Last week, the Tech:NYC team — with a crew of startup founders and other leaders in our member network — traveled to the annual SOMOS conference in Puerto Rico, where we spent some time connecting with a broad coalition of other organizations on how to support Latino communities, here in New York and in Puerto Rico.

If you’re like us, you’re still riding the adrenaline (or perhaps still recovering) from the whirlwind of events during New York Tech Week — more than 420 of them made it the largest Tech Week in any city to date! But a real highlight for us was all the founders we met at the Tech:NYC Founder House.

More than 400 events. Tens of thousands of attendees. A hustle that won’t quit. That’s New York tech.

Last week, alongside our friends at a16z and dozens of Tech:NYC member companies, we were proud to kick off the largest Tech Week to date. The idea was simple: We set out to celebrate New York and the startups that call it home.

Today, we have an exciting update to share: This morning, we announced our Board will expand to 60 members, including many who founded startups in NYC, to help guide the organization and the broader tech community through a crucial next phase of growth. 

A few weeks ago, Tech:NYC opened the doors to its first-ever Founder House, a new partnership with WeWork to support exciting New York founders at the earliest stages of building their startups. Catch up with five founders that were part of the inaugural cohort of Founder House — New Yorkers leading companies scaling new solutions in AI, food tech, mobility, and more.

In some ways, Luis von Ahn is an unlikely founder for a language-learning company: The entrepreneur dreamed of being a math professor from a young age. But after he invented the now-ubiquitous reCAPTCHA service and sold it to Google, the computer science professor and entrepreneur set out to create something with tangible value to its end users. He also wanted to ensure it remained free.

Today, Tech:NYC and WeWork are launching the Tech:NYC Founder House, a new partnership that will support New York’s early stage tech founders by providing them with opportunities to connect and collaborate with their peers, investors, and industry experts.