No offense intended, but if you want to start a startup, the first thing you should do is get the hell out of Alabama. In Silicon Valley, you can raise 15K by just asking for it.
Is this the best place to start a startup? No. However, having attempted to pull up and move to an expensive place where we knew no one (NH, in 2003), I'm not eager to go through that experience again just now, so we'll just keep plugging away until we succeed.
Zero reason to move to the bay area if you're in seattle... and a lot of reasons not to.