Bullish on Seattle
Cutting through the South Lake Union area of Seattle last Sunday, it looked like we had been awarded the 2016 Olympics. Construction everywhere.
A decade ago, Microsoft co-founder, Paul Allen, in the name of Vulcan Real Estate and Construction, had the wisdom to get out of dot-com like investing and start buying real estate in this factory and warehouse area of Seattle.
What started with some condo’s and office buildings exploded when Jeff Bezos and Amazon decided to move from a refurbished hospital on Beacon Hill to South Lake Union. 11 new buildings with 1.6 million square were constructed by Vulcan for over 6,000 Amazon employees. All in downtown Seattle.
Apartments, condo’s, bars, restaurants, coffee shops, stores and you name it flourished all around. A whole area filled with brilliant and driven people labeled by some as ‘Am-holes.’
In 2012 Amazon bought its 11 building campus from Vulcan for $1.2 billion so that it could further expand. Amazon now expects to have 10 million square feet of office space – enough for 71,000 employes – in Seattle in the next five years.
Facebook just announced it likes Seattle so much it is going to take 274,000 square feet, with an option for another 60,000 square feet, in the Dexter Station atrium building under construction in South Lake Union. This will allow Facebook to add another 2,000 employees in Seattle.
Microsoft, Bing, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Tommy Bahama, bio-tech companies, and tech incubators all call South Lake Union home or have large presences there. Down the street a few blocks you have Nordstrom corporate.
As you walk around downtown you see or hear of the tech based companies with large presences here. Zillow, Google, Cray, Apple, Oracle, Alibaba, Apple, Avvo, Dropbox, Sears and HP to name some.
These companies spin off more companies. Entrepreneurialism is rampant, with people leaving the larger companies to start there own tech company. They, in turn, find plenty of ‘kids” happy to work in a start-up versus larger traditional companies.
For a small town kid from rural Wisconsin, it’s all pretty amazing. My hometown of La Crosse, a wonderful place, has never grown because young people took off for Minneapolis, Madison, Milwaukee or elsewhere. My five kids all have more opportunities in Seattle than you can shake a stick at.
When asked on my travels what Seattle is like, I tell folks it is one very unique place. A hot bed of technology surrounded by water and mountains – with a temperate climate to boot. While other areas of the country are experiencing cold and snow, we’re about 60 degrees and sunny. No California, but not bad.
In 1999, I was told by the Venture Law Group in Palo Alto that I’d have to move to one of four cities to obtain the venture capital I needed to build Prairielaw.com, I could not stay in Wisconsin.
Not knowing a soul in Seattle, I thought if it was good enough for the likes of Howard Schulz, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Bill Boeing, it would certainly be good enough for me.
I was especially enamored with Bezos’ story of not knowing where he would start Amazon until he and his wife drove half way here from New York City and told the moving trucks to head to Seattle. Seemed like the place of opportunity. The place to make ones dreams come alive.
16 years later, I’ve now lived in Seattle for close to half of my professional life. I’m as bullish on Seattle as ever and and bullish as the day I got here that Seattle is the place to make my dream come alive — that being of helping lawyers dreams come alive through the Internet.
Seattle, best of all, has enabled our kids to stay close, something that probably would not have happened elsewhere.
If you have not been to Seattle, you ought to check it out. It’s one very unique place.