Chinatown Hosts Lantern Celebration Today

The Super Saturday celebration is a modern evolution of a tradition unique to New York's Chinatown that dates back to the 1960s. Originally, because many shops were closed on Lunar New Year's Day, lion dance troupes would perform for merchants on the following Saturday, drawing large crowds and filling the streets with confetti. Today's event, organized by the nonprofit Think!Chinatown, continues this legacy of community gathering and cultural celebration. The organization works at the intersection of art, storytelling, and neighborhood engagement to support and preserve the cultural heritage of the area. Their work often bridges the analog and digital, such as their HowToChinatown.nyc project, a map-based website built to bolster the online presence of local small businesses. This blend of tradition and technology mirrors a growing trend within the city's Asian American community, which is increasingly shaping the NYC startup scene. Founders like Benny Wong, the co-founder and CTO of Timehop who holds a computer science degree from Columbia University, exemplify the engineering talent emerging from the city. The Asian-American Entrepreneurs Network (AEN) has been fostering a community of entrepreneurs, investors, and startups in New York since 2006, providing a platform for connection and mutual support. For engineers considering a leap into this ecosystem, numerous Asian American founders have paved the way. Stella Han, for instance, transitioned from her role as an engineer at Affirm to co-founding Fractional, a platform for real estate investment, after identifying a personal pain point. Similarly, the desire to solve a personal problem led Mariko Tokioka to create EastMeetEast, a dating app for the Asian American community, which raised $1 million from investors including 500 Startups. The path for a full-time engineer into the startup world often begins with a side project. One NYC-based software engineer reported earning an additional $15,000 a month from side hustles, including building and selling AI chatbots for small businesses using no-code tools like Voiceflow. This "indie hacker" approach allows for experimentation and product validation while maintaining a stable income. The key is to set strict time boundaries, focus on small, achievable weekly targets, and remember that even 15 minutes of focused effort counts as progress. For those interested in AI and automation, the barrier to entry for building powerful applications has been lowered by various frameworks. Open-source tools like LangChain provide a modular way to build applications powered by large language models (LLMs), allowing for the chaining of prompts and integration of external tools. For more complex tasks, frameworks like AutoGen and CrewAI enable the creation and orchestration of multiple AI agents that can collaborate to achieve a goal. The New York venture capital landscape is actively funding early-stage companies in these fields. In January 2026 alone, NYC-based AI startups saw significant investment, with companies like FLORA, building creative tools with applied AI, raising a $42M Series A, and Sixfold AI, an insurtech company using AI for risk evaluation, securing a $30M Series B. Investors in the city have shown strong interest in enterprise AI, with an average seed round for AI companies hovering around $3.2 million. Beyond venture capital, a strong community of founders and builders provides invaluable support. Organizations and events during New York Tech Week often feature panels and networking opportunities focused on AI and consumer apps, connecting aspiring founders with established entrepreneurs and investors. This ecosystem, combined with personal drive and a focus on solving real-world problems, creates a fertile ground for the next generation of tech leaders to emerge from all corners of the city.