> The engineering elite of Silicon Valley may know more than most about building software. But they do not know more about how society should be organized or what justice requires.
Presumably Denver elites know what justice requires.
> Our company was founded in Silicon Valley. But we seem to share fewer and fewer of the technology sector’s values and commitments.
> Our roots in the intelligence community and defense sector introduced us to unique demands that many companies in Silicon Valley and elsewhere did not address: security, stability, and transparency
> Palantir was founded on the premise that the most critical challenges cannot be solved from the comforts of Silicon Valley.
This all makes more sense now that we know they were planning to move shortly, but it still struck me as weird and political. It read to me like "Remember, US government, we don't get wishy washy about using technology for military purposes like some of those other, differently-valued companies."
The absolute laughability of anything around Palantir being associated with "transparency".
Or perhaps their "demands" around transparency were "we want nothing to do with it".
They didn’t have to go all the way to denver: just leave the valley for San Francisco Which is full of companies that share palantir’s philosophy of never making a profit.
I think this point is basically about how Palantir have had generally hard time hiring in SV. People don't align with their values or generally want to work for companies that build tech for government agencies.
I mean, looking at their line of work and what they're doing with technologies such as image-recognition, and the contracts they seem to be getting, I agree. Anecdotally, whenever they come up in conversation here in the Bay people seem to not like them very much.
The CA FTB will likely go after some of them, on the grounds that they "earned" the stock/options while living in CA. In my prior life as a tax lawyer, I saw the FTB get beaten on this, but they probably still pursue the cases because there's so much money at stake.
Good chance they don't want to come back for other reasons I guess!
The state's theory (that I recall) doesn't relate to future visits to CA — it's all about what happened in the past.
BTW, I'm happy to make a referral to anyone who ends up targeted by the FTB on this issue. My former colleague, who is still a tax lawyer, nailed the FTB in court when they went after one of his clients on this.
Imagine you move from CA to CO, and in 2021 you live entirely in CO. Well, CO is going to say anything you earned during 2021 is fully theirs to tax. So if you sell $10M of stock, they'll want their 4%. But if CA says they want 13% of your $10M, on the grounds that you "earned" it while living in CA, then that's not fair to you.
Usually the laws are such that you pay the max, not the sum, of the two state taxes.
So instead you get handed two separate tax bills (and post 2018, you can't deduct more than $10k in SALT, making this hurt even more).
If CA comes after you for not filing taxes, you may owe fines, but you can still deduct other state tax when filing CA state taxes. SALT isn't relevant.
Like to give an example, if I found a startup in SV, and run it their for 5 years, move to Denver and go public and cash in my options as a CO resident, I'd argue that most of that money was earned while in CA. California enforcing that doesn't seem unfair as long as they treat it the same as any other income (allow you to deduct other state tax)
But even with your example, imagine starting a company in CA, having remote engineers around the world building your company, and then having all of your gains taxed in CA when you later sold the company (but no longer lived there). Why would that be fair? What if you sold it 5 or 10 or 20 years after leaving? Part of the reason we don’t let CA tax you after you leave is because doing so opens up a can of slippery slopes, to mix metaphors.
I'm just wondering: what is Denver's message? Is it similar to Utah's where a slew of successful software companies got started? [2] Or has the city's message become unimportant in the era of remote work?
I ask because it is often the case in history that great work is done in places that are the least comfortable.
We're currently in a big state of flux. The character of many cities is shifting. Many folks are betting that NYC will not recover from this remote-working trend and economic downturn, for example. Are the skeptics right, or is this a short-term bump in the road?
Millions are moving from certain states and cities right now. How will this migration shape the character of destination cities like Denver? I'd say that's the more important question to speculate on rather than look back at what Denver has been in the past. I do think when you move to a place, it shapes you and you in turn shape it. It's a give and a take.
"I made my money, screw you"
It's like the Florida or Vermont of the west only it's SV types who cash out and move there to raise kids or retire instead of the Wall St crowd.
I now live in a state where I pay lower taxes and that provides more and better services than California. In fact, I can't think of a single thing California does better. I'm happy to pay my taxes here as this state's government does a much better job with the tax revenue they do collect.
Sadly, as more Californians come to my state, they are supporting a lot of the same bad policy decisions that were well-intentioned but ultimately ended up becoming problematic in California.
Kinda funny (in a sad sort of way) that in a thread about California people assume that "I've made my money, screw you" is about dodging taxes because that implies things about where the Overton window is in CA and is illustrative about why people might not like a bunch of Californians with enough money to matter (the last part being key) showing up over a couple decades.
However, you can't deny or bemoan the freedom of others to do the same as you did, and to be political in the same way.
Add to that a good quality of life for employees (low pollution, the outdoors, etc), as well as an abundance of talent, and a city (or three) that's been very focused on nurturing its tech/startup community for the past 10 years (including Denver Startup Week, the largest free startup-focused event in the world)...and it's a no-brainer.
TBH, one of the biggest recent macro-challenges for Denver is the sheer number of people moving here, a large portion of which are from California.
If the goal is to get the hell away from CA culture and SV engineering mindset wouldn't somewhere else be a better fit? I get the attractiveness of Denver relative to CA at present but if you're playing a long game that's like trading in your ticket on the Titanic for one on the Lusitania.
That being said, as someone else mentioned, if your goal is to escape high taxes and the super-expensive housing costs of SF, all while living in an area that supports your life outside the office, Denver is a good place to look at. Even if its cost of living is rising.
And people who did that were the incremental change that enable the people who you think are changing it for the worse to feel like moving there and doing that is a good idea.
Sure that boutique deli that you and your neighbors keep in business (or local law you voted for, or whatever, doesn't matter what it is, just some small seemingly non-meaningful change) doesn't really matter individually but all these little things at the margin add up to a big difference.
It's like how the presence of ethnic neighborhoods furthers immigration from whatever that source country because potential migrants know they have a turnkey place to fit in (though I consider people migrating into a position to economic disadvantage to be fundamentally different than people migrating into a position of economic advantage).
I'm not picking on you. You're just one person. One person doesn't matter. It's the larger mechanism of migration that I'm trying to describe here. Basically don't blame the new migrants. People like doing what you did are why people like them moved in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxpayer_Bill_of_Rights
Peter Thiel is the guy that's so libertarian he wrote about how extending the franchise to women was a mistake.
> …I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible… The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of "capitalist democracy" into an oxymoron.
So I can see how that would appeal to him.
I also want them to not be so backed into a corner from a funding perspective that something like that looks like a good idea. This is a pretty good example of "it's expensive to be poor". Apparently CDOT wasn't going to have enough money for plows that year without an injection of money, and the investors' negotiators knew they had CDOT over a barrel. For an example of how much that would destroy the city's economy, we already have had several inches of snow this year (even with the wild fires going).
This idea of they're not doing well so cut their money leads to paying 80% on a project that's supposed to last fifty years, and then another 80% ten years later and so forth. Then you're left without enough money for basic infrastructure.
The lack of diversity in SV is stark, and there is pretty clear that they have grown disconnected with a lot of people who work in the world of atoms.