The Only Thing That Matters

The Seattle night is a mix of madness and money -- the stuff that start-ups are made of. At night in a Seattle bar everyone is a genius, every idea is brilliant, and even the most outrageous bullshit glistens like spun gold. At night in a Seattle bar everyone is a genius, every idea is brilliant, and even the most outrageous bullshit glistens like spun gold. At night in a Seattle bar, the world is alive with possibilities: dreamers and schemers fill the rain-stained air with hyper-talk of revolutionary business models, mind-bending techno-capabilities, and industry-reinventing breakthroughs.

Almost any night you can find them in the Six Arms Pub on the downtown slope of Seattle's Capital Hill. This Tuesday night, it's packed with artists, musicians, software engineers, and assorted other techno-preneurs whose array of body-piercings and asymmetrical do's identifies this nightspot as the place to be.

At a tiny table on the mezzanine overhanging the bar, slugging down pints of microbrews with names like Terminator and Hammerhead, sit Mike Almquist, Avi Bar-Zeev, and Sandra Smith, three 28-year-old prospectors from Seattle's current Gold Rush, the digital startup culture that has effectively taken over the city. The fourth person -- and the sole grownup -- at the table is Richard Novotny, a corporate vagabond-turned-venture capitalist whose investment helped launch Almquist's company, where Bar-Zeev now works.

"This guy really has things well thought-out," Novotny says, pointing at the kid across from him. Almquist, who's dressed in a tattered University of Delaware sweatshirt with a faded orange kerchief on his head, is typically oblivious to the compliment. He's too busy holding forth, gesticulating wildly as he tells war stories about how he launched F5 Labs. Novotny smiles indulgently when he hears Almquist blurt out his -- and every techno-preneur's -- dream request to every venture capitalist: "Give me $110 million and stay away from me for three years!"

Almquist's stories are met, outrage for outrage, by Sandra Smith, a producer at Zombie Virtual Reality Entertainment. Smith, like Almquist, graduated from the University of Delaware and gradually but inexorably gravitated toward Seattle. Like Almquist, her office is a mix of funky art and high-tech clutter, jammed into a former flophouse in the Pioneer Square District, a neighborhood chockablock with software shops, virtual-reality game companies, and Web-oriented hardware assemblers. "I don't know how many different budgets I've done for this project," Smith says between slugs of beer. "I'm up to $2.5 million now and it's still not enough."

Neither F5 nor Zombie is destined to be The Next Big Thing -- the kind of history-bending startup like Microsoft, Netscape, or the current favorite, Marimba. Neither F5 nor Zombie will change the game forever. Neither has the feel of a cultural icon -- the kind of startup that captures the popular imagination and propels its founder (the next Bill Gates! Marc Andreessen! Kim Polese!) into the realm of instant celebrity.

F5 and Zombie, and the people behind them, are simply not exceptional. Which is why they're exceptionally important. They are what's happening -- and it's happening everywhere. In just the last four years, Seattle has established itself as the ground-zero of startups: the number has jumped from 85 to more than 1,100 -- 200 of these launched by Microsoft alums. Job growth in the software startup sector in Washington is clipping along at 40%, compared with less than 6% in all industries statewide. Even mighty Microsoft, for many years the fastest growing enterprise in the Seattle area, has slipped to second on the growth charts behind the startup sector.

The people inside F5 and Zombie and the thousands of other startups aren't just building companies or executing business plans. They're creating their own reality. They're not in it for the money. They're in it for the freedom. They understand that they're taking a risk. And they know that it's absolutely risk-free. They're not doing it because they can. They're doing it because there's no way they can not. They -- and countless others like them -- simply cannot imagine doing anything else. They are doing The Only Thing That Matters. And so is everyone else.

Which doesn't mean it's always easy or fun. Startup life, Almquist says, alternates between moments of "bad, miserable depression" and "mere sloth and depression." According to Bar-Zeev, the tensions and pressures at work turn employees' lives into soap-operatic time-sinks. "Any little disagreement results in half a day of meetings," he moans.