I’ve been living in Seattle for a year and a half now. Does that qualify me to talk about the Seattle startup scene? Let’s find out together.
Four of the five cofounders moved from the SF Bay Area to start Egraphs in a Seattle house, where I learned that the Central District is cheap and has great Ethiopian food. It may seem strange that we left San Francisco and Palo Alto to start a company, and around the same time my former CEO even wrote about how he had to leave Seattle to get started in 2005. But Seattle was a new city for us and a new adventure, and it has worked out pretty well.
For one, it is way cheaper to run a business in Seattle. We have very roughly estimated that it would have cost twice as much to operate in San Francisco due to higher business expenses and taxes and rents and salaries. For example, we now have an office in Pioneer Square, which has a high concentration of startups, and the rent we pay would get us an office one-fourth the size in Palo Alto. For comparing other expenses, just plug in higher numbers across the board for operating in SF. We have essentially been able to run lean since we started.
When I started checking out the local tech scene, I was pleasantly surprised to find a thriving startup community. The monthly Seattle Hacker News meetup is regularly attended by 100+ industry folks, and many of them run their own startups. I remember chatting in a circle of attendees and finding that every person in that group was running something. Predictably, none of them were interested in joining Egraphs, and also predictably many of them had previous experience at Microsoft and Amazon. At other events, I was thankful to find people to give me a crash course on AWS topics. The scene is not quite as bustling as the Bay Area, where you can completely book your schedule with industry shindigs if you really wanted to, but you can definitely find startup types to socialize with in Seattle.
With respect to engineering recruiting, we have had good fortune to find some awesome engineers to join our team. We didn’t find any of them through the traditional avenues of online job postings (though I did learn that Resumator is a cinch to use), nor did we find them through meetups or campus recruiting. We met them in informal social settings, and one we met through a study group we hosted for Martin Odersky’s coursera class on Scala. The beautiful thing about startup recruiting in Seattle is the deep reserve of engineering talent quietly languishing at Microsoft and Amazon, waiting for a greater purpose. But they’re probably not exploring the startup scene, so you need to do the legwork to connect with them on a meaningful level. If I needed to recruit more engineers right now, I would get a rock climbing membership and socialize regularly at Beer and Code and host house parties to extend my social circle. And then pitch them on the cool stuff we’re working on.
It certainly would have been a different experience starting in the Bay Area versus Seattle, but I’ll shy away from saying which is better. Between two workable environments, it really isn’t meaningful to make statements like “City A is better than City B” anyway. Starting in Seattle is definitely possible, and moreover this town has been good to us especially in terms of recruiting. Beyond that, location is mostly a matter of personal preferences.
As a postscript, I will say that I was completely caught off guard by winter blues. Again, personal preferences.
Four of the five cofounders moved from the SF Bay Area to start Egraphs in a Seattle house, where I learned that the Central District is cheap and has great Ethiopian food. It may seem strange that we left San Francisco and Palo Alto to start a company, and around the same time my former CEO even wrote about how he had to leave Seattle to get started in 2005. But Seattle was a new city for us and a new adventure, and it has worked out pretty well.
For one, it is way cheaper to run a business in Seattle. We have very roughly estimated that it would have cost twice as much to operate in San Francisco due to higher business expenses and taxes and rents and salaries. For example, we now have an office in Pioneer Square, which has a high concentration of startups, and the rent we pay would get us an office one-fourth the size in Palo Alto. For comparing other expenses, just plug in higher numbers across the board for operating in SF. We have essentially been able to run lean since we started.
When I started checking out the local tech scene, I was pleasantly surprised to find a thriving startup community. The monthly Seattle Hacker News meetup is regularly attended by 100+ industry folks, and many of them run their own startups. I remember chatting in a circle of attendees and finding that every person in that group was running something. Predictably, none of them were interested in joining Egraphs, and also predictably many of them had previous experience at Microsoft and Amazon. At other events, I was thankful to find people to give me a crash course on AWS topics. The scene is not quite as bustling as the Bay Area, where you can completely book your schedule with industry shindigs if you really wanted to, but you can definitely find startup types to socialize with in Seattle.
With respect to engineering recruiting, we have had good fortune to find some awesome engineers to join our team. We didn’t find any of them through the traditional avenues of online job postings (though I did learn that Resumator is a cinch to use), nor did we find them through meetups or campus recruiting. We met them in informal social settings, and one we met through a study group we hosted for Martin Odersky’s coursera class on Scala. The beautiful thing about startup recruiting in Seattle is the deep reserve of engineering talent quietly languishing at Microsoft and Amazon, waiting for a greater purpose. But they’re probably not exploring the startup scene, so you need to do the legwork to connect with them on a meaningful level. If I needed to recruit more engineers right now, I would get a rock climbing membership and socialize regularly at Beer and Code and host house parties to extend my social circle. And then pitch them on the cool stuff we’re working on.
It certainly would have been a different experience starting in the Bay Area versus Seattle, but I’ll shy away from saying which is better. Between two workable environments, it really isn’t meaningful to make statements like “City A is better than City B” anyway. Starting in Seattle is definitely possible, and moreover this town has been good to us especially in terms of recruiting. Beyond that, location is mostly a matter of personal preferences.
As a postscript, I will say that I was completely caught off guard by winter blues. Again, personal preferences.
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