The University of Washington has one of the world’s best computer science programs. MBA recruiters recently ranked the UW’s business school No. 2 for entrepreneurship reputation. Its CoMotion innovation center has helped the university spin out 80 startups over the past five years and land among the top 10 on Reuters’ list of the world’s most innovative universities.
Yet for some reason, Y Combinator, the famed Silicon Valley startup accelerator, sees far fewer UW graduates applying for its program compared to other top public universities.
That’s why two YC partners, Kat Mañaalac and Gustaf Alströmer, made a quick trip north earlier this month and spent several hours on the UW campus in Seattle, hosting both “group office hours” and a two-hour workshop. The purpose was to educate students about startups and encourage them to apply to YC.
Of the more than 4,000 founders who have gone through YC’s 3-month cohort program over the past 14 years, only 50 of them attended the University of Washington, according to data from YC.
“There is a lot of talent at the UW and a lot of talent in Seattle — and I want to make sure people know that YC is an available path if they want to start a startup,” Manalac told GeekWire after the event.
Manalac, who specializes in finding entrepreneurs that can join the accelerator, said UW students tell her that they get so heavily recruited by big companies in Seattle — Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Expedia, T-Mobile, Starbucks, etc. — and “often don’t even think about starting a company as a viable option.”
Added Manalac: “The pull of the FAANGs and big companies like Boeing are strong up here.”
“In some cases, students are interested in starting a startup but fall into the trap of thinking, ‘I’ll work at a large company for a couple years to get experience and then start a company,'” she explained. “Once you’re used to working at big companies, it’s harder to make the shift into startups. And working at big companies doesn’t teach you what you need to know to start a company. The best way to learn about startups is to start one — or work at an early stage startup.”
The thesis that homegrown tech giants such as Amazon and Microsoft, along with the bevy of Bay Area companies with huge engineering outposts in the region, are sucking up would-be startup talent and preventing Seattle from becoming another Silicon Valley startup mecca has been discussed for several years.
“In the past, I have noticed that most of our students do take the ‘safer’ established industry path over the startup path,” said Shwetak Patel, a UW computer scientist who has sold startups to Google, Belkin and Sears.
Patel agreed with Manalac and said it is indeed hard to jump to a startup after joining a big company. But others say that experience at a place such as Amazon or Microsoft can be valuable preparation for startup life.
“Some of the fastest-growing companies in Seattle boast 20-something and 30-something entrepreneurs fresh out of Amazon who cite that experience as integral to their startup path and success,” noted Julie Sandler, managing director at Seattle startup studio Pioneer Square Labs and a lecturer at the UW’s Foster School of Business.
Tom Petry and Demetri Themelis graduated from the UW and worked together at UBS Wealth Management before coming back to Seattle to launch their real estate startup Knock, which just raised a $10 million investment round.
The founders say they picked up important skills and built a network at UBS that ended up being crucial to their decision to make the startup leap.
“Ultimately, my time with a big company gave me enough confidence to enable me to say goodbye to that world,” Themelis said. “And I imagine a lot of founders get the necessary motivation to start something when they see first hand the rat-race of a big company culture — it definitely was for me.”
But the opposite was true for Kyle Bartlow, a 2013 UW grad who launched a fashion startup while still in school. He’s now working at Amazon as a product manager.
“Beginning my career at a startup was definitely more beneficial for me than getting a job at a big company right away,” Bartlow said. “First of all, I don’t think I would have been able to get the product management roles I wanted without being able to leverage my startup experience. Second, it is much easier to stay in the frugal and hungry mentality coming right out of school.”
Bartlow credited the UW’s Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship for promoting startups through business plan competitions and programs such as the Jones + Foster Accelerator program.
In a statement, Amy Sallin, interim director of the Buerk Center, said that “the framework is in place for students or alumni to feel prepared to launch a startup at any point in their journey.”
“Our graduates leave with the entrepreneurial skills that do make them attractive to very large companies looking to innovate from within,” she said. “However, we also see graduates who do take their startup and grow it into a business — whether in retail, food and beverages, health, social impact, cleantech, biotech, etc.”
Sandler said she hopes the UW can encourage more cross-department connections across programs such as computer science, business, and human-centered design. She said that can help expose entrepreneurship to more students.
“At other universities, it not uncommon to see one big student success kickstarting a positive entrepreneurial cycle,” Sandler added. “Students see other students successfully build impactful companies during their years in school and they’re inspired to do the same.”
Whether the lack of UW grads applying to Y Combinator says anything about the university itself, or the larger Seattle tech ecosystem, is up for debate.
It’s true that the UW ranks lower than schools including UC Berkeley, University of Michigan, University of Texas, UCLA, and others in terms of producing startup founders. And some of the higher-profile startups with UW roots — Turi, Senosis Health, Vicis, etc. — originated due to the work of professors, not students.
Ed Lazowska, a longtime UW computer science professor, said geographic influence must be considered when comparing what a graduate from Stanford does after school, for example, to what a UW grad might do.
“Stanford sends a disproportionate number of students to startups because the startup ecosystem in the South Bay is an order of magnitude more vibrant than anywhere else in the U.S.,” he said. “UW sends a disproportionate number of students to major companies because all of those companies are either headquartered in Seattle or have engineering offices here, and UW is a public university where most students do internships, which have a high conversion rate to permanent employment, and the established companies have great internship programs.”
Lazowska said the UW has taken a number of steps to “address this balance,” from work being done at CoMotion and the Global Innovation Exchange, to the activity at Startup Hall, which houses the Techstars Seattle program and Founders’ Co-op venture capital firm on campus. He added that “as the startup community in Seattle expands, the involvement of UW students in startups will surely expand commensurately.”
And while some UW grads, such as Jason Tan and Brandon Ballinger of Sift Science, do migrate to the Bay Area and launch startups, many of them stick around Seattle, where there are plenty of local startup accelerators and studios.
“Yes, YC is the gold standard,” Lazowska said. “But UW students come from Washington and remain in Washington.”
For some, the idea of relocating to the Bay Area to build a startup may not be as attractive as in years past. Stefan Kalb, co-founder of Seattle startup Shelf Engine, participated in a YC cohort last year and came right back to Seattle.
“In my opinion, right now Seattle is the best place to start a software company,” said Kalb, who also spoke at the YC workshop. “The talent is here, Seattle is a beautiful place to live, and it’s way cheaper to live in Seattle than in San Francisco. No wonder Bay Area VCs keep asking me for good Seattle companies to invest in. I think we’ll see some of the greatest, fast-growing startups come from Seattle in the next ten years. If I were a YC partner, I would heavily index on whether a company is based in Seattle.”
YC’s interest in the UW is another example of the synergies between the Seattle and Bay Area tech markets. Lara Littlefield, associate vice president for innovation strategy at CoMotion, said that the UW’s innovation arm has increasingly engaged with various accelerators and investors from the Bay Area interested in Seattle-based talent.
“We welcome the opportunity to bring more partnerships and connections to the region that help to build the innovation ecosystem,” she said.
