Those of us who moved to Seattle from the East Coast (I’m from Maine originally) frequently remark that people who have lived in the Pacific Northwest for a long time tend to be understated about their opinions and emotions.
There’s a reason that when the Seahawks won the Super Bowl, the hashtag #HowSeattleRiots was filled with images of huge crowds waiting patiently for the crosswalk signal to turn or letting cars pass before running back into the street to celebrate.
But Michael Schutzler, the newly appointed CEO of the
, thinks it's time for this state’s tech industry to learn how to sell itself.
“It starts with winning the Super Bowl, getting comfortable with some people being brash. Polite, but brash,” he said. “We have to all get a bit of Richard Sherman in us.”
After all, Schutzler said, this is where the PC industry was born. “We created desktop publishing, digital music, streaming online video, the cloud industry and now almost all the data hosting is moving to Quincy because of the cheap energy,” he said. “These are tremendous things.”
Tremendous things people outside this area rarely talk about.
In fact, when Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos bought the
last year, many prominent news organizations incorrectly identified his company’s headquarters as Silicon Valley.
Schutzler is from the East Coast originally and lived in both New York City and Washington, D.C., for a while, so he’s not one to mince words. In fact, he’s been vocal about the Seattle City Council’s decision to limit ride-sharing services such as Uber and Lyft.
Schutzler said that part of his vision for a new and improved WTIA is that the organization will help sell Washington to the rest of the country and the world as a place where innovation happens. “This is an incredible place to live, and it has been for the 150 years we’ve been around. We’re the pioneers. We create things here. We just don’t tell the story,” he said.
Washington’s political leaders should be selling the region as well, he said. “Part of our opportunity at the WTIA is not only to begin acting like a cheerleader for the industry,” Schutzler said, “but encourage, provoke or bully our political leaders to do the same thing.”
Washington state has about 10,000 tech companies, he said, and the vast majority of them have fewer than 100 employees. Yet, when regulations and laws that affect the industry end up at the statehouse, few people from the industry show up to offer insight.
Gov. Jay Inslee recently signed a crowdfunding bill into law that could help small tech companies raise seed rounds, and Schutzler said that was the first time he was privy to the “political sausage-making.” A few tech companies went down to Olympia to help educate the politicians about what the law would mean for them. “We don’t do that very often, so when we do, the legislature is like, ‘Wow, thank you,’” he said.
That’s a stark contrast with other industries, particularly those with unions, such as teachers and
engineers. “They have placards, they’re all wearing the same T-shirts, with logos, message points,” Schutzler said.
He imagines the WTIA as a leader of tech industry “rabble rousers.”
“It can’t just be
. We need to rally those 10,000 companies,” he said. “If you’re going to have an impact on the legislative process, the bottom line is you have to show up.”
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