VC and startups are not monolithic entities so I never understood the objective of these lists. Your stage, focus and partner-founder fit determine who is the best investor for *your* company
E.g.
> if I started a new <insert weird deep thing> company, my “tier 1” would be @BoostVC
> if I was building in NatSec my tier would be In-Q-Tel
> if I was Series A-ish consumer tech my tier 1 would be @a16z
Etc.
Pick an investor that fits you, not one others rate nebulously as “tier 1”
At @BoostVC:
We exist to accelerate the Sci-Fi future.
We do this by investing $500k as a first or early partner in "Default Optimist", "Default Movement" founders.
Our core business model is to invest $500k at sub-$10m valuations.
We are highest velocity in the category of NewBio right now, but we are generalists for world changing ideas.
Thank you.
@nunzi46 People will recoil at this but it's not hard to put a conservative value together with cash, rev, and comps.
If you invested at a 5 and they now have $8m cash on hand from SAFEs, there's a way to correctly mark it up.
Much of the anger and frustration over the creation of an income tax in Washington state can be explained as the breaking of a century-long social contract that many generations of Washingtonians came to trust and expect.
This social contract was so foundational that it was enshrined in our state's constitution - namely that taxation needs to be uniform and the state cannot target any group for higher rates of taxation.
This is not to say that social contracts cannot be changed, but there is a legal and proper mechanism for doing that: amend the state's constitution.
The Democrats did not choose that path because it is a very high bar to overcome (rightly so) and every time they had attempted this in the past, the people of Washington voted it down.
Instead, the Democrat legislature chose the path of double-dealing and disingenuousness. This occurred in a series of steps:
1. Pack the Supreme Court with judges who would rubber stamp unconstitutional taxes.
2. Pass an unconstitutional capital gains tax but claim that, unlike any other state or at the Federal level, such a tax is an "excise tax" rather than a tax on income, giving the Supreme Court the excuse it needed to rubber stamp this wolf in sheep's clothing.
3. The Supreme Court then upholds this tax, clearly violating the Constitution and opening the door for a full income tax.
4. Create an fully fledged income tax (with all the bureaucracy required to administer it) but cynically label it a "millionaire's tax" even though they rejected every provision to guarantee it would only apply to millionaires.
5. Call the passage of this tax a state emergency, even though it only becomes effective two years from now. What kind of "emergency" allows you to wait 2 years?
Answer: by classifying its passage an emergency, the Democrats purposefully prevented the possibility of a referendum of the people to reject the tax (as Washingtonians had done for a century). This get-what-you-want-no-matter-the-cost strategy is a deeply dishonest means of undermining the democratic process.
6. The Governor claims this tax makes life more "affordable" for Washingtonians but its passage provides almost no meaningful tax relief for the legion of other taxes that have ballooned under the Democrats (gas tax, sales tax, b&o tax etc). They did provide some sales tax relief on shampoo and hygiene products though. 🙄
So much has been lost to the whims of our politically extreme legislature in the last four years, but perhaps nothing so significant and painful as Washington's century-long social contract.
DEVELOPING: Starbucks founder Howard Schultz announces that his family is leaving Seattle for Florida the same day Democrats passed an income tax on Washington state
Starbucks corporate is moving to Nashville
The wealth exodus is underway. Democrats have killed WA's economy