Opening Remarks
Hope everyone’s having a nice start to December (and a happy Spotify Wrapped Day to those who celebrate!).
News from Members 🎉
NYCFC Member Ty Wang’s startup Angle Health announced a $134 million round by Portage, Blumberg Capital, Mighty Capital, and others!
This edition:
NYCFC November Highlights
Upcoming Events in December
Roles at NYCFC Companies
Let’s get started! 🚀
Happy Holidays!
Member Spotlight: Jack Gardner, Founder and CEO of Kickoff
Who are you and what are you building?
“I'm Jack. I'm the founder and CEO of Kickoff. We’re the first to offer personal training covered by health insurance. I really am a fitness-obsessed and adventure-obsessed person.”
What inspired you to start Kickoff?
“We are a personal training platform. We're the first covered by health insurance. And the root of it comes from a lot of personal interest in this space, but also a lot of family history of medical issues, preventable disease.
Unfortunately, [there were] a lot of really scary things early in my life that kind of made me really focus on how do we help people take care of themselves and build good habits that keep them healthy for longer. It's a lot of a lot of stroke, a lot of diabetes, a lot of related illnesses in my family. So I've been close to my heart for a long time.”
What’s been the biggest surprise or lesson along the way?
“I think that one thing that comes to mind is that the most important thing for helping people change their lives for the better is not the quality of the content, it's not the data, it's not the quality of the app or the UX. What matters most for clients is feeling successful.
So in our context, if a client is super successful and is feeling like they're making progress no matter how small they are going to commit more, invest more, and continue to make progress. And if they feel like a failure, they're going to immediately quit and write negative reviews and be really, really disappointed and unhappy. So we have to find early concrete real wins. They can smell a fake win a mile away.
We have to actually get them wins early and often or they're immediately going to give up. And people give up way too often. This is also true in the entrepreneurial world, right? People give up way too often. And I think there's some amounts of like, you need to have a glimmer of hope as an entrepreneur as well. But it's definitely true for people's wellness journeys. They need to feel like they're progressing and that it's like, ‘how we can make that happen as quickly as possible’ is really key.”
What’s your biggest ask right now? How can others help?
Well, first of all, we’re hiring a BizOps Manager and Sr Software Engineer in NYC right now, so reach out if you’re a fit for one of those roles!
“Otherwise, we're offering the first opportunity to get personal training covered by health insurance for almost everyone. For 95% of our clients it's $0.
The rest have a very small copay. So we just need to get that awareness out about that. It's a no-brainer once people know about it. Our biggest challenge right now is people don't believe it. They literally think it's too good to be true. It's like a free lunch. It sounds too good to be true. But it's not when you think about what your insurance is going to pay for you if you're unhealthy, which is just mind-boggling millions of dollars. So it's a small investment for them to keep you healthy.
So yeah, the thing I'm looking for now is just introductions to folks who are interested in sharing this opportunity with their employees or with their patients. We're getting a lot of inbounds and it's gotten my attention from medical practices who want to be able to send their patients somewhere that they can get healthy and avoid bigger complications. So looking for introductions and ways to get the word out to people who would value getting in shape for free.”
If this sounds like you or someone you know, reach out at [email protected] or via LinkedIn.
Read and watch our full interview with Jack here.
November Highlights
Another great (N)YC Alumni & Friends Happy Hour, this time Fall-themed! Thanks to everyone who helped us eat the Costco pumpkin pies. 🥧🍂
Shoutout to SimpleClosure for sponsoring!
Coming Up 🔥
Events:
🗽 NYCFC Founders Dinner: Wed, Dec 3 (members only)
🗽 NYCFC Founders Dinner: Tues, Dec 9 (members only)
🗽 NYCFC Founders Dinner: Wed, Dec 10 (members only)
The AI Summit New York: Wed-Thurs, Dec 10-11
Big event announcement coming soon… ⛷️
Founder Opportunities:
TRMNL4 and Inworld Consumer AI Accelerator: application due Dec 10th
Newlab Founder Fellowship: application due Dec 31st
🗽 = NYCFC Event
Subscribe to our Luma calendar here.
Email [email protected] to have us feature your event!
Roles at NYCFC Companies 👩🏻💻
Kickoff is hiring a BizOps Manager and Sr Software Engineer.
Stepful is hiring Engineers (Software, Growth, Product).
Supademo is hiring Senior Frontend Engineers.
Wyndly is hiring a Performance Marketing Lead.
Zingage is hiring a Head of Talent Engineering, a Strategic Finance Lead, Founding Engineers, and SWEs.
Savvy is hiring a Sr. Engineering Manager, Head of Customer Success, and Sr. Software Engineers.
Invoice Butler is hiring a Founding Engineer.
See you next month!
Thanks for tuning in!
– Aakash, Adam, Mike, and Jordan
P.S.