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4 Seattle Tech Trends and Startup Sectors to Watch in 2020

January 30, 2020 by Brett Greene Leave a Comment

It’s a new year and a new decade. The “Roaring Twenties” if you will. The tech scene in Seattle and throughout the Pacific Northwest continues to explode thanks to the arrival of new satellite engineering offices, rapid job growth and a record year of venture capital funding for local startups. As TechCrunch noted in late December, Seattle startups are “having a moment.”

Several trends are fueling our local tech community’s growth and momentum. I wrote about two broader technology trends last year: 1) our region’s evolution from rain king to the cloud capital of the world and 2) how Seattle is leading the way in artificial intelligence (AI). In many ways, these technologies are at the heart of so much success over the past decade and what’s likely to come next. The recent acquisition of Paul Allen’s AI2 incubated Xnor.ai being acquired by Apple bodes well for Seattle’s standing as leading international city for AI development.

While the 2010s cemented Seattle’s place in the tech world as the “king of cloud,” one might reasonably predict that the 2020s may well result in Seattle becoming one of the dominant players in artificial intelligence (check back in a few weeks when I’ll sit down with Jacob Colker, managing director of the startup incubator at the Allen Institute for AI) before his March New Tech Seattle presentation.

Leveraging cloud computing and AI, several industry sectors are likely to see continued growth and success in 2020. I hope to highlight each of these in more detail throughout the year, but here are a few other sectors to watch:

Financial / Fintech – The GeekWire Startup List of approximately 1,350 Pacific Northwest startups, identifies 43 companies in the finance space. The online and mobile payment service, Remitly, which provides international money transfers, leads the way thanks to a $135 million funding round last year that moved the company closer to ‘unicorn’ status. Other startups, like Snap! Raise, empower schools, sports teams and other organizations with the tools needed to fundraise for their cause. Seattle-based doxo, on the other hand, offers an all-in-one bill pay service, providing an easy way for users to pay their bills with a single account. Lastly, the BECU Fintech Incubator at the University of Washington’s CoMotion Labs is fostering startups that explore how technology can improve financial activities and has already spun out several new companies.
Healthcare / Healthtech – Digital health or healthcare technology is a fast-growing industry vertical within the healthcare industry, which accounts for nearly 18% of the U.S. gross domestic product. The GeekWire Startup List includes 82 health and life sciences companies. One of the region’s biggest players, Accolade, a personalized healthcare and benefits experience for employees, appears positioned to go public this year. Similarly, Limeade, an employee experience platform that unifies well-being, engagement and inclusion solutions, went public on the Australian Securities Exchange in December. Other growing startups in this space include Edifecs, a healthcare data company seeking to improve outcomes, reduce costs and accelerate innovation, and MedBridge, which develops evidence-based solutions for healthcare professionals and organizations using technology and education.
Real Estate / Proptech – Home to online real estate giants Zillow and Redfin, it’s no surprise that the Seattle area is becoming a growing hub for real estate and property technology startups. Years before Redfin or Zillow, there was com. Launched in 1995 – the same year as Amazon.com (and a few years before the cult classic movie of the same name) – it became the Internet’s first online marketplace for commercial real estate property information. Today, the GeekWire Startup List count 35 companies in this category. Flyhomes, which raised $141 million in equity and debt funding last year, is an end-to-end real estate brokerage and technology company that empowers home buyers, sellers and agents. Others, like CityBldr, are focused on determining the highest and best use of urban lands and then connecting buyers and sellers of underutilized properties. On the rental side of the spectrum, Knock’s CRM platform is designed to help landlords build better relationships with residents and prospects.
Education / Edtech – The last sector that I find particularly interesting is the education technology space. The Pacific Northwest features a surprising 50 education-focused companies on the GeekWire Startup List. DreamBox Learning, for example, provides personalized learning experiences that guides and engages students through a combination of rigorous K-8 math curriculum and a motivating learning environment. CreativeLive, with dual headquarters in Seattle and San Francisco, is transforming continuing education with its live, online classroom for creative entrepreneurs. Up north, Bellingham-based Faithlife, which started in 1992, publishes and creates digital content and electronic tools for Bible study. Lastly, Seattle is also home to a number of coding education startups such as Coding Dojo, Educative and Data Science Dojo.

So, there you have it. It will be interesting to watch how these four verticals progress in 2020 and also to see what other sectors might emerge in the coming year. I realize this is just scratching the surface as there are a number of interesting sectors emerging here as well, including blockchain, internet-of-things, logistics, AR/VR and more. I look forward to highlighting these industries in the months ahead!

Your Escape From Email Hell

January 16, 2020 by Brett Greene Leave a Comment

Between producing New Tech Seattle and New Tech Tacoma, doing regular work, and shoveling lots of snow multiple times to be able to use my driveway, writing an article for our newsletter and blog fell off the radar this week. So, I’m opting to write you a short note, but an impactful one.

There have been many times that I’ve thought about writing an article about how Superhuman has given me back hours in a day. Today is the day that article gets written. When products, companies, or any resources positively impact my life I love turning other people on to them.

If you feel like email sucks hours out of your day and you’re using Gmail then Superhuman will blow your mind. They cracked the code on how to set up email to not show you the emails that you don’t need to focus on, how to focus easily to quickly move through email responding, and to use keyboard shortcuts to manage email responses faster than you can imagine. And did I mention, it gets me to inbox zero almost daily?

There’s no affiliate code here for me to make money BTW, I’m just sharing about a great product because I’ve never come across anything as helpful to alleviate email pain. Also, it was created by Rahul Vohra who created Rapportive before selling it to LinkedIn. LinkedIn then proceeded to kill an amazing product :/ That tool was another favorite of mine that helped me to build my LinkedIn connections to 26,000+ so I was already a fan of his.

On a similar note, today I learned about InboxDone on the Entrepreneurs on Fire podcast. They have email specialists you can hire to train and take over managing your emails completely. This may be the next step for me to generate even more freedom.

Finally for today, Join us if you can next week for a great lineup of presenters at New Tech Eastside and/or learn about Unloop at our Diversity & Women in Tech event on Wednesday. We’ve been big supporters of Unloop since they launched in 2015. They help people in prison learn how to code and help them to get jobs once they’re out which helps them to rehabilitate and move on to being more productive in society. The coolest part, there’s no internet access in prison, so they learn to code without being online!

Stay safe and warm, be kind, and I hope to see you next week!

Emerging Spaces: How Jenna Bono is helping identify new opportunities for PitchBook’s data

January 8, 2020 by Brett Greene Leave a Comment

Today I have the pleasure of sitting down with Jenna Bono, lead product manager, at PitchBook, the leading financial data provider covering the global venture capital, private equity and public markets that’s headquartered here in Seattle. Jenna will be part of an amazing group of presenters next Tuesday evening to kick off New Tech’s Seattle events in 2020!

To start, can you tell the New Tech community about PitchBook?

PitchBook is a financial technology company that provides data on the private and public markets. Our platform aggregates hard-to-find financial information about private companies, public companies, investors, exists and much more into a format that provides our clients with transparency into a rather opaque industry. At PitchBook, we’re empowering our users to make better decisions with more confidence faster than they could otherwise if they didn’t have that data.

Who are some of the customers using PitchBook’s platform?

We have a lot of different client types and use cases. For example, venture capitalists looking to raise money or target different investments and value the companies they’re trying to invest in rely on PitchBook. In addition, corporations use our data to understand where a market is going, what markets make sense for their business as they try to grow, or what companies are out there that they’re looking to acquire. We also support limited partners from endowments to pension funds and more.

Would you mind sharing with readers a bit about your role as lead product manager?

I’ve been at PitchBook for two and a half years and I lead our Discovery initiatives, which is one of our core product teams focused on supporting more proactive use cases for our data. This includes everything from tracking a market and watching where it’s headed to understanding how to segment out a landscape or identifying new opportunities that are challenging to uncover. We’re trying to make it easier for our users get to where they’re trying to go – or perhaps where they didn’t even know they were trying to go.

Can you give us a sneak peek of what you’re planning to share at our event next week?

I’m going to talk about a new feature that we released in October called Emerging Spaces. Emerging Spaces helps our users identify nascent investment opportunities ahead of the curve. We all know everyone wants to be first to market but understanding where to look, what to pay attention to and what shows the most promise can be a big challenge for our users. And it’s also very time consuming.

Given that PitchBook already tracks the startup ecosystem, clients typically ask, “what are you seeing?” and “what’s the next big thing?” It was a natural place for us to try and solve that problem and help our users identify those opportunities or what may be a threat to their business and really make sense of those trends. A challenge we heard from our users is that even if you can identify a new space or a new trend, it can be really difficult to quantify that trend – especially early on – and understand if and when it’s a relevant to your business.

In the presentation I’ll be talking about that feature and insights into why and how we built it, as well as some paths we took to solve these problems. It can be easy to get swept up in a direction – especially as you’re building new technology and trying to go in a new direction with a product – so it’s really important to stay focused on your user, their pain points and what you’re trying to solve for them. I’ll also discuss how to make sure the new technology you’re building resonates with that user.

What are some of the interesting different emerging spaces you’re tracking at this time?

One that’s interesting but doesn’t get a lot of attention is insect-based foods, which is focused on alternative and more sustainable protein sources such as cricket flour. It’s really surprising how big the space is and how many companies there are already. It’s not something that’s top of mind for most people, so seeing how large it is in relation to other consumer spaces is pretty interesting. We’re also tracking tech spaces from post-quantum cryptography to LIDAR, which has implications for autonomous vehicles and carbon capture and removal on the energy side.

Any other interesting emerging spaces you’re monitoring here in the Northwest?

Yeah, two that come to mind are digital freight brokerages and ghost kitchens. Another is autonomous deliveries. We’re tracking the use of both ground and air-based drones to facilitate that last mile of delivery in urban areas. To see a group of 29 startups doing innovative things in that space is interesting.

What’s ahead for PitchBook in 2020?

We’re continuing to build on the releases and themes that we started last year. You’ll see more in that space to support proactive use cases for our data. For example, getting more analysis and insight on top of the data we already provide and making it easier to extract meaningful insights and analysis in interesting ways. On the product side we have an ambitious, exciting roadmap full of problems and challenges to solve, like Emerging Spaces. There’ll be a lot of cool features to come in 2020!

Anything else you’d like the New Tech community to know?

Yes! We are hiring, so we’re looking for great people in the Seattle area and our other offices in San Francisco, New York and London.

Thanks so much for your time today, Jenna! I can’t wait to hear your presentation at New Tech Seattle next Tuesday, Jan. 14 at Thinkspace (1700 Westlake Ave. N., Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98109).

Happy Holidays & Thanks for Being a New Techie :)

December 19, 2019 by Brett Greene Leave a Comment

Thank you for another fantastic year in a crazy-fast and ever-changing Seattle tech community. It seems like our city and community shift almost every 2 months.

This means there are even more silos than ever and even more need to spend time with quality people supporting each other on our tech careers and tech company journeys.

As New Tech has grown to almost 50,000 members (we’ll be there in Q1 of 2020) with lots of new friends moving into town, what has gotten deeper is our commitment to connect. Our Puget Sound area is on fire with new jobs, companies, and connections.

The hundreds of you who come out to New Tech events every month don’t always realize the magic you create. At a time when most of us are stressed, overwhelmed, distracted, and living under non-stop existential national political turmoil, you make time to get off your devices for a couple of hours a month with your techie neighbors to celebrate the amazing innovation being created in our backyard .

When you choose New Tech you choose community. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for making that choice month after month. As we continue being leaders in AI, IoT, VR/AR/XR, spacetech, healthtech, cloud computing and so many other great fields, what matters is that we enjoy the ride together.

Have a wonderful holiday season with your family, unplug, relax, exhale, reflect, and get ready to share an amazing 2020 together. …and Happy Birthday to our co-founder Red!

Creating Healthy, Inclusive Cultures that Scale: Mikaela Kiner Insights-Part 2

December 11, 2019 by Brett Greene Leave a Comment

Last week we had an opportunity to sit down and speak with Mikaela Kiner, founder and CEO of Seattle-based people operations consultancy Reverb. She gave us a preview of her upcoming book, Female Firebrands: Stories and Techniques to Ignite Change, Take Control, and Succeed in the Workplace. Today, Mikaela shares more about how Reverb helps companies build healthy, inclusive cultures to engage and inspire employees.

Thanks again for your time, Mikaela. Let’s talk about your company, Reverb, for a moment. You’ve worked with some of our most iconic brands like Microsoft and Amazon, but what pushed you to start and build your own business?

I always say there was both a push and a pull. Part of the prompt was to be able to do what leaders need and when they need it. That’s much easier as a consultant. Where a big company might spend three months going through their performance review process, a startup can design it, launch it and be done with it in three weeks. That was a breath of fresh air!

But the other pull for me was that in 2014 I was certified as an executive coach. When I went into my last job at Redfin, they were fantastic. I had a coaching practice and they were completely accepting. But when I stepped back and realized that if coaching was what I saw myself doing for the next 15 or 20 years, then I should probably make a more significant change that allows me the time to invest in myself and grow as a coach. In addition to running and growing Reverb today, the only client-facing work I do is some executive coaching. And I’ve continued to do that this entire time.

How can our community tap into Reverb’s services to create healthy and inclusive cultures at their companies?

We’ve worked with companies as small as two: two founders wanting to start early in thinking how are we going to pay people, how are we going to make sure that we have a feedback culture, how are we going to set up our job descriptions, and things like that. So we can work with teams from super small to any size organization. There really no limit.

We often come into growing startups when they have little to no HR infrastructure. Maybe they don’t have policies or processes in place, they haven’t thought about professional development. Maybe they’re early stage and haven’t thought about those things yet. We can step in and run HR on a part-time basis until they’re ready for full-time help.

We do have free resources on our website, including a free employee handbook template. You can always download and customize that template, which is a good place to get started. We also do a series of manager training workshops that we host at Galvanize. If smaller organizations can’t bring training into their organizations, but if they want to get some practical hands-on training and build a network of peers from other Seattle startups, the workshops are a great way to do that. And we also do one-on-one coaching for individuals and leaders.

Speaking of community. You spend a lot of time giving back to our community? How to you juggle it all?

It is hard to make time. My team would probably tell you that I give away a lot of time. They may think that sometimes it’s too much time. But I’m a big believer in the five-minute favor. I just read Adam Grant’s book on this and I’m so glad someone put a name to this. If I can help someone through a quick meeting or a favor, I’m always happy to do it.

But I did just get smarter on how I do it. I stole this tip from Shannon Anderson at Madrona Venture Group where she said she allocates one day per month and that’s her networking day. So now if it’s something like that, where it’s a little more of a favor or advice, that’s where I schedule those meetings. I just did that earlier this week for the first time. For me that feels like a really good balance – I want to be helpful but also have to remind myself that I have a day job to do as well.

That’s really great advice. I may have to steal Shannon’s tip as well. Thank you so much for your time again today, Mikaela. We look forward to hearing from you at tonight’s Diversity & Women in Tech event! (Galvanize Seattle, 111 S. Jackson St., Seattle, WA 98104)