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.

Yeah UW is great but one university isn’t enough to sustain a world class talent pipeline

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.

The mountains are awesome but idk how many people are moving to Seattle for the weather haha

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.

Rain in the city means snow in the mountains

How did you arrive at no elite universities is the cause of under investment relative to Seattle's status as a tech hub?

According to popular research, the best founders are older, as in 40s. [0]

Maybe older founders need/want to raise less?

[0] https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/podcast/knowledge-at-wha...

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.

Microsoft might not have been successful without a local Seattle software company to buy 86-DOS from.