Winners Welcome Podcast, Episode 13 with Julie Samuels, President and CEO of Tech:NYC.

The Woman Bridging Silicon Alley and City Hall

In late 2015, Julie Samuels took a meeting she assumed would go nowhere. Then she took another. And another. Six weeks and countless coffees later, she woke up one morning and realized she’d accidentally agreed to build something from scratch: an organization to represent the voice of New York’s tech industry in a city that didn’t quite know what to do with it yet.

Ten years later, Tech:NYC is the connective tissue between Silicon Alley and City Hall, and Julie Samuels is the person both sides call when they need a translator.

In this episode of the Winners Welcome podcasr, Julie sits down with Harlem Capital Managing Partner Jarrid Tingle to trace the founding story of Tech:NYC, and to unpack a political moment she calls one of the most dynamic she’s seen: a governor championing a supercomputer built for AI research, a new mayor still finding his footing on tech policy, and a workforce that increasingly leans further left than the executives who employ them.

The conversation moves fast. Julie makes the case for why New York builds differently than San Francisco (people here still use the word “profit”), walks through the city’s affordability crisis and why good jobs matter as much as housing supply, and previews the Grid Fellowship, her nine month program teaching tech executives how the city actually works, from snow removal operations to wastewater treatment plants.

But the throughline of the conversation is relationships. Julie’s approach to politics, to hiring, to building an organization out of a maternity leave and six weeks of meetings, comes down to one idea: find the work that doesn’t feel like work, and build everything else around it.

This episode of Winners Welcome is powered by Gunderson Dettmer, the top law firm in venture capital globally.

Watch the full conversation to hear Julie’s take on congestion pricing, ranked choice voting, and her vision for what New York’s tech ecosystem could look like a decade from now.

About The Winners Welcome Podcast

The Winners Welcome Podcast brings elite founders and top investors into thoughtful conversations on pushing past possible, sharing the conviction, standards, and lessons behind building generational companies.

About Harlem Capital

Harlem Capital is a venture capital firm that backs the next generation of winners. The firm partners with exceptional founders with the irrational motivation to build generational companies. All Winners Welcome.

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