Companies to Watch: Five New York Founders Building the Tools for Other Founders to Succeed
Building a new startup is hard. Building a new startup amid forecasts of an economic downturn is even harder.
We started the year reading a lot of doomsday market predictions for 2023, and Tech:NYC has fielded a wave of questions from founders about how other startups like theirs were navigating the uncertainties. But the silver lining is that we haven’t seen a single inquiry that couldn’t be solved by a connection to another NYC founder building the software solution they needed. (And hot tip: our friends at Work-Bench put together a running list of nearly 50 enterprise playbooks to help you manage the most challenging aspect of sales, fundraising, and other growth functions).
In an uncertain market, startups are (rightfully) looking for every opportunity to minimize spend, extend runway, and set themselves up for long-term growth. We know the startups who can help.
For the first edition of our Companies to Watch series in 2023, we talked with five NYC founders building the companies to make sure other companies thrive, regardless of the market climate.
GYNGER
What does your company do?
Gynger founder and CEO Mark Ghermezian: Gynger helps founders grow their companies by providing upfront, non-dilutive capital to finance their software and infrastructure spend. By enabling businesses to purchase the software they need with flexible payment terms — regardless of what their vendors offer — we help them build their ideal tech stack while saving money, improving cash flow, and extending runway.
A question we love to ask every founder: why New York?
MG: There’s something special about New York. There are other tech hubs, but New Yorkers have a certain level of grit and creativity that’s unique to this city. I spent over a decade building Braze in NYC and the unique, diverse talent here is really unparalleled.
Speaking of Braze: You know firsthand how much infrastructure support young startups need to get off the ground — you surely remember the first days of growing that company — and now it’s one of NYC’s anchor publicly-traded companies. What are you taking from your experience as a founder and former CEO there into starting something new from the ground up again?
MG: It came down to the team and the underdog mentality at Braze. I wake up every morning thinking we are losing and need to win by the end of day. I want to always be learning from my team, customers, and investors. It’s also about keeping close to your customers, hearing what they are liking or not. Using that feedback to evolve the product and your GTM is key. Your customers can unlock the future of your company in a massive way.
Now that startups are tightening up costs and thinking a lot more about runway, how would you advise founders to choose between an alternative financing solution like Gynger versus, for example, pursuing new venture sources?
MG: Startups should aim to have multiple sources and methods of funding. When considering various financing options, it's important to think about the intended use of the funds. Debt financing is best suited for short-term needs, while equity financing is better for longer-term investments and growth. Founders seeking to maintain greater control can benefit from debt financing as a strategy. Unlike venture debt, which is expected to be repaid by your next round of funding, debt financing is more flexible, allowing you to select the desired terms for each contract. If you’re in between funding rounds, or want access to capital that is non-dilutive, alternative financing solutions are a great way to access the funding you need quickly.
What types of contracts are being serviced through Gynger so far? Are there particular types of software/other infrastructure needs you’re seeing the most underwriting requests for?
MG: We’ve financed contracts as small as $1,000 to as high as $1 million for top platforms, including Datadog, Airtable, Secureframe, GCP, AWS, Amplitude, Apollo, Braze, Slack, and Notion. But right now, we’re seeing really strong traction with cloud infrastructure.
What’s the next milestone on Gynger’s roadmap?
MG: At Gynger, we are staying close to our customers, while growing the team and product. This year it’s all about product market fit, scale, and process. I feel like we’re halfway there, but still have a lot to get done. Again, it's the underdog mentality I have — I hope it enables us to execute and win.
Okay, some rapid-fire questions. First: where do you get your favorite pizza slice?
MG: Saba’s Pizza on the Upper West Side, no question.
What’s the best place in New York for a coffee or lunch meeting?
MG: Telegraphe Cafe is a great spot for coffee right near our office in Chelsea.
What’s your favorite hybrid/remote work office hack?
MG: I'm actually an office person, Monday through Thursday. I think it's hard to build a new company being hybrid. That being said, we have a team in Israel and communication is key. We have weeklies with the entire company, then 1:1 standups across each department. We also try to fly the team in as much as possible as we are all getting to know each other and building relationships with one another. It's a real challenge in this market as you learn so much from each other being in person. Zoom calls are incredibly transactional by nature.
What’s the one piece of advice you’d give a peer founder spooked about the 2023 market predictions we’re all reading about?
MG: I’d say keep your head down and keep building. When the outlook is bleak, that’s the best time to build. Stay as efficient as possible, but if you keep your focus throughout, when the next inevitable upswing occurs, you’ll be ready.
PASITO
What does your company do?
Pasito co-founder and CEO Pauline Roteta: Pasito is an insurtech and HRtech that saves companies and employees money on healthcare and benefits. We do this in two ways: During enrollment periods, we connect directly with payroll and process individual data to provide personalized decision support to employees improving benefits elections and outcomes. And throughout the year, we use benefits and payroll data to proactively reach out to each individual employee with timely and targeted communications about their benefits, improving utilization and efficiency.
A question we love to ask every founder: why New York?
PR: There’s no city like New York. We decided to base Pasito here because of NYC’s tech community, density of customers, concentration of investors, and our existing networks. We’ve also found amazing talent in the city.
Tech:NYC actually first met Pasito in 2022 when we partnered with Google for Startups to launch their inaugural Latino Founders Fund! How was the program for you? What else does the tech ecosystem need to do more of to support Latino/a founders in New York?
PR: The Latino Founders Fund has been a great tailwind for us. Google has delivered customer and investor introductions, hands-on marketing and product support, and a warm community of underrepresented founders working together to succeed.
Latino/a-funded startups attract less than 2% of all venture capital funds even though we’re over 18% of the US population (and growing). One thing everyone can do to support underrepresented founders is open up your networks — make a customer introduction or send a warm email to an investor. That’s how we level the playing field. I’d also love to see more programs like Google’s LFF emerge to support Latino/a-founded startups, not just with programming but also with capital behind the commitment.
What are the types of recommendations Pasito makes for most of its customers? What are some of the solutions that have become most sought-after over the last year?
PR: Benefits touch on the two most intimate and important facets of anyone’s life: health and finances. Leveraging an employee’s payroll, financial, and health data, we recommend the right health insurance, health contributions, retirement savings, and insurance benefits for each family. We then surface and plan that information throughout the year to encourage employees to take ownership of their health and finances and save money on care.
Over the past year, we’ve really seen Pasito’s solution strike a chord. Benefits have always been personal but historically it has been too resource-intensive to help employees one-on-one. Now employees expect a better experience. They’re used to one-click checkout at Amazon and cannot understand why they have to spend hours on the phone to figure out where they stand on their deductible. The most sought-after solutions this past year have been ones that drastically improve the employee experience while streamlining benefits administration for the company.
Inflation is up, healthcare costs are up for both employees and businesses. Are those trends you expect to continue through 2023? How is Pasito helping to navigate that?
PR: In 2000, an employee could expect to pay $1,619 for family coverage on average. By 2020, the same coverage cost $5,588! Health premiums have grown at twice the rate of inflation for the past 20 years, and we expect the next few years to continue the trend. Pasito is empowering companies and employees to make better benefits decisions with data. For families, it’s about proactively managing health needs, using the benefits you’re already paying for, and allocating your paycheck in the most optimal way. For companies, it’s about reducing unnecessary costs and driving employee retention through a benefits experience that shows you care.
What’s the next milestone on Pasito’s roadmap?
PR: We’re working closely with customers to launch our benefits communications product.
Okay, some rapid-fire questions. First: where do you get your favorite pizza slice?
PR: Without a doubt, Razza on Grove Street in Jersey City.
What’s the best place in New York for a coffee or lunch meeting?
PR: Maman for a quick coffee or Sant Ambroeus if you’re looking for something fancier.
What’s your favorite hybrid/remote work office hack?
PR: We do offsites in cities where we have team members, who often host casual dinners or board game nights at home.
What’s the one piece of advice you’d give a peer founder spooked about the 2023 market predictions we all seem to be reading about?
PR: Focus on your business and not the chatter. There’s oodles of dry capital out there, but it will only go to companies focused on building great products and hitting their metrics.
DANDI
What does your company do?
Dandi co-founder and CEO Jeff Fernandez: Dandi is the analytics platform for advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the workplace. With customers like Blue Shield of California, Braze, and Oscar Health, Dandi is leading the data-driven DEI movement for 500,000 employees in the US, EMEA, and APAC.
Our platform measures and manages DEI programs in real time; tracks key DEI metrics across every part of the employee lifecycle; creates DEI reports at the push of a button; and exports visuals to Google Slides and Powerpoint. Dandi’s team is distributed with headquarters in NYC and Stockholm, Sweden.
A question we love to ask every founder: why New York?
JF: Professionally, we have been building technology companies in NYC since the late 2000s. Now more than ever, NYC’s tech community provides a deep concentration of talent, even for a company in its early and mid-growth stages. Personally, our family lives in and around NYC, the culture is nearly one of a kind, and the food is among the best in the world. NYC has always felt like home to us.
Dandi came out of stealth last year with its seed round, but you’ve actually been working on building the company since before the pandemic. But diversity numbers in tech don’t seem to have really moved all that much. What measurements does Dandi have on that? Any insights we might be surprised by?
JF: DEI is often about small numbers, not big numbers. So when we look at the tech industry across all locations using basic math, sure, the large numbers haven’t moved that much. That said, some companies have made enormous progress on reducing their wage gap disparities, pinpointing and removing bias in hiring underrepresented folks, and eradicating bias in performance scores to balance promotion rates. One example here in NYC is Oscar Health. The progress companies are making will start to show up in the high level reporting soon enough. Dandi is working on putting together best-in-class benchmarking for each component of the employee lifecycle. From compensation gaps to workforce representation and promotion rates, we’ll soon share very specific guidance.
The pandemic did a lot to shift best practices around recruitment and retention, of course, and now with startups tightening costs amid worries of a downturn, DEI programs are often “the first to go.” What are you telling Dandi’s customers about how they can continue fostering inclusive workplaces through 2023?
JF: At Dandi, we’re finding that market to be increasingly bifurcated: some companies are doubling down on DEI as the opportunity to make progress and build a stronger business now is better than ever before, while other companies are focusing elsewhere. In that ‘first to go’ article you mentioned, about 40% of recruiters told Monster that, “more than ever,” workers expect to learn about potential employers’ DEI efforts. With more and more folks from Gen Z entering the workforce, we expect these requests to become requirements.
Some tech workers or tech workers-to-be assume only larger companies have enough resources to have DEI programs. What are some ways younger startups can build DEI efforts that have a lot of impact?
JF: Younger startups often want to embed DEI initiatives early in their lifecycles, and they always want to know how they can have the most impact. Our suggestion is to treat DEI like a business function — empower DEI leaders with clear metrics and KPIs, spans of control, and measurable outcomes. As you focus on marketing and sales, a quantitative point of view is almost always the foundation, right? The same is true for DEI. So set up your analytics, understand your baselines, identify where the company is doing well and where it needs work.
That might mean recruiting is doing well, but compensation gaps need some adjustments and promotion rates need immediate focus. From there, we create quarterly and annual strategies to start scaffolding DEI into the DNA of the company as it grows in headcount and market impact. This is one of the best ways for DEI to succeed long term.
What’s the next milestone on Dandi’s roadmap?
JF: The next milestone is a suite of workflow features for DEI practitioners to track their progress. From events to goals and tracking reminders, we couldn’t be more excited about the early response from our customers.
Okay, some rapid-fire questions. First: where do you get your favorite pizza slice?
JF: I love Highline Pizzeria on 28th Street and 10th Avenue. We used to live nearby, and I miss it often.
What’s the best place in New York for a coffee or lunch meeting?
JF: I’m pretty agreeable here. Provided it’s convenient, mostly quiet, and has decent coffee, I’m in.
What’s your favorite hybrid/remote work office hack?
JF: I like to have one large external monitor rather than several. I can focus and single-task more easily this way. Also, if you use Slack, their “Huddle” feature is a very convenient way to make an audio-by-default call to a team member. It’s quite useful.
What’s the one piece of advice you’d give a peer founder spooked about the 2023 market predictions we’re all reading about?
JF: It’s hard, and you’re not alone. Spend very carefully and assess performance often and critically.
ETHENA
What does your company do?
Ethena co-founder and CEO Roxanne Petraeus: Ethena is a compliance training platform for modern companies. You know that training you have to do every year, whether it’s sexual harassment prevention training or code of conduct? We do that, but in a way that employees actually like and learn from, instead of just tolerating while watching Netflix in the background.
A question we love to ask every founder: why New York?
RP: Because I love spending all of my money on rent. And because my co-founder was already here when we started Ethena. We thought this would be a great homebase for incredible tech talent, so I moved here to join her.
You started your career as an officer in the US military. How did you translate those skills into making the jump into tech?
RP: The Army taught me about great leadership, so it’s actually been very helpful to remember many of those lessons as I hire, manage, and lead a great team. The Army also taught me how to stick it out through hard times, which is honestly useful in all of life.
Did compliance training change over the course of the pandemic? With more remote and distributed teams, and more use of collaboration tools, what are the more effective ways to deliver training programs now?
RP: The pandemic and WFH definitely impacted compliance training. Historically, many companies did their annual required training in person, but with the pandemic, that no longer worked. Additionally, most companies used to have employees only in one or two states but suddenly, even small companies had distributed teams which meant that they needed to comply with multiple states’ compliance requirements.
This was a big boon for Ethena, which automated state compliance requirements and was much more engaging than putting a lawyer on Zoom.
Ethena is already working with major companies — Zoom, Netflix, Figma, for example. Do younger, smaller startups have the same training needs as those large employers? How would you advise them differently?
RP: Thankfully, for us, yes, both large and small companies have similar training needs. But there are some distinctions — for example, a large company typically wants to do some customization of the training to make sure it’s consistent with their brand, which we make very easy. But yes, the core product is the same.
In terms of how I’d advise them, it’s actually a pretty consistent message — leadership needs to set the right tone. Ideally, do that from day one. Even as a small company, talk about ethics, talk about inclusion, make sure those aren’t just afterthoughts you deal with “later.” At the core of getting your team to do the right thing, it’s really about making sure that leaders — starting with the top but trickling down to frontline managers — know what “right” looks like and know when to bring in help, be that HR, Legal, or Compliance.
What’s the next milestone on Ethena’s roadmap?
RP: We found that our same buyer has a bunch of needs that the Ethena platform addresses. We just released a training uploader, so that you can use Ethena to host your own company’s internally created training (which is great for centralizing reporting and tracking). Next, we’ll be releasing more survey functionality because training is really about giving an employee content and then asking them a series of questions. We’ve seen our admins want to leverage Ethena to send even more survey questions, so soon, they can!
Okay, some rapid-fire questions. First: where do you get your favorite pizza slice?
RP: L’Industrie. It’s the best!
What’s the best place in New York for a coffee or lunch meeting?
RP: Talea for a drink! Fun fact: it’s run by a fellow military veteran!
What’s your favorite hybrid/remote work office hack?
RP: Walking meetings.
What’s the one piece of advice you’d give a peer founder spooked about the 2023 market predictions we all seem to be reading about?
RP: Constraint breeds creativity!
LEXCHECK
What does your company do?
LexCheck founder and CEO Gary Sangha: LexCheck believes growth accelerates when companies agree faster. As a result, LexCheck’s mission is to provide near instantaneous delivery of redlines and issue lists, while surfacing trends and insights to optimize future negotiations.
The LexCheck platform harnesses the power of artificial intelligence, including natural language processing (NLP), to help legal teams expedite the most tedious parts of contract management — reviewing, editing, and negotiating contracts. LexCheck’s products are built by practicing lawyers in collaboration with linguists and software engineers. This approach helps LexCheck deliver products that provide real value to the market by directly incorporating insights from legal professionals who experience the pains of contracting processes firsthand. We create solutions that work the way lawyers need them to work.
A question we love to ask every founder: why New York?
GS: New York is the greatest city in the world! For what we do today — primarily selling to professional services and Fortune 1000 companies — there is no better place. Additionally, there is an endless supply of talent in New York, which makes finding and retaining talent much easier.
You started your career as a lawyer. Were you working with tech clients? Is that what gave you the inside perspective that led to you jumping into the tech space yourself?
GS: I practiced securities law at Shearman & Sterling in New York City and White & Case in Hong Kong. During my time as a lawyer and an entrepreneur, I saw firsthand the complexity, heavy workload and time constraints faced by corporate legal teams, and how contracting can sometimes be a barrier rather than a business accelerator. I started LexCheck to address these challenges and minimize the friction for businesses.
LexCheck is perhaps an even more important tool for a smaller startup that doesn’t have a robust legal team in-house. What’s the one contracting process that most bottlenecks smaller teams — and that LexCheck solves for?
GS: The smaller legal teams at startups should be focused on helping the business close high-dollar deals — not focusing on high-volume contract review on agreements such as NDAs. LexCheck solves this problem by automating contract review and negotiations, freeing lawyers to focus on the revenue-generating work. LexCheck has proven it can help legal teams increase deal velocity and businesses recognize revenue faster.
The software is powered by AI, which is getting a lot of attention right now. Are industries of all kinds — not just tech — going to see automation become a more dominant force in their operations?
GS: Absolutely, distributed teams working under more pressure as a result of an economic downturn will need to increase the speed and efficacy of business processes wherever possible. The need for quick business processes will lead to an influx in AI innovation as businesses continue to navigate the do-more-with-less economy.
What’s the next milestone on LexCheck’s roadmap?
GS: Providing more robust metrics that will help provide insights into current and future negotiations. These enhanced metrics will provide companies the ability to optimize future negotiations by surfacing data that helps understand where their contracts get stuck.
Okay, some rapid-fire questions. First: where do you get your favorite pizza slice?
GS: Rosa’s Pizza by Penn Station. It’s a nice welcome home to New York.
What’s the best place in New York for a coffee or lunch meeting?
GS: Sarahbeth’s at 27th and Park. They have unlimited coffee and comfy, plush seats.
What’s your favorite hybrid/remote work office hack?
GS: I think we are all still trying to figure this out as we adjust to the new way of working. What I’ve found most successful so far is optimizing for Tuesday through Thursday.
What’s the one piece of advice you’d give a peer founder spooked about the 2023 market predictions we all seem to be reading about?
GS: You’re an entrepreneur so you have grit. The best companies are founded during economic downturns.
