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Phil Mickelson and Tiger Woods are an example of each. Many others, some entrepreneurs who post on HN, hopped out of California before taking a capital gain.
by Ferrotin 4y ago
Phil Mickelson and Tiger Woods are an example of each. Many others, some entrepreneurs who post on HN, hopped out of California before taking a capital gain. I think that also might be why Amazon is in Washington, but possibly that was just sales tax and California’s large population.
- pyuser583 4y agoFor Amazon it was California’s sales tax.
- lotsofpulp 4y agoNot specifically California’s sales tax in and of itself, but the fact that California has a huge population that Amazon would have had to collect sales tax for. https://www.fastcompany.com/27309/whos-writing-book-web-business https://www.fastcompany.com/27309/whos-writing-book-web-busi... >You moved from New York to Seattle to start this business. Why? >It sounds counterintuitive, but physical location is very important for the success of a virtual business. We could have started Amazon.com anywhere. We chose Seattle because it met a rigorous set of criteria. It had to be a place with lots of technical talent. It had to be near a place with large numbers of books. It had to be a nice place to live — great people won’t work in places they don’t want to live. Finally, it had to be in a small state. In the mail-order business, you have to charge sales tax to customers who live in any state where you have a business presence. It made no sense for us to be in California or New York. Pretty genius to recognize the pricing advantage from people evading sales and use tax in the cutthroat retail business which was unable to be exploited as easily before the internet.
- pyuser583 4y agoThat was the exact quote I was thinking of! I recently listened to the Acquired podcasts 4 hour long episode on Amazon.