Geek on the Street in Seattle: ‘SF beats us because they invest in vibes’
Seattle’s first base has talent and skills. It boils down to a culture of risk-taking and programs to support people willing to take the plunge.
Those were the recurring themes from the city’s tech community at a World Cup viewing party at GeekWire’s venue on Tuesday. In this summer installment of our occasional Geek on the Street feature, we asked attendees to complete this sentence: “Our startup ecosystem would be better off if…”
Read on for the answers, edited for brevity and clarity.
Our startup ecosystem would be better off if… “We had more resources for startup founders,” he said Jen Hallerpartner and chief operating officer at Ascend, which supports early-stage founders to build high-quality companies. He mentioned that the community needs “more opportunities to learn how to build, to establish the structure of their company, to raise money.”
While there are plenty of startup resources, even for the very early stages, the city has a blind spot when it comes to support and development pipelines for less experienced founders.
He said the region also lacks ways to support good companies that are not on the business track, those that will not bring the big profits that VCs are chasing.
“There are a lot of amazing companies being built that can’t be invested in a VC way,” he said. “We really lack the means to support those founders and those ideas.”
Our startup ecosystem would be better off if… “People are taking more risks,” he said Matthew Barclaya Google and Microsoft veteran who is now the founder of a private AI company. “That goes to investors in this ecosystem.”
Seattle has a reputation for being a safe bet, though Barclay cites local investors who are taking the kind of risks that are more common in the Bay Area, especially on the pre-seed side. The problem, he said, is that many big names remain reluctant to roll the dice, and most engineering talent is content with comfortable tech salaries.
“If there was a culture of risk-taking here, you would see that it would be at a high level,” he said. “We have the talent, the money is there, it’s taking risks that I think is holding us back.”
Our startup ecosystem would be better off if… people “can take too many risks – they’re crazy,” he said Emeka Aloziefounder and consultant for Seattle.
He wants to walk downtown and feel like bold new companies are growing around him, the way startups feel everywhere in San Francisco. Seattle needs a visible culture of risk-taking, he said, and the money will follow.
“The capital will come when it feels like this is the place where, holy smokes, how can the next innovation not happen here?” he said.
But that needs to make the leap sound doable, especially if the business model still feels like a safe bet.
“We need to create a safe environment, a safe culture, a safe infrastructure, a safe climate to produce what is extraordinarily dangerous,” he said, “because it’s much safer to get a job that pays $200,000.”
Our startup ecosystem would be better off if… “We had a really centralized resource base,” he said Shannon Swiftfounder and CEO of Swift HR Solutions, a human resources consulting firm.
Swift, who served as a board member and chairman of the Northwest Entrepreneur Network before it was acquired by the Washington Technology Industry Association in 2014, said the region used to have organizations where entrepreneurs knew exactly where to go to find what they needed.
He said all the components of the startup ecosystem are there – the problem is that they are not connected. The community would benefit from one central hub to bridge that gap as well.
Our startup ecosystem would be better off if… “People are just happy,” he said Jordan Bakermanaging general partner at Athenaeum Ventures, a firm focused on identifying off-price talent.
“I don’t want to see your pro forma. I don’t want to see your P&L,” he said. “I don’t want to see hand-made numbers. I want to see an amazing inventor with a passion who will hit the wall every day until success emerges.”
Baker called it “blasphemous” to expect polished funds from a former seed company with no product, no customers, and no revenue. “That’s why SF beats us: because it invests in vibes,” he said, “and that’s something Seattle can do a little bit.”
