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"I just find it interesting that two otherwise academically talented areas are burgeoning hotbeds of neither startups nor even talent for said startups." FWIW,
by webwright 14y ago
"I just find it interesting that two otherwise academically talented areas are burgeoning hotbeds of neither startups nor even talent for said startups."
FWIW, there are half a dozen YC startups in Seattle that are doing well. And there are dozens more that have people who came from Seattle.
Also, companies are opening up engineering offices in Seattle pretty rapidly (Twitter, most recently, but also Facebook, Hulu, Google, Jawbone, Zynga, etc).
The reason you don't seem more startup activity in Seattle is that many are lured down to the Valley.
To one of your other points-- UW graduated 23 comp-sci students this year.
- mahyarm 14y agoOnly 23?! UVic across the gulf graduates more than that.
- sirmarksalot 14y agoUW has historically capped its CS program at what seems like an absurdly low number of students. When I was there, they accepted only 80 students per year (40 more for computer engineering). The stated reason for this is to keep the student/faculty ratio low, and to maintain a sense of community in the department. Also, I know quite a lot of UW CS graduates who headed down to the valley to do startups. While they could have conceivably found the talent to do it in Seattle, they perceived the environment as better down South. It's not that students from other schools don't do startups, it's just that they go to the Bay area in order to do them, and the culture perpetuates itself.