The best place to build a tech company isn’t where you think
The best place to build a tech company isn’t where you think
When my co-founders and I started Phaidra at the end of 2019, we looked at a map and, like typical engineers, built a matrix to determine where to live. Our criteria included tax rates, talent availability, proximity to customers and venture capital, the strength of the startup ecosystem, and affordability.
We quickly narrowed our choices to the Bay Area, New York City, and Seattle. The Pacific Northwest, with its history of heavy industrial manufacturing and companies like Microsoft and Amazon, was the clear answer for a startup at the intersection of AI and industry.
After incorporating Phaidra and securing our pre-seed funding in Seattle, the onset of COVID shifted us to a remote-first organization. This dramatically altered our company operations and rendered many of our initial location criteria irrelevant. We realized we could hire globally and no longer needed to be based downtown.
While we loved Seattle, the high cost of living limited our quality of life. This led us to explore the west side of Puget Sound and specifically Kitsap, which offered a significant improvement in affordability while still providing access to venture capital and the startup ecosystem. We put down roots and quietly built our global company and life, right here.
Five years later, Phaidra is a venture-backed company that builds AI agents for AI factories—optimizing the infrastructure that underpins AI workloads and reducing the energy utilization of every token. Kitsap remains integral to our success.
Living here has fundamentally improved our quality of life, enabling us to purchase a home, grow our family, and afford childcare—all impossible in Seattle on startup salaries. We can pop out between meetings to walk in the forest or view the Olympic Mountains. It’s profoundly grounding to be in nature in between high-stakes discussions with our teams and customers.
Frankly, I feel like we found a cheat code for entrepreneurs by living here.
There are tradeoffs to be sure. Seattle offers an incredible founder community, not to mention the infrastructure to support diverse interests and needs. But it’s also prohibitively expensive. When you are growing a young company, every dollar counts.
I believe the next frontier for Seattle startup growth should be in Kitsap. It’s a short ferry ride away and offers the breathing room for founders to do their best work while staying tapped into Seattle. It’s far more affordable and has a massive amount of untapped space for companies to grow. The fact that Kitsap has its own burgeoning startup ecosystem—through Vibe Coworks and Matchstick Lab—makes it even more compelling.
This future requires investment: critical infrastructure development, startup-friendly policies, more restaurants, childcare options, and other quality-of-life amenities to attract and retain talent. It requires Seattle-based venture capitalists to encourage their early stage portfolio companies to build on this side of the Puget Sound. We must also grow our own Kitsap- based venture capital ecosystem.
Most importantly, we need to keep building a community that supports and retains talent. I’m grateful to be here building Phaidra, and am excited for the bright future so many are working to achieve hee in Kitsap.
New role? New Hire? Promotion? Leadership change? Certifications? Receive an Award? Let the community know! Submit your update to Changing Faces, Changing Places and be featured among the professionals driving Kitsap’s business growth.
