Why these startup founders are leaving Seattle for San Francisco

Seattle’s startup ecosystem has its strengths. But for some tech entrepreneurs, the gravity of San Francisco is hard to resist — especially in the middle of an AI boom.

We caught up with early stage startup founders who recently relocated from Seattle to San Francisco — a move that echoes earlier eras when entrepreneurs with local roots ultimately built valuable companies elsewhere.

This time, founders say the pull is about being inside the “world’s AI capital” as a way to supercharge their startups.

“I knew that moving to SF — where the largest concentration of startups are — would be the best move for maximizing our success,” said Avi Agola, co-founder of recruiting platform Talunt.

Before he arrived at the University of Washington this past fall, Agola immersed himself in Seattle’s startup scene as a teenager. He worked out of Seattle founder hub Foundations, launched his own company, and sold it last year to a fellow Seattle startup.

Agola credits Seattle’s startup community with helping him develop credibility and understand what it takes to run a company.

But as he got Talunt off the ground, Agola packed his bags for San Francisco. Part of the decision was practical: Investors encouraged the move, and many of Talunt’s early customers are in the Bay Area.

Aviel Ginzburg, a Seattle venture capitalist who runs Foundations, said he understands the strategy.

“I think that anyone in their 20s who wants to build in startups should be living down there right now, simply for building a network to get lucky,” he said.

That was part of the reason Nour Gajial, CEO of MathGPT, also moved from Seattle to San Francisco.

After dropping out of Cornell to pursue her AI education startup full time, Gajial returned home to the Seattle area. She found a supportive, tight-knit tech community and a comfortable place to build.

But as MathGPT gained traction, Gajial and her co-founder started making trips to San Francisco. They noticed more startup events, younger founders, and more frequent in-person interactions with people building and funding AI companies.

“There’s always some new AI research that’s going on, or some event that will open your eyes about something,” Gajial said. “I don’t see that energy as much in Seattle.”

Gajial said she’s grateful to have met “some really cool founders” in Seattle. MathGPT co-founder Yanni Kouloumbis lauded the region’s talent pool. But they felt that being in Silicon Valley gives them better odds at making it big.

“We just want to put ourselves in the best possible situation for these spontaneously good things to happen to us,” Kouloumbis said.

Nistha Mitra spent three years in Seattle, where she worked at Oracle. She later launched Neuramill, an early stage company developing software for manufacturing, and noticed a clear divide between Seattle’s corporate tech culture and startup life.

“I don’t think my community in the Big Tech world had any awareness of startups and how startups work,” Mitra said.

Mitra moved to San Francisco six months ago. “In SF, everyone knows what’s going on, no matter who they are,” she said.

She described a hard-charging atmosphere where it’s normal behavior to work 15-hour days on your startup. Being in that environment “really changes how you perform,” Mitra said.

When she worked long days in Seattle, friends worried about her. “I feel like in SF, it’s kind of normalized, that kind of lifestyle,” she said.

The same calculus is playing out for more experienced techies.

Vik Korrapati, a Seattle-based founder who spent nearly a decade at AWS, recently announced that his AI startup Moondream is moving from Seattle to San Francisco. He framed the decision around the scale and urgency of the current AI moment.

Artificial intelligence, Korrapati wrote in an online post, is “the biggest platform shift we’re going to see in our working lives,” and relocating was about being “in the right place, with the right people” as his company builds high-performance vision models.

Korrapati said the move wasn’t driven by a lack of talent in Seattle, but by differences in risk tolerance and default behavior. “The issue isn’t ability. It’s default settings,” he wrote, describing a culture where many engineers optimize for stability and incremental progress rather than the uncertainty of early-stage startup work.

In San Francisco, he said, he found more people who had already left Big Tech roles and were willing to make the startup leap. “Seattle has been good to me,” Korrapati said. “I learned how large systems work here. I got the space to spin up Moondream here. I’m not leaving angry.”

Ethan Byrd, a former engineer at AWS, Google, Meta, and Microsoft, helped launch Seattle software startup Actual AI in 2024. Now he’s working on a new startup called MyMX — and is strongly considering a move.

Seattle isn’t a bad place to build a startup, Byrd said, and he loves the city. But San Francisco is just on a different level when it comes to entrepreneurship.

“Everything is easier: hiring, talking to customers, raising money, hosting events,” he said. At the end of the day, as he tries to grow his new startup, Byrd said moving to Silicon Valley “just seems unavoidable.”

But not all Seattle founders are headed south.

“There’s a really good pool of talent right now, especially with the layoffs unfortunately happening,” said Ankit Dhawan, CEO of Seattle-based marketing startup BluePill. “We don’t feel any need to move out of here.”

Silicon Valley is great for fundraising and making connections. “But there comes a moment when it’s too much noise,” said Alejandro Castellano, CEO of Seattle AI startup Caddi. “You just need a place to actually focus on work.”

And when a trip to the Bay Area is needed — some of Caddi’s investors are based there — it’s a short flight away. “You can come back the same day,” Castellano said.

Many Silicon Valley investors also make trips up to Seattle. Earlier this week, Sunil Nagaraj, managing partner of Palo Alto-based Ubiquity Ventures, hosted a startup event at Seattle’s AI House. During his fireside chat with Auth0 co-founder Eugenio Pace, he called out the various Seattle-based founders in the crowd that he’s backed. “Ubiquity Ventures ❤️ Seattle!!” Nagaraj wrote on LinkedIn.

Yifan Zhang, founder of AI House and managing director at the AI2 Incubator, said she wants to get more out-of-town investors connected to the Seattle region.

Zhang built her first startup in San Francisco. For certain types of founders, she said, Silicon Valley is a better place to create serendipitous relationships that can lead to a funding round or a large customer.

“But it’s also easy to get lost in the mix, or get distracted by the hype,” Zhang noted. “It really depends on who you are, but no matter where you’re based, founders still need to do the hard work of selling and building an incredible product and scaling it.”

Seattle is still attracting many founders from out of town. Real estate startup RentSpree moved here from Los Angeles last year, attracted to the tech talent base and concentration of other real estate and proptech companies.

“Seattle is really great for talent that balances both an aggressive growth perspective, but also building sustainable companies over time,” RentSpree CEO and co-founder Michael Lucarelli told GeekWire in December.

Drone startup Brinc is another transplant that landed from Las Vegas. The company, now ranked No. 7 on the GeekWire 200, raised $75 million last year and employs more than 100 people. CEO Blake Resnick has cited the engineering and tech talent pool in Seattle for his decision to relocate.

Ginzburg said even as some founders move to San Francisco, it’s important to keep building community in Seattle. He noted that Agola, for example, still remains tethered to Seattle through the Foundations network.

Agola said he’d consider returning to Seattle at some point as his new startup grows.

“I don’t think the Bay is the best for long-term startup growth when it comes to post-series B,” he said. “Moving to Seattle would be the best play to keep the best talent flow while minimizing overhead costs.”

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