[mechazoidal]

But do you invite other people, or have some way of introducing others to it? That's kind of what I'm getting at: regardless of the activity, there's a social disconnect for getting people involved if they're not already in a circle of friends--and the few circles I was in didn't intersect at all.

It's not necessarily an insurmountable gap but it's enough to intimidate most people who aren't already outgoing, or who are accustomed to a friendlier town.

I grew up in Redmond, went to college at WSU, and moved into Seattle in 2002. For the longest time after that, when walking into a bar or show, I had to keep persuading myself that people were not going to point and scream at me like Donald Sutherland in the 70's Body Snatchers movie.

[gills]

Indeed. Most of my friends I have met through work or church or other friends; some sort of pre-existing common cause. Cultivating friendships "from scratch", so to speak, is admittedly much more difficult.

On topic, that feature of Seattle may have some bearing on entrepreneurs in search of capital or employees or a support network. But it seems orthogonal to actually taking the plunge; you're either going to do it, or keep talking about it.

(Also, I think we may have been in some classes together at WSU! We must know some of the same people, you're 3 degrees away on LinkedIn.)

[mechazoidal]

I definitely agree that entrepreneurs are going to take the plunge or not. I'm focused on the support network / employee angle, and harkening back to daveschappell's point that the circles don't really connect. There are communities, yes, but no sense of overall community that you can get a starting point in. It seemed like tribes all the way down: ex-[Amazon | MS | Google], UW clubs, etc. And if you didn't know where to begin, there wasn't an easy way to find someone to ask.

Case in point: if I'd known there were more startups looking for talent, I probably wouldn't have moved out to the eastern part of the state in 2007. At the time, my options after burnout+dismissal seemed to be 'work for another large company'(which I'm still wary of), 'pursue your own idea on your lonesome'(which I didn't have any of at the time) or 'don't work at all'.

(My best classes at WSU were with Hagemeister, Wang(CS460 FTW), and Biker Bob. Contributing to my slight-insecurity as a dev, I was also part of the Benson class that petitioned to have him removed: for tossing us a description of car/cdr and expecting us to build a complete Lisp in SML)