What a clown. You should see the team at our SEATTLE area start-up before making a such a definitive declaration. We grind just like the valley, and I know because I’ve done both.

I was sitting next to Janis when she said that. It was kind of funny that I was actually worrying about my next bike ride at that very moment, since this panel was the day before RAMROD. The next day, as I was grinding out the last two miles of a mountainous, 160-mile ride in 100+ degree weather, I thought to myself, “perhaps I’m not dedicated enough to my goals….”

To me, endurance athletics is a better teacher for entrepreneurship than, oh, I dunno, golf. Whereever I go in biotech, in Seattle, SF, SD, or wherever, I disproportionately see Livestrong bracelets and marathon tees. (There are also a lot of motorcycle tourers, which seems to be a slightly different version of the same thing.) Such a hobby is clearly not a requirement for startup success, but if your idea of fun is a heady cocktail of fear, pain, and confusion, then there’s a good chance startups are for you.

I do agree with most of what Janis said in answer to that question, but I see the situation a little differently. What the Bay Area has that Seattle doesn’t have is scale. A better question is, what did San Diego have ten years ago that Seattle didn’t (and doesn’t) have? Lifestyle has always been a big draw for SD (and especially UCSD), so I’m not convinced that’s the differentiator.

I think what San Diego had and has is a diverse group of people across the whole city that want startups and especially biotech startups to thrive there. I don’t think we yet have that in Seattle.

My answer to the question on the positive side was, our biggest advantage is that the future is unusually uncertain. This gives us a chance to redefine Seattle role in the nation’s and world’s biotech community.

How is Janis qualified to comment on successful companies? She has been “associated” with a lot of companies over the years, but no successes that I know of. Didn’t she end up at UW because Paladin Partners wasn’t doing so well? Maybe I’m wrong though.

Janis lost all her credibility years ago before Paladin failed. The angel and VC community stopped caring about her companies after they saw that she touted any company to them that was willing to pay her high fees, and entrepreneurs almost always talk of being bullied by her. She’s a pretender.

@Luke: Yeah. It’s especially easy (cowardly) to launch anonymous attacks.

Anyway, as I said, I’m not completely sold on the deathmarch approach to startups. You should be prepared to work very, very hard. But if you work as hard as you can every day and every week, pretty soon, you will lose your edge. You need to challenge your limits, back off, then do it again. That’s typically how top athletes do it, and I strongly suspect that’s the highest probability path to success in a startup.

In my experience, for an extremely motivating goal, people can work 16 hours a day, six days a week for a while. Months, at least. But after even a few weeks of that effort level, the quality of their decisions will falter, and the time they spend at work will be less and less valuable as “work.” Sooner or later, you need to take a few days off, find out if you’re still married, do some laundry, etc.

Sometimes, in a startup, what you really need to do is to crank. Very often though, what is most needed is for somebody to put their finger in the air and say, “guys, we’re making a critical mistake here, but there’s time to fix it.” The person with their finger in the air is probably the one who had a decent night’s sleep and didn’t have a snickers bar for lunch.

We should not worry about what Janis said. This was probably in the line with what she is doing right now. She has to say something in order to be commented in press sometimes. There is nothing else probably she or her boss has to say or be proud of. And it is easy to blame someone else, whether or meltdown in Arctic.
I will agree with someone’s comments about expensive fees that her previous firm charged.

Many of the startups in Seattle do work their tails off. I think the better way to think of it is that the NW lifestyle may shrink the pool of available talent willing to do so rather than take anything away from the people in the current startup community.

An intriguing discussion. First, while there is an overlap between innovation and entrepreneurship it is not strictly necessary that both reside in the same person.

I think there is some worth in examining another area where creativity overlaps with capitalism – artists and art dealers.

Artists are as innovative as they come but few of them are also really great at creating a corporation around themselves (Chiluly notwithstanding). They need help for their innovation to be seen or heard.

Simlarly with science and technology. Seattle has no problem with innovation in high tech or biotech. It has a problem with the innovation getting seen.

For example, as stated in the article, someone may have a great idea for an immunology company, but because they are not the ‘right’ sort of person, they will not get any funding for a company, no matter how creative the idea is.

It is not a culture of innovation that is the problem here but a culture of entrepreneurship, which includes a lot more than innovation. In fact, innovation may not even be the most important thing for an entrepreneur.

Perhaps they are more like the owner of an art studio. They know who the buyers are, what they want and how much they will pay. They constantly find new and innovative people to fill up the studio with creative works. They are practitioners of an important process. Some like Chiluly are both artists and entrepreneurs. But it is not a requirement.

I think Seattle has many artists and not enough ‘studios.’ And an artist without a studio may have little impact at all.

How do we create better ‘studios’ in Seattle and do they have to look the same as in San Francisco or San Diego?

I’m glad to see Janis’s comments have ignited another interesting discussion on Xconomy. I suspect that there is an element of truth in her assertion that a desire to live a balanced life may be inhibiting some people in our area from starting companies. However, as Erik Nilsson points out above, it is extremely difficult to quantify issues of how hard people work in Seattle vs. Silicon Valley or San Diego, and how they differ in their desire and efforts to achieve “work life balance”. Anecdotal stories are not a substitute for hard data. Is this desire for “work life balance” new, or has this been a part of the Seattle culture for decades? What can be quantified is how Seattle ranks relative to these other regions as a function of time for different industry groups, such as software, biotechnology, and green technology. I believe that there are multiple causes of the relative number of entrepreneurs and start-ups (or lack thereof) in Seattle compared to Silicon Valley and San Diego, as Gerald Barnett’s numbers illustrate. These would include a smaller number of core companies headquartered here, a smaller VC community, fewer and less effective business promoting organizations, a lack of coordination between business promoting groups, CEOs that preferred to establish companies in these other regions when given the choice (e.g. Fate Therapeutics), more resources (i.e. experienced employees) in other areas that facilitates rapid hiring, and a (previous) lack of organizations such as Janis’s Launchpad that serve as a one-stop shopping source for entrepreneurs looking to put together a new company. Unless most of these issues are addressed, it is likely that the Seattle area will continue to trail these other regions in starting new companies. Maybe we can take some solace in the fact that Seattle outranks other regions in these same criteria, and that has led some companies to relocate here (e.g. AVI Biopharma is moving it’s headquarters from Corvallis to Bothell to tap into our bigger biotech talent pool, as Luke reported last week).

It is always hard to get in all of one’s points in a 90 minute panel with 4 panelists and the press always love to pick up on the controversial points. There are many reasons that Seattle has not reached higher than we have. Work/life balance may be the case for some employees who don’t want to work at startups (those who do choose to likely work incredibly hard and are totally driven) or for those executives who don’t start companies after leaving BigCo but instead choose to retire or advise from the sidelines. We would have a lot more startups if we had more universities to secure talent from, a deeper broader VC community, and more serial entrepreneurs who dive in after they exit their 1st or 2nd company. It would be interesting to see data on # of serial entrepreneurs by region as one measure of productivity and leveraging innovation. We have at UW a lot of interesting technology but what we lack are enough business minded entrepreneurs willing to take on a long term commitment to realize the value from the IP. And enough seed stage funding to get it to a commercializable state.

My comments are a small fraction of what I see as differences and similarities between regions more successful than we are in given sectors but as a necessary outcome Luke took the thing from my talk sure to capture a lot of dialogue. Dialogue is great but outcomes and change is even better.

The reason I signed on to help out at UW is NOT because Paladin Partners was failing (I still get more entrepreneurs wanting to work with me than I can take on and I do select my clients carefully for what I see as successful plays with great people and not for who can pay my fees-that is not why I do this mentoring work with founders) but because I so strongly believe in the need to create a strong innovation ecosystem for WA state tied to entrepreneurship and what better place at which to do it.

Janis,

I’m glad that you added some commentary to what I’m sure was a sound-bite from a more lengthy discussion. So, are you both working at UW, and also continuing the work at Paladin Partners? How do you separate the two?

What goals does UW have for increasing entrepreneurial investment in university-incubated technologies? How will the UW efforts accelerate that?

I’m sure that a lot has been written, that I’m not aware of, but I think that the startup community would benefit from learning the more specific/tactical goals & methods that your team will be pursuing to exceed them.

Dave

This was an honest observation.
She did not say that people in Seattle do not work hard.
She did not say that there is no startup where people work hard. So there is no need for commenters to show their insecurity and get defensive “well, MY startup works hard (whine, whine)” and shockingly insulting.

She merely commented, rather positively, that we have balance in our lives and that’s what makes Seattle a better place to live than Silicon Valley.

I think the tone of Luke’s writing sensationalized her comment. He paraphrased her at first, before going into an actual quote. Then, he made it a total editorial by using the word “kicker.” I’m sure Luke did not mean to attack her comment but that’s the result of his choice of words, and it set off a mini-firestorm.

She’s right. If we collectively, on average, display differently, she’d be happy to observe some other trend.

I’ve been up and down the west coast quite a bit. I grew up in Vancouver BC, worked in the Bay Area for a time in biotech consulting during the dot com era, lived and worked in San Diego for 3 years (Diversa Corp during the genomics heyday), moved up to Seattle (Corus Pharma) then found myself flying back and forth to the Bay Area dozens of times a year as a member of Gilead’s corporate development team the past 3 years. Now I am at Alder Biopharmaceuticals in Bothell, a venture-funded biotech. Having lived and worked in these cities and companies, my observations have been that yes, I agree that the Bay Area atmosphere tends to be more aggressive in general (there are always exceptions) but I have seen many cases of colleagues there with serious work/life imbalances that are probably unsustainable in the long run, especially with regards to growing a family. However, in San Diego I felt the *geographic proximity* of biotechs (UTC/UCSD/Carmel Valley/Sorrento Valley region) and not aggressive behavior was what really made a key difference in building up momentum and cross-fertilization of entrepreneurs and ideas leading to new venture proliferation. I have experienced the same geography effect on the 101 corridor between Palo Alto and South San Francisco in the Bay Area (for example, Gilead Foster City was in the middle of all this, and we found numerous potential partnering opportunities worth investigating within a short car ride up and down the freeway). I definitely don’t feel as much “biotech buzz” in Seattle, probably due to the geographic spread of companies in the region as well as the fact there are simply fewer companies here — and yet the innovation and science is world-class. It just seems to grow in a little more isolation up here, there is less networking overall, and things don’t spread as fast by word of mouth. However, having now worked with folks who started new bioventures after leaving their former Seattle companies (Pathogenesis, Celltech Seattle), I think the spirit of innovative entrepreneurship in Seattle biotech is alive and growing. As far as I know, there aren’t many biotech executives who get such massive Microsoft-like payoffs that they can afford to retire early these days.

Hi Luke, Xconomy has been a great forum for keeping up with biotech news beyond the usual press release feeds. It’s definitely a refreshing source of information for me.

Sometimes I think the “building a biotech region” debate is a little on the academic side – it is definitely an interesting discussion topic but it took decades for California to develop its clusters, and let’s not forget the IPO boom around 1999-2000 gave life to numerous California companies (some questionable) that have since gone bust but on the positive side spun out a new generation of startups and entrepreneurs. In terms of risk taking entrepreneurs, there are already many ex-ICOS and ex-Immunex folks hard at work around Seattle (in addition to my ex-Celltech colleagues at Alder), and I think we just need to have a little patience. People who can develop a balanced life and settle down tend to stay in the region and put down roots — people who stay in the region and don’t want to leave are the ones who will ultimately have the most interest in sticking around to create a new startup when the time comes versus going to California to create a newco there.

Kevin