Can Singapore be a Seattle?

Around the time of Singapore’s independence, Seattle was viewed more as a backwater than a leading city in the United States. The two biggest corporate titans were perhaps Weyerhaeuser, in the very low-tech lumber industry, and Boeing, which had highly-skilled engineers yet was hardly considered high-tech, except in areas like airplane wings.

Today, Seattle is a high-tech hub that is home to companies and global brands ranging from Microsoft and Amazon to Starbucks, as well as more than 700 technology spin-offs. And in the latest Technology Index from renowned University of Toronto’s Professor Richard Florida, Seattle surged into first place in the US, ahead of previously top-ranked Silicon Valley.

Looking at what powered that surge could provide useful insights as Singapore tries to move up to the next level as a technology leader and strives to develop a creative workforce.

ATTRACTIVE AMBIENCE

Looking back, according to research by Virginia Tech University’s Prof Heike Mayer, just five firms were central to the growth of Seattle’s technology cluster over the past three decades: Microsoft, Amazon.com, McCaw Cellular Communications, Aldus (now part of Adobe) and — as it became more tech-savvy — Boeing.

Fundamental to that shift was also an improvement in education, said Prof Mayer, underpinned by the transition of the University of Washington from an average school into a top-level institution with a leading computer science department.

While much research is underway about how Seattle emerged as a technology centre, and the reasons are understandably complex, three factors stand out.

One is that the environment and ambience in Seattle kept, or drew back, the entrepreneurs who started the companies as well as a vast number of other high-tech workers.

University of Washington’s Prof Richard Morrill found that “Seattle’s attractiveness to the young and to the educated — built on a reputation of tolerance of alternate lifestyles, excellent educational opportunities, superb environmental attractions, and a high level of confidence and innovativeness — contributed to the creation, survival and growth of high-tech and related sectors.”

Even though entrepreneurs like Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and McCaw Communications founder Craig McCaw were educated elsewhere, they chose to live in Seattle because they liked the location.

LOOK MA, NO GRANTS

Second, those innovators had to make it on their own, and their passion to succeed powered growth.

When Mr Gates was starting up Microsoft and Mr Bezos set up Amazon, for example, they had to use their own money or go out and raise funds from family or friends. They did not have government grants going their way, and if they ran into financial difficulties, government funding was not there to bail them out.

Local government did not target them as strategic sectors to support with start-up capital or other services. If anything, these innovators faced a public as well as government organisations sceptical that small companies building software in the shadow of behemoths like IBM or selling anything without an actual storefront could actually succeed.

And third, people who failed knew they could start over. Seattle-based Mr Andy Sack, the founder of failed start-up Judy’s Book, told Xconomy: “I failed and went out and started my own thing. Because we didn’t know any better. The entrepreneurs that don’t know any better, they just go do it again.”

Similarly, Seattle-based Cheezburger founder Ben Huh, who failed in his first start-up and succeeded in his second one, told Entrepreneur magazine that he looks at his first failure as “the best education money can’t buy”.

Even though some observers say Seattle may not be as accepting of failure as places like Silicon Valley, people do fail and start over.

As venture capital firm Madrona Venture Group’s Greg Gottesman told Xconomy: “Failure of a startup, that’s not a negative. We talk about that as a learning experience.”

All this is not to say that everything about Seattle is positive. Indeed, Silicon Valley has a larger high-tech sector. Business processes in Seattle can be slow and taxes high. Some observers say the culture has long been slower-moving compared to Silicon Valley.

And while the ambience and mountains and ocean may be attractive, Seattle has a reputation for cloudy, rainy weather that drives some people away. Despite hurdles like these, however, Seattle thrived.

KEY ISSUES HERE TOO

Some of the key attributes that Prof Florida more recently describes as behind Seattle’s rise in the Technology Index have commonalities with Singapore.

He said the reasons Seattle surged and displaced Silicon Valley at the top include investments in the university sector, housing affordability, continuing development of downtown and quality density, and light rail and public transit that enables low-income workers to reach employment centres.

Yet, these are developments that came about over the past decade or so, rather than in the first decade or two of the technology boom.

The original drivers of tech growth in Seattle, on the other hand, have much in common with some of the key issues under discussion in Singapore today. The quality of the environment is a core part of the population discussion, for example, and there are varying views on whether certain sectors here like technology should continue to be coddled.

And in an environment where failure may be viewed as a negative rather than a valuable lesson, perhaps resulting in some parents piling on pressure for their children to succeed, there is much discussion about the need to review education and long working hours.

Amid the complexities that drive economic growth, it may be too simple to say that it was only tolerance, an attractive environment, entrepreneurship without government support, and freedom to fail that were the keys to success for Seattle or other high-tech locations. Yet, they were clearly an important part of Seattle’s shift to technology leadership and could well be worth a deeper look.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Richard Hartung is a consultant who has lived in Singapore since 1992.