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.