In the past week, I spoke with founders and co-founders of startup companies. These companies are pursuing projects in diverse areas including internet-of-things, software-as-service for invoices and shipping, robotic games for consumers, novel application of sensors for physical environments, etc. The founders are bright, focused, and exude energy in their missions. They are mindful of the challenges and are grounded, while keeping an eye on the bigger addressable market.
At the 9-mile labs event, today I got to hear these founders talk about their traction with customers and solutions they had built. A few of these companies went from an idea to early customer testing (ex: Storm Sensor, IoTify, Talla, Jodone), while a few others went from few customers to many customers (ex: Namastream, Client Linkt, Muze). I like their approach to develop solutions, incrementally test the market, and explore new business opportunities.
There are some folks talk about vibrancy in Seattle area is slightly (okay, somewhat slightly) milder compared to the silicon valley. However I am enthused to see and hear about these startups, whose founders had come from several miles away, even as far as from India. Seattle has the unique position of having the largest number of developers dabbling with cloud platform software, thanks to Amazon with AWS and Microsoft with Azure Cloud services.
Increasingly the hundreds, if not thousands of engineers from these big companies may try out their own adventures outside the calm environs of big companies. And when that happens we can expect to see a significant run up in folks engaged in startups in the coming years. And that means we can see more energy and enthusiasm fueling the emergent products of the future.
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