Where to Build: A Founder's Take on Irvine, Seattle, San Francisco, and New York
Sinan Sari has legit founder credibility. He co-founded Cuboh and was part of YCombinator’s Summer 2019 batch. Cuboh was eventually acquired by Chow Now. He’s now working on his third venture, SimplyHRA, a health benefit platform for startups and small businesses. For employers, it offers a smooth experience for providing healthcare benefits to employees. For employees, there’s an AI-assisted concierge for finding health insurance and health care services.
In 2022, he moved from Seattle to Irvine and co-founded his second startup, Kidsy. Kidsy was a distributed company, his co-founder lived in Chicago and their warehouse was in Nebraska.
After almost three years working on Kidsy, Sinan decided to give healthcare another shot. He co-founded SimplyHRA in 2025 with Saif Akhtar, who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Their stack is NodeJS, Typescript, and React, but he was quick to point out, “I don’t think [which stack you use] is very relevant anymore.” SimplyHRA is using AI agents to follow what’s going on with the IRS, state government, healthcare, health insurance, taxes, and other regulatory bodies. The agents then suggest improvements on workflows and the codebase based on the latest regulatory updates.
Sinan was “always a healthcare guy.” Before immigrating to North America ten years ago, Sinan lived in Turkey where he built healthcare systems for the government. In Seattle, Sinan worked as a senior software engineer at two healthtech companies, first Tasso and then Oscar Health. These roles exposed him to how distributed, decentralized, and difficult the US healthcare and insurance system can be.
When I asked him to compare Seattle to LA, he said, “It’s apples and oranges.” Seattle’s population has a larger percentage of engineers working for Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Facebook. Their startup ecosystem is small but it’s growing fast. On the other hand, LA has people coming from different industries with different backgrounds. LA has manufacturing, transportation, defense, aerospace, and a huge military presence in nearby San Diego. Ultimately he concluded that if he was building a developer tool or something technical people use, he’d build his startup in Seattle, but for B2C (business-to-consumer), he’d go with LA.
A challenge in Irvine: events and community. His view is that having a community of founders that you can meet in-person is essential, “Observing what’s going on from LinkedIn is not a good way to keep yourself motivated or up-to-date.” The number of events and entrepreneurs in Orange County is less than ideal. In his experience, cities like San Francisco and LA have a higher quantity and variety of events aimed at entrepreneurs, “You have events for CTOs, you have events for fintech, you have events for health tech, different segments”. But traveling to LA for a weeknight event could take up to two hours one-way.
While organizations like UC Irvine and Sunstone Venture & Innovation Center are striving to grow the Orange County tech ecosystem, Sinan says, “it’s not growing as much as it grew in Austin or Seattle.” He sees the potential in Irvine; the city has an innovation council with strategies to support entrepreneurship but “there’s still a long way to go.”
From a fundraising perspective, Sinan doesn’t see being in Southern California is a disadvantage. SimplyHRA is post revenue and will eventually raise its seed round. “If you want to approach top tier VCs, you can generally find a partner or associate residing in LA and working with LA startups.” He admits that he hasn’t raised funding with a VC partner or associate residing in LA for his last two startups. He explains, “When you’re not in San Francisco or New York City, you set up your target list, you find interesting VCs who have a similar portfolio or interest in your product. Somehow that always moved us towards VCs in the Bay or New York City.”
Even if the VCs are in the Bay Area, getting there is just a matter of hopping on a plane at John Wayne Airport, “I have a meeting next week and I will go [to the Bay Area] just for that meeting.” Not overnight, just fly in, have the meeting, and fly out.
He’s at a crossroads deciding where to build SimplyHRA long term: stay in Irvine or relocate to New York City. Sinan sees the benefits of staying in Irvine. His family has built a strong social circle. The lifestyle: going to the beach, enjoying the sun, walkability, bikeability, being next to the desert and mountains. He sees no shortage of talent, “UCI is really producing a good amount of ambitious people. Developers, product managers, entrepreneurs that might opt to basically spend four to eight years of their life here.”
Why New York City? “I’m building a tool in healthcare and health insurance. Generally the capital of this industry, especially for startups, is in New York City.” He added, “But I can see that I can make the same success happen even being here.” Irvine’s got the incumbent advantage, but only time will tell whether that’s enough to keep Sinan and SimplyHRA.
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Keep up with SimplyHRA at SimplyHRA.com or connect with Sinan on LinkedIn
Deciding where to build your startup? Check out Compile LA's side-by-side compilation of tech hub rankings, by city.
