Seattle has many many people working on their own thing and side projects. It has an excellent talent pool of varying skills. Raleigh is nowhere near in scale right now
Everyone I know with talent here is too overworked at their main job to sustain side projects. That, rampant seasonal depression and a pervasive weed and drinking culture to deal with it all make it incredibly to hard to connect with people who actually want to collaborate on things on the side. It's the seattle freeze culture - it just isn't conducive to organic networking and small scale innovation. At least the Bay has nice weather to lift moods a bit.
Raleigh has plenty enough talent, from far more diverse backgrounds than Seattle, and just keeps growing. I don't need 10,000 engineers for a startup - I just need 10 really good ones and a pipeline for more. I've already got that network and I know the culture is better for me to find more, so I'm ready to go for it. It's a risk in some ways, but I gave Seattle a real try - it just isn't as uniquely conducive to building new things as people would like to believe.
I visited RDU for a week to figure out if it was a place that I would want to settle down in. I was told the American Tobacco Campus was a hotbed for new startups, and of course SAS in Cary has a big presence. There's definitely talent in the area (State, UNC and Duke) and there's definitely potential.
One thing I noticed though was the relative lack of cultural diversity and city feel (the entire RDU area feels suburban and comfortable, and lacks "struggle" as it were), but I don't know if this adversely affects startup viability, so it probably doesn't matter. I decided it wasn't a place where I would feel comfortable settling in, being a city-person, but for many people who are turned off big cities, I could see RDU being a good middle ground.
