The D.C. area has surpassed the Bay Area in AI-related job postings, according to a recent report.
These new jobs are a clear sign of how the emerging technology is already impacting Arlington and its neighbors, per a Tuesday report by the real estate company JLL.
The report predicts the region’s numerous data centers will have to undergo AI-focused upgrades to meet industry requirements and notes there is already a surge in AI lobbying in response to potential regulations.
“While the Bay Area has long been known as a hotbed for AI product development, tech companies are navigating economic uncertainties by scaling back on their workforce,” the report says. It says the D.C. metro area had 1,110 AI-related postings as of December, a notch above 1,076 in the Bay.
“Meanwhile, Metro DC’s tech ecosystem is less susceptible to market fluctuations, stabilized by federal spending and government contracts,” JLL wrote.
Of these jobs, only 155 list Arlington as their location, however, JLL Researcher Kate Paine chalks this up to its proximity to D.C. She tells ARLnow that many Arlington employers recruit from out of state and often list the location as “Washington, D.C.”
“There is nuance in the data and the way jobs are posted that might not accurately reflect the reality,” Paine said.
Farther out, there are more AI-related job postings, or 437, in Fairfax County and the city of Fairfax.
The report says the D.C. area has several industries driving demand for AI specialists, including defense, health care and finance — sectors that are well-represented in Arlington’s startup scene.
While the D.C. area and the Bay are in close competition, New York City, the region with the next-highest AI labor demand, comes in a distant third with 574 job postings.
Beyond creating jobs, AI is expected to impact the region’s data centers. Northern Virginia has more data centers than anywhere else in the world and — while last year saw a surge in data center leasing — JLL says these centers still need to adapt to meet AI-specific requirements, including higher power consumption.
“As the largest data center market in the world by a magnitude of 3x, Northern Virginia will be at the international epicenter of the AI-fueled demand curve in the near-term and long-term,” the JLL report says.
AI lobbying is also on the rise as lawmakers — including Arlington’s Rep. Don Beyer — try to pass a slew of laws regulating the industry. The number of entities seeking to influence AI policy ballooned in 2023 — from 129 in the first quarter of that year to 335 in the second quarter, according to JLL.
“The future of AI will undoubtedly hinge on the regulatory environment, which is unknown territory currently,” the report says. “Further complicating the legal landscape [are] the numerous copyright disputes making their way through the judicial system. As a result, lobbying firms are racing to represent the industry.”
Companies, nonprofits, universities, trade groups and other organizations reported spending $569 million in federal AI lobbying during the first three quarters of last year, the report estimates.
The region’s place as a lead location for people with AI backgrounds has been several years in the making. In the last five years, AI-related job postings in the D.C. area have more than tripled, JLL found in a fall 2023 report.
While recent years have seen companies such as Amazon establish major presences in Arlington, the fall report noted that the Pentagon is also investing huge amounts of money into AI.
The Department of Defense requested $1.8 billion in its 2024 budget for capabilities, workforce development and data management efforts related to the rapidly developing technology. And that’s not to mention demand from the intelligence community.
JLL found that nearly half of all AI-related positions in the D.C. area required clearance for top secret or sensitive compartmented information, as of last fall.
Only 15% of AI job postings in the region were remote — potentially good news for places like Arlington, which is adapting to an economic landscape in which many remote workers have been leaving for places with lower costs of living.
Rep. Don Beyer is taking a leading role in Congress to address what he says is one of the most pressing issues this century: the regulation of artificial intelligence.
This year, Beyer (D-Va.) and a bipartisan group of colleagues intend to tackle a variety of AI-related issues, including the creation of deep fakes, copyright infringement and enhancing privacy protections.
Although the Congressman recognizes the difficulty of keeping pace with AI’s rapid advancements, he told ARLnow that the primary focus is on current threats rather than trying to predict future uses.
“I think we’re coming pretty quickly to understand that we can’t regulate the math or the computer science,” he said in an interview this week at his office on Capitol Hill. “We’re regulating end uses. So, if there’s bias in AI, we need to make sure that we’re saying that’s unacceptable. If they’re invasions of privacy, we need to say there’s that’s not acceptable. Here are the consequences.”
It is fitting that Arlington’s member of Congress has taken an interest in AI, given the numerous local startups also trying to innovate the technology and mitigate its potentially adverse effects. Beyer has gone so far as to enroll part time at George Mason University to pursue a master’s degree in artificial intelligence.
So far, he has completed nearly six out of nine prerequisite courses, including pre-calculus, calculus, multivariable calculus, discrete mathematics, Python three and object-oriented programming. He has several more years to go to complete his degree, however, because he is only taking one class per semester.
“So, probably, it’s going to be four more years before I get it,” Beyer said. “I’m hoping to do it before I’m 80.”
Given his background, Beyer has taken on prominent roles in several AI-focused groups on Capitol Hill, serving as vice-chair of the New Democrat Coalition AI Working Group, and is also member of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s bipartisan AI working group.
Earlier this week, he was appointed to a new 12-person bipartisan Artificial Intelligence Task Force that will be responsible for drafting a report on AI. The goal of the task force is to help elected officials understand its societal impact and guiding Congress in curbing potential fallout, Beyer says.
“Every technological breakthrough throughout the history of mankind… people have been displaced — agricultural revolution, industrial revolution, Information Revolution, the development of wheels, whatever. But we’ve always ended up with more jobs than we had before,” he said.
“But nothing has ever happened as quickly as this has, so you don’t get 100 years to adapt to the change of [AI],” Beyer continued. “You get a couple of years [to adapt] to the enormous changes that will come from it.”
Congress has already introduced dozens of AI-related bills — Beyer claims the number official number is close to 200 — aimed at addressing issues such as protecting people’s likeness and voice, ensuring AI-made content is clearly marked and stopping the spread of fake audio or video that could mislead voters about election candidates.
Beyer has also co-sponsored multiple bills, including the CREATE Act and AI Foundation Model Transparency Act, intended to enhance transparency about AI data training and equip the public, particularly small businesses and organizations, with the resources and tools needed for innovation.
He also think that government may have a role in supplying training data for AI models.
“One of the initiatives that I hope will advance is using government to create a big database — like OpenAI has — to train models on, but that didn’t take 6 trillion words off the internet which ChatGPT 4 did,” he said. “Rather, it is a curated dataset that’s smaller but has almost everything that you would want out of Wikipedia, the Encyclopedia Britannica, or whatever else.”
A newly formed committee says it aims to learn more about how Arlington Public Schools students use their school-provided devices both in and out of the classroom.
The Educational Technology Advisory Committee, which formed last year, consists of parents, technology specialists and APS personnel. One of their top priorities is determining the educational impacts of the iPads and MacBooks that APS provides all students.
“I think parents are really interested to know, how are they used, and how is it helping our children?” committee Chair Chris Woolfe told the Arlington School Board yesterday evening (Tuesday) during a work session.
Of particular interest, according to a committee progress report, is the degree to which devices are distracting students in class as well as any connection between device usage and academic performance.
“Our immediate goal is to gather student iPad & MacBook usage data,” the report says. “This would help inform all of our decisions moving forward and these kinds of analytics are standard in the industry now.”
Some parents have raised concerns about APS’s one-to-one device program, which previously only provided devices to students in grades 3-12 but expanded in 2020 to include K-2 students. School Board watchdog group Arlington Parents for Education in September 2022 called for a more thorough examination of how effectively iPads and MacBooks help children learn.
While a polarizing issue for parents, some students have pointed out that the devices can make it easier for them to organize their schoolwork and find information.
School Board member Mary Kadera argued on Tuesday that the school system has an obligation to provide parents with more information about school-issued technology.
“We have to. We just have to,” Kadera said. “As a parent, I am continually frustrated by the fact that I have so little visibility on what my kids are actually doing on their APS-issued devices.”
A 2019 study found that Arlington students were spending substantial portions of their school days using electronic devices: about 40% for elementary-aged students and 53% and 58%, respectively, for middle and high school students.
In addition to learning more about device usage, the Educational Technology Advisory Committee wants to reconsider the effects of accessories such as headphones. These are often necessary to avoid disrupting other students but they are one of the pricier items on school supply lists.
The advisory committee intends to make specific recommendations about school-issued devices only once it has collected and reviewed usage data.
Its February progress report notes that this is “a unique cultural moment,” with students learning in ways that are very different from how their parents were taught. Ultimately, the committee says it aims to represent the views of APS and parents, even when they may be at odds.
“This committee allows bidirectional communication between our school system and our parents,” the progress report says. “We aim to help parents better understand how tech is used at APS which hopefully may ease some anxiety. We also aim to help APS better understand how tech impacts students from a parents’ perspective, so that we can make necessary course corrections.”
After more than a decade and nearly 500 articles, one of our longest-running columns, Startup Monday, is ending — at least for now.
Since 2013, ARLnow has profiled scrappy entrepreneurs with thoughtful ideas and new businesses at every stage of a startup’s life cycle, from raising a seed investment fundraising round to landing on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies to outgrowing the “startup” descriptor when they merge, get acquired or list their shares on a stock exchange.
Through the column, written by ARLnow staff and supported by longtime sponsor Monday Properties, we have covered some companies before they made it big. Profiled when it was just five years old, today, Privia Health is publicly traded on the stock market. Once a small outfit out of Rosslyn, PerformYard — founded to disrupt how HR is managed — moved to Ballston, nabbed $95 million and celebrated its revenue growing by five times in the last four years.
A few had brilliant strokes of luck: Zoobean, which nabbed a coveted investment from outgoing Shark Tank shark Mark Cuban, is still going strong and still headquartered in Arlington. Since Cuban’s investment, the company ended its subscription service, renamed itself Beanstack and now focuses on partnering with libraries and offering software solutions that motivate kids to read.
ARLnow covered Ballston food tech startup HUNGRY when it launched in 2016 and long before its founders, brothers Shayan and Eman Pahlevani, scored major celebrity investors including actress Issa Rae and NFL player DeAndre Hopkins, along with scores of other performers, TV show hosts and major athletes.
Other Startup Monday subjects never went national but cemented themselves in Arlington. Sol Schott’s Columbia Pike bakery, ACME Pie Company, is a household name for locals and the baker is still thinking of ways to expand his brand — most recently getting in on the ground floor of a membership-based arcade business located inside his shop.
Amid these success stories, dozens of other companies never gained the same traction and were integrated into other platforms or sold to larger companies.
There were amusing and serious Kickstarter campaigns — among them, for an urban planning-themed take on “Cards Against Humanity” and a phone-based breathalyzer. Attempts to disrupt the landscaping and tailoring industries, in the style of ride-sharing app Uber, struggled to take off.
Such is the fate that every entrepreneur with an idea risks tempting when they get started, however.
Startup Monday was able to have that breadth of coverage thanks to a sponsorship agreement that gave ARLnow free rein to select who to profile. We could give equal weight to bright ideas such as portable cup holders for airplane and to to businesses solving entrenched problems in health care, including the physician-patient experience in women’s health or gaps in comprehensive diabetes care.
This column also became an unofficial history of the changes Arlington’s local economy has experienced. After thousands of Dept. of Defense workers left major office buildings in the 2010s, Arlington rebranded itself as a tech hub, especially in the wake of the arrival of Amazon, with a particularly strong presence of cybersecurity and defense-oriented startups, securing planes and trains and military installations and power plants.
ARLnow thanks Monday Properties for the long-standing partnership and the hundreds of stories of startup successes and failures — including, in a fitting final installation, today’s story of a new beginning for veterans of a long-shuttered game company.
There’s a chance that Startup Monday makes a return down the road, but for now the column is signing off. While we might not be able to chronicle it on a weekly basis, the march of innovation locally — at the smallest local startups to Arlington’s more established tech firms — continues unabated.
Sponsored by Monday Properties and written by ARLnow, Startup Monday is a weekly column that profiles Arlington-based startups, founders, and other local technology news. Monday Properties is proudly featuring Three Ballston Plaza.
Like the setting of its game, “Dark Age of Camelot,” Mythic Entertainment was a game studio of another semi-legendary time in the industry.
In true Arthurian fashion, Ballston-based Loric Games sets out to restore that legacy at a time when gaming needs it most.
Fairfax-based developer Mythic Entertainment worked on groundbreaking multiplayer games like “Dark Age of Camelot,” “Warhammer Online” and “Ultima Online,” and assisted with the criminally underrated “Dragon Age II” before shutting down in 2015.
Loric Games, based out of the Industrious coworking space in Ballston, is a new studio founded by former Mythic Entertainment leaders. The studio recently raised $4 million in funding to work on a game that CEO Brian Johnson says combines some of the best of Mythic’s narrative-led multiplayer experiences with gameplay of the popular sandbox role-playing game subgenre.
Even before closing its doors a decade ago, some developers from Mythic’s round table drifted apart, taking on their own quests. Johnson launched cybersecurity startup DivvyCloud — later acquired by Rapid7. Others worked on different games. New Loric chief production officer Jeff Hickman, became an executive producer for Bioware, overseeing ongoing development, or live services, after “Star Wars: The Old Republic” was developed.
After a few years, Johnson said he and co-founder Rob Denton started to get back together and talk about books and games.
“We were like, ‘Well, you sold a company and I sold a company; why don’t we give it a shot,'” Johnson said.
Mythic Entertainment veterans caught wind of their new enterprise, decided to join their quest, and now comprise half of the studio.
“We didn’t set out with the intent of getting a bunch of Mythic people back together,” said Johnson. “We set out to get back to our roots, back to smaller game [development] with a 20-30 person team, to make a meaningful game that can push the boundaries.”
Many of those who stayed in game development felt they were stagnating on formulaic projects, Johnson said.
“This was an opportunity to get back to what made us passionate,” Johnson said.
Loric Games is keeping its cards close to its chest on some of the details of its new project, including the name and the setting, but an official announcement will come sometime around the Game Developers Conference in March.
The game will have an early access period — a stage where a polished but unfinished build is available for players to test — with a launch targeted sometime in the next year. That’s the goal, but Johnson noted “it is the game industry” and those timelines can be slippery.
Arlington County awarded $225,000 in grants to five local startups working to solve problems in their respective industries, from keeping track of freight trucks to helping veterans with disabilities.
The five winning startups are the first to receive grants — of $25,000 to $50,000 apiece — from the Arlington Innovation Fund. This new pot of money, which the county approved last year, is intended to support early-stage tech companies, particularly those owned by women, veterans and minorities, while pushing down office vacancy rates.
Arlington Economic Development (AED), which oversees the fund, says it selected the five startups from 22 applicants because of “their executive and and technical capabilities, as well as their potential for significant revenue growth and societal impact.”
The companies are as follows:
- Dispatchr Technologies, LLC, which developed software to reduce the energy costs and carbon emissions of power plants.
- Freely Payments, LLC, which aims to cut processing fees when businesses accept credit card payments from customers.
- GenLogs Corporation, an artificial intelligence company that tracks freight trucks and tractor-trailers.
- Phalanx AI, Inc., a cybersecurity company that helps protect sensitive documents in online products such as Office 365 and Google Workspace.
- Seamless Transition, a medical device company that helps wounded veterans transition from active duty to civilian life through use of “a prosthetic knee that mimics the movement of natural human limbs.”
“We are excited to support these innovative companies in their startup journey as they launch, scale and advance out-of-the-box solutions right here in Arlington,” AED Business Investment Group Director Michael Stiefvater in a statement. “Their dedication to innovation and entrepreneurship aligns with Arlington’s vision as a leading technology hub offering a dynamic and inclusive business environment for startups.”
The grants can be used for business expenses such as hiring employees, leasing office space, and purchasing equipment. Many recipients told AED they plan to add new hires, enhance current features of their products and increase their marketing presence.
One entrepreneur, Seamless Transition CEO Sarah Malinowski, said she plans to patent the design of the prosthetic knee.
“With these resources, we’ll be able to secure a full patent for our innovative design using the current provisional patent,” said Malinowski. “This grant propels us forward on our trajectory, eliminating any potential delays and allowing us to focus unwaveringly on out mission.”
AIF still has $425,000 to award, having received $650,000 in the county’s 2024 budget. A second round of applications opened yesterday (Monday) and will close on March 10.
Depending on how many approved in the second round, there may be enough funding for a third, AED spokeswoman Destiny Esper told ARLnow.
Summer camp registration is just around the corner, with yet another change to smooth out the process.
Camp registration — historically a process plagued with problems for parents — was a relatively quiet affair last year after the county and its platform vendor tweaked the technology and made a few other changes.
After surveying families, Arlington’s Dept. of Parks and Recreation made a few other changes to the process this year, DPR spokeswoman Jerry Solomon tells ARLnow. Notably, registration starts next week, up from March and April in years past, so families can get a head-start on summer plans.
The parks department has also staggered registration start dates to ease potential strains on its software. Sign-ups for camps run by DPR’s partners open next Wednesday, Feb. 14, and for county-run camps the following Wednesday, Feb. 21. All registration sessions open at noon.
Registration opened for families who qualify for fee reductions on Monday while out-of-county residents can register for camps starting March 4.
This year brings another change that Solomon says is intended to make the process more efficient and manage expectations for families. Waitlists will be limited to 50% of each camp’s total enrollment — so, a camp with 40 available slots will have a maximum waitlist of 20.
This is a shift from years past, Solomon said, when families “often were on huge waitlists with little chance of getting a camp slot.” That could beget families signing up for multiple waitlists, leading to a pile-on effect and additional system strain.
“This change will allow for a more efficient registration process,” Solomon continued. “If spaces become available for new enrollments, the camp enrollment status will be updated.”
The newest update tacks onto a package of changes that went into effect last year to keep the county’s registration software from crashing. For years, parents would wake up early to nab spots for their children only to be greeted with spinning wheels and error messages.
County officials promised change in 2022, only to have the software melt down once again. They tried again, making a variety of changes that included:
- A virtual waiting room function
- Adjusting and staggering registration dates and times
- Updating the camp refund policy
- Adding more camp slots
- Increasing the number of day-of-registration support staff to 40
- Offering early registration for families with active fee reductions
Solomon said the adjustments proved successful. The system “remained stable” last year and DPR had “unusually low call volumes,” indicating that fewer families were having problems.
“We are encouraged by the registration system’s improved performance and look forward to a successful summer camp registration this February,” the spokesperson said.
Sponsored by Monday Properties and written by ARLnow, Startup Monday is a weekly column that profiles Arlington-based startups, founders, and other local technology news. Monday Properties is proudly featuring Three Ballston Plaza.
Ballston-based human resources startup PerformYard has nabbed a $95 million equity investment from Updata Partners, a D.C.-based growth equity firm.
PerformYard, which offers companies employee performance management software that handles everything from annual reviews to quarterly goals, announced the investment earlier this month.
The investment from Updata, which invests in business-to-business software-driven companies, caps off other recent windfalls for PerformYard. Its revenue grew by five times over the last four years, launched a new product last summer and, last spring, was ranked first in the category of “Highest Satisfaction Software” by G2, a peer-to-peer review site.
Now, bolstered by the $95 million investment, PerformYard intends to hire more staff across all departments. Right now, it has eight full-time positions open, per its website.
“We are thrilled to partner with Updata as we embark on our next phase of growth in solving performance management challenges,” PerformYard Founder and CEO Ben Hastings said in a statement. “Given the incredible success and growth our team has realized in recent years, I view this partnership as a natural evolution of our business to support continued development and expansion.”
Hastings founded PerformYard in 2013 to help organizations improve employee performance through better management and improvements to standard practices within human resources, such as performance reviews. For instance, notes PerformYard, 93% of organizations run employee performance reviews but almost the same percentage of HR leaders, 90%, are unhappy with their process.
“We identified a critical need for employers to better manage, coach, retain and progress talent throughout their organizations,” Hastings said. “Over the last 10 years, we have seen the emphasis on employee performance and engagement deepen significantly. Our plan is to continue building our organization to support these critical initiatives.”
Updata General Partner Carter Griffin, who will join PerformYard’s Board of Directors, complimented Hastings and the PerformYard team for its exceptional performance in recent years.
“With PerformYard, we see an opportunity to win in a large and important category,” he said in a statement. “We are excited to help further scale the company.”
Photo via PerformYard/Facebook
(Updated at 4:55 p.m.) Arlington Public Schools experienced a data breach this week affecting information it collects for visitors to school buildings.
The school system notified people of “externally exposed” data in a message sent this afternoon (Friday). The breach is part of a broader leak, reported this morning, affecting some schools in the U.S. that, like APS, use a visitor management system from Raptor Technologies.
“Arlington Public Schools was contacted this week by our Visitor Management System vendor, Raptor Technologies, regarding the discovery of some APS data that was externally exposed for an unspecified timeframe,” Chief Operating Officer Dr. John Mayo said in the message, which APS shared with ARLnow.
“At this time, we do not know what specific APS information was exposed or if it was accessed by anyone,” he continued.
The leaked information could relate to government-issued IDs.
The visitor management software that Raptor Technologies offers screens each visitor’s government-issued ID card against sex offender registries in all 50 states and “an unlimited number of custom databases,” according to its website.
This information is collected when visitors enter and exit a building, according to someone familiar with how APS uses the system. The technology also scans APS ID badges, for those who have them, and is used partly for substitutes to record when they show up for work.
Visitors receive a badge with their photo, name, role, destination and date and time of entry, according to Raptor.
APS says Raptor took action after learning of the breach.
“Upon learning of the breach, Raptor secured the accessible information and initiated an investigation,” Mayo’s message said. “This issue has affected many school systems nationwide, not only APS. For your awareness, this system is used to manage visitors and volunteers entering our facilities. APS utilizes a limited number of services offered by Raptor, compared to the full range of its capabilities.”
The school system says it is working with Raptor and will give updates as it learns more information.
“The safety of our students, staff and community is our utmost priority, and we will continue working with Raptor to ensure that all necessary steps are being taken to safeguard the information in Raptor,” Mayo said.
This was not the only tech issue that APS faced this week.
It appears APS used up all of its allotted Google cloud storage space — 122 terabytes, or roughly 5 gigabytes per user — according to June Prakash, the head of the local teachers union, Arlington Education Association.
“Some staff could not access email or other documents including plans for the upcoming days,” she said.
On Saturday, APS got to work to resolve issues some users reported, including being unable to save documents, according an email sent to staff. By Monday, “the issue reported with Google has been resolved,” a follow-up email said.
An APS spokesman later said the brief disruption was caused by a “service subscription issue between our retailer and Google,” and the school system worked to ensure the service was restored on Monday morning.
Photo via Burst/Unsplash
Last month, a peculiar cybersecurity incident derailed class at Washington-Liberty and prompted a police investigation that is ongoing.
Around 10:10 a.m. on Nov. 30, police were dispatched to the school for “the late report of suspicious circumstances,” says ACPD spokeswoman Ashley Savage.
“The preliminary investigation indicates that between 10:45 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. on November 29, a student inside Washington Liberty High School utilized an electronic device that caused nearby iPhones to turn off,” she said.
“Police identified the involved student and the manner of intrusion that impacted the iPhones,” she continued. “Based on the preliminary investigation, there is no ongoing threat to the community related to this incident.”
Although ACPD identified the student involved, no charges have been sought at this time because police are still investigating the incident and any impacts to affected devices, says Savage.
Later that week, on Dec. 1, Arlington Public Schools shared a message from ACPD to the W-L community, seeking to find more potentially impacted phones. The message, shared with ARLnow, advised recipients of the incident and asking anyone whose cell phone turned off while at the school on Nov. 29 to file an online police report or contact the tip line at 703-228-4180 or [email protected].
“Victims have been identified and efforts to identify potential additional victims are ongoing,” Savage said.
ACPD did not provide additional details, such as what kind of device might have been used, citing the need to preserve the integrity of the ongoing investigation. A cybersecurity expert contacted by ARLnow declined to speculate on how a student might have turned off nearby iPhones.
The police department did note that it is not currently investigating any similar incidents. ACPD also shared some general cybersecurity tips.
“Police recommend community members always ensure their electronic devices are up to date with the latest software provided by their manufacturer and/or service provider,” Savage said. “Additional cybersecurity best practices include using strong passwords, thinking before you click on suspicious links, and using multi-factor authentication.”
The unusual incident comes as Arlington Public Schools have seen multiple lockdowns, some due to gun-related threats, particularly this year, while others have been chalked up to “swatting,” or hoax calls to 911 about school threats intended to elicit a large police response.
Sponsored by Monday Properties and written by ARLnow, Startup Monday is a weekly column that profiles Arlington-based startups, founders, and other local technology news. Monday Properties is proudly featuring Three Ballston Plaza.
By the time Arlington native Roger Nowakowski graduated from Yorktown High School, he had already founded and sold his first startup venture.
Nowakowski, who grew up in the Woodmont neighborhood, built an app for people trying to get their hands on the next hot product in the luxury goods market — especially sneakerheads. He founded it at 16, as a high school sophomore when he was stuck at home at the height of the pandemic.
Limited-edition shoes from brands such as Nike and Adidas sell out online within seconds, which he says made it borderline impossible for a human to manually buy the product. His app allowed users to, for instance, purchase a single pair or mass quantities of shoes at the press of a button.
“Sneaker resellers would use my product to buy these hyped sneakers on drop in mass, to then sell on the aftermarket for profit,” he said noting, sneakers can sometimes sell at 10 times their retail price on the aftermarket.
Some 1,500 paying users made more than $1.4 million in purchases through the app before he sold it in 2021, when he was 17 years old. He graduated from Yorktown a year later and went straight into coding for other projects.
“I felt more alive than ever through the pursuit of knowledge out of genuine curiosity in areas I was passionate about,” he said. “After exiting from my first project, I was extremely eager to get back to work.”
For the next two years, he would work with a Miami-based team on a blockchain app for music artists. Now, he is a founding engineer at Waves, a venture capital-backed platform connecting brands looking to advertise with social media influencers.
It launched on the App Store this September, the Denver Business Journal reported.
“I was the first engineer and employee hire,” said Nowakowski. A colleague referred him to the founder of Waves, Bruce Weaver, when the platform was just an idea.
Typically, brands select leading influencers to make paid promotional posts to market their products. Waves allows people with smaller Instagram and TikTok followings to buy products from participating brands — at a discount — if they make promotional content within two weeks. Brands then pay creators based on how well this content does.
Waves is poised for significant growth next year, Nowakowski said.
“We’re setting ambitious milestones; 100,000 creators and processing over $1 million in total creator payouts,” he said. “We want to expand the creator economy while delivering unparalleled returns on ad spend for brands leveraging [user-generated content].”
Nowakowski credits his computer science teacher at Yorktown for helping him launch his first app — and thus, his career.
“At the time, Mr. [Greg] Rusk made an effort to align what we were learning in [computer science] with what I was building personally,” he said. “Not only was he a great teacher, but given his experience building software, he was easily relatable to, and guided me on the right path in class.”