One of the most important decisions anyone makes is deciding where to live. Lucky for me, that decision has already been made. Since I’ll be graduating soon with an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management, I thought it would be great to head out West to where the software revolution began: the emerald city of Seattle, WA.

Now, I understand what some of you may be thinking: why the heck would anyone want to live in Seattle? I mean, doesn’t it rain like 10,000 inches per year? And aren’t they just a bunch of granola eating, rock band wannabes? What kind of job opportunities exist out in Seattle anyway?

I recently had the opportunity to help organize a “Seattle Tech Trek” for some of my MIT classmates (as well as the Harvard Business School, who helped set up a “startup mixer”). While many of us have roots in the technology scene, a large majority are obsessed about tech startups. Most are interested in either a) working for a small technology company, or b) starting our own venture (and if anyone is looking for good talent, please e-mail me for a list of resumes). Approximately 30 of us made the trip from Boston out to the Pacific Northwest and toured some of the area’s premier technology companies, both large and small.

I realize some of you may be biased toward the East Coast, especially since the majority of readers reside in Boston where Xconomy got started. But, I want you to keep an open mind especially if you’ve never been out West before. What follows is my “elevator pitch” for those who are contemplating whether they should move to Seattle, post-MBA.

First, and probably most obvious, Seattle is home to some of the most innovative technology companies. Yeah, sure, there are the “old timers” such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Expedia. I mean, everyone knows about those guys, right? Well, yeah—but there are also some up-and-comers which some of you may have never heard about: Impinj (RFID semiconductors), Farecast (travel, sold to Microsoft for $115 million), Isilon Systems (storage, acquired by EMC for over $2 billion), Big Fish Games (online games), DocuSign (digital signatures), AdReady (online display ads), Tableau Software (Web data), PayScale (salary data), Picnik (photos, acquired by Google), and Off & Away (travel deals). While the Bay Area may host its fair share of startups, rest assured Seattle is doing its best to stay in the running.

And, speaking of the Bay area, look at all the Silicon Valley companies who are opening offices in Seattle. Facebook recently opened an engineering center (currently the only other office besides its headquarters in the Valley), while Google, Cisco, Adobe, and Salesforce.com all have satellite offices in Seattle as well. There’s probably a host of others I’m forgetting, but these stand out to me. (Side note: my MIT Sloan colleagues also put together a “Silicon Valley Tech Trek” as noted here by MIT Entrepreneurship Center director, Bill Aulet. )

Second, and probably most important, is the Pacific Northwest “entrepreneurial … Next Page »

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[Updated 3:30pm 1/9/10 with clarification (see below)] If you want to know which companies are looking to hire top young business talent around town, just ask the group of 20 or so first-year MBA students from MIT Sloan School of Management. The students from Cambridge, MA, are in Seattle this week looking to make contacts for jobs and summer internships.

It’s all part of the annual “tech trek” program in which some 150 Sloan MBA students split up to visit companies in Seattle, Silicon Valley, and the Boston area. The students on the Seattle leg visited Adobe, Microsoft, and RealNetworks yesterday, and they are at Amazon, Starbucks, and T-Mobile today.

I met up with a group of them over drinks last night. They had a refreshingly candid perspective on job prospects at Seattle tech companies, and some valuable insights into the local tech-business scene. (Almost worth the $43 parking ticket I got from the BluWater Bistro lot—it’s been one of those weeks.)

“The job market is better than last year. Companies are very receptive, and positions are open,” says Sloan student Hilda Tang, a former management consultant in New York City and a native of Vancouver, BC. Tang helped organize this year’s trip to Seattle, together with fellow first-year Ryan Thurston, a former design engineer and product manager at Seattle-based Impinj. “Everyone’s hiring, but they’re hedging their bets,” Thurston says.

Kathryn Wepfer, another Sloan student, previously worked for four years at General Electric in Massachusetts managing a technology development program (defense work). Wepfer went on the Silicon Valley leg of the trip earlier this week, where Sloan students visited VMware, Cisco, Google, Apple, LinkedIn, Yahoo, and Zynga. Last year, Google and Yahoo didn’t participate, as their hiring was on hold. This year, the students say Google is hiring selectively for positions in finance, operations, marketing, and business development; Yahoo didn’t impress, with one student commenting, “What are [they], really?”

It sounds like some companies were much better at marketing themselves to students than others. The strongest reaction I got was when I asked about their visit to Apple (in Silicon Valley). “Everyone came away totally creeped out,” one student said, adding that the company came off as “secretive” and “sterile,” and that during their visit, at least one Apple employee admitted it wasn’t a great place to work while Steve Jobs was on leave.

[This paragraph added on 1/9/10 for more context on Apple---Eds.] This student followed up with me later to say, “We heard from people in finance, marketing, and product management—everyone hands down was very excited about their job and being part of the Apple community. It’s a very attractive company to me, but it is somewhat difficult to see the reality of the secretive culture that may be necessary to maintain Apple’s ability to create products that change the world. I, and I think the rest of the group, appreciated their openness and honesty.”

On the Seattle front, I had to wonder about Microsoft, which is coming off a year of … Next Page »

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I’m sure some of you have heard a version of this quote before: “In the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, large families in the U.S. sent their fifth or sixth child to work for the government or a utility company under the assumption that the later the child was born the less intelligent he/she was.” Even for most of us from the generation X (or Y or Z, whatever they are calling us these days) any mention of government or utility jobs brings visuals of diesel locomotives coughing dark soot and slowly chugging away to, well, nowhere. When was the last time you saw a glossy business school brochure highlighting how many students they place with the Bureau of Land Management or Pacific Gas & Electric? Exactly.

Is this about to change? Has it suddenly become sexy to work for the government and/or a utility company? There definitely are some signs here at the MIT Sloan School of Management that attitudes are changing. More than a handful of my classmates have accepted summer internship offers from utility companies and/or government agencies this year.

“How is this possible?” I’ve been asking myself. How can two such dissimilar worlds—the business schools that are the ultimate centers of capitalist education and the utilities and government offices that are the ultimate conservative workplaces—come together? Well, it turns out that we’re living in a new world in 2009.

Today, with $900 billion of stimulus capital being handed out, Washington, D.C. is being touted as the new Wall Street. After decades of inaction, there is suddenly urgent talk of building 220-volt electricity transmission lines all across the U.S. Today, consumers want an hour-by-hour update of their electricity consumption. Today, new business models are being talked about to get ready for carbon pricing. It’s in this environment that students from business schools are expected to thrive.

“Working at the US Department of Energy (DOE) today is like working at NASA during the Apollo program,” says Leland Cheung, a first-year Sloan student. Leland will spend his summer at the Advance Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) in Washington. ARPA-E, under the DOE umbrella, has been tasked with dispensing $400 million to companies moving advanced energy technologies toward commercialization.

Cheung, with a pre-Sloan career in the venture capital industry, hopes to get valuable exposure to the energy sector and develop his network while at ARPA-E this summer. While he does not think a full time job in the government is something he would prefer, he says “I would try to adopt and incorporate best practices from the private sector in the government to make it more attractive for bright and energetic individuals.”

Obama Administration policies seem to be making government jobs more attractive. “Obama changed the tenor of what it means to pursue an energy career with the US government,” Christina Ingersoll, a first-year Sloan student, told me. “Under Bush’s administration, I would have felt different and probably more suspicious of working for the government.” Ingersoll will spend her summer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, CO in the Technology Transfer Office.

Prior to starting at Sloan, she had not given any thought about working for the government. She changed her mind after talking to a faculty member at MIT Sloan and fellow MIT students. “NREL is a phenomenal place if you’re interested in renewable energy,” she says. “I knew I would work hard, but with smart interesting people. I have the chance to develop an expertise, and to have access to some of the leading scientists in the world on energy. Also, Colorado is a great location for the summer!”

Changes in regulations, including feed-in tariffs/decoupling/advance metering, seem to be making the utilities a sought-after destination for business school students. A group director at Massachusetts utility NSTAR told Pavel Gavrilov, a first-year Sloan student, that she felt change was coming due to the increase in MBAs coming through the organization. Gavrilov was one of those interested students. He has accepted a summer internship offer from NSTAR.

Gavrilov would like to see further changes at utilities. “For too long it’s been slow and steady growth as the only option for utilities and thus they just build rate base” he says. ” I think with changing regulations they are able to fulfill their shareholders needs in other ways–just look at decoupling.”

Veronica Metzner, another first-year Sloan student, agrees with Gavrilov and says that the utilities should go further. “It is critical for the utilities to asses how to best meet the needs of their customers by helping them become as energy efficient as possible while at the same time continuing to deliver sustained and respectable returns to shareholders,” says Metzner.

Metzner accepted a summer internship offer from the California’s largest utility, PG&E. She added that she always wanted to be in the energy field, but the support of MIT’s Energy Club and other campus resources helped her maintain a focus and get access to career opportunities.

Like other organizations, government agencies and utilities expect students to have a grasp of both traditional management skills and cross-disciplinary concepts. A strong focus on energy related activities and quantitative skills help immensely, Metzner and Ingersoll commented. Gavrilov on the other hand thinks that while MBAs are becoming a more important part of utilities, there’s a long way to go for most of them. To apply skills learnt and using the MBA experience to help the organizations flourish in these changing times will require some time and patience.

What remains to be seen is whether the change that seems to be getting business-school students excited about working for government agencies and utilities will continue, or whether these organizations will settle back into the conservative status quo ante. Can a bunch of motivated business school students armed with management and quantitative skills catalyze this change? Stay tuned.

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It’s been three months since Janis Machala took the helm of LaunchPad, the University of Washington’s support service for UW spinoffs. Her charge: to grow the service into a world-class entrepreneurial assistance program, and to promote the creation of new startups based on university research. I recently dropped in on Machala, a former tech executive and the founder of Paladin Partners, to see how her experience has been so far.

LaunchPad has just started a couple of new initiatives, she told me, including an “entrepreneur advisor” program that Rachel wrote about last week. For that program, Machala says she has signed up about 15 seasoned entrepreneurs in the Seattle area—Joe Eichinger of Redmond, WA-based CoAptus Medical and John Hansen, formerly of Bellevue, WA-based Vallent among them—to volunteer their time and mentor UW faculty and researchers on the ins and outs of starting companies. Another new LaunchPad thrust is an internship program whereby MBA students at the UW’s Foster School of Business team up with faculty entrepreneurs to work on market development plans. (More on that soon.)

It sounds like a very busy time. Machala says she’s currently tracking about 40 company prospects at the UW. They range from faculty members who have said they want to start a company to full-fledged business plans and management teams. “I’m incredibly enthused by all the entrepreneurial activity,” Machala says. “It’s far greater than I initially thought it was. What’s clear to me is the lack of business talent to drive it forward.” Almost every plan she reviews these days needs a qualified CEO, she says, and they’re tough to find.

Why is that? “Researchers hang out in their labs, and engineers don’t network,” Machala says. “They didn’t know how to get out there and engage….Anything we can do to help them leverage their time and bridge the gap, we do.”

As for her experience at the UW TechTransfer department so far, Machala says, “I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the lack of bureaucracy. My biggest fear was that it’s such a big organization, it would have lots of impediments. People have been very open, and very engaged in entrepreneurship. I haven’t felt the resistance I expected. The support is top-down.”

More broadly, I asked Machala about her philosophy on starting technology companies, especially from within an academic institution. “A startup needs three basic elements,” she says—a management team, financing, and market research and development. That all assumes the technology is strong, she adds. (Which usually isn’t the issue for UW startups.)

So where will the next Amazon or Google come from around here? If Machala knows, she’s not letting on. But she points to the wireless sector, including mobile software and devices, as particularly fertile ground—and a technology cluster in which the Seattle area is particularly strong. Of course, the aim of LaunchPad would be that whatever field the next big winner is in, it will come from the UW.

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Want to know who’s hiring the top young business talent around town? Just ask Saleem Hussain, an MBA student from Boston. In a brutal market for tech industry jobs, he gave me a fresh perspective on the next-generation talent pool and where it’s headed, in terms of both big companies and startups.

Hussain is a first-year MBA student at MIT’s Sloan School of Management in Cambridge, MA. He is one of the organizers of a 16-student Sloan contingent that made a “tech trek” to Seattle last week, on Thursday and Friday. It’s part of an annual program that takes 150 Sloan MBA students to companies in Seattle, Silicon Valley, and the Boston area to make job and internship contacts and learn about the respective markets.

In the Seattle area, the group visited Amazon, Microsoft, Expedia, Adobe, Starbucks, and Digeo. The students met with recruiters and executives to ask about business challenges the companies are facing, and to learn what MBAs need to do to land jobs in the current market. “As far as internships go, there are lots of opportunities at big companies,” says Hussain.

Despite the economy, he says, Amazon and Microsoft “seem to be really hiring in full swing” on the MIT campus. Adobe has a lot of openings in Silicon Valley, he adds, but not as many in Seattle. Interestingly, Google and Yahoo usually host the Sloan students (in Silicon Valley), but did not this year. “A lot of companies are delaying,” says Hussain. “They’ve held back interviews, putting hiring on hold.”

I also asked Hussain about Sloan’s contacts with Seattle-area startups. If there’s one hiring issue I hear about in the innovation community, it’s the relative dearth of top management, sales, and business development talent—so tapping programs like Sloan’s seems like an obvious way to address the matter. The Sloan tech trek focuses on bigger companies that tend to hire on campus, but Hussain says organizers would embrace meetings with startups as well. “In Boston, we have a lot more access to small companies and strategy consulting firms, because of neighbor relationships,” he says.

As for broader impressions, some in the Sloan group were expecting a wary market for new jobs and internships, given tightening budgets and the prospect of layoffs seemingly around every corner. But the Seattle companies were very receptive, Hussain says. “They seemed surprisingly welcoming in talking to MBA students.” As for any wariness or uncertainty (about internships anyway), he says, “we didn’t see any of that.”

“A lot of people in business school are excited about coming out in this economy,” Hussain says. “For companies, it’s very pivotal for them. It’s such an important time to be working at these companies. That’s what makes it so exciting, and that’s what drives our visits.”

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