Seattle Seahawks owner Paul Allen walks off the field during the fourth quarter of an NFC divisional playoff game against the New Orleans Saints. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson) Associated Press

SEATTLE—Sunday's NFC Championship between the San Francisco 49ers and Seattle Seahawks will renew the fierce rivalry between a flashy outfit that has won big the last few years and a group looking for its first big win since George W. Bush was in office.

We're talking, of course, about the cities' tech communities.

For Seattle, there's more on the line than just a trip to their first Super Bowl since the 2005 season. There's the chance for payback against the city that swiped their title as the technology hub of the universe.

"Those b------- have won so many championships...and we would love to have had one-tenth the startup culture they have," said Paul Shoemaker, a former Microsoft executive who is now the founding president of Social Venture Partners. "We have a big brother-little brother thing with Portland. With San Francisco, they are more our big cousin."

Not surprisingly, the two football teams are dominated with tech veterans.

Paul Allen, a Microsoft co-founder, owns the Seahawks. In San Francisco, team president Gideon Yu is a Facebook alum who hired a handful of high-tech ex-pats as team executives. The Seahawks mascot, Blitz, has a day job as a Microsoft employee. The Seahawks home stadium, CenturyLink Field, is named for a local cable-and-Internet provider, while Microsoft's Bing search engine bought naming right to the Seahawks training camp.

But for all of Seattle's tech bona fides, there's little doubt who is the capital of tech. In the first nine months of 2013, Bay Area startups attracted $8.8 billion from venture-capital firms, which invest in young companies. Startups in Seattle and the rest of Washington raised just $409 million from venture investors in the same period.

Northern California's major companies like Apple Inc., Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. along with an endless number of startups have overshadowed Seattle staples Microsoft Corp and Inc., making Sunday's title game a chance for Seattle to gain some respect in Silicon Valley. Just now, tech-style trash-talk is at an all-time high.

Seattle's companies, said Michael Hanlon, an early Amazon employee who now teaches at the University of Washington, "depend on long-run relationships with their customers. I feel like the Bay Area is dominated by companies obsessed with collecting my personal data so they can sell it to advertisers. That's about as likeable as Jim Harbaugh."

In Bay Area technology centers, they profess not to think about Seattle at all.

"It's similar to the way the Bay Area feels about New York: 'Oh, that's cute. You guys have startups too,'" explained Steve Huffman, co-founder of a San Francisco travel website called Hipmunk.

On the field, the two cities have been engaged in a war of words since 2011, when brash former Stanford coach Jim Harbaugh jumped to the 49ers to compete against Pete Carroll, the Seahawks coach who jumped from Southern California, who was Harbaugh's chief rival in college.

Seattle-area tech workers feel their Bay Area counterparts are overly brash and swimming in money. Seattleites brag about and Microsoft, both headquartered in the Seattle area, and about the growing number of hot Bay Area companies—including Google and Facebook--with major engineering outposts in the Emerald City.

When the tech rivalry intersects with each city's passion for its NFL team, it can get ugly.

For several years, Sunny Gupta, chief executive of Seattle-area startup Apptio, has bickered over dinners with Ravi Mohan, a Bay Area investor and director of Gupta's company. The topic isn't Apptio's strategy, but Seahawks coach Pete Carroll. Early on, Mohan liked to needle Gupta that Carroll's trademark energy wouldn't translate to the NFL coaching ranks.

"It used to really p--- me off," Gupta said.

On the field and in the tech community, the rivalry between the Bay Area and Seattle is a one sided. "As a Seattle technology executive, I feel like we don't get any respect from Silicon Valley," Gupta said.

A graphic that has made the rounds among tech workers shows stereotypes of Silicon Valley geeks versus Seattle geeks. While a typical Bay Area techie sports soul patches, reveres Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and wears the barefoot running shoes FiveFingers, a Seattle techie has a faux-hawk, loves Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and dons REI hiking boots. The topic of which city has better coffee houses can provoke loud arguments.

Pacific Northwest backers say the Seattle-area tech community is less flashy and just as good at their jobs as their counterparts in the more celebrated Bay Area tech scene.

"Seattle isn't a fashion capital," said Hanlon, the former Amazon engineer. "But when Jim Harbaugh tucks his sweatshirt into his khaki pants, I feel like we're doing pretty well up here."

Tim Mahlman, a San Francisco-based co-founder of video content startup Vidible and a 49ers fan, said that the rivalry between the two cities has always existed, but it is at a boiling point with a football rivalry that has blossomed in the last three years. His company hires mostly Seattle-based engineers. On game days, they will typically be on Skype for work and the trash talk flows.

"You have to put a lot of digs in whenever you talk. You'll say 'IPOs, you don't see that in Seattle like you do in San Francisco'," Mahlman said. "So it's nice to see the Niners and Seahawks have that rivalry, with [quarterbacks] Russell Wilson and Colin Kaepernick. It's nice to take some more shots."

Many of the company's employees are engineers that come from Seattle who, Mahlman said, love to brag after a Seahawks win. But after the company's recent round of funding, Vidible added five new hires with crucial credentials. "They are all Niner fans to the bone," he said. "The tables have turned."

Write to Kevin Clark at and Shira Ovide at