Andrew Dunlap

building the future of Virginia

[Andrew Dunlap @andrewdunlap]

There's one American landscape Virginia can't give you. The desert.

That's it. That's the whole list.

Everything else is here:

• Oceans and mountains
• Lakes and rivers
• Four seasons, snow and beach in the same year (and when you're unlucky, in the same 60 days)
• Rural quiet or a big city skyline, one hour apart
• Cheap in the mountains or a fortune near DC
• Simple or luxury, your call

Oh, and 12+ nationally ranked universities, public and private, from UVA to Virginia Tech to Washington and Lee to Mary Washington. Number one in education, two years running.

Six-time number one state for business. More than 120 million people within a day's drive. Europe, one flight. And none of it at California or New York prices.

Name a state that does all of it better.

I'll wait.

[Andrew Dunlap @andrewdunlap]

Appalachia is being gutted.

So is the rest of Virginia.

When a business in Southwest Virginia sells, it leaves the state 88.7% of the time. Even Northern Virginia sits at 74%.

We have to slow this down.

See it all at https://t.co/ptfLSXIYJ2

[Andrew Dunlap @andrewdunlap]

Why would any young person want to live in Virginia?

Someone actually asked me that this week.

Quick reminder: Virginia is more than gridlock traffic on 95.

You can live in a city with this as your backyard.

[Andrew Dunlap @andrewdunlap]

Virginia just lost its largest venture capital firm.

Columbia Capital in Alexandria, founded in '89. Over $9B raised in its life.

A Texas REIT (Digital Realty) bought it.

After QED, the next biggest VC firm in the state manages under a billion...

Losing talent stings.
Losing a company hurts.
Losing investment infrastructure is worse.

Those are the institutions with scale, with the LP relationships, with their finger on the pulse of where capital and industries are moving.

Aaaand now that all lives in Texas.

Brutal.

[Andrew Dunlap @andrewdunlap]

Everyone overcomplicate this.

more HQs = more leaders
more leaders = a healthier place
∴ more HQs = a healthier place

That's the whole thing.

The problem isn't that Virginia can't grow leaders. It's that we keep selling the companies that produce them. 82% of the businesses that sell here go to out-of-state buyers, and the leadership leaves with the logo (https://t.co/rQUZS2q20r)

Harbor is the buyer that keeps them home.

[Andrew Dunlap @andrewdunlap]

Most people spend a 40-year career earning a view like this for retirement.

I get it out my front door before work.

Virginia is unbeatable.

[Andrew Dunlap @andrewdunlap]

Virginia ranks 42nd out of 50.

In small business lending per person. 1/3 below the national rate.

It isn't loan size. Our average loan runs a hair above the national number. And it isn't that we have fewer businesses. We have the same share of companies as the rest of the country.

It's that far fewer of them are getting funded.

Just to get to the national average, we would have to fund roughly 2,800 more Virginia businesses, with about $1.4 billion in capital.

We don't lack companies worth backing.
We can do better than 42nd. And we will.

[Andrew Dunlap @andrewdunlap]

Harbor bought a few businesses this spring. And that was exciting.

But none of it came close to the joy of coaching my daughter and her little lacrosse team.

She won't be this little next spring. And one day, she'll want me on the sideline, not in the huddle.

Until then, I'm holding on to every second of this.

[Andrew Dunlap @andrewdunlap]

"I can't find anyone good to hire in Virginia."

Really?

I get messages from people (young and old) like this every week. Went to Virginia Tech, started his career in Lynchburg, and wanted to stay in Virginia. His employer closed, so he left for Charleston,
SC to find the work that wasn't here.

He's thriving in South Carolina, but he still wants to come home.

The good people didn't vanish. They followed the jobs across the state line.

Talent doesn’t hate Virginia. They just don’t have a reason to stay or come back.

[Andrew Dunlap @andrewdunlap]

Most states are good at a few things. Virginia, is the complete package.

Start with just the map:
Drive east and you reach the Atlantic and the Chesapeake Bay, the largest estuary in the country. Drive west and you're into the Blue Ridge mountains. You can stand in the ocean at breakfast and be on a mountain by dinner, same state.

But, maybe you're not an outdoors person... ok:
This is where the country was BUILT. Jamestown in 1607, the first permanent English settlement in America. The Revolution was won at Yorktown. Eight presidents were born in Virginia (more than any other state). William & Mary opened in 1693, then Washington and Lee University in 1749, then Hampden-Sydney College in 1775; AND the Father of the Constitution, James Madison, was a Virginian. He got a school too!

We also haven't stopped building:
The only shipyard in America that builds nuclear aircraft carriers is here. So is the largest naval base (on earth). The densest cluster of data centers on the planet sits in Northern Virginia, which means a LOT of the internet physically runs through Virginia. As of this year we have the deepest harbor on the East Coast, and the single largest customer in the world (the federal government) is right across a river.

CNBC has named Virginia the best state in America for business more than any other state. ANY. OTHER.

And none of that is the best reason to be here…

The best reason is that you can have all of it and still afford a life. Outside Northern Virginia, you get a job market with home prices that would be a fantasy in California or the Northeast. The schools are among the best in the nation, and the towns are old and have a soul. You keep what you earn, while you build where you live.

Coast and mountains, the birthplace of America and its powerhouse. The career and the life. No other state has that.

The rest of the country has not priced Virginia correctly yet. Get here before it does.

Why do you love Virginia?

[Andrew Dunlap @andrewdunlap]

@dave_christison Have you tried putting precision hydration flow gel in your own flask and using that? I found that to be the answer after 20 years of looking.

[Andrew Dunlap @andrewdunlap]

Turns out, Virginia is for lovers. And buyers.

Trailing twelve months of Virginia companies sold to out-of-state buyers attached.

When the owner leaves, the decision makers leave. Then the jobs. Then the tax base.

Harbor is the other kind of buyer that stays.

https://t.co/K4pRMcalbK

[Andrew Dunlap @andrewdunlap]

Virginia Tech is running out of people in charge.

For those keeping score at home: in a few weeks they have turned over their:

- president
- athletic director
- board chair

And now they're standing up a brand-new CEO role next to the AD.

Four powerful seats. All at once.

Hokies, how are we feeling about all this??

[Andrew Dunlap @andrewdunlap]

George Washington's single largest act of philanthropy is still funding student tuition in 2026.

In 1796, he gave 100 shares of James River Canal stock to a struggling academy in Virginia. Worth $20,000 then. The largest donation to any school in America up to that point. The trustees renamed the school Washington Academy in gratitude. We know it today as Washington and Lee.

The stock is still in the endowment. Every student's tuition is partially underwritten by a check George Washington wrote in his second term as president.

And the school it built has produced:

- A Supreme Court Justice
- A Secretary of the Navy
- A Pulitzer Prize winner who invented New Journalism
- A Virginia governor who desegregated the public schools
- A painter with permanent collections at the Louvre and MoMA
- One of the highest per-capita pipelines of federal judges in the country

1,860 undergrads and older than the country.

One gift in 1796, still funding tuition in 2026.

That's what long-term thinking actually looks like. And it's the whole idea behind permanent capital.

[Andrew Dunlap @andrewdunlap]

Virginia spent millions last year attracting new businesses.

We celebrated every announcement. We posted pictures of every ribbon cutting. We talked about every job that would be created at the top of the funnel.

Meanwhile, hundreds of Virginia businesses sold to out-of-state buyers. Hundreds of founders aged out. Hundreds of companies quietly left.

Nobody tracked that.

Bringing in a new company that creates 50 jobs costs incentives, marketing, site prep, tax abatements, infrastructure, and years of relationship-building. Convincing an existing 100-person employer not to leave costs so much less.

One of those is 5 to 10 times cheaper. Guess which one gets 95% of the attention.

Attracting is glamorous. Retention is boring. So we pour resources into the top of the funnel and ignore the hole in the bottom.

But here's the thing about leaky buckets. You can fill them as fast as you want. You're still losing.

Growing a Virginia company from $10M to $11M is easier than finding a company/startup that will ever bring $1M. We know this. Every operator knows this. The easy wins are the businesses already here.

We just don't fight for them.

[Andrew Dunlap @andrewdunlap]

Virginia Tech just fired the athletic director job in half.

On June 1, the Board votes to create Hokie Ventures, LLC, a separate entity with its own CEO, independent board, and $15.2M of capital. The AD keeps coaching the coaches while the CEO chases the sponsorships and media rights that now define modern college athletics.

The work that built an institution is rarely the work that scales it, and at some point you either split the job or accept the ceiling.

Clemson moved first. Now Tech.

The schools that figure this out early will compound for a decade.

[Andrew Dunlap @andrewdunlap]

"Buy local" might be the worst-branded good idea in America.

It sounds like a bumper sticker, a farmers market thing, or a tote bag virtue. So people nod, feel mildly guilty, and click Amazon anyway.

Here's what buying local actually is, as the most self-interested thing you can do:

When you buy from a Virginia company, the owner pays Virginia taxes that fund your roads and your kid's school. They bank with a Virginia bank that lends to your neighbor's business. They hire Virginia people who spend their paycheck at the Virginia restaurant down the street from you. They sponsor your daughter's lacrosse team.

When you buy from an out-of-state alternative, the margin leaves, goes to a shareholder in California, a fund in New York, a holding company in Delaware.

It does not come back.

A dollar spent locally bounces around through your ecosystem four, five, six times before it leaves. A dollar spent nationally leaves on the first bounce.

Multiply that across a region, across a decade. That is the difference between a town that compounds and a town that gets hollowed out.

This is not charity.
It is not sentiment.
It is not a tote bag.

It is you, quietly building the place your kids will inherit.

[Andrew Dunlap @andrewdunlap]

Virginia Beach taxpayers just got robbed.

The Cavalier. The Marriott. The Embassy Suites. All are selling to a private equity firm in Connecticut.

Taxpayers helped pay to renovate them. $24.5M in public financing actually. Another $18M in tax rebates, grants, and infrastructure. A public-private partnership the city sold as civic pride and a model for Virginia.

Now the whole package gets flipped north. The subsidy travels with the asset, and Connecticut collects the cash flow.

This is the deal Virginia keeps making. We take the risk. Someone else takes the return.

82% of Virginia businesses that sell go to out-of-state buyers. Now our landmarks are on the same conveyor belt.

We built Harbor to break it.

Permanent capital. Virginia owners. Businesses and landmarks that stay here because the people who own them live here.

Build it here. Own it here. Keep it here.

https://t.co/K4pRMcalbK

[Andrew Dunlap @andrewdunlap]

Hey UVA fans, you should want James Franklin to win a lot at Virginia Tech. To build a dynasty.

Virginia needs it.

A huge share of Virginia's tourism runs through the western part of the state.

- A home game at Lane Stadium fills hotels.
- It fills restaurants.
- It fills wineries.
- It fills rentals.
- It fills Virginia airports.

When the Hokies are nationally relevant, ESPN points a camera at Virginia for three hours and the whole state benefits.

Same thing works in reverse. When UVA wins, Virginia wins. When JMU wins, ODU wins, George Mason wins, the whole state wins.

Virginia's economy isn't one city. It's a bunch of connected economies that all need their own reason to put visitors on a plane or in a car.

College football is one of the biggest reasons we have.

You can hate the other teams on that one Saturday you play them. The rest of the year, every Virginia institution doing well is good for every Virginian.

[Andrew Dunlap @andrewdunlap]

51% of our college graduates leave Virginia within 10 years.
82% of our businesses sold last year went to out-of-state buyers.

These numbers aren't coincidental.
Young Virginians look around and see companies run from New York and Atlanta.
They see career ladders that lead elsewhere.

So they follow the ownership.

This isn't about Virginia lacking opportunity.
It's about ownership gravity, that leads to less opportunity for talent.

Value flows where ownership sits.

We train them.
We educate them.
Then we lose them...Because we already lost the businesses they might have led.

When Virginia businesses stay Virginia-owned, career paths stay rooted here.

More here: https://t.co/pi5U1AIhdE