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Comment by adamredwoods | Hacker News Reader

Seattle, or Washington in general, needs more big universities. UW is great, and WSU is far in the east in mostly conservative-thinking areas. There's not much else.

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Washington has lots of universities... and the UW itself is larger than Berkeley.

Washington only has a population of 7.7 million, so it wouldn't make sense to have as many universties as California, which has a population of 39 million. For its size though, Seattle is one of the best educated places in the US...

I think the poor startup ecosystem has more to do with a lack of VC funding, and most people working for big companies like Amazon... and Amazon being notorious for suing to enforce non-competes, which are legal in Washington.

Non-competes are no longer legal in the United States

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/04/...

Doesn't go into effect until at least August, is being sued over by a business group[0], and may be dropped by a Republican administration if Biden loses the election. So: not yet, and maybe.

[0]: https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-ban-worker-noncompete-agree...

UW is no slouch - it usually in the top 10 universities for research output any given year and their computer science program is a juggernaut. It's hard to compete with Berkley on name recognition, but young talent isn't an issue in Seattle.

> There's not much else.

Western (WWU) in Bellingham is decently sized (~14k). There are some smaller schools in Seattle itself like SU (~4k) and SPU (~2.5k). And there are UW's branch campuses in Bothell and Tacoma (~5k undergrads apiece).

Outside of the I-5 corridor, Central (CWU) and Eastern (EWU) both have ~11k undergrads.

WWU, UW, CWU, and WSU are all on the national radar in anthro for one reason or another. WWU and UW have been CS draws for the past three decades at least. I think they all have top Ed programs.

A distant family member similar age as me graduated from EWU with a degree in CS and does well in Spokane working for a more traditional mid size company. But I wouldn’t put it in the talent radar. Going out that way, you’ll get more at U MT, and Missoula has its own small startup scene going on.

WSU isn't really a thing in computer science, but I wouldn't call it "conservative-thinking".

We have UBC, SFU, and even UVic closer by, and the punch a bit higher in computer science. But these days many of the UW professors that started companies back in the late 90s/early 00s are long gone.

UBC and SFU have great ECE programs, especially for FPGA research

It's also the available space for renting a property to establish a startup.

Office space is not a problem anywhere (and do you even really need it these days?)

An investor once said to me "If you can't figure out how to get office space for your startup, you shouldn't be an entrepreneur"...unless you need specialized lab space for your biotech startup or similar, I kind of agree....

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