Latest Press Releases
- NY Tech Meetup, Control Group, & Girl Develop It Announce Formation of Coalition for Women in Technology
- New Sponsors, Full Schedule Announced for Made in NY: Austin Event at SXSW
- Made in NY: Austin Returns to SXSW to Celebrate NYC Tech, Culture, Food, and Art
- NY Tech Meetup Organizes Its Tech Community to Aid Victims of Hurricane Sandy
Click here for more press releases.
Recent Media Coverage
- NY Tech Meetup Announces New Coalition to Support Women in Tech – The Next Web
- WNYC Presents: How Tech Is Changing the Way Women Work (video of Jessica Lawrence on panel) – The Greene Space
- Marketplace Tech for Friday, March 8, 2013 (interview with Jessica Lawrence) – Marketplace Tech Report
- NY Tech Meetup’s Jessica Lawrence on the Hottest Ticket in Town – Entrepreneur
- This Is New York: Dawn Barber, Co-Founder of NY Tech Meetup – The Epoch Times
- NYC’s Tech Community Lends Culture and Code to Hurricane Sandy Relief Efforts – Forbes
- NYC’s Mayor Challenges Designers, Hardware Hackers, and Policy Buffs to Reinvent the Humble Payphone – TechCrunch
- Mayor Bloomberg Calls Upon Techies to Reinvent New York City’s Payphones – VentureBeat
- City to Techies: Design Payphone of the Future – Crain’s New York
- Michael Bloomberg Wants to Do Something Cool with New York’s Phone Booths – Slate
- New York City Challenges Silicon Alley to Reinvent the Payphone – WNYC
- Tech Community Helps Sandy Victims by Offering Expertise – NY1
- Hacking for a Post-Sandy New York City – Forbes
- New York Tech Meetup Rallying Tech Volunteers Post-Sandy – Business Insider
- Silicon Alley Deals with Power Loss – New York Post
- Geeks to the Rescue: NYC’s Tech Community Rallies Together for Sandy Relief – VentureBeat
- NYC Techies Volunteer to Get Businesses Back Up Post-Sandy – Xconomy
- These Are the People Making NYC Tech Rock – VentureBeat
Click here for more media coverage.
About NY Tech Meetup
Founded in 2004 by meetup.com founder Scott Heiferman and co-founded by Dawn Barber, the NY Tech Meetup has more than 30,000 members, representing professionals from all parts of the New York technology community. NYTM centers around its monthly events, where members gather to watch emerging companies demo new ideas, hear leading-edge thinking on technology topics, and build their networks to develop their businesses. NYTM has been integral in the birth of New York’s new Silicon Alley, with nearly every notable new company, including Foursquare and Tumblr, making their debut at a NYTM demo. NYTM is a not-for-profit, community-led organization. Its Executive Director is Jessica Lawrence, President is Nate Westheimer and Chair of the Board is Andrew Rasiej.
Click here to see photos from previous events.
Executive Bios
Jessica Lawrence – Executive Director
Jessica Lawrence, 32, was named the first Managing Director of the NY Tech Meetup in April 2011 and Executive Director in February 2013. In these roles, she has worked to expand the capacity of the 30,000+ member organization while also managing its day-to-day operations on a full-time basis.
In 2003, she began working with the Girl Scouts of San Gorgonio Council, a non-profit serving 10,000 girls and 5,000 volunteers in Southern California. She got her start as a Fund Development Associate, working her way up through the organization until she was named Interim CEO in November 2007 and CEO in February 2008. Under her leadership, the organization was ranked the #8 best nonprofit to work for in the country on the NonProfit Times’ 2010 “Best Nonprofits to Work For” list. Some of her other accomplishments with the organization include leading massive organizational culture change, leading the organization to become the first non-profit Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE) in the country, addressing longstanding issues with a volunteer management structure that had been in place since the 1950s, and substantially increasing cookie sales and retail store revenues when sales for the same time period nationally were flat or only slightly up. In November 2010, she was one of 15 women selected to participate in FeMBA, Seth Godin’s mini-MBA program for female entrepreneurs.
In 2011, Lawrence served as a consultant to the Intranet Benchmarking Forum, and produced the first U.S. Coworking Unconference in Austin, TX in collaboration with Loosecubes.com. She gave the solo presentation “Rebel in a Polyester Sash: Rehabbing Corporate Culture” at SXSW and at the Non-Profit Technology Conference in March 2011.
Lawrence is also a speaker, consultant, blogger, and writer of the column “The Practical Business Radical” in The Press-Enterprise. She graduated cum laude with a BS in Psychology from the University of Maryland and earned a Certificate of Non-Profit Management from Duke University.
