Guest Post by Randy Ottinger
Over 25 years ago my wife asked me to visit Seattle from Boston where we were living at the time. She is a native from Mercer Island, and most of her family is still living in the area. It was May, and the weather was sunny, just as it was this summer. I am sure she told me under her breath that the weather was not always like this in Seattle, but for some reason I never heard it!
In 1989, I was 4 years out of business school. I had worked for IBM, and then started a tech company with some business school friends, which we grew and successfully sold to a public company. So when we decided to move to Seattle I was looking for an MBA-type opportunity with an entrepreneurial tech growth company. Well back then it was slim pickings. Seattle was still a Boeing town. Microsoft was just beginning its rise (which I unfortunately missed). Amazon did not exist. And MBA jobs were few and far between. Ultimately, I made my way to McCaw Cellular, which was a fantastic experience and enjoyable every step of its meteoric rise.
Flash forward to today, and Seattle is one of the most exciting places in the country for a technology entrepreneur. Silicon Valley iconic companies are opening offices here to access Seattle area talent. Successful tech executives from Microsoft, Amazon and elsewhere are becoming tech entrepreneurs and Angel investors. The University of Washington is becoming more and more of a tech hub, following in the footsteps of Stanford. It is exciting times!
So I figured to keep my entrepreneurial juices flowing I would start a business advising tech entrepreneurs on building tech companies, finding the right investors, and identifying the top advisors to support them. I found this to be a bit more complex than I originally thought not only because the landscape was growing and changing so fast in Seattle, but because finding the right VC investors in particular led very quickly to Silicon Valley. As a result, I proposed a study of the Seattle Tech Ecosystem, and with the support of Brian McCarthy, a student at University of Washington’s Foster School, we created a guide for tech entrepreneurs identifying the Angels, VCs and professional networks that exist in the Seattle area along with free resources for tech entrepreneurs.
Today, I cannot imagine a better place to live for a technology entrepreneur than Seattle, and from everything I can see the best is yet to come.
Randy Ottinger has 30 years of business experience as an executive in tech companies such as IBM, McCaw Cellular (Claircom), and Captaris. He has also been an adviser to business leaders through Kotter International, a management consulting company he co-founded with Harvard Professor John Kotter. He now advises growth companies in the Seattle area through his firm Leader-2-Leader. Randy has a BA from Cornell University, and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He is member of the Young/World President’s Organization, the largest CEO network in the world, and is involved in technology initiatives that can positively transform lives.