This winter, a few months into my pregnancy, I began making a spreadsheet to collect information about my local childcare options. I didn’t get very far into manually pulling details about fees, class sizes, and addresses before I gave up, relegating the process to my endless to-do list as something to tackle sometime between now and infinity.
Enter the administration of Zohran Mamdani. And with it, the mayor’s new chief technology officer, Lisa Gelobter, also the commissioner of New York City’s Office of Technology & Innovation. Within Mamdani’s first 100 days in office, Gelobter’s team released a first-of-its kind childcare map. It’s a simple work of coding, and yet the kind of effort we have come to think of as an impossible ask from our government agencies. It helped me create a day care short list in a matter of minutes. With Gelobter just settling into her job, she told me, it’s only the beginning.
Gelobter has a sweeping directive, from managing the technology that directs 311 calls to maintaining the city’s cybersecurity systems to enabling equitable access to government services. “I can sit on my sofa and order a vegan burrito and mezcal and weed and have it delivered within 10 minutes, whereas if I want to apply for SNAP benefits or find a childcare provider, that process is so onerous,” she said. That’s the kind of problem she wants to fix.
NYC CTO Lisa Gelobter in the Shirley Chisholm Recreation Center media lab.
Photographer Will Pippin
I met Gelobter in April at the new Shirley Chisholm Recreation Center in Brooklyn, where the smell of fresh paint in bright, Caribbean colors felt like an apt metaphor for the city’s new lease on life. On the way in, she stopped to photograph a plaque honoring Chisholm. “My father was her campaign manager,” she told me, beaming. That’s just one bit of lore from a storied childhood in ’70s and ’80s New York City. Her father was a Polish Holocaust survivor, her mother a Caribbean immigrant who became the only Black woman in the country to own a television station. They counted Gloria Steinem, Charles Rangel, and Jerry Nadler among their family friends.
I sat down with Gelobter—slender and long-limbed, her silver hair tied back in a ponytail—in the center’s new media lab, where locals can use gleaming equipment for podcasting, video production, and 3D printing. Staffers stopped her for selfies; yet another signal that this was no ordinary mayoral administration. “That enthusiasm, the energy—it’s crazy,” she told me. When she got the call from Mamdani’s team, the person she was most excited to tell was her 18-year-old niece. “She might have cried,” Gelobter said.
It’s all a bit reminiscent of another chapter in her career: In 2015, Gelobter joined the Obama administration as chief digital service officer for the United States Department of Education. Her signature achievement there was building the College Scorecard tool, which helps students navigate the college selection and admission process.
But she also brings years of experience in the private sector. She was part of the team that invented the Shockwave Player, the ’90s plug-in you might recall from the iconic little puzzle piece with X’s for eyes that appeared as a result of errors. (She was not, however, the inventor of the GIF, she told me in an apologetic tone, hoping to dispel, once and for all, a myth that has somehow circulated online for many years.)
She later helped launch the streaming service Hulu, was the interim chief digital officer at Black Entertainment Television (BET), and founded her first start-up, the anti-workplace-discrimination platform tEQuitable, in 2017.
I asked Gelobter what it was like to watch DOGE effectively replace her old agency, the United States Digital Service. The irony, she explained, was watching it dismantle “the shortcuts and the bureaucracy hacking that we put into place”—exactly the kinds of things Elon Musk’s organization allegedly aspired to achieve. Perhaps the difference was in the ethos backing the work: “It should be in service of protecting people, providing services to people, which maybe was not always the case.”
Another legacy her team will have to reckon with is the last mayor’s. In 2023 the Eric Adams administration banned the usage of TikTok on all government-owned phones, citing security concerns around the then Chinese-owned company. Mamdani has reversed course on that decision—as long as staffers only use the app on specially designated phones on which no other government business is allowed to be conducted. These kinds of social media initiatives are not some sideshow, she insisted. Building government tools without “messaging, communication, promotion,” she told me, is only half the battle. “The mayor wants to reach people where they are,” she added, “and they’re on TikTok.”
I asked whether she had any trepidation about her team’s ability to execute on the lofty vision presented during Mamdani’s campaign. “I’m not nervous about it. I’m not daunted by it,” she told me. “That’s what I’m here for. That is literally why I’m showing up.”
-
The Wild, Strange Case Todd Blanche Can’t Seem to Escape
-
Miles Davis’s Complicated Legacy as Artist—and Abuser
-
How Kane Parsons Brought the Backrooms to the Silver Screen
-
Carlos Alcaraz on “Living the Dream Life” and His Rivalry With Jannik Sinner
