This article is pure fluff. Instead of gathering or analyzing any data, the author merely cites a report, and then uses that as fuel to waste countless paragraphs celebrating the cultures of New York and Silicon Valley, while condemning Seattle as a bunch of scared, boring people. Most irritatingly, it turns a massive blind eye to the largest factors that affect whether a community of people do "risky and interesting" things with their lives:

Foremost, it helps to be born incredibly wealthy, or be born into a world where you have connections to incredibly wealthy, powerful people.

Secondly, whether it's the bootstrapping founder or the speculating funder, the person sitting on their mountain of cash and influence has to be unsatisfied with sitting on a mountain of cash. There's many things money can't buy, but there is one difficult--yet attainable--thing you can do with wealth:

Be famous.

In Silicon Valley, those who are merely wealthy-but-not-famous feel envy toward Jobs, Zuckerberg, and all of California's movie and music celebrities. These people are / will be remembered after they're dead. If you die with ten Ferarris in your garage, you're just as non-existent as a blue collar worker who has a couple dozen people show up to his funeral.

In New York, those who are merely wealthy-but-not-famous have spent generations sitting on old wealth, but the '80s are long gone. Stock brokers aren't cool anymore. Goldman Sachs is hovering somewhere between evil and being a joke. Manhattan's wealthy are starting to feel envy toward Silicon Valley's fame, so they're throwing money at their young relatives and friends in Brooklyn. They do this in the hopes that some of that money will stick to something famous, and they'll be a part of something more eternal than their own lives.

Seattle's wealthy tech giants aren't glamorized. Gates is the quintessential nerd who made Microsoft Windows, the eternal punching bag of boring corporate software. Jeff Bezos is strange to say the least, and Amazon, the WalMart of the internet, is a company that somehow manages to be even more culturally boring than Microsoft.

In fact, the concept of using wealth to achieve fame to achieve immortality isn't lost on Bill Gates. He isn't spending the second half of his life trying to buy in at the ground level of the next big American corporation, he's becoming immortal by spreading his name throughout the developing world via the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

So what does this article really mean when it talks about being risk-adverse? Most people don't have the luxury of avoiding risk. If having rent money is an actual concern in your life, the uncertainty of attaining that next round of VC funding pales in comparison. What's more risky than putting your life savings into opening a small shop or restaurant? But since that's not a tech startup, it doesn't count in the rankings, and so the author of the article condemns Seattle as being a city of people who are frozen in fear of failure.

In fact, the article even manages to touch on the right idea, while missing the truth behind the statement:

"Seattle's weak spot is funding."

In other words, the ultra wealthy of Seattle just don't care as much about tech startups. It's not good or bad, it's just a fact.

If you're rich in NYC or Silicon Valley, status means buying into someone else's good idea so that you can claim your role in being a part of the "next big thing." If you're rich in Seattle, status means that you have the best quality of life: Wealth means a beautiful house by the water, a boat, a nice camper van, and enough free time to regularly take it out of the city. Extreme wealth doesn't mean that you get to look over business plans and sit on the board of directors for what you hope is going to be the next Snapchat. It means that you found a charitable organization, host big community events, create crowd-pleasing spectacles, and put your name on them.

This article is one person's feeble attempt to put attention-grabbing spin on a statistical study. The cited study is likely trustworthy and indisputable. The article is pointless fluff and arbitrary value judgements. Everybody already knows where to move if you want to network with wealthy startup investors, we didn't need some fool writing an article about how Seattle "flails".