When you think of someone hustling to build a better life in New York City, do you think of a small business owner getting up in the wee hours of the morning to open up their food cart so they can support their family, and their community? Or do you think entrepreneurship is when the richest tycoons in the world swoop in from the other side of the country and demand that New York City’s taxpayers give them billion-dollar handouts?

We’re in a moment of reckoning for how we provide new jobs, build new businesses, invent new technologies, and imagine a new future in New York City. And we’re going to have to choose between those who want to bring everyone along in that future, or those who want to strangle opportunity for the least among us, in favor of just capturing all the winnings for a handful of billionaires. This is the closest we’ve come in decades to truly opening the door for so many more to pursue their dreams in the city.

One key decision we can make to enable that better future is to elect Zohran Mamdani as our next mayor, if you care about innovation and entrepreneurship in New York City — especially for the tech sector that provides the single biggest source of new jobs in the city. There are three simple reasons why he’s the right person for the job:

1. We need a solid foundation to build our businesses on.
2. Entrepreneurship is about working, not getting paid to move money around.
3. Our community has always been defined by service and values.

For a little bit of quick background about me, and why I care so much about this topic — I’ve been part of the tech community here in NYC for more than 20 years, helping found half a dozen companies, involved in raising hundreds of millions of dollars in venture funding, serving on the boards of companies worth billions of dollars providing thousands of jobs. But more important than any of those traditional business credentials, I’ve been part of a genuine community of entrepreneurs, founders and innovators. These are people who come together to help each other when times are tough, offering support, encouragement, advice, and, yes criticism (!) when creating new things. And that work goes far beyond just venture-backed startups to vital areas like mom-and-pop businesses, academia, non-profits, side-gigs and creative work that’s more focused on expression than commerce.

It’s too important to the heartbeat of our city to leave this conversation to be dominated by just those with the biggest bank accounts. So let’s dig into the three ideas that distinguish this candidate and this movement, and explain how Zohran uniquely delivers on each.

1. Businesses need to build on a solid foundation

From the start, we’ve seen Zohran Mamdani illustrate his campaigns, and his principles, by standing with small businesses and entrepreneurs. Being in the desi community, I had known about his Nani video back in the day, where Zohran pops up in a halal cart, though I will admit I was mostly checking for Madhur Jaffrey there, and not Young Cardamom. More recently, and far more seriously, the thing that had put Zohran on the radar of most people city-wide was his solidarity with taxi workers, when he participated in a 15-day hunger strike and helped win over $350 million in debt relief for taxi drivers. Those drivers epitomize the entrepreneurial spirit that powers the city, and Zohran literally putting his body on the line on their behalf is the energy we need fighting for those who are trying to build a better life. Because it’s important to remember that entrepreneurship isn’t just about tech, and isn’t just about venture-backed startups — it’s about anybody who’s got a dream of building a better life through their hard work and good ideas.

If you do want to build a company, so much of what it takes to succeed is about reducing risk. And many of the biggest risks to a company come from factors outside your control as a founder. Can you rely on infrastructure, like reliable transportation for your workers? Can your workers depend on services that enable them to do their work in a consistent way, like reliable and affordable childcare, education and nutrition? If you look at reports like this one from the Center for the Urban Future — a very moderate, very pro-business organization, which I was glad to collaborate with many times as a tech CEO — their number one recommendation for enabling continued tech growth in New York City is improved housing affordability. And, no surprise, that’s one of Zohran’s three signature policy initiatives. Their next priorities are addressing key public services like transit and libraries, which are also right at the top of his list.

If your workers are at risk, or your community is at risk, your company can’t succeed. Zohran Mamdani clearly understands that, and the priorities that he’s focused on make that clear. The issues that the entrepreneurial community has identified as its most important requirements, like ensuring access to housing, transportation, education and other foundational services, are exactly the ones being addressed by the Mamdani platform. That’s important to know when there are parties with loud voices distorting that fact.

2. Entrepreneurship is about working, not getting paid to move money around.

This is an important point that’s increasingly getting lost in the conversation around entrepreneurship and innovation. Someone who builds a new business, or invents a new technology, or who shows up every day to provide goods and services to their community — that’s an entrepreneur. A person who moves money from one bank account to another? That’s not an entrepreneur. And a person who just tries to create systems that let them extract rent from everyone else for doing nothing? That’s definitely not an entrepreneur.

As New Yorkers, we’ve got to say that loud and clear, as often as we can, because the people with a vested interest in lying about this reality — and a lot of them are people who hate New York City, but care a lot about being able to influence our politics with their money.

A clear example a few years ago was Amazon’s attempt to demand up to three billion dollars in handouts to build an office complex in New York City, a greater subsidy than has ever been given to any tech startup that was ever founded in the city. Exactly as predicted by every critic of the deal, Amazon has since then hired more workers in New York City than they would have been required to by the agreement, making the handouts completely unnecessary. This fits the larger pattern of tycoons demanding that working people give them billions in handouts, and coercing politicians into supporting this grift by saying they are “anti-business” if they don’t. That’s why it’s important to draw a distinction between actually starting a business and just moving money around.

The serial sexual predator Andrew Cuomo, who lost to Zohran Mamdani in the Democratic primary and was forced to resign as governor, called the lack of giving a $3 billion handout to Amazon the “greatest tragedy” he had seen during his tenure as governor of New York. The current estimates of the death toll in nursing homes during his administration is over 15,000 people.

By contrast, one of the most resonant messages of Zohran’s primary campaign was his story about “halalflation”, the increasing cost of food at halal carts (there’s those halal cart vendors again!). In this video, he shows his fluency not just in the concerns of ordinary New Yorkers who are worried about paying too much for lunch at a food cart, but also the entrepreneurs running these carts, who struggle with complex permitting systems and extractive leases. These are the real concerns that actual business owners face. NYC doesn’t lose jobs and business because we fail to give billions of dollars to billionaires, we lose small businesses because they keep getting squeezed by higher and higher rent until they finally have to put that sad note up in the window telling the neighborhood that it’s time to say goodbye.

These are the things that can change by policies like cracking down on bad landlords and making services like 311 more efficient for reporting inspection problems. In a recent conversation with NYC tech execs, that promise of engaging on making systems like 311 more efficient was one of the topics that seemed to resonate best — and that's part of why this community’s tech leaders have started to embrace him. I know many of these leaders, and used to participate in these kinds of conversations when I was a CEO or founder, and given that there isn’t any representation from workers in the room, it’s an extremely positive sign that there’s still a relatively open-minded reception to Zohran and his policies, even amongst the investor class here in NYC. This is a stark contrast to the extremists in power in Silicon Valley, many of whom are trying to influence our election here in New York with their money, who have resorted to rank bigotry as their first line of attack against Zohran's platform, since they can’t win on either substance or popularity.

Fortunately, the fundamental culture of entrepreneurship in New York City is still united by everyone wanting the guy who opened up the bodega on the corner to succeed.

3. Our community has always been defined by service and values.

There’s one final thread that connects the community of entrepreneurs in New York City, and I’ve seen it demonstrated many times: there’s a common set of values. People give a damn about each other, and look out for their neighbors and their community. Yes, that’s taken the form of saluting IPOs from wildly successful startups, but it’s also been members of the community getting together to roll up their sleeves to help folks in the Rockaways dig out after Hurricane Sandy. It has been celebrating milestones about founders raising funds for their companies, but it’s also been watching Aaron Swartz rally the crowd to stop the SOPA and PIPA bills and fight for everyone to be able to innovate and express themselves on the internet. (A fight that couldn’t be more relevant at a time when today’s apps are demanding that people put in their driver’s license just to listen to a song.) For every time we cheer on a startup from our community getting acquired by one of the big tech companies, we also celebrate a cool new demo from one of NYU’s ITP students wowing us with their brilliance.

That civic attitude, community service, and genuine connection has gone up and down over the years, but it’s never completely faded away. And it stands in stark contrast to the rising intolerance, obnoxiousness and plain cruelty of the tycoons who dominate the larger tech industry today. Many seek to strangle the innovation in our midst, rather than allowing anything to happen outside of their control.

I don’t pick that phrasing lightly, and I don’t merely mean it metaphorically: they mean to strangle entrepreneurship.

We saw this coming with Eric Garner’s death more than a decade ago. The act that he was alleged to have perpetrated was the selling of loose cigarettes without a tax stamp. Even if we grant that this may have been an act that he participated in — something which has never been proven — this is certainly far less of a crime than operating a ride-hailing app completely outside of taxi laws, or enabling private home rentals through an app in clear violation of hotel laws. It’s absolutely far less of a crime than any of the crimes the current president has committed, but it is one for which Eric Garner was strangled to death on camera, by cops who were not even indicted for his death. Based on the brief conversations I had with her before her passing, I think the public hounding of his daughter Erica Garner by the enthusiastic fans of her father’s killers contributed to her also having passed away at an unconscionably young age.

This is pertinent for two reasons. First, Eric Garner was plainly participating in an act that anyone would recognize as entrepreneurial. If he were a member of a demographic that Silicon Valley considered respectable, they would have called him a “disruptor” who challenged obsolete regulations by serving needs directly to consumers. Second, many of the most powerful and influential investors in Silicon Valley saw what happened to Eric Garner years ago, and took away a clear, and awful, lesson.

Andreessen Horowitz is one of the most visible and well-financed venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, with enormous reach and impact across the industry. Earlier this year, they hired a new partner at their firm on the basis that he had strangled one of our neighbors to death here in New York City; he has no experience or credentials in either technology or finance. The partner they hired killed his victim, Jordan Neely, even though Neely had not made any moves towards him. This was considered a positive thing within their social circles because his victim was a Black man, and the venture firm wanted to send a signal to our city about their intentions for our entrepreneurial community. Obviously, this makes clear who would feel comfortable asking Andreessen Horowitz to invest in a company, based upon the likelihood that they might have to share a boardroom with this partner, or even be forced to have this person represent the firm as their investor, at some point in the future.

You can’t pretend that this is a choice about innovation. You can’t pretend that this is a choice about inventing the future. There’s only one reason a handful of billionaires who have virtually unlimited dollars would make a choice like that. If these are the depths they’ll sink to just to send a signal about who’s welcome in their investment portfolio, there’s no limit to how far they’ll go to keep someone they hate from actually holding office and having power.

But it’s no surprise that our community of entrepreneurs and innovators and dreamers here in New York City has rallied behind someone like Zohran, who wants to open up opportunity for all, by actually making people’s lives better. Because making people’s lives better is what great entrepreneurs want to do, too. And it’s no surprise that those who profit from extraction and exploitation and corruption have resorted to hatred and bigotry in an all-out effort to stop this movement that’s inspired and motivated so many.

But you can’t stop an idea whose time has come. Just like any of us who’ve been lucky enough to build a successful business know, there’s a magical feeling when it starts to click. And all of us who’ve watched Zohran’s rise have gotten to have that same feeling. In a moment where there’s so much that’s broken, so much that induces despair, and when so many had very nearly given up on even hoping for good things to happen… it’s been possible for someone to remind us what a great leader can do.

I had gotten a little embarrassed about my past as someone who had been a CEO in tech, honestly. The very worst of the industry had tainted it so much that I’d worried people would never believe that it could ever have been something people could go into with a good heart, or honest intentions, however imperfect. But now I’ve realized that I probably felt the same way about politicians, too. And no, I don’t idealize any politician. But I do have a ton of hope about what the people can do, especially with good leaders to help inspire them.