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.
Google Mitch Kapor Hawaiian shirt. Nobody in Boston VC or angel investing wears a tie. They might wear a jacket and laundered shirt meeting a limited. Nobody pitching them wears a tie.
It is a phrase, very serious and hard to enter. If someone is a fresh grad or someone with tons of experience wants exposure to a fast pace burn you out startup culture there is absolutely nothing like West Coast startups.
Isn’t Boston usually ranked 2nd or 3rd in these lists? I think the MIT ecosystem, military / defense, and biotech usually make them punch above their population size. But also Boston itself is fairly tiny but when you include Cambridge and surrounding cities it’s like 5 million people.
I was born/raised in Seattle and I asked a startup vet why Seattle startup funding under performed so hard against the perception of Seattle being a tech hub.
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.
Seattle/Washington has no elite or quasi-elite universities. That’s probably the #1 reason.
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.
UW computer science is top 5 or top 10 depending on the US News year. It often is one spot behind UCB. But there are only so many UW CSE graduates (getting in is really hard), and most of them go to FAANGs these days. Ya, they are mostly working class and don’t have to economic cushion to go out and start a company. In comparison, Stanford, MIT, CMU have much better resources to take risks with.
I in rarely meet people from UW these days and I live near enough to campus in Ballard. People from all over wind up here for some reason, which is bad for traffic but whatever. So not much UW, but a-lot of IIT and Tsinghua. Seattle doesn’t need to grow its own talent, they come for the weather and mountains.
You would be surprised how many people can tolerate rain but not extreme heat or cold. Mild climate means our average temperature is 55 and deviates by 10 degrees either way.
Seattle became a tech city because of Microsoft and Amazon, period. If they didn’t decide to have their HQ there, we probably wouldn’t consider it a tech city.
Ok, but the valley wouldn’t be the valley without Fairchild semiconductors, HP, intel, Sun, Netscape, then Google. If they didn’t decide to have their HQ there we probably wouldn’t consider it a tech city.
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.
Fairchild is an excellent and key example, because it shows clearly what is necessary: people leaving their former jobs to go start or help start different things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight
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.
I don’t think this bears out in a place like seattle for everyone. I’ve been here since 2014 when home prices were much more affordable. I also made a substantial amount on my FAANG+ and adjacent work such I own my house and am debt free and have plenty of savings. I’m not alone. That’s a common story. And, after I wrap what I’m working on now, I’m starting my own thing. But I don’t plan to take VC, I’ve got my own capital now. Especially as FAANG loses its luster I think you’ll see people who did well and aren’t interested in retirement doing their own self financed things. A fair amount of my personal orbit have already done that. They’re actual real engineers that build stuff reliably that’s commercial. Their startups tend to do pretty well. But they’re not flashy valley kids - so maybe they don’t register for most people.
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.
The thing Seattle needs most is more Series A and beyond firms. We have a bunch of great folks looking at pre-seed and seed deals. But beyond Madrona and Trilogy (who is virtually unknown even here in town -- they deserve more spotlight) and Maveron (if you're in consumer), you have to go raise in SF/Valley or in NYC for the breakout round.
The report in question is very scarce on details why there is such a stark tumble. I am not sure how much trust to put into a random incubator's ranking.
That chart gives you the false impression that LA is a prime startup hub, it's in the top 5 after all. But for anybody who's spent time in that scene and can compare it first hand to the Bay, it's night and day. https://dealroom.co/guides/global
If the only thing you care about is maximizing startup outcomes, then the answer is always SF/Bay Area, but that doesn't factor in other things like cost of living, your personal enjoyment of the area, and so on.
Seattle, or Washington in general, needs more big universities. UW is great, and WSU is far in the east in mostly conservative-thinking areas. There's not much else.
Washington has lots of universities... and the UW itself is larger than Berkeley.
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.
Doesn't go into effect until at least August, is being sued over by a business group[0], and may be dropped by a Republican administration if Biden loses the election. So: not yet, and maybe.
UW is no slouch - it usually in the top 10 universities for research output any given year and their computer science program is a juggernaut. It's hard to compete with Berkley on name recognition, but young talent isn't an issue in Seattle.
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.
A distant family member similar age as me graduated from EWU with a degree in CS and does well in Spokane working for a more traditional mid size company. But I wouldn’t put it in the talent radar. Going out that way, you’ll get more at U MT, and Missoula has its own small startup scene going on.
WWU, UW, CWU, and WSU are all on the national radar in anthro for one reason or another. WWU and UW have been CS draws for the past three decades at least. I think they all have top Ed programs.
WSU isn't really a thing in computer science, but I wouldn't call it "conservative-thinking".
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.
Office space is not a problem anywhere (and do you even really need it these days?)
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....
Kinda impressive to think about what degree of ending ZIRP programming can be observed in real world data. I’m sure I personally overestimate the degree of causality but I bet others underestimate, so it all balances out.
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.
How certain can we be that these rankings reflect an accurate picture? Rankers seem to be paid customers of Startup Genome, the organization that is providing the rankings.
When I was there the Seattle Angel community was deeply broken.
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.
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.