Opinion: You couldn’t pay me to leave Washington state, and I would pay more to stay

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At a meeting in San Francisco a few months ago, an icebreaker asked where we would live if we could live anywhere in the world. I was the only one in the room and the answer was in this place that I already call home. Over the years, opportunities have tried to entice me, and I turned down offers that cost multiples of what I was earning to stay. I’m sure I would have been in a position to be hit with higher tax brackets sooner had I followed them, but I’m equally sure it wouldn’t have made me happy.

My relationship with Washington began when I fell in love with Seattle during a visit in 2004. Soon after, I moved to Alaska, founded my first company, and when it was acquired by a Seattle company in 2006, my dream of living here came true. That move changed my life. It put me in a place where I felt alive with radiant beauty, ambition, and a defiantly brilliant brand of creativity, all surrounded by pioneers creating important innovations. In high school and college I had followed the story of Microsoft and the early developers who helped create the entire technology ecosystem. Right away I fell in love with music from the Seattle area. Washington felt like a place where innovation could coexist with tradition, where a generation of architects and artists developed the foundations for the next. Twenty years of living here later, that is still true.

I did very well here. I founded companies here and worked alongside venture capitalists at Madrona Venture Labs and Pioneer Square Labs and saw firsthand how startup ecosystems really work. For years I hoped that one day I would be able to grow my own, and now I can. I’m excited to continue participating in the building cycle that drew me here in the first place. But one of the things I love most about this region is that it has never been a tech ecosystem.

Some of the people I care about the most in this community are artists, musicians, and creators. They shape the culture and spirit of this place in ways that no economic model can capture. As someone who has benefited greatly from the work of technology and AI, I feel a real responsibility to support the wider community that makes this region come alive. Honestly, it was that community that kept me from giving up during the hardest part of my career.

That’s why my view on Washington’s proposed tax on very high incomes is simple: if I find myself in a position to make that much a year, I can contribute more to the environment that helped make that situation possible.

As someone who started my career in Georgia, a red state with a personal tax, it always amazes me how amazing the regression is that we don’t have one. People here have long pointed out that Washington’s tax system is among the most regressive in the country. In that context, and after looking at the past 20 years of reform efforts, the proposed wealth tax sounds like one of the few realistic ways to balance the system.

Is the proposal complete? Of course not. Washington’s laws and constitution make this type of policy very difficult to design. But as I once heard in a talk at Y Combinator in 2008, the enemy of perfect is the enemy of good enough, and sometimes good enough is its enemy at all. “Infiniteness” is not a compelling argument for doing nothing forever.

I’m certainly no expert on this topic. But I also don’t think my job is to pretend I know more about tax design than the people whose job it is to work on it. We elect legislators to make difficult public trade-offs and represent the interests of the entire community. I take that process seriously and I trust democrats more than I trust any heated debate that might be fueled by social media algorithms. Management, like construction companies, is repetitive. We try things. We improve ourselves. If something doesn’t work, we fix it or choose new people and try again. We work through an agency.

I keep hearing that taxes like this will drive away inventors and businesses, that investors will leave, that Washington will cease to be a place where ambitious or creative people build things. Whether you can sift through the data to support that case, I have no doubt. But to me at least, as someone who has started companies, that just seems wrong.

Founders don’t decide where to build by researching low tax rates. They build in their homes, coffee shops or garages, where their supportive friends and collaborators live. They build where their community is. They build where their loved ones can live and where they can survive through years of stressful work and uncertainty. Building a company is too time-consuming and too personal to prepare a hypothetical line item in a spreadsheet of projected future results.

One of the things I love most about Washington is that it doesn’t feel like a place for just one type of person. It’s pretty wild, culturally and ecologically diverse, and a little weird in the best ways. It has old towns and cozy places, amazing scenery and nature, and a long tradition of people showing up to build things, literally burn them, and rebuild them in one story. In investor parlance this is our unfair advantage. People will continue to travel here because of all our natural assets. Others will start companies. Others will work for the winners. Some will sell shovels. Some will strike gold.

What I care about is that finding wealth here is accompanied by a sense of reconciliation. If someone is highly compensated in Washington and decides that the fair tax on their higher income means they no longer want to be a part of this place, that’s fine! That is their choice. Of course I’m not going. Others say “just give.” I agree. But anyone who has run a business knows that one-time large sums of money are not the predictable source of funds needed to plan for the future and sustain an ecosystem.

It is fair to say that obviously supporting this proposal does not mean that I am not interested in some change. I would especially like to see a clear connection between the new benefit and the quality of life issues that determine whether Washington is sustainable: housing, transportation, education, and the ability for people from many backgrounds and circumstances to remain rooted here. We must measure and adjust accordingly.

Ultimately for me, it comes down to this: I feel lucky to be here. The thriving community drew me to this region and gave me the opportunity to build new things, work with investors I respect, among amazing and smart people I admire, and ultimately become a pioneer. I benefited from what the previous generations built here and I feel a responsibility to the next generation. This is just my personal opinion. I cannot speak for everyone affected by this policy proposal or even those who hope to one day do it. But if my circumstances and lifestyle make it easier to afford to contribute more to an environment that helped shape the best years of my life, I think I should.

And if this proposed bug fix for a design flaw in our fundraising code is enough to make someone give up on Washington, sell a boat, and move to Florida, cool. Personally, I would be happy to invest in the next group of people who love it here as much as I do and want to build a life in this magical place.

Related:

• Washington’s governor says he will sign a multibillion-dollar tax bill
• In a new letter to the governor, Seattle tech leaders say the income tax proposal will hurt the region’s AI development.
• Perspective: Narrative and facts of income tax in Washington