new-york-city
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John Gallagher Built a Career for the Moment the Story Gets Difficult
From rebuilding Lower Manhattan to advising leaders in a crisis, Gallagher has spent nearly three decades working where public decisions meet public judgment. In 2026, that long apprenticeship put him in Mercury's top job.
The People You Call Before the Jackhammer Arrives
Burtis Consulting Group does the municipal work most people notice only when it goes wrong: translating construction plans into notices, meetings, permits, detours, and fewer nasty surprises.
The Agency That Learned to Turn Up the Right Kind of Noise
NOISE began with a six-second lesson about attention. It grew by turning that lesson into a full-service agency, a venture studio, and a culturally specific bet on the many meanings of Latin America.
The Cookie That Asked the Publicist to Stop
Nicholas & Lence sells a rare New York combination: the ability to make a story travel and the judgment to know when enough people have heard it.
Todd Aydelotte Runs New York's History - Then Gives Technology a Story
By day, Todd Aydelotte turns complicated technology into a clear argument. After hours, he turns archives into ultramarathons - following Tesla, Poe, Whitman and New York itself, one address at a time.
WinIt Turned New York’s Orange Tickets Into a Legal-Tech Wedge
A photo of a parking ticket became the front door to a larger business: consumer disputes, attorney access and the software plumbing behind high-volume legal work. The clever part is not the app - it is how WinIt packaged delay, paperwork and uncertainty into a workflow people will pay to avoid.
Casey Neistat Still Wants to Make the Thing
He built a career by treating the city as a set, the deadline as an editing tool and the audience as a collaborator. Now the platform he helped define feels unfamiliar, so Casey Neistat is returning to his oldest advantage: making unmistakably human work.
Anthony Vigilante Built a Modern Business Around a 1927 Brooklyn Name
The Brooklyn operator inherited nearly a century of family history. His real work has been turning that inheritance into a system that can still answer when the boiler quits.
John Dantzler Took a Teenage Beer Mishap All the Way to Manhattan
A confiscated fake ID, an exploding homebrew kit and 250 rejected spaces became a brewery beneath SoHo. Now its finance-minded co-founder is testing what independent craft can build together.
Josh Wiener Learned to Sell the One Thing a Contractor Can't Show You: Trust
He wanted to act. He learned to plaster. Then he built SilverLining by asking architects for a chance - and discovered that the most expensive thing on any job is the promise.
Relay Cut the Apps Out of Delivery - Then New York Repriced the Ride
Relay gave restaurants a clever bargain: keep the customer, rent the courier. Its rise, acquisition and New York exit show both the power - and the hard limit - of unbundling food delivery.
FreshDirect Bet the Grocery Aisle Could Be Rebuilt as a Supply Chain
Long before grocery apps became ordinary, FreshDirect built a Bronx food machine that could taste a peach, portion a salmon and route both to a New York doorstep. Its next act is testing how far that tightly controlled system can open up without losing the quality that made it matter.
OUTFRONT Media
The billboard business used to sell rectangles by the roadside. OUTFRONT is turning those rectangles - and thousands of screens below the street - into a measurable, programmable media network built for the real world.
Century 21 Stores
Century 21 Stores is a New York City off-price fashion retailer, founded in 1961, known for selling designer and luxury apparel, footwear, handbags and accessories at deep discounts. After filing for bankruptcy and closing all 13 locations in 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the Gindi family reacquired the brand and reopened its Financial District flagship at 22 Cortlandt Street in May 2023. Rebranded 'Century 21 NYC,' the retailer pairs its trademark 'treasure hunt' in-store experience with a growing e-commerce presence, live shopping and a TikTok Shop.
Daisy
Daisy is an AI-native property management company for condos, co-ops and HOAs, founded in 2020 in New York City. It replaces the manual workflows and patchwork of tools legacy managers rely on with a single platform that unifies building finances, maintenance requests, compliance, board decisions and resident communication. Pairing proactive human managers with automation and AI agents, Daisy manages more than 4,000 units across nearly 200 buildings in NYC and has begun expanding into New Jersey, with a stated goal of national and global reach by the end of the decade.
Inside Clay: What Is a Go-To-Market Engineer?
In this episode of 'Stories of Scale,' a host spends a full day inside Clay, the $5 billion New York startup that coined the term 'go-to-market engineer,' to figure out what this fast-growing role actually is. Shadowing Everett Berry, Clay's Head of GTM Engineering, along with teammates like Spencer, Varun (co-founder), and George, the video unpacks how GTM engineers blend engineering, marketing, and sales to build automated systems that find, understand, and reach customers. It also reveals Clay's two-team 'flywheel' — an internal pipeline team and a forward-deployed customer-facing team — that helped the company scale from five years of near-zero revenue to over $100 million and 16,000+ customers.
Orenda, Inc
Orenda, Inc is a Brooklyn-based renewable energy company that develops, builds, and operates standalone battery energy storage projects across densely populated Downstate New York. Founded in 2020, Orenda handles the full lifecycle - site diligence, permitting, interconnection, engineering, construction, financing, and ongoing asset management - and pairs it with an AI/ML software platform that forecasts energy prices and optimizes when its battery fleets charge and discharge. The company claims roughly a 34% market share in New York City with a development pipeline of about 920 MW / 2.7 GWh, and is co-developing roughly 675 MW of distributed storage with the New York Power Authority.
Runwise
Runwise is a New York-based smart-building company that retrofits aging heating, cooling, water, and electrical systems with proprietary wireless hardware, sensors, and cloud software. Its platform learns each building's behavior and automatically runs core systems at the minimum needed, cutting fuel use 20-25%, lowering carbon emissions, and helping owners comply with climate laws like NYC's Local Law 97. Used in over 10,000 buildings across the U.S., Runwise has saved customers more than $100 million in energy costs and positions itself as the operating system for buildings still running on 1960s technology.
Nicole Gelinas
Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor of City Journal, and a New York Post columnist who has become one of the most-cited voices on how New York moves, pays its bills, and keeps itself safe. A Chartered Financial Analyst turned urban-policy writer, she translates municipal bonds, subway capital plans, and congestion-pricing math into prose ordinary readers can follow. Her 2024 book Movement: New York's Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car won the 2025 Gotham Book Prize and reframed the century-long fight over the city's streets as a story with many heroes, not just one Robert Moses villain.