Road New York so the dead could get dignified burials.

“This happened in buildings near my parents’ apartment in Corona,” Vazcones said.

Banks are required by law to provide loans and services to all residents of communities where they do business. Vazcones’ job is to make sure M&T is reaching the neediest in the city and the suburbs, as well as the Hudson Valley.

Last year he initiated the bank’s charitable response to Covid-19.

In addition to paying for burials, it meant funneling cash and food to poor people who didn’t qualify for government assistance.

He also created an employee matching-gift program to support the Movement for Black Lives.

Vazcones is a child of immigrants from Ecuador, and grew up in Astoria and attended Queens College. He joined M&T after a stint as a loan officer at the Brooklyn Cooperative Federal Credit Union.

To unwind, he plays saxophone and listens to Stan Getz bossa nova records.

“As a bank, we want to make money, but we also have a civic duty,” he said. “I see my job as an extension of myself.

“I know I’m very lucky to be in a position to say that.”

— AARON ELSTEIN

Sheneya Wilson, 26 Founder and CEO, Fola Financial

W

hile studying accounting at SUNY Morrisville, Sheneya Wilson learned that only 4% of certified public accountants are Black. Wilson, who is of Jamaican and Cuban descent, decided then to pursue an MBA that would give her credits toward a CPA’s license so she could begin to change that percentage.

“That was a big thing to me,” she said. “There’s a very small percentage, and I wanted to directly impact that.”

After a year and a half working at PwC, Wilson decided to strike out on her own.

She started Fola Financial in 2017 with the goal of helping small, individual business owners put themselves on a steady financial footing.

Wilson had heard about a common set of issues plaguing store owners and entrepreneurs. “The biggest thing they were lacking was business acumen and not understanding how to build a strong financial foundation for their businesses.”

At Fola Financial, Wilson advises clients on everything from bookkeeping and tax planning to investing and creating money-saving strategies through a tax-essentials learning program.

“My whole goal was to be a CFO for each of my clients,” she said.

In her first year, advertising mainly through LinkedIn videos, Wilson worked with a couple of interns to serve 30 clients. By year two she had 150 clients. Today the number is over 600. She’s hired two additional CPAs, an executive assistant and a full-time bookkeeper to help her keep up with the growing demand.

“I have a great referral system,” she said. “My real passion is educating people to make more money for themselves.”

— BRIAN PASCUS

28 | CRAIN’S NEW YORK BUSINESS | MARCH 22, 2021

“

IF YOU DON’T HAVE A TECHNOLOGY THAT IS DISRUPTIVE, YOU’RE NOT GOING TO GAIN MOMENTUM AND GET THE CONTRACT”

Crystal Ng, 36 Director of sustainability, Curtis + Ginsberg Architects

S

ustainability has always been important to Curtis + Ginsberg Architects. But the firm took its focus to a new level last year by naming Crystal Ng the first director of sustainability in the company’s 31-year history.

Ng, who earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Southern California in 2007 and a master’s in architecture and urban design from Columbia in 2014, said the industry’s focus on sustainability has steadily increased during her career. The products available to architects looking to design green buildings have steadily improved as well, she said.

“We’re getting new tools now that can inform our design, that are more data-based rather than just guidelines,” she said. “Now we’re being asked to test them in simulations.”

Ng is particularly proud of the first passive building project she worked on at Curtis + Ginsberg: Beach Green Dunes in Far Rockaway, Queens. The project, a block from the Atlantic Ocean, consists of 228 affordable housing units across two buildings. Its environmentally friendly features include solar photovoltaics on the roof, an underground geothermal heating and cooling system, and a bioswale garden to retain and treat stormwater.

“I like the affordable housing realm because you can impact more lives and design some things that will improve the quality of life for everyone,” Ng said. “That relates to sustainability, because if you develop better building materials, better mechanical systems, people can also thrive where they’re living.”

Curtis + Ginsberg clients are typically amenable to making sustainability a priority, and the firm aims to ensure its recommendations for going green don’t drive its clients into the red, Ng said.

“We try to make creative solutions that are also economical and easy to build,” she said. “So you can get the — EDDIE SMALL energy efficiency that you want but also stay within the budget.”

Matt Jozwiak, 33 CEO, Rethink Food

I

t took a chef to envision a radical new approach to food insecurity.

Matt Jozwiak spent years working in top restaurants in Europe and New York. But the hunger he witnessed during his career is what’s at the top of his mind.

“I was broke as a cook,” Jozwiak said. “I lived in rough neighborhoods, and I saw that people were hurting. I saw this juxtaposition while I was serving the wealthiest of the wealthy. There’s so much food waste.”

In response, the accomplished chef founded a nonprofit, Rethink Food, in 2017. It rescues fare from restaurants, corporate kitchens and grocery stores that otherwise would go to waste—not for the typical purpose of delivering pantry items to distribution sites but to transform the food into meals for the hungry.

Rethink has two main components: a commissary that prepares nutritious, culturally appropriate meals for religious organizations, senior centers, after-school programs and homeless shelters and its year-old Rethink Certified program, which provides grants to restaurants to prepare meals for the food insecure in their own neighborhood.

In 2020 the program provided more than 2.5 million meals for some 125 community centers in New York, Chicago, Nashville and San Francisco, with more cities planned. The projection for this year is 4 million meals.

Rethink Certified distributed $10 million last year to about 60 restaurants; the goal for this year is $21 million.

Financial support comes from corporate sponsors, foundations and individuals.

“Matt brings a deep level of passion and authenticity to this work,” said Erin Hill, Rethink’s chief development officer. “These meals provide dignity for someone going through a rough time while also preventing restaurant layoffs and closures.”

Why hasn’t there been a successful new approach to feeding the food insecure before?

— DEBORAH NASON “Because it’s such a massive problem,” Jozwiak said.

— TAGLINE

Nuaman Tyyeb, 39 CEO and co-founder, CoPilot

N

uaman Tyyeb’s businesses have thrived in some of the most complex corners of the health care industry.

Tyyeb is co-founder and CEO of CoPilot, which helps patients and their doctors verify that insurance plans will cover specialty drugs. The drugs are administered at physician offices, not sold at drugstores, and CoPilot is paid by drug companies to ensure consumers can access their products.

Based in Lake Success on Long Island, CoPilot has serious competition. Health care behemoths AmerisourceBergen, CVS and UnitedHealth Group have divisions marketing so-called patient hubs.

The key to competing is technology, Tyyeb said.

“If you don’t have a technology that’s disruptive, you’re not going to gain momentum and get the contract,” he said. “The biggest complexity is getting in front of the decision-makers.”

Born in Pakistan, Tyyeb emigrated to Astoria when he was 3 years old and grew up in Valley Stream, Long Island. He said he has always been fascinated by business and remembers competing as a teenager with his mother over who could access the phone line first. He was trying to buy stocks on Ameritrade with a dial-up internet connection, while she was making phone calls.

He founded his first company, a telecom business that sold wholesale Voice over Internet Protocol minutes, from his dorm room at Stony Brook University. It grew to nearly $20 million in annual revenue before Tyyeb decided the market was saturated. He wound the business down and moved on to his next venture.

With the money he made from the VoIP business, Tyyeb founded CareMed, a specialty pharmacy company, with Dr. Moby Kazmi, a Stony Brook classmate.

Kazmi’s father had worked in specialty pharmacy, and Tyyeb’s father ran an independent drugstore in Far Rockaway. The pair grew CareMed to more than 250 employees and about $300 million in annual revenue. In March 2017 it was acquired by PharMerica of Louisville, Ky., for about $50 million.

Tyyeb declined to share revenue figures for CoPilot but said its sales grew nearly 80% last year and it has expanded to Arizona and Florida.

“Seeing patients get access to better health care solutions is a driving force for me,” Tyyeb said. “But it’s also the excitement from creating different tech solutions which can disrupt markets.”

— JONATHAN LAMANTIA

MARCH 22, 2021 | CRAIN’S NEW YORK BUSINESS | 29

Michael Novak, 38 Artistic director, Paul Taylor Dance Company

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Monica Klein, 31 Founder, Seneca Strategies

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rowing up in New York City during the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations, Monica Klein saw firsthand how rhetoric espoused by politicians failed to take into account the difficulties working-class New Yorkers experienced while making ends meet in an increasingly pricey city.

“It’s very clear that there’s an incredible divide between how the wealthiest New Yorkers live and how working New Yorkers struggle to get by,” she said.

Having spent 10 years in politics—first as a consultant to the nascent Bill de Blasio mayoral campaign in 2011, then as de Blasio’s deputy press secretary at City Hall, and finally as communications director for his 2017 reelection—Klein has deep knowledge of the local electoral landscape.

She founded Seneca Strategies in 2018 with the purpose of lifting up working people and championing progressive candidates and causes.

While still new on the scene as a political consulting firm, Seneca Strategies executed its first major victory during its first year of operation. In 2018 the firm was essential in unseating Albany’s moderate Independent Democratic Caucus with six progressive senators, including Jessica Ramos and Julia Salazar. In 2020 Klein played a role in electing to Congress Mondaire Jones, one of the chamber’s first openly gay Black members, and preserving the Working Families Party on the state ballot line.

“It’s incredibly gratifying to see that grassroots campaigns that start with a couple staffers and an idea end up helping elect these progressive champions that make real change in people’s lives,” she said.

Seneca Strategies’ fight today is about raising taxes on the wealthy to pay for health care and education.

“There’s a hunger we’ve seen reflected at the ballot box for bold leadership that isn’t afraid to demand real revenue from New Yorkers who have only grown wealthier,” Klein said.

— BRIAN PASCUS

ichael Novak was about to give up on dance when his life was transformed outside a Chelsea theater in 2006. An alumna of the Paul Taylor Dance Company urged him to audition, saying the founder would love him.

Good advice.

Three years ago Novak was anointed artistic director of the modern-dance troupe shortly before its famous founder died. In the past 12 months he has been strikingly successful in keeping the 67-yearold company alive.

To keep the dance company on the radar screen of students and supporters, he almost immediately pivoted to offering classes on Instagram and released archival films of performances. A virtual benefit attracted 5,000 viewers from 18 countries and raised $1.2 million, the second-highest total ever.

Now, the troupe is beginning to rehearse together in its Lower East Side studio and perform in theaters, although audiences still have to watch virtually while awaiting the day they can come back for live performances.

“We’re innovating faster than ever before because we have to,” said Novak. “Every generation has its own way of engaging with art. Zoom chats are a new form of community, and we have a responsibility to relate to our audiences.”

Dance helped Novak express himself in ways he couldn’t as a teenager because of a severe stutter that developed at age 12. Initially drawn to jazz and musicals, he was a late bloomer in ballet and struggled to find work. It took four years before he was admitted to the Taylor company in 2010.

Once there, Novak came into his own before the renowned choreographer summoned him to his apartment and, to Novak’s great shock, named him his successor.

“Dance can transform lives,” said Novak, who has stopped stuttering. “It helped me regain my ability to talk.”

— AARON ELSTEIN

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Akila Raman, 39 Chief operating officer, investment banking, Goldman Sachs

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ou never know where a college class will lead you.

“I fell in love with my derivatives class, and that led to an internship in the Goldman Sachs derivatives group,” said Akila Raman, a Princeton grad.

Raman has been with Goldman ever since, climbing the ranks in 16 years from intern to vice president, managing director, partner and, as of Feb. 3, chief operating officer of the investment banking division. A specialist in natural resources and risk management, Raman was formerly COO of the global financing group.

She helped lead a team that worked with PG&E to raise $40 billion in capital to facilitate its bankruptcy exit and helped lead Saudi Aramco’s $12 billion debt offering.

What has she done right in terms of career growth?

“It’s a combination of raising your hand [for projects] and listening to clients and coming up with solutions [and] not being defined only by the role on your business card,” she said.

She also credits her success to her decisions to invest in

30 | CRAIN’S NEW YORK BUSINESS | MARCH 22, 2021

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Jin Lee, 39 Senior vice president of global production, TransPerfect

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Linton Mann III, 38 Litigation partner, Simpson Thacher & Bartlett

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litigation partner at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, Linton Mann III says he believes lawyers have an important obligation to move the country forward.

Mann represents clients in a broad spectrum of litigation and investigative cases including securities matters, shareholder derivative disputes, class actions and antitrust and commercial disputes.

“The world is a complicated place,” Mann said. “It works because we agree to a set of norms, and lawyers play a big part in enforcing those standards.”

Last year Mann represented underwriters in a case involving mortgage-backed securities. The plaintiff, a corporation, sued Mann’s client, which had sold certificates in an offering, even though the certificates weren’t the ones the plaintiff purchased. Mann convinced the court that liability under securities law should be limited to the party that sells certificates to an investor.

“We roll up our sleeves to represent that our clients’ version of the way the world works is more plausible than the other side’s arguments,” Mann said. “We hope our views carry the day.”

Mann has a large pro bono docket too. He represents his firm in an industry-wide collaboration with the New York Civil Liberties Union. The team is reviewing records of police violence and misconduct in New York state.

Mann is involved in the Innocence Project and is chairman of the board for Uncommon Schools. He is also the board chair of Manhattan Legal Services.

“As an African-American gay man, I didn’t always feel I had a seat at the table,” he said. “Now I am part of the conversation. When my children ask someday what I did when the country was faced with so many questions and controversies, I want to be proud of my answer.”

star athlete at Litchfield High School in Connecticut, Jin Lee went on to play Division III basketball at Middlebury College, where he majored in economics and dreamed of working in sports marketing. But after graduating, he heard about an opening at the Manhattan-based translation services firm TransPerfect and jumped at the chance to move to New

York.

That was in 2003, when the privately held company was a decade old and had annual revenue of around $35 million. It now has sales north of $850 million and employs more than 6,000 people around the world—1,500 of whom, across a half-dozen divisions, report to supervisors who report to Lee. The former shooting guard struggled at first as a project manager. But his competitive drive kicked in, and within a few years he was training others and building the teams that, as part of TransPerfect’s entrepreneurial model, are essential to the company’s success.

“That was really when I felt this was my calling,” Lee said. “Being a leader, being a coach, being somebody who was responsible for people’s careers.”

He added that the company’s model rewards innovation: “Within your team, you have the ability and autonomy to grow.”

As TransPerfect has grown, Lee has had to gain at least a moderate understanding of new fields, such as the technology behind organizing the complex documentation needed for clinical drug trials.

TransPerfect “is a place where you can never be complacent or you’re going to be a dinosaur overnight,” Lee said.

He’s also proud of the quick work his translation teams did surrounding Covid-19 vaccine trials this past year.

Co-founder and CEO Phil Shawe credits Lee with helping the company stay on the cutting edge.

“Jin’s teams have often taken the lead on implementing new technologies,” Shawe said. “This, along with his ability to develop future leaders, has helped us achieve over 100 consecutive quarters of prof— MATTHEW FLAMM itable growth.”

— DIANE HESS

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I’VE MADE A POINT OF GETTING ADVICE FROM PEOPLE I RESPECT, INVESTING IN CLIENT RELATIONSHIPS AND PEOPLE WHO HELPED ME”

her team and seek out diverse mentors. As a woman in the male-dominated finance industry, she values the guidance she has received from both male and female mentors.

“I’ve made a point of getting advice from people I respect, investing in client relationships and people who helped me along with my career, and developing relationships with the next generation,” she said.

Susie Scher, chairwoman of Goldman’s global financing group, has worked with Raman since she was an intern and says , “Akila has a big brain.

“She’s very quantitative to begin with—it’s her original foundational skill,” Scher said. “Clients really like her. People who reach her level of success do it in a certain way. She has that ability to build long-term relationships.”

— DEBORAH NASON

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[TRANSPERFECT] IS A PLACE WHERE YOU CAN NEVER BE COMPLACENT OR YOU’RE GOING TO BE A DINOSAUR OVERNIGHT”

MARCH 22, 2021 | CRAIN’S NEW YORK BUSINESS | 31

Natalia Quintero, 29 Senior vice president of innovation, Partnership for New York City

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atalia Quintero has long been interested in the intersection of technology and government.

As head of the Transit Tech Lab, part of the Transit Innovation Partnership run by the Partnership for New York City and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Quintero works at that juncture every day, selecting tech companies and steering them through pilot programs for the region’s transit agencies. The goal? Solving sticky problems such as how best to update bus routes and how to get people to and from work when the subway is closed for Covid-19-related cleanings. To find a consensus, she tends to work backward from agreed-upon outcomes.

“I love running a good process,” she said.

Take the bus route update project, which came out of Remix, one of the Transit Tech Lab’s partners.

Usually, a committee of experts would print large maps, laminate them and debate adding or changing routes while pointing to a 100-page printout of demographic data, Quintero said. She watched as Remix invented software that could suggest routes within minutes.

“Seeing that in real time—the excitement around the room to validate something that might have taken weeks or months—is what happens when you bring the best minds in tech together with public service,” she said.

Kathryn Wylde, president and CEO of the Partnership for New York City, said Quintero has the ability to create and maintain a shared vision with entrepreneurs and transit executives. “There was no precedent up to that point for the Transit Tech Lab,” Wylde said. “Yet Natalia was able to envision it.”

Quintero was recently promoted to lead the Transit Innovation Partnership to broaden the Transit Tech Lab’s model into other public-private partnerships. She will be hiring her replacement.

Her goal is driven by a belief that equitable transit is what makes New York City great. Growing up in Bogota, Colombia, and Los Angeles, she was frustrated by the lack of effective transit services. In New York, where she graduated from Columbia University, she watched barriers disappear.

“For less than $3, you could truly get yourself anywhere” in the city, she said.

— CARA EISENPRESS

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I LOVE RUNNING A GOOD PROCESS”

32 | CRAIN’S NEW YORK BUSINESS | MARCH 22, 2021

Neil V. King III, 37 Vice chairman, CBRE

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t has been a rough year to be an office broker in New York, as the pandemic has prompted many companies to switch to remote work and has called the very nature of being in the office into question. But for CBRE Vice Chairman Neil V. King III, the crisis has strengthened his passion for the city.

“We’ve seen a lot of people utilize the pandemic to cut ties with New York and move somewhere else,” King said. “For myself, it’s actually tied me even more to New York.”

Real estate first sparked his interest when he was working for a family friend while attending the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “He was a longtime friend of my mom and the epitome of a real estate jack of all trades,” King said. The friend “spent the time to really explain to me everything I was exposed to.”

Since King joined CBRE in 2007, he has worked on major Manhattan office leases including about 150,000 square feet for the National Basketball Association at 645 Fifth Ave., around 121,000 square feet for Snap at 229 W. 43rd St. and roughly 104,000 square feet for Netflix at 888 Broadway.

He and his team faced a drastically different environment starting in March 2020, when the city’s typically bustling office market froze.

“Elective real estate decisions were effectively put on hold,” he said. “Through the summer of last year, everybody was just trying to figure out where the world was going.”

His team has kept working as hard as it had been before the pandemic, he said, adding that he now sees a light at the end of the tunnel. The relationships he has with his clients have helped him stay strong.

A growing exhaustion with working from home will bring people back to office buildings once it is safe, he predicted. In the meantime, he said, he and his team will continue to keep in touch with clients and aggressively pursue available deals.

“We’ve stayed incredibly connected with all of our clients to show them that we’re here,” he said, “and whatever activity that’s out there, we’re going to pursue.”

— EDDIE SMALL

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Jillian Williams, 27 Investment principal, Anthemis Group

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bout 1% of venture-capital investment goes to startup founders who are Black. Roughly 2% goes to companies led by women.

Jillian Williams is guiding efforts to challenge both those disparities. She leads the New York chapter of BLCK VC, a national organization on a mission to double the number of Black venture capitalists by 2024.

Through BLCK VC, she organized an online fellowship program to connect Black professionals in other parts of finance with jobs in venture capital, partnering with Lerer Hippeau, one of the city’s largest venture investment firms, and Anthemis, the venture firm where Williams is an investment principal.

The program, which ran for eight weeks starting in October, launched as the Black Lives Matter movement prompted the sector to reckon with its lack of Black investors.

“It is not that Black investors only invest in Black founders, but it expands networks when you have people from different backgrounds,” Williams said. “It is a huge asset to expand your firm’s network to see as many interesting deals as possible.”

At Anthemis, Williams finds investments for startups in the red-hot financial-technology sector. She helped launch the U.S. office for the London-based firm in 2016, after starting her career out of Yale as an investment banker at Barclays.

She helped bring Anthemis and Barclays together in 2019 for the Female Innovators Lab, which provides support for women-led fintech startups.

Williams grew up in Manhattan, surrounded by the language of finance. Her parents, Christopher Williams (a 1994 Crain’s 40 Under 40 honoree) and Janice Savin Williams, led an investment bank, Williams Capital, that in 2019 was one-half of a merger deal to create the largest minority- and women-led investment firm in the U.S. "I probably knew the term ‘basis point’ a little younger than most," — RYAN DEFFENBAUGH Williams said.

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“IF WE CAN TOUCH ENOUGH PEOPLE, WE CAN PUSH FORWARD INITIATIVES”

Zack Dugow, 33 Founder and CEO, Insticator

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ack Dugow says he has been an entrepreneur “right from the get-go.”

The native New Yorker, who grew up playing tennis on Randall’s Island, started his first business when he was in college. He describes it as a “mini Eventbrite” that did online ticketing for events.

After selling that company in 2011, he launched Insticator, which works with internet publishers to increase page views and time spent on websites, earning advertising dollars.

Nearly a decade later, Insticator is a regular entry on lists of fast-growing companies, with its revenues increasing 100% to 150% each year.

And more growth is coming, Dugow said, predicting he will double the company’s workforce to 150 in the next year or two. The firm recently opened a Miami office and acquired commenting platform Squawk-it, and Insticator is considering more acquisitions, he said.

When he’s not working on growing his company, he exercises, does yoga and mentors young entrepreneurs, he said.

Last year he launched the #PathUp initiative, which interviews entrepreneurs and executives from underrepresented groups in order to shine a light on their successes—and mistakes—and encourage others to attempt similar journeys.

“When you remove the veil and sunshine the mistakes, a lot more people will embark on their path up and think, I can do that,” he said. “They made mistakes, but it didn’t prevent them from being successful.”

The effort is just the tip of the iceberg, said Dugow, who leads a company that reaches more than 1 billion people through different publishing platforms.

“If we can touch enough people, we can push forward initiatives around better communication and help individuals learn more,” he said. “I’m looking forward to being able to touch other countries and cultures with what we do—and have fun doing it.”

— JUDY MESSINA

Dilip Rao, 39 CEO, Sharebite

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NICK BONURA

f today’s my last day on Earth, what purpose have I served? I began thinking very deeply about that,” Dilip Rao, co-founder and CEO of Sharebite, a corporate food-ordering platform, said while describing his thoughts after a near-fatal car accident in 2014.

“I’ve had the benefit of amassing a lot of life learnings, and I want to leverage these to impact society,” Rao continued. “I’m just going to do things I want to do from now on.”

Those things have included completing his MBA at Columbia University and volunteering with nonprofit City Harvest, where he became alarmed by the extent of child hunger and resolved to respond to it. By 2015 he had co-founded Sharebite with the aims of addressing and publicizing childhood hunger, encouraging kindness and corporate social responsibility, and improving the experience of ordering food for the workplace.

For every meal order placed on its platform, Sharebite donates 2% to charities looking to mitigate hunger—to date, the equivalent of almost 1 million pounds of food.

Revenue shot up in 2019, 10 times more than in 2018, because of improvements that made it easier for client companies to place orders, Rao said.

When Covid-19 arrived last year, overtime dinner ordering disappeared. But as people started to return to the office amid social-distancing concerns, Sharebite pivoted. It began coordinating and bunching restaurant deliveries together to lower the number of outsiders entering buildings.

In the past year Sharebite has expanded into nine U.S. cities.

“Dilip saw the opportunity to create a better product, and he envisioned the organization to take it on,” said Todd Benson, a Sharebite investor and board member. “He was on a mission to make it successful and prove to the world that there’s a way a CEO and a company can build a great business by being stakeholder- and societally focused.”

— DEBORAH NASON

MARCH 22, 2021 | CRAIN’S NEW YORK BUSINESS | 33

Mia Nagawiecki, 34 Vice president for education, New-York Historical Society

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ia Nagawiecki had always dreamed of a career in education, but she wanted to pursue it outside the classroom. Although she comes from a family of schoolteachers, Nagawiecki felt she was better suited to work in a museum.

She values the kind of education that is possible in a less formal setting.

“Museum education fosters curiosity and discovery over the memorization of facts and performance on standardized tests; it’s energizing,” she said. “Learners of all types can find something that sparks their interest and passion.”

Nagawiecki began working at the New-York Historical Society, the oldest museum in New York, 13 years ago as a college intern. Today she’s vice president of education, responsible for initiatives and inquiry-driven programs that bring history to life for more than 250,000 students and teachers per year. Nagawiecki is most proud of the Women & the American Story project, the first comprehensive U.S. women’s history curriculum website.

“When we started working on the project, in 2018, only 13% of figures in textbooks were women, and teachers wanted more information,” she said. “The response from schools to having a more accurate portrayal of American history is game changing; it makes more women interested in their classes.”

Nagawiecki appreciates the museum’s ability to expand its reach during the pandemic, serving 30,000 people in the first three months of the crisis. A recent class, Tech Scholars, would have been capped at 20 people in person, but it accommodated more than 70 people online.

“We’ve been able to grow our footprint in an exciting way while attending to our core community, which is New York,” she said.

— DIANE HESS

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A LOT OF THE DEALS ARE LIKE DIFFICULT AND INTERESTING PUZZLES”

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Roni Mazumdar, 38 Founder and CEO, Unapologetic Foods

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or many restaurants, success comes from finding a formula that works and replicating it. For Roni Mazumdar, who opened his fourth New York City restaurant in February, growth represents the opposite: It’s pushing the boundaries of regional Indian cuisine, experimenting with ingredients and asking diners to come along for the ride.

“We want to change the narrative and the conversation about how people look at our food and our culture,” he said.

Mazumdar got into the restaurant business to honor his father, who had moved to New York from India and worked as a fruit vendor, a role where his charisma suggested a calling to enter the hospitality field. Father and son opened The MasalaWala at Essex and Houston streets in 2011. MasalaWala became a neighborhood gem, known for its food and the warmth of “Mr. MasalaWala”--Mazumdar’s dad.

That’s when Mazumdar, whose day job was in software engineering until 2015, began to wonder why Indian chefs hewed to expected fare such as chicken tikka masala or felt insecure about charging enough for labor-intensive food. At Rahi, he paired up with chef Chintan Pandya and began to offer modern, artisanal Indian dishes. Next came Adda Indian Canteen, on the Queens side of the Queensboro Bridge, where Pandya’s menu originally scared Mazumdar with ingredients such as goat brains. Yet the restaurant’s popularity signaled to Mazumdar that his inklings about Indian food were becoming reality.

“Three weeks in at Adda, it was 5:47 p.m. and we opened at 6,” he remembered. “I saw a line wrapped around the block. I had never seen that at an Indian restaurant before, ever.” Out of a commitment to serving all comers, Adda has a $7 lunch special for students across the street at LaGuardia Community College.

In the summer of 2020, he co-launched a takeout product called Biryani Bol, a version of the rice dish to finish at home.

Mukul Arya, a longtime investor, said that the success of these ventures comes straight from Mazumdar’s character: “He is honest with himself, his background and what he wants to do for the cuisine and the culture.”

— CARA EISENPRESS

Dohyun “Do” Kim, 37 Partner, mergers and acquisitions, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP and Affiliates

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t’s when complex negotiations among international powerhouse companies reach an apparent impasse that Dohyun “Do” Kim hits her stride.

“In most deals there are a few moments where the parties are far apart in their positions and you’re not sure how you can guide them to a middle ground,” she said. “That doesn’t discourage me.”

She credits an around-the-world upbringing for her flexible, open thinking and her ease at learning new concepts, both crucial for deal-making in Skadden’s mergers-and-acquisitions group. She has recently worked on the Morgan Stanley acquisition of E-Trade for $13 billion in stock and on LVMH’s acquisition of Tiffany & Co. Kim, born in South Korea, spent her formative years in Australia and France before she came to the United States for law school in New York. Her delight in negotiations began at the Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs. As an editor and a translator on the Korean delegation for the United States–Korea Free Trade Agreement, she had to understand each party’s positions and the negotiation dynamics, she said, “and always be thinking on my feet.”

She felt that thrill again after her second year in law school, as a summer associate in M&A. “A lot of the deals are like difficult and interesting puzzles,” she said.

Kim loved working with teammates at the firm and with clients to accomplish everyone’s objective and get to the win-win moment.

“She’s an excellent technical lawyer,” said Allison Schneirov, head of the firm’s New York M&A/Corporate Group, adding that it’s Kim’s positive outlook and appreciation for other people that set her apart.

“Clients and colleagues, and even the opposing counsel, love her.”

Kim once thought she might write novels or poems, and she still enjoys the arts as a pro bono attorney for DreamYard, an arts and community organization in the Bronx.

“A big perk is getting to watch the students perform on a regular basis,” she said.

— CARA EISENPRESS

34 | CRAIN’S NEW YORK BUSINESS | MARCH 22, 2021

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Amit Paley, 39 CEO and executive director, The Trevor Project

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mit Paley started out helping lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, queer and questioning youth in crisis one at a time as a weekend volunteer at The Trevor Project’s call center. He had just become a management consultant in health and nonprofits for McKinsey, and news reports of several suicides by young people had pushed him to action.

He and other counselors would “counter messages of hatred and rejection with messages of love and support,” he said. Today The Trevor Project’s research shows that having just one accepting adult around reduces the risk of suicide in LGBTQ youth by 40%.

“We aim to be that adult,” he said.

Soon after realizing the impact of his efforts, Paley recruited his consulting colleagues to donate their time too. They helped professionalize the nonprofit, working on analytics and strategic plans.

In the spring of 2017, Paley left consulting to become the CEO of the organization. As leader, Paley’s vision for the organization has grown: He wants all 1.8 million LGBTQ youth who consider suicide in the United States to have someone to talk to.

To that end, he has hired 100 employees in the past year; set up text, chat and social media channels where young people who need help can reach counselors; and deployed technology to pick up the most at-risk callers’ lines first. Paley has added advocacy to The Trevor Project’s work and created a research department that conducts an annual survey on mental health and publishes a peer-reviewed journal. He has more than doubled the nonprofit’s revenue since he started.

The Trevor Project has also received more than $3 million in grant funding and two full-time teams of fellows from Google.org to help them reach more people.

— CARA EISENPRESS

David Flugman, 39 Partner, Selendy & Gay

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awyer David Flugman has litigated his share of headliner cases—negotiating a groundbreaking settlement in a lawsuit against Bernie Madoff, winning changes to the “Dickensian” treatment of psychiatric patients at Kings County Medical Center and achieving affirmation of a New Jersey statute outlawing conversion therapy for minors.

A concert pianist, opera lover and onetime member of Yale University’s a cappella group, he originally thought he might practice entertainment law. But in the end, litigation and its problem-solving excited him more.

“The joy for me of litigation is you never know what’s coming next,” Flugman said.

After a dozen years at Kirkland & Ellis, where he became a partner at age 31, he joined majority women-owned Selendy & Gay three years ago to build out its litigation practice and head up its diversity and inclusion efforts. One attraction was a commitment to breaking the traditional mode of thinking at law firms.

“From the inception [of a case], we think about the themes, the storytelling in front of a judge or jury,” he said. “Then we work backward to understand not just a case but industries and where market forces are going.”

Much of his public-interest practice concerns LGBTQ rights. Flugman, who married his husband in 2017, is particularly proud of the firm’s diversity and inclusion efforts, as well as the significant amount of time spent mentoring young associates.

“We are trying to celebrate people’s diversity and use it as an asset,” he said, “helping people realize the full potential they have as lawyers.”

He predicts his public-interest practice and that of the firm will increase as cases dealing with equal access, religious liberties and transgender rights become more common—and more contentious.

“We are poised to explode,” Flugman said of his firm. “We have a group of people committed to getting at systemic causes and building us into a model for how busi— JUDY MESSINA ness can achieve those objectives.”

MARCH 22, 2021 | CRAIN’S NEW YORK BUSINESS | 35

Moira Penza, 37 Partner, Wilkinson Stekloff LLP

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n just her third year in the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn, Moira Penza launched an ambitious and complex case against sex cult leader Keith Raniere—who was found guilty on all counts. Now in private practice, she is investigating alleged misconduct at the Washington Football Team and representing former Apprentice contestant Summer Zervos in her defamation suit against former President Donald Trump.

She is also representing Altria in national litigation involving its investment in vaping giant Juul.

Penza is very much a legal star. But she does not remotely seem a legal pit bull. That may be one reason the unassuming Queens native has been so effective.

As the daughter of a schoolteacher and a local bar owner, with an undergraduate degree from SUNY Binghamton, Penza doesn’t have to work at sounding like a regular person when she talks to a jury or to reluctant witnesses. It helps that she has proved to be a canny legal strategist—and can go for the jugular when necessary.

“I do pride myself on being approachable,” Penza said. “Some attorneys have one speed, and that’s super aggressive all the time. I have not found that to be the most effective form of advocacy.”

She added that her manner can sometimes be “disarming.”

“People aren’t always expecting me to be as fierce as I definitely can be,” she said.

Penza showed promise from the start, says trial-lawyer heavyweight Beth Wilkinson, who supervised her as a partner at Paul, Weiss, when the young attorney was fresh out of Cornell Law School.

“She has ingenuity, creativity and doggedness,” Wilkinson said. “And she was eager to have any opportunity she could.”

In late 2019 she recruited Penza to her new firm, Wilkinson Stekloff, which specializes in major courtroom cases.

“She has great confidence, but she also has humility,” Wilkinson added. “Jurors can see that.”

— MATTHEW FLAMM

Paul Coyne, 34

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PEOPLE AREN’T ALWAYS EXPECTING ME TO BE AS FIERCE AS I DEFINITELY CAN BE”

36 | CRAIN’S NEW YORK BUSINESS | MARCH 22, 2021

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President and co-founder, Inspiren; assistant vice president and chief nursing informatics officer, Hospital for Special Surgery

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efore Paul Coyne was a nurse practitioner and co-founder of medical startup Inspiren, he was a patient himself.

Coyne was born with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a condition that makes it more difficult for the heart to pump blood. At age 15 he needed to have an implantable defibrillator inserted into his chest.

After graduating from Providence College, he suffered a stroke at age 22—just a month before he was to start a job in derivative operations at Goldman Sachs. He kept the stroke a secret, starting the job as he worked to regain his speech and long-term memory.

Coyne said there were mornings when he needed to call his mother to remind him who he was and where he worked. He seldom spoke as he rebuilt his vocabulary. Coworkers assumed he was just shy.

“I just didn’t want to be sick,” Coyne said. “I didn’t want to be in a state where I felt like I didn’t know what part of me was missing.”

Coyne pursued his MBA and master’s in finance at Northeastern University on weekends. Then he left his job to study nursing at Columbia University, receiving bachelor’s, master’s and doctor of nursing practice degrees. He completed the five degrees in four years.

New York-Presbyterian hired Coyne as a project lead in analytics and data visualization, and he found his niche using data to improve nursing care. He also started Inspiren with nursing school classmate Michael Wang, a bedside nurse. The pair teamed up with industrial designers to create a wall-mounted device that monitors patients to prevent falls and bedsores and alerts nurses.

During the pandemic New York-Presbyterian has used the device to track clinicians’ use of protective equipment and limit unnecessary trips to the bedside that could spread Covid-19.

The device is also in use at two nursing homes, and eight more medical facilities have agreed to deploy the technology. The company has raised $4 million from investors.

“Identifying with patients and what they need has been critical to my success,” he said.

— JONATHAN LAMANTIA

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Adam Mandelsberg, 32 Counsel, commercial litigation, Perkins Coie LLP

S

ervice to others has long been a passion for attorney Adam Mandelsberg, who has been volunteering with local immigrant communities since his teenage years. In 2018 he immediately jumped into action and flew to Texas to volunteer at an immigrant detention center for 10 days when the Trump administration rescinded legal protections for asylum seekers, mostly women and children fleeing gang violence in Central America.

“This was something brand-new. Everything we thought we knew about asylum protection blew up overnight. I knew this was devastating,” said Mandelsberg, who is fluent in Spanish.

As counsel, he was one of the first individuals to speak with migrants once they were detained by border control. “When you get detained at the border—at night, in the desert—you’re brought before an asylum officer,” he said. “Frequently there’s no translator, and many of the refugees are indigenous people who don’t even speak Spanish. Invariably they were deemed not credible and subject to deportation.”

During his time there, Mandelsberg worked with 60 clients, eventually reversing deportation orders for all of them. He credits his success to his ability to understand their stories, convey them in a way that spoke to the law and provide external verification of key facts.

Also while in Texas, he set up a framework for facilitating future deportation reversals and helped to bring in more law firms and nonprofits to help migrants.

Mandelsberg’s compassion informs his paid work, his colleagues say.

As counsel at Perkins Coie, he has represented a range of clients, including public companies, financial institutions and sports leagues, in federal and state courts.

“We recruited him as a budding superstar to be an important piece of our growing commercial litigation practice in New York,” said Alan Howard, partner at Perkins Coie. “At the same time, we recognized what kind of person he is and that he was a tremendous fit for what our firm stands for. I’ve seen firsthand his devotion to his — DEBORAH NASON clients, his empathy and his commitment to the cause.”

“

EVERYTHING WE THOUGHT WE KNEW ABOUT ASYLUM PROTECTION BLEW UP OVERNIGHT”

Karsten Vagner, 39 Vice president, people, Maven Clinic

K

arsten Vagner has led human resources at one high-profile startup after another, but he only landed in the profession by accident. In 2008 he was employee number three at health-tech startup ZocDoc, and, like everyone else, worked in a number of roles. Then he found himself in the “people” department.

“It was so clear to me—I just had this lightbulb moment—that that was the function that had the most impact on a company,” Vagner said. “If you get that right, you can do anything.”

The past year at Maven Clinic, which he joined in mid-2019, has once again proved his thesis. The virtual clinic, which focuses on women’s health, has seen stratospheric growth during the pandemic as the use of telemedicine has surged—and as more companies have recognized the need for Maven’s services.

The Manhattan-based company has doubled its number of employees this past year, adding 100 of them without any in-person meetings.

“We had to build a process that makes sure we’re vetting and engaging the right people—and getting them to put their trust in us without our ever having an office to show them or even shaking their hand,” Vagner said.

In addition, the death of George Floyd in May 2020 and the activism it inspired brought demands for greater equity and inclusiveness. Vagner’s job now includes helping employees make their workplace more diverse.

“At the company level, when we talk about goals and performance, we include diversity,” he said.

Maven founder and CEO Kate Ryder, who herself was a Crain’s 40 Under 40 honoree in 2019, said Vagner’s “empathy, flexibility and creativity” helped the company get through a tough year.

“A people leader is one of the most critical roles at a high-growth startup,” she said. “It’s why Karsten reports to me directly, and that won’t be changing.”

— MATTHEW FLAMM

Eric Wei, 39

Senior vice president and chief quality officer, NYC Health + Hospitals

O

n Feb. 10, 2020, Dr. Eric Wei and his wife, Lili, welcomed their third child, Aiden. Just three weeks later Covid-19 arrived in New York City, and Wei was tasked with helping to take on the worst pandemic in 100 years as chief quality officer of NYC Health + Hospitals.

Wei said it was heart-wrenching to be isolated from his family for eight weeks, starting in March, but he feared bringing the disease home. Beyond his administrative role, Wei treated patients at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn and remembered the swiftness with which Covid-19 overwhelmed the hospital’s emergency room.

“It went from, ‘Do we test this person?’ to ‘Everybody has Covid, and who do we intubate next?’ ” Wei said.

During the height of the pandemic, Wei focused on working to more evenly distribute Covid-19 patients across the 11-hospital system and coordinated its emergency department response. Some facilities, Elmhurst Hospital among them, were besieged with cases, whereas others had beds to spare. As the volume of Covid-19 hospitalizations subsided, he oversaw planning for the second wave, which emerged in late 2020, to ensure workers had the necessary training and equipment.

In 2018 Wei spearheaded the program Helping Healers Heal, which focuses on giving hospital workers a chance to cope with the emotional trauma they endure at work. The system has leaned on it during the pandemic.

“We’re all just scratching the surface of how this pandemic has changed us,” Wei said. “We fight every day because we believe there shouldn’t be two standards of health care—one for those with means and one for those without.”

Dr. Mitchell Katz, CEO of NYC Health + Hospitals, said he recruited Wei from the Los Angeles public health system because of the way staffers responded to him.

“I’m a big believer that to make change, other people have to want to follow you and want you to succeed,” Katz — JONATHAN LAMANTIA said. “I could see that in the quality improvement efforts Eric was doing.”

MARCH 22, 2021 | CRAIN’S NEW YORK BUSINESS | 37

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Office location: NY County.

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Certificate of LLP filed with Secretary of State of California located at: 1500 11th St, Sacramento, CA 95814. Purpose: any lawful act or activity.

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Glen Falls DB Developer LLC. Arts. of Org. filed with the SSNY on 11/16/20. Office: New York County.

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Notice of Qualification of Fairview Property Group LLC. Authority filed with Secy. of State of NY (SSNY) on 12/1/20. Office loc: NY County. LLC formed in NJ on 9/23/20. SSNY designated agent upon whom process may be served & mailed to: 348 Fairview Ave, Cedar Grove, NJ 07009.

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38 | CRAIN’S NEW YORK BUSINESS | MARCH 22, 2021

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OUT OF OFFICE

BUCK ENNIS

THAIMEE

THAIMEE LOVE

Making it work: A Thai chef opens a pop-up to keep her spirits up

Owner of the defunct Thaimee Table also rolls out a meal kit, cooking classes

BY CARA EISENPRESS

T

he difficulty of running a restaurant in New York City had shattered Hong Thaimee’s spirit even before the pandemic began.

In 2019 she had to close Ngam, later renamed Thaimee Table, where she had served Thai food in the East Village since 2012. She also published a cookbook, taught cooking classes and opened a nearby offshoot called Thaimee Box. The landlord took possession of both spaces, and she was in debt and left feeling adrift.

“I was broken,” she said.

She spent 2019 figuring things out.

By early last year Thaimee had found fulfilling work as a guest chef and Thai cooking teacher hired by luxury hotels for residencies. She started the year in the Maldives before heading to Paris and then Mauritius. Lucrative contracts with hotels in Mexico and Greece were on the horizon.

But then the pandemic shutdowns canceled those trips, a $20,000 loss for Thaimee. And in April Floyd Cardoz, a friend who had run contemporary Indian restaurant Tabla, died from Covid-19. Thaimee was devastated, but instead of succumbing to gloom, felt inspired to work.

First she cooked and delivered meal kits with friend Erina Yoshida, owner of the bar Angel’s Share. Thaimee used her mailing list to announce the kits, and hundreds of replies came from old Ngam customers.

“They missed my food,” she said. A percentage of profits went to people in need.

During the summer came a chance for a six-month lease in the West Village, and she planned a pop-up, Thaimee Love, which opened in late November for three weeks before indoor dining was shut down again.

She had just hired six employees and couldn’t apply for Paycheck Pro-

tection Program loans because the business was new.

But customers still showed their support. One booked a tiny holiday party. Another wanted a cooking class. A potential partnership with a Los Angeles–based importer firmed up, and Thaimee launched a product line of sauces and Thai staples, such as rice noodles. The goods helped bolster a virtual cooking class offering on subscription service Table22, through which students can get the ingredients for her class delivered.

Right now a dozen people pay $100 each month for Thaimee’s classes.

She cut her own salary to pay rent and payroll. And she negotiated with suppliers and even called the state to say she couldn’t pay sales taxes. “It’s OK, ma’am. We’ll find a way to make it work,” Thaimee recalled being told.

A payment plan was created for her.

Catering company Great Performances passed along a gig. “That I

ADDRESS 615 Hudson St. HOURS 11:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. daily EMPLOYEES Six MAIN BUSINESS LINES In-person dining, food delivery, cooking classes and products ON THE MENU Khao soi: Chiang Mai curry soup with house-made kale noodles, pickled cabbage, shallots and chili oil Chiang Mai “fries”: Fried yam and kabocha squash with red curry batter and coconut flakes, served with red curry mayo and peanut relish Roti ghan kiaw wan: Green curry, Japanese eggplant and Thai basil, served with roti (made with a choice of 24-hour braised lamb or Heermance Farm winter vegetables) Thai iced tea WEBSITE thaimeelove.com

remember,” she said, “because that paid the payroll for our staff.”

This past Valentine’s Day, when indoor dining resumed, pressure began to ease. Thaimee extended the popup through the coming November and is beginning a search for a deal on a permanent city location.

“In the midst of the pain and this time of anxiety, I was asking how to keep going and how to survive,” she said. When future trouble comes, she hopes to remain as resilient. “I’ll just keep on working and inventing.” ■ MARCH 22, 2021 | CRAIN’S NEW YORK BUSINESS | 39

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