Seattle tumbles to No. 20 in global ranking of startup ecosystems
geekwire.com
geekwire.com
I find this list hard to take too seriously. Despite the city's incredible university culture it's always been fundamentally anti-startup from it's very nature.
Boston is a city were credentials matter far more than ideas, and even then there's a strong, strong culture of "you aren't special, nobody is". People are skeptical of new ideas, compensation for tech has always been abysmal, and people tend to be surprisingly risk adverse.
I've lived there a few times, and there are parts of the city I love, but nobody seriously interested in anything disruptive is going to be hanging in that area too long after graduation.
Plus, tech isn’t the only startup dimension. Boston has a ton of medical stuff too.
I don't think these are "startups" like a couple of guys and a beer keg - they are looking at well-funded business ventures.
Apollo, Akamai, BBN, DEC, Data General, Draper Labs, EMC, Prime, Raytheon, Stratus, Thinking Machines, Wang...and numerous others I'm probably forgetting.
The 128 and 495 belt used to chock full of tech companies.
Nowadays it's a lot of bioscience startups.
>Boston at number 6? ... I find this list hard to take too seriously.
and silicon valley london, new york, tel aviv, and los angeles are ranked higher than it; the headline, that seattle dropped to 20, is the headline.
after Boston are singapore, beijing, seoul, tokyo, shanghai, and washington dc.
what is your suggested list? I just don't understand what you and many other commenters are saying.
His answer is because the rich Seattle techies got rich by being employee # 60,000 at MSFT / AMZ / FB / GOOG and aren't apart of the Seattle startup scene, and don't have any interest in investing into it.
What do you folks think?
Compare it to Boston which is a similarly sized city.
Boston/New England has Harvard, MIT, BC, Tufts, Dartmouth, Amherst, Williams, Middlebury, Brown, etc. It’s the most educated region of the world with huge pool of founders and talent. Even though it’s not a tech focused place the way Seattle is it’s a better place to find young talented people willing to work for or start a new company.
According to popular research, the best founders are older, as in 40s. [0]
Maybe older founders need/want to raise less?
[0] https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/podcast/knowledge-at-wha...
Likewise seattle wouldn’t be a tech center without Boeing, Cray, Microsoft, Amazon, F5, Expedia, Real, etc.
It’s not like tech is a natural resource that comes from the ground in some cities and not others. It’s built around what was built there, whether it’s seattle or Mountain View.
It's just far too terrifying a world for that shit now. Housing prices are absurd, and just as bad, healthcare is deathly terrifying to consider. None of these companies reward ambition or drive very well, progress is incredibly slow, culminating in more glossy over-produced show-off events of very little. This top-heavy pace would be horrible for engineers and is, except it's well paid awful & unproductiveness, and jobs have been relatively abundant.
Usually when there's some kind of shitty local optimum that's obviously bad at producing new value, there is correction. New things start. But this whole era has been consolidation/aquisitions & belt-tightening difficulty, even somewhat when zero-interest rates were in effect. There's such limited ability & will to try, such a dearth of ideas people will find if it doesn't promise to become the best new monopoly in the world.
Yes it’s not a story for everyone. But an awful lot of the seattle scene has had a really good run and every one of the FAANG have a second largest if not largest presence here and Microsoft has been churning out wealthy alum for decades, and an awful lot are tired of the megacorp bullshit.
An investor once said to me "If you can't figure out how to get office space for your startup, you shouldn't be an entrepreneur"...unless you need specialized lab space for your biotech startup or similar, I kind of agree....
We have UBC, SFU, and even UVic closer by, and the punch a bit higher in computer science. But these days many of the UW professors that started companies back in the late 90s/early 00s are long gone.
Washington only has a population of 7.7 million, so it wouldn't make sense to have as many universties as California, which has a population of 39 million. For its size though, Seattle is one of the best educated places in the US...
I think the poor startup ecosystem has more to do with a lack of VC funding, and most people working for big companies like Amazon... and Amazon being notorious for suing to enforce non-competes, which are legal in Washington.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/04/...
[0]: https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-ban-worker-noncompete-agree...
Western (WWU) in Bellingham is decently sized (~14k). There are some smaller schools in Seattle itself like SU (~4k) and SPU (~2.5k). And there are UW's branch campuses in Bothell and Tacoma (~5k undergrads apiece).
Outside of the I-5 corridor, Central (CWU) and Eastern (EWU) both have ~11k undergrads.
If I’m right all it’s going to take is some billionaires wanting to invest in companies more to come back to spending. It takes money to make money, after all.
I know the military is throwing a lot of money around in San Diego, but would be surprised if it has such impact on the startup scene.
Seattle Angels thought they had this great tight-knit community with lots of events, but every Angel was secretly terrified to pass on any founders they met to any other Angels, not because the other Angel would steal them but because the other Angel might think the startup was stupid and lose respect for the Angel.
Go down the coast to Silicon Valley and angels made handoffs constantly ("you're doing biotech, I don't know anything about biotech, let me connect you to my buddy who does biotech investing"). None of that happened in Seattle.
The end result is valley angels got tons of dealflow that steadily walked deals towards the right investors. Seattle angels got no deal flow and Seattle founders spent all their time pitching people who were not good fits while valley founders quickly found the right investors to pitch.
Every recently funded seattle founder I knew or met told me the exact same thing when I was doing a startup there "I understand why you're trying to raise here in Seattle, we felt the same way, I wish we'd gone to the valley sooner." Every single one said that.
It was a lot like the term the "Seattle Freeze" that people used to use to talk about the dating market there. Everyone is super friendly and it's very easy to get the first conversation, but after that everything freezes and nothing advances the way it does in other cities, plus most of the angels were from huge companies and had no idea what was actually involved in starting a company.
When I was there, most angels also perceived the seattle venture market to be broken and much too small, so angels told startups we won't invest unless you can show us you won't ever need additional capital after this raise because we don't believe seattle companies can raise VC capital (yes, I heard that exact statement from multiple angels). That attitude, unsurprisingly, was highly contributory to their being no startups that were interesting to VC's, guaranteeing seattle companies weren't getting VC funding, because those angels expected you to get to hugely profitable valuations on $1.5MM of Angel funding, period. There are businesses that can do that, but they are lifestyle businesses not venture businesses.
Anyway, I'm mostly surprised Seattle has ranked as high as it has for as long as it has.