There’s certainly been a lot of discussion on GeekWire in the past few weeks about the vibrancy — or some may say lack of vibrancy — in the Seattle startup community. But, sometimes, it is good to take a moment and reflect.
Speaking at the Hacker News Meetup Tuesday night, Seattle 2.0 founder Marcelo Calbucci gave a “brief history of Seattle Startups” from 2004 to 2011, telling the story through his own experience in the startup community.
The ex-Microsoft manager described those early years of his startup career as the “dark ages,” with few events, investors or lawyers to help entrepreneurs get their ideas off the ground. There was “no community, there was nothing here,” he said.
Calbucci went on to describe how that lack of infrastructure led him to create Seattle 2.0, a blog and directory for startup entrepreneurs. Today, he said, with the number or resources available to entrepreneurs “it is so much easier to start a new startup or to join a new startup,” he said.
But, even so, he’d like to see more. Much more. And that came across in the Q&A portion of his talk in which he said there just aren’t enough early-stage investors supporting startup companies.
‘We have a lack of lead investors in town. There are probably five lead investors in Seattle, and if you don’t get one of those, you are fucked,” said Calbucci, adding that there needs to be more education for some of the wealthy folks in Seattle who are not investing back into the community.
“Microsoft doesn’t have a culture of investment, and there are so many billionaires and multi-millionaires that could be doing that if they were taught how to,” he said. “The Alliance of Angels does some good work educating them, but not enough.”
Here’s more from Calbucci’s Q&A with folks at the Hacker News Meetup.
And here’s the first part of Calbucci’s talk:
Previously on GeekWire: How do we make the startup ecosystem stronger?
