John Borthwick, CEO of the venture capital firm Betaworks, tells WIRED that he is skeptical about the feasibility and potential effectiveness of many Mamdani campaign proposals—like free buses, or a city-owned grocery store pilot program—and felt his answers tended to be “very general and nonspecific.” But Borthwick adds that he found Mamdani “very compelling and friendly, and a smart, interesting person.”
“I think he’s very good at campaigning, and it also illustrates a massive vacuum within the Democratic party that he is very adeptly filling,” Borthwick says. “It’s a vacuum of lack of new ideas, lack of new people, lack of views. And I think that there’s an idealism that he brings that is refreshing.”
A handful of questions focused on how a Mamdani mayoralty would affect the tech industry. Borthwick says he asked Mamdani how he would respond to the risk that artificial intelligence poses to jobs—in particular, entry-level white-collar jobs—over the next several years.
“I’m kind of amazed that this has not become already a campaign issue,” Borthwick says. He says that Mamdani “admitted that this hasn’t been a focus of the campaign, but would need to be a focus if he was elected.” But overall, Borthwick didn’t feel Mamdani’s answer was specific enough.
Ryan says that he asked Mamdani about the “staggering increase” in the number of tech workers and startups based in New York City in recent years. He says Mamdani “acknowledged” the prominence of New York’s tech sector and talked about how the public sphere could learn from it. Ryan says Mamdani floated a few ideas, like having the city government use AI to reduce costs and increase efficiency, and introducing a progress-meter for 311 complaints resembling something like the Domino’s pizza tracker.
Most of the conversation with Mamdani, however, focused on things that mattered to attendees as New Yorkers rather than businesspeople. Susan Lyne, cofounder and managing partner of BBG (Built by Girls) Ventures, tells WIRED that she thinks attendees “were there to understand who this guy is, who might be our next mayor.”
“The tech industry actually doesn’t need any tax breaks,” Ryan tells WIRED. “What we do need is a city where all kinds of super smart people who are between the age of 20 and 40 want to come work.”
In the first years after the pandemic, New York City attracted more relocating tech workers than any city in the country, despite having some of the nation’s highest rent rates.
Mamdani was also asked about universal child care up to 5 years old, which he supports, and what his priority would be during his first 100 days in office, which he said would be free buses. He was also asked about his stance on charter schools.
What went unremarked upon during this meeting, however, is the online discourse railing against Mamdani, which one person who attended the meeting said has had “a lot of influence” in the tech world.
Much of the online discourse about Mamdani doesn’t focus on specific policies. Frequently mentioned, however, are Mamdani’s public comments about how billionaires would not exist in a just society in which workers are paid fairly and moderating forces on wealth inequality exist. Individuals like Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan have responded by wearing shirts that say “We should have more billionaires” in the color scheme and style of Mamdani’s campaign material. (Tan, however, has specifically spoken out against Mamdani’s critical position on specialized high schools several times, calling the position “anti-Asian.”)
