On Tuesday night, longshot New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani appeared close to pulling off the impossible. The vote count in the Democratic primary had him comfortably in the lead, and the prediction market Kalshi gave the 33-year-old, self-proclaimed socialist 99% odds for beating Andrew Cuomo, the presumptive favorite in the race. Tyler Winklevoss, the cofounder of the New York-based crypto exchange Gemini and one-half of the famed rowing/Mark Zuckerberg lawsuit team, was none too pleased. “New York City on the brink of becoming Gotham City,” he posted, sharing the Kalshi projection.
It was a sentiment I saw plastered all over my X feed (which, I should note, is heavily biased toward crypto accounts, as a peril of my beat) in response to a candidate who has proposed pilots of government-run grocery stores and freezing hikes for rent-stabilized units. One New York venture investor wrote using derogatory language about “libs” getting infatuated by young politicians fitting a certain profile, which I probably shouldn’t reprint in the newsletter pages of Fortune. And then there was the schadenfreude of those who had already decamped to greener pastures. “Congrats you morons turned nyc into Britain,” wrote a Miami-based VC. “Seasoned criminals roam free while ordinary people who post mean words go to prison.”
For those of us in the trenches of X, the meltdown was a familiar sight, echoing the contempt that the tech elite have directed at San Francisco for years, with the endless lamentations of anarchy at pharmacy branches in Union Square or the liberal policies of politicians like Aaron Peskin.
As a longtime New Yorker who has lived through the Bloomberg, de Blasio, and now Adams administrations, I will not opine on whether Mamdani deserves this response (though it should be mentioned, for non-New Yorkers, that the Department of Justice charged our current mayor with bribery related to Turkish Airlines ticket upgrades, among other perks, and had his case dropped by the Trump administration after agreeing to crack down on immigration. I think it’s safe to say we’re a pretty resilient city, regardless of the person in charge).
But, given the San Francisco tech rebellion against their political ruling class, I was curious whether the same thing could happen here. I caught up with Julie Samuels, the president and CEO of Tech:NYC, which she founded alongside Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson in 2016 with backing from Bloomberg LP, Facebook, and Google.
Samuels didn’t go so far as to say that they founded Tech:NYC as a response to de Blasio’s election, but more diplomatically, that they “did really care about ensuring that the Bloomberg administration’s legacy supporting technology continued.”
“Like many people in New York tech and beyond, I’m still unpacking it,” Samuels told me when I asked about Tuesday’s primary. “But New York is a city that constantly reinvents itself, and New York is a city where people always find a way to make cool big things happen, and I am confident that no matter who is mayor, we will continue to see this city thrive.”
Unfortunately, that doesn’t quite fit in a tweet.
