Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce CEO Joe Nguyen delivered a direct message to regional leaders at the organization’s 144th annual meeting on Thursday: Seattle’s progressive social goals cannot exist without a thriving employer base.

Nguyen, a former Washington State Senator and Microsoft manager who served as Director of the Washington State Department of Commerce before taking over the Chamber, used his inaugural annual meeting address to bridge the gap between regional business priorities and broad civic goals.

While political and business leaders often appear at odds in Seattle, Nguyen argued that the two are deeply intertwined and fundamentally interdependent. Having a healthy business community is “not up for debate; it is a requirement,” Nguyen told the audience of more than 800 civic and business leaders.

He continued:

“So I want to be very clear: the progressive values in this region depends on the economic activities and jobs created by strong employers. Housing doesn’t fund itself. Human services do not fund themselves. Public safety and parks do not fund themselves. They are made possible by people creating companies, making payroll, and hiring workers, when businesses succeed, our values get funded. Economic growth is not separate from social progress.  In fact, economic growth makes social progress possible. You cannot fund compassion from an empty treasury.” 

Nguyen framed his vision for Seattle through a personal lens, detailing his family’s journey arriving in Seattle as refugees from Vietnam with little more than “hope.” A powerful image of his family departing Vietnam on a rickety boat accompanied his remarks.

He recalled his family taking footholds in local business, operating a billiards hall in White Center, working at the Port of Seattle and his mother sewing for JanSport. Nguyen later attended Seattle University on Capitol Hill while washing dishes, went on to work at Microsoft, entered the Washington State Senate representing the 34th District, and eventually joined Governor Bob Ferguson’s administration as Commerce Director.

“The larger lesson from my family story is not about any one company or career,” Nguyen said. “It is about what’s possible when a region creates opportunity. Microsoft opened doors for me that I never knew were even possible as a kid growing up in White Center. The employer community did more than employ my family; it changed the trajectory of our lives.”

Pointing to macro-level data, Nguyen highlighted that the tri-county regional economy (King, Pierce, and Snohomish counties) generates $600 billion in annual economic activity, representing 71% of Washington State’s total economic output and ranking as the 10th largest metro economy in the United States.

Additionally, local business activity funds roughly 70% of the City of Seattle’s budget revenue.

However, Nguyen cautioned against taking the regional economy for granted amid rising operational costs, public safety challenges, and regulatory friction.

“Prosperity is not permanent. It is not part of the scenery like Mount Rainier,” Nguyen said. “It is something a region must earn, protect, and renew… When an employer leaves, we lose jobs, we lose customers for nearby small businesses, we lose charitable giving, we lose future investments, and we lose the public revenue that sustains our shared priorities.”

Nguyen pointed to recent momentum in aligning state and local government with economic development priorities.

Over the past year, state lawmakers introduced a dedicated economic development committee in the legislature, the governor formed a state business council, and the Mayor of Seattle signed an executive order establishing a local Economic Development Council.

The Chamber’s core advocacy pushes remain centered on faster permitting, housing expansion, and addressing public safety as both a quality-of-life and economic imperative.

On the latter issue, Nguyen joined other business leaders earlier Thursday in signing an open letter with executives from Microsoft, Starbucks, and dozens of regional employers demanding a 100-day public safety action plan from City Hall.

The letter, spearheaded by the Chamber, Challenge Seattle and the Washington Roundtable, urged the city to accelerate 911 response times, activate surveillance cameras, and step up foot patrols to protect workers, visitors, and foot traffic across downtown.

“We will partner when partnership produces results. We will push when pushing is necessary,” Nguyen said in his remarks at the annual meeting. “We will be constructive, but we will not be passive. And we will never apologize for standing up for the employers and workers who make this region possible.”

Looking forward, Nguyen urged the region’s tech sector, innovators and policymakers to resist complacency and bet on the future of Seattle. Nguyen concluded his remarks by asking the audience to embrace the future, and he said he’s optimistic about what’s ahead because he sees “people betting on Seattle every single day.”

“I believe that Seattle is at an inflection point. We can give in to complacency… or we can decide that our next chapter will be even more ambitious than the last… Somewhere in this region, an entrepreneur is building our next great company, a scientist is making a discovery that will save lives, and a young person in White Center is imagining a future none of us can see yet. And it is our responsibility to give them that chance.”

We’ll be breaking down Nguyen’s address, the Chamber’s 100-day public safety push and the broader debate over Seattle’s economic future on this weekend’s episode of the GeekWire Podcast. Be sure to tune in here, or wherever you get your podcasts.

A roster of top Seattle business leaders and regional CEOs is demanding urgent action from City Hall on public safety, calling on Mayor Katie Wilson and the City Council to roll out a concrete 100-day action plan backed by measurable goals and transparent progress tracking.

In a letter sent Thursday, executives from major area employers — including Microsoft, Starbucks, Costco, F5, Alaska Airlines, Zillow, and others — urged city leaders to protect and expand public safety funding amid growing skepticism that the city currently has an effective strategy to address crime and homelessness.

The push centers on findings from an August joint public-opinion poll of registered Seattle voters, which revealed that while every proposed safety measure drew at least 75% support across all demographics, only 34% of respondents expressed confidence in the city’s current strategy.

Pointing to severe staffing shortages — noting Seattle has just 1.31 sworn officers per 1,000 residents, far below peer cities like Denver, San Francisco, and Boston — the signatories argued that budget decisions must directly align with measurable safety outcomes.

The effort was spearheaded by major regional business leadership organizations, including the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, Challenge Seattle, and the Washington Roundtable. Their leaders — Joe Nguyễn, former Gov. Chris Gregoire, and Rachel Smith — jointly signed the appeal alongside dozens of local chief executives spanning technology, retail, healthcare, and sports franchises.

“Voters are asking for action, on a timeline, with results they can measure,” the coalition wrote in the letter, emphasizing that their recommendations reflect a broad consensus across the city. “This is not a narrow or partisan agenda, it is a shared baseline that Seattle residents and the business community are asking their elected leaders to deliver both now and as a sustained priority.”

The letter outlines a series of immediate and short-term actions the group is asking City Hall to enact, backed by overwhelming support in their poll:

CCTV surveillance: Activate CCTV cameras in Pioneer Square, the Stadium District, and other high-event areas to deter crime and assist law enforcement.

Foot and bike patrols: Establish regular police patrols on foot and bicycle in areas facing persistent public safety problems, specifically citing Little Saigon (90% poll support).

911 response accountability: Recommit to a standard 7-minute priority 911 response time, backed by transparent reporting when targets are missed (90% support). The letter noted data from Nordstrom showing only 29% of 911 calls from its flagship downtown store yielded a police response, compared to 100% at its Bellevue and Southcenter locations.

Drug treatment and diversion: Direct CARE Department specialists to offer treatment and shelter first, but require law enforcement to arrest and prosecute repeat offenders who repeatedly refuse help (82% support).

Open-air drug markets: Require SPD and the City Attorney to establish a clear, prioritized pathway for shutting down open-air drug markets (81% support).

Encampment bans and timelines: Institute a policy banning encampments within 250 feet of parks, playgrounds, or schools, and mandate that the city clear encampments in those zones within 72 hours (79% support).

Among those who signed the letter: Brad Smith, Vice Chair & President of Microsoft; Jeremy Wacksman, CEO of Zillow; François Locoh-Donou, CEO of F5; Matt McIlwain, Managing Director at Madrona Venture Group; Julie Sandler, Co-founder & Venture Partner at PSL Ventures; Matt Oppenheimer, Chairman of Remitly; Erik Nordstrom, CEO & Co-President of Nordstrom; Brian Niccol, Chairman & CEO of Starbucks; Ron Vachris, CEO & President of Costco; Ben Minicucci, CEO & President of Alaska Air Group; Mike Sievert, Vice Chairman of T-Mobile; and Ada Healey, Chief Real Estate Officer at Vulcan Real Estate.

The business community’s coordinated push arrives during a pivotal moment for public safety policy in City Hall, where political tensions over policing and crime response have flared in recent weeks.

While overall violent crime and homicides in Seattle dropped during the first half of 2026 compared to last year, high-profile violent incidents continue to fuel public and commercial anxiety. Downtown, Belltown, and high-foot-traffic corridors have experienced recent spikes in gun violence and fatal altercations — including multiple homicides in Belltown and Westlake Park in early September alone.

At the same time, the Seattle Police Department continues to grapple with acute staffing shortages following years of officer departures exceeding hiring goals. The persistent deficit has left response times stretched thin, prompting deep frustration from major employers and pushing retail hubs to demand a more visible police presence.

Policy friction between the Council and Wilson’s administration has also intensified. Debate has centered on the rollout of public surveillance technologies — where the mayor’s office recently paused CCTV camera expansions pending a data privacy audit — as well as ongoing friction surrounding the leadership of the police department.

Responding to the letter, Wilson told GeekWire that her administration shares the business community’s commitment to public safety, noting that “many of the specific requests they made are well underway.”

Wilson highlighted expanded foot and bicycle patrols in neighborhoods like Little Saigon and Belltown, 3,500 police officer applications currently in the queue, and an upcoming gun violence reduction strategy set to roll out next week. While noting that SPD data shows homicides and shootings at 10-year lows, Wilson acknowledged public impatience.

“We have far too much crime and public disorder and people have a right to be frustrated,” she said. “I, like everyone in Seattle, want to see that progress happen faster and steadier.”

The safety campaign comes on the heels of a 127-page independent economic study commissioned by the city, which warned that while Seattle boasts an “almost peerless” tech workforce and key AI assets, its economy is in a fragile position due to heavy corporate concentration and tax policies that penalize senior hiring.

The study noted that Seattle’s tax base remains vulnerable if major employers opt to relocate or grow outside the city limits, reinforcing the business coalition’s argument that public safety is closely tied to the city’s long-term economic stability.

If you attended the Sunset Market in Seattle’s Pioneer Square on Thursday night, you might’ve noticed that one of the local galleries had been transformed into a shrine to, of all things, Sonic the Hedgehog.

That’s because on Labor Day weekend, Seattle is hosting 35 Years of Speed: The Sonic Art Exhibit. This touring art collection is part of the celebration of the anniversary of the Sonic franchise, which began in 1991 with the original Sonic the Hedgehog for the Sega Genesis.

The Sonic Art Exhibit features framed concept and box art from the Sonic archives, several pieces by official Sonic artists, and a curated selection of pieces created and submitted by the Sonic fan community, which includes paintings, sketches, and even statuary.

“It’s Sonic’s 35th anniversary, so we’ve been looking at ways to celebrate his legacy,” said Jessica Perri, Sega brand director. “We commissioned 50-plus artists across styles and different mediums, and we also worked with fans who bring their own inspirations to the table. We’re displaying it all here in Seattle over the course of the weekend.”

Perri continued, “We’re really just excited to celebrate Sonic through the lens of art.”

The game was Sega’s first-party “killer app,” intended to compete directly with the Super Nintendo and its Super Mario franchise. The title character is a blue hedgehog with the power of super-speed, who fights alongside his friends against his nemesis, Dr. Ivo Robotnik.

In the last 35 years, Sonic has appeared in more than 100 video games, which range from some absolute classics to one of the most infamous misfires in the history of the medium.

There have also been multiple lines of merchandise; several animated shows; a successful live-action film series with a fourth entry coming in early 2027; a popular comic book, which is currently published by San Diego-based IDW; and a recent comic crossover with the DC Universe that did well enough to get a sequel. (Trivia: Sonic the Hedgehog is now technically a member of the Justice League.)

35 Years of Speed: The Sonic Art Exhibit is running at Seattle’s 210 Gallery at 301 Occidental Ave. S. from Sept. 4 through Sept. 6 from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Admission is free. After its Seattle run, the exhibition will have its final show in Los Angeles later this month.

Starbucks is laying off 224 more workers tied to its Seattle headquarters, according to a new state filing. The coffee giant says the layoffs don’t represent a new round of cutbacks, but rather the lingering effect of restructuring work announced earlier this year.

About 120 of the 224 are employees who were offered roles in Starbucks’ new Nashville office and declined to relocate, according to the filing. Those roles are expected to be filled in Tennessee.

The remaining 104 in the notice filed Thursday stem from the restructuring that Starbucks announced in May, and fall largely within the group that designs, sites and builds its coffeehouses.

Not all 224 are based in Seattle. The filing covers employees who work at or report to Starbucks’ headquarters at 2401 Utah Ave. S., so some are located elsewhere in the country while reporting to managers at the Seattle campus. Starbucks did not say how many are based in Washington state.

The reductions are part of the “Back to Starbucks” turnaround CEO Brian Niccol launched after taking over in September 2024 — an effort that has paired store-level technology upgrades and a simplified menu with a restructuring of the company’s corporate ranks.

Starbucks has now laid off 537 corporate workers tied to its Seattle headquarters this year, across three state filings: 61 in a tech reorganization in May, 252 at the support center later that month, and the 224 disclosed this week.

Starbucks is targeting $2 billion in cost reductions over two years under Niccol, and has shed more than 2,300 corporate jobs companywide since last year, according to Bloomberg.

At the same time, Starbucks is building out its Nashville office, a $100 million investment expected to house 2,000 support jobs within five years. The company has said the majority of its corporate teams will remain in Seattle.

The design and development cuts come later than the rest of the May restructuring because the executive who leads the group, Stephen Piacentini, joined Starbucks from Chipotle in April, and the organizational changes in his group weren’t finalized when the May restructuring was announced.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to clarify that the 224 workers covered by the filing report to Starbucks’ Seattle headquarters but not all are based in Seattle.

BELLEVUE, Wash. — There is no prominent signage outside Anduril’s downtown Bellevue office. The name isn’t listed in the building directory, on the suite door, or in the lobby. That may be by design: Inside, Anduril engineers are quietly building AI-driven, autonomous technologies intended to keep the U.S. and its allies ahead in a rapidly changing military landscape.

Step through the front doors and it becomes clear that this is no ordinary tech company. 

Scattered across desks, production tables, conference rooms and showroom labs are autonomous drones ranging in size from a microwave to a ping-pong table, alongside next-generation digital night-vision goggles and military-grade edge computers designed to keep soldiers connected in an increasingly data-rich battlefield. 

The Costa Mesa, Calif.-based defense giant — which closed a $5 billion funding round at a $61 billion valuation earlier this year and is reportedly targeting a $100 billion valuation — is rapidly building a massive engineering footprint in the greater Seattle region. It includes modern offices in downtown Bellevue and Seattle, and a multi-acre military testing facility near Carnation, Wash.

GeekWire got a peek inside the iconoclastic company’s Seattle-area operations this week. We toured the Bellevue offices, demoed products, and sat down with senior vice president Tom Keane. The former Microsoft cloud executive leads Anduril’s local presence and oversees its connected warfare division, including mixed reality, AI and edge computing technologies.

Keane was clear about the company’s growth ambitions in the Seattle region: “I could absolutely see a world where we get to 1,000 people here in terms of engineers,” he said.

Asked when that milestone could be reached, Keane said, “It’s sort of almost as fast as you can hire people.” Realistically, that will likely occur over the next two years.

Anduril currently employs 560 people in its Bellevue and downtown Seattle offices, up from about 30 four years ago. That’s when Keane, who had interviewed with 62 companies looking for a new challenge in edge computing, joined Anduril because of what he called “world-class teams in every discipline.” 

With more than 110 open positions in Washington state and a newly leased third floor in downtown Seattle coming online, Keane said the regional expansion is only accelerating.

The regional workforce was until recently slated to include a maritime manufacturing hub along the Lake Washington Ship Canal in Seattle. However, as GeekWire reported this morning, Anduril has since vacated the former Foss Maritime shipyard space after the U.S. Navy canceled the autonomous warship program the company was pursuing.

But Anduril’s maritime ambitions haven’t gone away. Alongside its autonomous aircraft, low-cost cruise missiles and counter-drone interceptors, the company continues to develop a large subsea fleet, from modular survey vehicles to the extra-large, school-bus-sized Dive-XL.

The Big Tech pipeline meets ‘grit’

The company’s Seattle-area ramp-up is a play for the region’s engineering talent — a mix of disciplines well-suited to a next-generation defense hardware company, and one Keane says is hard to find in one place. That includes distributed systems engineers, AI and machine learning specialists, and advanced optics experts.

Another advantage: proximity to major military installations including Joint Base Lewis-McChord and Naval Base Kitsap.

Tech giants such as Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Meta have long dominated local engineering hiring. But Anduril is recruiting aggressively from those companies, pitching engineers who want to move fast and see their work in the field.

Deep pockets and close ties to the U.S. defense establishment don’t hurt, either.

Anduril got a large infusion of that talent 18 months ago, when it took over Microsoft’s IVAS (Integrated Visual Augmentation System) program along with about 100 local engineers who had spent years developing augmented reality hardware for the U.S. Army.

“If you take machine learning and AI… you can look out any of these windows and see places that we can recruit from,” Keane said from a conference room overlooking downtown Bellevue. “For a lot of software engineers, this is incredibly applied.”

Keane acknowledges the company’s culture isn’t for everyone. In fact, Anduril got plenty of buzz last year with its edgy recruiting campaign, “Don’t Work at Anduril.“

Rather than plush tech perks and work-from-home flexibility, Anduril pitches what Keane calls “grit” — a willingness to take ownership of hard engineering problems and test them in the field. It’s very much an in-office culture, in part because the company builds hardware.

Anduril also moves fast, an approach Hawaiian-shirt-wearing founder Palmer Luckey wields against slower traditional military contractors.

The company’s “grit” translates directly into how Anduril tests its gear.

In rural Carnation, Wash., about 20 miles east of Bellevue, Anduril operates a testing range with a built-out “shoot house” for low-light tactical work. It gives engineers a place to iterate on code and hardware in the mud and rain alongside active-duty warfighters.

Among them: members of the Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment from nearby Joint Base Lewis-McChord, who recently put Anduril’s EagleEye mixed-reality system through its paces on the firing range and obstacle course.

Hands-On with ‘EagleEye’ and Lattice

During a walkthrough of the Bellevue facility, Anduril’s team showed us a wide range of hardware being designed, tested, and calibrated on site.

The centerpiece was EagleEye, the company’s heads-up hardware and software suite built for warfighters. Historically, soldiers have had to lug 3 to 5 pounds of glass and electronics on their helmets, paired with fragmented radios, specialized batteries and thick cables.

Anduril’s system strips that down to a 115-gram pair of augmented reality glasses — about four ounces — built in collaboration with Meta (for waveguides), Canon (for sensors), Qualcomm (for custom silicon) and Oakley (for ballistic protection).

I tried on the lightweight camouflage backpack and glasses — no helmet in this case — in a demo in the Bellevue testing lab. It ran through three operational “vignettes” driven by Anduril’s core Lattice software:

• Tactical HUD: A heads-up display projecting friendly force markers, compass headings, and mini-maps into the user’s field of view so troops don’t have to look down at a handheld screen while moving.
• Threat Detection: Real-time alerts from external AI sensors — such as a tower camera or an overhead drone — highlighting incoming aerial threats directly in the display.
• Command & Control (C2): The ability to assign tasks to autonomous technology. Using a small handheld controller, an operator can send a virtual Ghost drone to a location, pull up a live video feed and execute a simulated strike.

In each case, the user controls the system — navigating between maps and text — with a click of a button on a small device connected to the front of the backpack.

The team also previewed its upcoming digital night vision system. Instead of the narrow “toilet paper roll” view of traditional analog goggles, Anduril’s VR-style digital displays offer an 84-degree field of view. That’s more than double the 40 degrees warfighters get in devices today.

Using machine learning models, the system fuses thermal imagery and low-light camera feeds in real time, making heat signatures leap out in pitch-black environments.

To ensure every pixel lands accurately without causing motion sickness, Anduril’s engineers use custom robotic arms to run geometric calibration on each lens distortion map before it leaves the facility. An engineer running the testing equipment politely asked GeekWire not to photograph the system.

The night vision system has not yet been deployed but will be part of the Soldier Borne Mission Command prototype delivery to the U.S. Army next year, said Stephanie Davis, communications manager for Anduril’s connected warfare group.

Protests, hiring and hardware

Operating a high-profile defense company in the Seattle area doesn’t come without friction. Activist groups recently staged protests outside Anduril’s downtown Seattle offices, targeting the company’s autonomous weapons development and military contracts.

At the time, Anduril issued a statement to GeekWire saying that it respects the right to free speech.  “That said, it is perplexing when people choose to protest a company dedicated to supporting the very military that safeguards those rights,” the company added.

When asked about the pushback, Keane said critics don’t affect Anduril’s hiring. “There’s protests at every company, frankly.”

Anduril’s hiring reaches well beyond Big Tech. Drew Swanson, a lead architect, spent 13 years in the military working in communications supporting special operations units in the field. He described an Anduril technology called Squad-A, which helps squad leaders pick the best network connections to stitch together incoming intelligence feeds.

Swanson said the draw of Anduril is the chance to escape corporate bureaucracy and tackle high-stakes physical problems, reflected in comments he gets from others in Seattle tech.

“One of the biggest things that I always hear is: ‘I want to come over there because you guys are going after really hard problems,'” Swanson said of conversations with tech colleagues around Seattle.

Solving those problems often comes down to fundamental hardware redesigns, like combining a soldier’s ballistic vest, battery and edge computing device into a single body plate. Keane showed off a prototype as the tour wrapped up — an example of Anduril’s broader approach.

“Batteries are such a huge thing,” he said, pointing to the body armor. “If you put the three of them together… you can start to get rid of stuff. You take what was historically three separate heavy things and turn it into one software-enabled platform.”

— Teri Hatfield was named chief revenue officer for Iterable, a customer engagement platform. The Seattle-area tech executive most recently served as executive vice president of sales and solutions at Salesforce and CRO of Tableau, which Salesforce acquired in 2019. She joined Tableau in 2012 and spent more than a decade in sales leadership roles at Verizon earlier in her career.

“I’ve come to believe that great customer relationships don’t start with technology. They start with understanding your customers,” Hatfield said on LinkedIn. “Iterable stood out because it’s built around that belief.”

Hatfield will work remotely for Iterable, which is based in San Francisco.

— Seattle-area attorney Ken Miller has joined Arnold & Porter as a partner in the life sciences and technology transactions teams within the law firm’s corporate and finance group.

Miller began his legal career at Perkins Coie, where he spent 16 years focused on tech companies and nonprofit organizations.

In 2015, he moved to the Gates Foundation as associate general counsel, briefly serving as lead counsel for the Gates Medical Research Institute before returning to the foundation as director of legal. In that role, he led work tied to the Global Health Division, the research institute, and business development and licensing, privacy and AI.

— Ben Reed is now chief marketing officer for AIM Intelligent Machines (AIM), a Seattle-area startup developing software that lets bulldozers and excavators operate on their own.

Reed previously ran a firm offering AI marketing and go-to-market advisory services. Other past roles include CMO for Sanctuary AI and a decade at Microsoft, where he departed as head of strategic storytelling for the company’s digital transformation platform.

“I’ve spent much of my career helping frontier technologies become understandable, credible, and consequential, from Microsoft Surface and HoloLens to physical AI, humanoids, and robotics. At AIM, the unusual opportunity is that the technology, customers, deployments, and proof already exist,” Reed said on LinkedIn.

— Aerospace startup Gravitics named Philip Wong chief financial officer. The Marysville, Wash.-based company designs and manufactures modular space infrastructure such as commercial space station modules, cargo-carrying spacecraft and orbital carriers. Its customers include U.S. Space Force and Axiom Space. On Tuesday, Gravitics announced a partnership with Lockheed Martin on a Department of War contract.

Wong joins Gravitics from Viasat, a communications company providing satellite internet services, where he led financial strategy and investment planning. He previously held leadership roles at Pure Storage and Seagate Technology and is based in California.

“Philip has spent 30 years deploying capital across satellite, network, and space infrastructure … He knows how to translate real engineering programs into the financial strategy that supports them,” said Colin Doughan, co-founder and CEO of Gravitics, in a statement.

— Ian Fliflet, former chief growth officer at Seattle online sales platform OfferUp, is sharing his insights on Intro, a service that provides video chats with experts from wide-ranging backgrounds.

— Katy Brown, president of Microsoft’s Americas Markets & Industries organization, was named to Avanade’s board of directors. Brown has been with the tech giant for nearly 30 years and is past president and board chair of the Professional Businesswomen of California. She also serves as executive sponsor of the Bay Area Women at Microsoft group.

— Ben Minicucci, CEO and president of Alaska Air Group, has joined Lyft’s board of directors. Minicucci has spent more than two decades with the airline, which is the parent company of Alaska Airlines, Hawaiian Airlines and Horizon Air.

— Seattle tech leader Ash Wahi was appointed to MoPOP’s board of directors. Wahi is the founder and CEO of Revenaut, a startup building an AI marketing tool. His career includes leadership roles in product and advertising at Microsoft, Snap and Meta.

— TiE Seattle, a nonprofit supporting entrepreneurship, named five new members to its board of directors:

• Joseph Sirosh, CEO of CreatorsAG and former executive at Amazon and Microsoft. He also serves on the board for the biotech company AbSci.
• Monika Panpaliya, partner director of product management at Microsoft and former leader at JPMorgan Chase & Co., Boeing and T-Mobile.
• Vamshi Reddy, CEO of Quadrant Technologies, founder of Seattle Venture Capital, and past leader at Lenora Systems and Microsoft.
• Prasad Anguluri, co-founder of the social media platform Haply, which connects neighbors. Anguluri also serves as a Bothell City Council member, president of ANG Technologies, and co-founder of Innovative Investing Group.
• Sanjay Puri, who was previously a vice president with Icertis and a former leader at Avalara, 9Mile Labs, Edifecs and others.

— JT McCrone, a Fred Hutch Cancer Center genomic epidemiologist, was named leader of Nextstrain, an open-source project that tracks the evolution and spread of viral and bacterial pathogens in real time.

The effort is primarily based in Seattle at Fred Hutch and two institutions in Basel, Switzerland. It has received $1.5 million from the Gates Foundation to support its next phase, which aims to make analyses of viral evolution more accessible and scalable.

— Graham Littlehale is now an investing partner with venture firm Felicis. He previously served as vice president of Point72 Ventures.

AI House co-founder and managing director Jacob Colker may be Seattle’s number one cheerleader. In posts on LinkedIn, panel discussions and recent news stories, Colker is reminding Seattleites that this is a pretty special place.

That all bubbled up at a Seattle Tech Week startup showcase event on Tuesday when the venture capitalist gave a passionate speech about the positive attributes of Seattle — a city that despite a robust innovation economy, spectacular scenery and a great showing during the World Cup is a bit down on itself lately.

Colker, channeling the best motivational speaker vibes, let loose at the Showbox Market.

“I am here because Seattle is at the forefront and has an opportunity to have a massive impact on this next wave of technology,” he said. “But we are missing a major piece of making that happen.”

That missing piece, he explained, is community and connection.

He shared a story about his first experience at a Cirque du Soleil show, saying his mind was blown seeing people doing flips and flying horses floating above him. He was amazed, and awestruck. Many years later, he took his family to Redmond’s Marymoor Park to see a Cirque show, and they walked out kind of underwhelmed.

“We get numb to the magic,” said Colker. “And I’ll tell you what, that’s what’s happening right here in Seattle.”

He went on to say, “We have flying horses in every part of this city,” citing the impact of companies like Boeing, Amazon, Microsoft and countless startups. “We literally created the cloud,” he said.

Colker also noted the world-changing impact of the University of Washington, ranked one of the top public education institutions in the country.

At the end of the day, it wasn’t so much a speech as a rallying cry. Or, perhaps, a love letter to a city that Colker believes punches well above its weight and yet is globally (and locally) underappreciated in many ways.

Colker’s message resonated with some, including fellow venture capitalist Jen Haller from Ascend, who commented on Colker’s LinkedIn post: “Jacob for Mayor!”

Asked later by GeekWire why he felt compelled to share this message with the crowd, Colker said that Seattle “has absorbed years of lazy criticism and has started to internalize it.”

“The city does not have a talent problem, an ambition problem, or an innovation problem,” he tells us. “It has a confidence problem. Too many people have forgotten what has been built here, what is being built here, and how much potential is still sitting in this region waiting to be activated.”

Colker does not see himself as a civic booster. He just wants people to stop accepting others’ definition of the community, recognize the extraordinary assets already in place and “start behaving with the urgency, pride, and conviction of a city that belongs at the center of what comes next.” 

It was a common theme at Seattle Tech Week. Earlier in the day, at a Building in Seattle event, startup leader Zaylan Jacobsen, co-chair of the local Young Professionals Nexus chapter, described Seattle as “one of the most special places in the entire world.” While acknowledging short-term problems, he urged the crowd to recognize its timeless qualities, including the natural environment.

Colker, after his speech later that night, still had some bottled up energy left over to play drums on the Showbox stage with his band: Good Lettuce and the Hallpasses.

One of the songs Colker and his bandmates belted out: Don’t Stop Believin’ by Journey. It seems an appropriate message for Seattle at this given point in time.

Rock on, Jacob. Rock on.

Seattle’s emergence as a hub for companies building the next generation of industrial technology is drawing another high-profile startup.

Los Angeles-based Nominal, whose software helps engineers build, test and validate complex hardware systems, is establishing a permanent Seattle office as it ramps up hiring and looks for a larger home in the region.

The nearly 4-year-old company currently employs 11 people at a downtown Seattle co-working space, and expects to more than double that number by the end of the year.

The company is also relocating Head of Product Stephen Slattery, the former director of technical operations at defense tech giant Anduril Industries, from Los Angeles to Seattle to oversee the new office. Employing about 200 employees globally, Nominal also operates offices in Austin, New York, Washington, D.C., and London.

Seattle’s concentration of tech and aerospace talent, along with proximity to key partners and customers, attracted the fast-growing company.

Nominal CEO Cameron McCord said Seattle is one of only a handful of U.S. markets with a deep concentration of engineers experienced in solving large-scale infrastructure and reliability problems. Seattle’s aerospace heritage also appealed to the company.

“Some of the magic of Nominal is putting them in one room,” McCord told GeekWire.

The company boasts 75 customers, about half of which are in the defense sector. It also sells its software to companies in the energy, robotics and automotive arenas.

The Seattle expansion comes just months after Nominal raised an $80 million venture capital round led by Founders Fund at a $1 billion valuation, part of a growing trend of companies serving industries where artificial intelligence is accelerating innovation in the physical world.

“Nominal exists to help these engineering teams rethink their data supply chain: the end-to-end flow from instrumentation through acquisition, storage, analysis, reporting, and into the decisions that shape the next design,” the company wrote in the funding announcement.

Seattle has increasingly become a landing spot for companies operating at the intersection of AI and the physical world, while some of the region’s fastest-growing homegrown startups — including Overland AI, Carbon Robotics, Brinc and Stoke Space — are helping define the category.

In recent months, defense tech company Anduril has expanded its operations in the Seattle area. AI infrastructure startup Armada — which like Nominal is backed by Founders Fund — and AI giants Anthropic and OpenAI also have opened new offices or expanded engineering centers in the region.

Nominal’s McCord, a former U.S. Navy submarine officer and nuclear engineer who previously worked at Anduril, said conversations with former colleagues, including Anduril co-founder and COO Matt Grimm, helped reinforce Seattle’s appeal.

“I’ve been able to get a lot of advice and thoughts from him on what it looks like to properly enter the Seattle market,” said McCord. “Everything from him is incredibly positive on the talent and density.” 

While Nominal has gained traction among defense contractors — McCord said four of the five traditional U.S. defense companies use its software — he said the company increasingly sees opportunities across a number of industries. The energy sector — including nuclear, fusion and batteries— as well as AI data center infrastructure are growing areas of interest for the young company.

The Seattle office will be more than an engineering outpost. McCord said Seattle will become a full cross-functional location, with engineering, sales, customer success, design and other teams represented as it grows.

The company expects the Seattle office to reach roughly 20 to 25 employees by the end of this year and could double again to 40 or 50 employees by the end of 2027. It is currently looking for a permanent office space, likely targeting downtown Seattle.

McCord said the Seattle office will play a key role in Nominal’s growth as it looks to reimagine the unique challenges that industrial companies face in building hardware systems for this new era.

“There’s a huge market opportunity as the world reindustrializes,” he said.

See this interview with McCord by General Catalyst’s Paul Kwan for more on the company: