A Cloudy City, With Amazonian Growth

In the 1970s, amid Boeing layoffs, a famous billboard instructed the last person leaving Seattle to please turn out the lights. In the 1990s, the city was still attractively inexpensive, so Jeff Bezos put Amazon headquarters right downtown. Fast-forward 20 years and there’s a greater population influx than there was during the 1890s Yukon gold rush. According to the Census Bureau, the Seattle area has been gaining 1,100 new residents every week. Unemployment is at a historic low. Traffic, home prices, and homelessness are at all-time highs, with some locals now priced out and resentful of those they call Amholes. Seattle itself is being referred to by boosters as Cloud City, not because of the weather, but because of cloud computing firms Microsoft Azure and AWS and the growing Google footprint. There’s also a healthy VC presence, led by early-stage firm Madrona Venture Group, which has had a record four IPOs in the past two years—Apptio, Smartsheet, Redfin, and Impinj.