Glimpses of Seattle

Yes­ter­day was a grey Novem­ber day in Seat­tle. I spent a chunk of the day in the down­town finan­cial dis­trict, attend­ing an angel net­work meet­ing. Sev­eral com­pa­nies I’d coached last week were pitch­ing invest­ment oppor­tu­ni­ties to a group of women angel investors. I wanted to see how the founders had evolved their pre­sen­ta­tions in response to the coach­ing.

Foundations and Blue Sky Thinking

After the meet­ing I was reminded of some of the things I love about Seat­tle: its funky sky­line, the moun­tains, the har­bor views and reminders of the city’s mar­itime past. Here are two sim­ple exam­ples. The har­bor and ferry view was taken from the 17th floor of the Nor­ton Build­ing; the shot of the brick build­ing was taken moments later from the 6th floor of a nearby park­ing garage. (Although not cap­tured by the iPhone, yes­ter­day fea­tured sun breaks, a Seat­tle con­cept that implies glimpses of blue sky and hints of sun­shine on an oth­er­wise cloudy day.)

What charmed me about the brick build­ing, with its over­size pul­leys and block-and-tackle mech­a­nisms, is the visual metaphor about “heavy lift­ing.” This might serve as a cau­tion­ary tale about soci­ety’s assump­tions about per­ma­nence, and what works.

Even these seem­ingly sturdy brick build­ings are built on land­fill close to the water’s edge. Worse yet, this is a known earth­quake zone with sig­nif­i­cant seis­mic risk; the aged masonry would be highly vul­ner­a­ble to col­lapse in a bad quake.

As a soci­ety we invest in things we think will have endur­ing value, yet time passes, and tastes or require­ments change.  Or we find we have built on unsta­ble foun­da­tions, as the case here.

Glimps­ing these scenes just moments after leav­ing the starry-eyed pitches by three entre­pre­neurs, I was reminded about the fac­tors that go into a per­son or a soci­ety’s choices about where to invest and why. And the wis­dom that comes with 20/20 hind­sight.

If only fore­sight were that clear.