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Seattle tumbles to No. 20 in global ranking of startup ecosystems
- adamredwoods 2y agoSeattle, 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.
- Sparkyte 2y agoIt's also the available space for renting a property to establish a startup.
- throwaway-blaze 2y agoOffice 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....
- seanmcdirmid 2y agoWSU 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.
- buildbot 2y agoUBC and SFU have great ECE programs, especially for FPGA research
- kerouac999 2y agoWashington 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.
- IntelMiner 2y agoNon-competes are no longer legal in the United States https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/04/ftc-announces-rule-banning-noncompetes https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/04/...
- loeg 2y agoDoesn'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. [0]: https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-ban-worker-noncompete-agreements-faces-lawsuit-major-business-group-2024-04-24/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-ban-worker-noncompete-agree...
- legitster 2y agoUW 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.
- loeg 2y ago> There's not much else. 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.
- gopher_space 2y agoWWU, 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.
- seanmcdirmid 2y agoA 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.
- byyoung3 2y agothis seems sort of like college rankings
- sovietmudkipz 2y agoKinda 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.
- PheonixPharts 2y agoBoston at number 6? 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.
- gfourfour 2y agoEven if credentials matter more than ideas there’s more than enough credentialed people to go around and soak up funding Plus, tech isn’t the only startup dimension. Boston has a ton of medical stuff too.
- legitster 2y agoTaking a look at Boston in this report and it is dominated by startups in categories like agriculture, drug research, and fintech. I don't think these are "startups" like a couple of guys and a beer keg - they are looking at well-funded business ventures.
- Sparkyte 2y agoBoston is a suit & tie startup scene completely different from the West Coast. You won't find anyone wearing shorts and a Hawaiian shirt in office.
- legitster 2y agoThe 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.
- _t9ow 2y agoHow can London achieve the top score in all categories and yet be ranked #2?
- yieldcrv 2y agoI think they look at number of exits but then dont list that as a category
- xbar 2y ago"The Netherlands" beats Seattle?
- throwaway-blaze 2y agoThe 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.
- Apocryphon 2y agoThey gave Miami a 1 for Knowledge? Ouch
- erksa 2y agoI find it odd about San Diego being number 1 in funding, but overall 19? 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.
- myth_drannon 2y agoStrange, they mix cities and countries.
- milesskorpen 2y agoThe Netherlands are one big metro area, I guess.
- Apocryphon 2y agoAnd totally understandable in Singapore's case.
- asdfkhafs 2y agoIs London a top city for startups? Also, where is Bangalore & Stockholm?
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 2y agoThat 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 https://dealroom.co/guides/global
- da02 2y agoFrom your own personal experiences, which cities/towns do you recommend?
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 2y agoIf 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.
- nickfromseattle 2y agoI 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. What do you folks think?
- gfourfour 2y agoSeattle/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.
- seanmcdirmid 2y agoUW 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.
- gfourfour 2y agoYeah UW is great but one university isn’t enough to sustain a world class talent pipeline
- seanmcdirmid 2y agoI 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.
- gfourfour 2y agoI can’t imagine that DC is a better place to have a startup than Seattle
- yodon 2y agoWhen 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.
- dbs 2y agoHow 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.