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At a meeting in San Francisco a few months ago, an icebreaker asked where we’d live if we could live anywhere in the world. I was the only one in the room whose answer was the same place I already call home. Over the years, opportunities have tried to entice me away, and I’ve turned down offers worth multiples of what I was earning to stay. I’m certain I’d have been in a position to be affected by a higher tax bracket sooner if I had followed them, but I’m equally certain it would not have made me happier.
My relationship with Washington started when I fell in love with Seattle during a visit in 2004. Shortly after, I moved to Alaska, co-founded my first company, and when it was acquired by a Seattle startup in 2006, my dream of living here came true. That move changed my life. It landed me in a place that felt alive with lush beauty, non-ostentatious ambition, and a kind of defiantly clever creativity, all surrounded by pioneers building new things that mattered. In high school and college I had followed the story of Microsoft and the early engineers who helped create an entire technology ecosystem. At the same time I of course loved the music coming from the Seattle scene. Washington felt like a place where innovation could coexist with culture, where a generation of makers and artists fostered the foundations of the next. Twenty years of living here later, that still feels true.
I’ve done pretty well here. I’ve founded companies here and worked alongside venture capitalists at Madrona Venture Labs and Pioneer Square Labs and seen firsthand how startup ecosystems actually work. For years I hoped I might someday be able to invest myself, and now I can. I’m excited to keep participating in the same cycle of building that drew me here in the first place. But one of the things I love most about this region is that it’s never been just a tech ecosystem.
Some of the people I care most about in this community are artists, musicians, and creatives. They shape the culture and spirit of this place in ways no economic model can capture. As someone who has benefited enormously from working in technology and AI, I feel a real responsibility to support the broader community that makes this region vibrant. Honestly, it’s that community that has kept me from burning out during the hardest stretches of my career.
That’s why my view on Washington’s proposed tax on very high incomes is simple: if I’ve found myself in the position of making that much in a year, I can afford to contribute a little more to the place that helped make that circumstance possible.
As someone who started my career in Georgia, a red state that does have personal income taxes, it’s always struck me as strangely backward that we don’t. People here have long pointed out that Washington’s tax system is among the most regressive in the country. In that context, and after observing the past 20 years of attempts at a fix, the proposed wealth tax feels like one of the few realistic ways to make the system more balanced.
Is the proposal perfect? Of course not. Washington’s laws and constitution make this kind of policy exceptionally hard to design. But as I once heard at a talk at Y Combinator in 2008, perfect is the enemy of good enough, and sometimes good enough is the enemy of at all. “Imperfect” is not a compelling argument for doing nothing forever.
I’m certainly not an 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 is to work on it. We elect legislators to make difficult tradeoffs in public and represent the interests of the entire community. I take that process seriously and trust democratic representatives far more than I trust whatever pithy inflammatory argument happens to be boosted by algorithms on social media. Governing, like building companies, is iterative. We try things. We improve them. If something doesn’t work, we fix it or elect new people and try again. We act with agency.
I keep hearing that taxes like this will drive founders and business away, that investors will leave, that Washington will stop being a place where ambitious or creative people build things. Whether or not you can scrounge up data to support that case, I’m at best skeptical. But for me at least, as someone who has actually started companies, that just feels obviously wrong.
Founders don’t decide where to build by researching marginal tax rates. They build from their homes, in 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 the grind of years of stressful and uncertain work. Building a company is too consuming and too personal to optimize around a hypothetical line item on a spreadsheet of imagined future outcomes.
One of the things I love most about Washington is that it doesn’t feel like a place that belongs to just one kind of person. It’s beautifully wild, culturally and environmentally diverse, and a little weird in the best ways. It has quirky cities and cozy neighborhoods, incredible scenery and nature, and a long tradition of people showing up to build things, have them literally burn down, and rebuild them one story up. In investor parlance this is our unfair advantage. People will keep moving here because of all of our natural assets. Some will start companies. Some will work at successful ones. Some will sell shovels. Some will strike gold.
What I care about for myself is that finding wealth here comes with a sense of reciprocity. If someone becomes extremely highly compensated in Washington and decides that a reasonable tax on their very high income means they no longer want to be part of this place, fine! That’s their choice. I’m certainly not leaving. Some have said “just donate.” I do. But anyone who has run a business knows that one-time lump sums are not the predictable source of funds required to plan a future and sustain an ecosystem.
It’s worth saying that obviously supporting this proposal doesn’t mean I wouldn’t mind some changes. I’d especially like to see clearer connections between new revenue and the quality-of-life issues that determine whether Washington remains livable: housing, transportation, education, and the ability for people from many backgrounds and situations to stay rooted here. We should measure and adjust accordingly.
Ultimately for me, it comes down to this: I feel lucky to be here. A thriving community pulled me into this region and gave me the chance to build new things, work alongside investors I respect, among wonderful and creative people I love, and eventually become someone who can pay it forward. I benefited from what earlier generations built here and I feel responsible to the next. This is just my personal perspective. I can’t speak for everyone affected by this policy proposal or even for those who hope that one day they might. But if my circumstances and lifestyle make it easy to afford to contribute more to the place that helped shape the best years of my life, I think I should.
And if this proposed bug fix to a design flaw in our revenue collection code is enough to make someone give up on Washington, sell the boat, and move to Florida, cool. Personally, I’d be happy to invest in the next cohort of folks who love it here as much as I do and want to build a life in this magical place.
Related:
- Washington governor says he’ll sign millionaires tax
- In new letter to governor, Seattle tech leaders say income tax proposal will hurt region’s AI innovation
- Opinion: The narratives and realities of an income tax in Washington
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