Seattle can definitely do very well. It's one of the most beautiful places on the planet, it has a lot of talent, and it's still relatively affordable. Let's hope that, if it grows, it doesn't fuck everything up the way San Francisco and its progress-hating NIMBYs did.

“The galactic players are here, and they are creating lots of little companies. The only thing driving anyone away from here is the weather.”

I'm surprised people are saying this. Seattle weather is gloomy by California standards, but it's actually not that bad. If you're from the northeast, you won't notice much of a difference, except for the winters being slightly warmer and the summers being cooler. (Summer is actually a nice season, not a humid hell, in Seattle.) Sure, it's cloudy a lot (55-60% in the summer, 80-85% in the winter) and it rains, a little bit, most days. But heavy rain that prevents you from doing things outside is very rare. If you're into running or biking, you probably prefer 50- to 70-degree cloudy days anyway, which makes Seattle ideal.

Others note that Washington State has tougher noncompete clauses in its labor laws than does California, which can give established firms some peace of mind about setting up shop in Seattle but frustrate venture capitalists by making it harder for people to walk out of one company and start a competitor.

This is something it will need to change. Whether you want non-competes and employer-friendly ownership laws over side projects depends on whether you're courting hedge funds or tech. (Hedge funds are more of a meritocracy than VC, which means that it's easier for a guy with no connections to run with a proven idea and get a hedge fund.) If you're going for the hedge funds, keep the non-competes in play. If you want tech, then eschew non-competes and give the benefit of the doubt, on ownership, to the employee. (California gets this right in a major way.) However, the hedge funds don't want to be in Seattle, because it's not near any of the major exchanges. Tech loves Seattle. So Seattle should play for tech and kill the non-competes, because the hedge funds aren't about to move there no matter what it does.

I'll say one thing, based on very limited data. Seattle's an amazing, beautiful city and, unconstrained, would be one of the top places I'd choose to live. What has concerned me is (based on very limited data; it could be that I just talked to crappy companies) that the creeping non-progressivism of technology employers (back-channel references, aversion to people with "too many" jobs, closed allocation) seems to be meeting less resistance there than I'd like. The sense I got from a recruiter (who may be completely biased) is that workers don't fight back hard enough to have nice things. I said to him, "I'm in my 30s now and only want to work on interesting projects, because I'm old enough to know that I will die someday." He said that if I said something that direct in an interview, that alone would sink me. (In New York, people are more accepting of directness. That a smart person will bolt if given boring work is a given. I like that.) Of course, that can change in a matter of months. Seattle has an incredible number of smart people, and a beautiful environment, and I think anything's possible there. But (if I'm right that Seattle's scene is more conservative and corporate) it's something that will have to evolve if it wants a leading tech scene.