Hello, and welcome back to Inc.’s 1 Smart Business Story. NYC wants its entrepreneurs back and Steve Fulop is leading the charge. The new president of Partnership for New York City isn't your typical power-broker replacement. The former Marine and three-term Jersey City mayor is bringing a scrappier, founder-focused approach to the city’s economic engine. 

From early-stage tech funding to pushing back on restrictive AI and data regulations, Fulop is betting that innovation, investment, and affordability will keep the city competitive in the race for talent and business. 

In this piece, you will see:

BY LEAH CARROLL, SENIOR EDITOR

Steve Fulop, the new leader of Partnership for NYC, wants to make the city both innovative and affordable for founders.

When Steve Fulop took over as the president and CEO of Partnership for New York City last year, he stepped into the role vacated by one of the city’s premier power brokers, Kathryn Wylde. For nearly 25 years, Wylde represented more than 300 CEOs, many at blue-chip companies, who make up the Partnership, a nonprofit formed in 1979 to advocate for business and “advance the city’s standing” as a global economic center—and the $263 billion in economic output and jobs they accounted for. Wylde was known for cultivating relationships across the public and private sectors and leveraging her vast network of mutual obligations to advance the Partnership’s goals.

Enter Fulop: a former Marine and Jersey City mayor who brings a style that’s markedly different from his predecessor’s. Fulop is an outsider who cut his teeth on the scrappier side of the Hudson, first as a Jersey City council member and then as a three-term mayor. As mayor, he championed SciTech Scity, a 14-acre innovation hub designed to house 200 startups alongside Fortune 50 companies. During his three-term tenure, the city saw nearly 800 new small businesses open, creating roughly 10,000 jobs.

Fulop was handpicked by members of the Partnership to fight for policies that support innovation, entrepreneurship, and New York City’s economic stature. He’s made it clear that he will push back against proposed AI and data center regulations, calling them “prohibitive” and warning they could have a “chilling effect on entrepreneurs.” But he’s also focused on quality-of-life issues such as homeless encampments, and both he and the Partnership were early supporters of congestion pricing. (Fulop has not yet met with Mayor Mamdani, six weeks into his term.)

For now, Fulop is preparing for what he hopes will be a lengthy tenure at the Partnership. Maybe not 25 years like Wylde, he clarifies, but a “long time.”

You’re coming into the Partnership after over two decades of leadership by Kathy Wylde. How do you see your styles differ?

Kathy’s greatest strength is her extensive knowledge of New York’s history and her strong personal relationships, both of which I lack. As someone who has served in elected office and, at a similar age to Mayor Mamdani, served as mayor, I understand what it’s like to differ from your political base. I have a perspective on how you move people when you’re in elected office because I sat on that side and knew the pressure points.

I’m pivoting the organization from being perceived as an advocacy group for CEOs to one recognized for being responsive to the needs of those CEOs’ employees. We represent 500,000 direct employees, and if you include everyone we liaise with, that number rises to 800,000.

The Partnership hasn’t historically been hyper-focused on areas like tech. What does your new, more entrepreneurial focus look like?

We have a $150 million evergreen fund focusing on early-stage New York City-based technology companies. The fund’s board is a who’s-who of the VC and startup world. Companies come through, very Shark Tank-esque, pitching for early-stage investments. We’ve had some huge winners: Datadog, for example. We were their first money. [Datadog currently has a market cap of approximately $45 billion.]

We also have an accelerator that overlaps with the New York City public sector—whether it’s transit or the environment. We place private-sector companies that solve complex public-sector problems into the government. We’ve had huge success with that initiative.

One thing we want to do over the next year is make the Partnership Fund and the accelerators more prominent. It’s an evergreen fund, so all distributions are reinvested in New York. We want people to understand how involved we are in this ecosystem. The best way to do that is not by saying it, but by showing people our track record.

Read more at Inc.com 

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