(Illustration: Robert Grossman)

Jack Dorsey, cofounder of Twitter and Square, recently tried to disabuse the tech industry of its infatuation with the word ‘disruption.’ “We don’t want ‘disruption,’ where we just move things around. We want a direction. We want a purpose,” he said on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt, humbly suggesting the biannual conference change its name. But it’s more than just semantics. The tech sector’s claim to produce world-changing products and services often gets drowned out in a chorus of me-too companies solving problems no one ever complained about. The umpteenth nightlife-recommendations tool or empty real-time dating app can obscure the whirr of a nascent robotics sector in Manhattan or a futuristic, even revolutionary, experiment in manufacturing in Queens.

However, there are insurgents in our midst, quietly pushing the city closer to Mayor Bloomberg’s goal of "reclaiming our title as the world capital of technological innovation." To identify those mindful mutineers, we tried to look beyond established leaders (see: Wilson, Fred) to the next class of innovators, who are forcing corporations to come to terms with the mobile revolution or shepherding startups toward making money without selling out. We found investors, developers, educators and agitators. We identified pioneering companies that set off the self-education craze (you’re welcome, Peter Thiel). We spotted a trio of provocateurs in Long Island City and an open-source radical on Roosevelt Island. Looking at this constellation of entrepreneurs, you can start to see the outline of New York’s tech future taking shape.

Valery Komissarova, Grishin Robotics: Rallying the Robots

Phineas Barnes, First Round Capital: the Bottom-Up Investor

Marleen Vogelaar, Shapeways: the Manufacturing Maven 

Anil Dash, Activate and ThinkUp: Amiable Agitator

Alex Taub and Michael Schonfeld, Dwolla: The Credit Card Killers

Mike Karnjanaprakorn, Skillshare: The Principal of New York

Rick Webb, Tumblr: The Undercover Ad Man

Deborah Estrin, CornellNYC Tech: the Entrepreneurial Egghead

Ryder Ripps, Jonathan Vingiano and Jules LaPlace, OKFocus: The Merry Pranksters

Daniel Loeb, Third Point LLC: the Poison Pen

This story appeared on the cover of the November 14, 2012 issue of The New York Observer. 

Ms. Komissarova.

Rallying the Robots

When longtime Wired editor in chief Chris Anderson left his post earlier this month, it wasn’t for another Condé title or a sabbatical to write his fourth book. He decamped for a robotics startup. It’s just the latest sign, along with drones appearing on the cover of every magazine from The New Yorker to The Economist, that robotics is no longer relegated to science fiction.

New York has never been known as a robotics capital, unlike Boston, with its MIT hackers, or Pittsburgh, with its Carnegie Mellon engineers. But one Russian oligarch wants to change that.

In June, Dmitry Grishin launched Grishin Robotics, New York City’s first venture capital firm devoted wholly to personal robotics. Mr. Grishin is the CEO of Mail.ru, a Russian company that recently unloaded a large stake in Facebook, giving him cash to play with and allowing him to follow the pattern established by Mail.ru cofounder-turned-venture capitalist Yuri Milner. As Mr. Grishin told The Observer back in June, “Most of the VCs are focused on mobile applications, but you really need risk capital to improve this area. I want to focus fully on mass-market robotics.”

But Mr. Grishin remains in Russia, running the show at Mail.ru. It’s his business development director, Valery Komissarova, who’s laboring to turn this town into a thriving robotics hub. Her role is part sleuth, seeking out quiet but promising startups, and part booster club president, talking up the high-risk sector to other investors and would-be founders. “Entrepreneurs know the Mark Zuckerberg success stories, but in robotics, they don’t have such clear role models,” Ms. Komissarova told The Observer. She’d like to change that.

Her job isn’t as simple as establishing a meet-up and cruising co-working spots, however. Unlike the self-promoting social media types, this is a tough group to wrangle: robotics companies are often outright secretive, and even the more open ones are commonly toiling away on very specific problems. But if anybody can pull this off, it’s the cool Ms. Komissarova.

Next: Phineas Barnes, First Round Capital: the Bottom-Up Investor

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