So, as we already did with Chicago, we at Tech.Co decided to round up a group of CEOs, founders, and entrepreneurs with two things in common. They’re all Seattleites and they all have a little insight to share about their experience starting up in the city. Here’s the rundown.
It’s Collaborative, Not Competitive
Rutu Mulkar-Mehta, CEO of boutique AI consulting firm Ticary Solutions, summed up one of the more frequent praises I heard while chatting with CEOs about their views of Seattle’s startup ecosystem. They tend to love the open, approachable attitude:
It’s Having a Moment
Sarah Adler, founder of Simply Real Health, started her company in Seattle in 2012 and is still located there. She highlights another benefit to the city: Yes, Sarah mentioned that well-loved collaboration again. Hey, I told you it was a common praise.
And Solid Infrastructure
I don’t just mean the tax perks, though some entrepreneurs I talked to mentioned that, too. Here’s Robi Ganguly, co-founder and CEO of Apptentive:
It’s Still the Wild West
Perhaps Dave Hebert, SVP Product at Bellevue-based AI startup DimensionalMechanics, best sums up Seattle’s allure: It’s a view shared by many, including Ty Griffin, Entrepreneur in Residence at the Center for Financial Services Innovation and co-founder/CEO of Prism: […] New entrepreneurs need to be careful about which angel groups they approach as many are not worth the time. While many angel groups offer entrepreneurs a great stage to practice their pitch and garner awareness, there are very few serious investors who attend these pitch events. Bottom line: Some angel groups (not all) have lots of tire kickers, egos and people selling you their professional services. Unless you are practicing your pitch, spend your time making real connections with serious investors who share your vision and believe what you believe.”
…But Maybe That’s a Strength, Too
Aaron Suzuki, CEO of SmartDeploy, offers a different take on that same situation, the limited amount of VC funds available in the Seattle ecosystem: We also have an excellent angel community up here, with many engaged and experienced investors ready to step in and help launch a business. Our only real weakness is that we have a small VC community up here. I would love to see a real ecosystem develop so that more companies that are raising these larger venture rounds could do so locally.” Having exhausted our coffers and my patience we began scaling back. Revenue increased with every move we made. We fired our PR agency and revenue doubled. We laid off 90 percent of engineering and revenue doubled again. It seems that we had turned a corner just as I was about to give up. We focused 100 percent of our attention on the customer. Suddenly the business was profitable.”
Seattle Has Larger Incumbents, Too
Chad Wittman, VP of Product and co-founder of Dolly, weighed in on the need for non-startup tech companies in a startup ecosystem: Despite our 4x growth year over year, our impressive margins and exciting KPI’s – it was a hard sell. Except to the women. In fact, 90% of our current investor pool are women who got on board early, believed in us and our vision. The takeaway lesson I have from that is that, for the most part, you have to find people who look like you to write you a check. Most angel groups are primarily comprised of men or have men as gatekeepers. We should have been more selective early on but the practice really did make our pitch that much more perfect. There are so many female angel funds springing up across the country because they recognize that we have to support each other in our endeavors. It’s awesome to see. TomboyX is here today because of that trend (Thank you Cheryl Sandberg!) and has investors from angel groups in Kansas City, Los Angeles, Boulder and New York. Seattle doesn’t have a similar group yet, but I would hope that we can get something like that started soon.”
It’s Changing Fast
Simon Robinson, CEO at Intuitive IP, knows what he’s talking about: He’s been a partner and collaborator to three Seattle-based startups. In addition to nailing the collaborative benefit and the low funding disadvantage, Simon had this to say on the future of Seattle as a startup hub: Volt Athletics CEO and co-founder Dan Giuliani backs this up: Image: Wikimedia
