Nike COO Eric Sprunk said he felt a little out of place as a Portlander on stage at the GeekWire Summit in Seattle this week, as there tends to be this unspoken tension between two of the Pacific Northwest’s largest cities.
But he said Nike may be looking to bridge that divide sometime soon.
Sprunk spoke highly of the tech talent flowing out of the University of Washington, but he said he wants to see more of those graduates making their way to that other billion-dollar sports giant down Interstate-5.
Asked if that means Nike is considering a Seattle office, he said it’s a possibility.
“I would be lying if I said we weren’t talking about that,” Sprunk said. “If you’re Nike, you have to be looking at what an engineering center in Seattle looks like. So we are.”
Of course, Nike — which prides itself on being innovative — wouldn’t be the first out-of-town company to come here in search of tech talent flowing out of UW and pooling around companies like Microsoft and Amazon.
There is a large group of tech companies competing for technical talent that have engineering offices in the Seattle region, including giants like Google, Facebook, Dropbox, Twitter, Salesforce, and Uber.
