A (30:42)
for as long as the most talented, ambitious people from all over the world want to be here, we will probably always have a massive competitive advantage. But that requires a few things. It requires a, on a federal level, allowing immigration. Right. And letting people come here and not charging $100,000 for an H1B visa, which makes it very hard to. We've sponsored people in the past. I think it would be a lot harder now to do so. That's number one. And then number two is, you know, it has to feel clean and safe and well run. And if those two things are happening, it can work. But then number three, I guess would be people who come here have to feel like they could at least somewhat afford to live here. Right. And when we make housing so impossible to build, you know, you really start to make that impossible. So. And then if we were to raise income taxes, that would further drive more high income earners out of the state, more jobs out of the state, and further weaken our competitive positioning. So, and then the last thing would be, you know, we saw this a little bit in this qsbs. Did we talk about this on the air? I think we did a little. Maybe a little bit. So there was a proposal by Andrew Gonartis, who's been on this podcast before, who I like, who's a state senator, to decouple New York from federal qsbs tax treatment. QSBS is a provision in federal tax code that encourages people to invest in new companies, early stage startups. So the idea is that if you invested a company, it was 10 million, now it's 15 million, where the valuation of the company is below that, the gains that you have on that particular part of the investment are tax free. And New York, Ganard has proposed should decouple from that and charge people that and the reason why that was such an incredibly stupid idea was New York is already not a place that the tech sector has to be, right? We don't have an MIT or a Stanford that are churning out incredible engineers who want to stay local. Cornell Tech was supposed to be that maybe it will be that one day. It's not that right now the weather sucks, taxes are high, regulations are high, it's wildly expensive to live here. So if they had done that, the message they were sending to tech was, go fuck yourself. We don't want you here, we don't want your jobs. And you would be robbing New York of one of the biggest growth opportunities at the same time when other industries like finance, I think JP Morgan now has more jobs in than they do in New York City, right? So it died. We ran a quick campaign against it. It died a very quick death. But what it did sort of unveil was how little awareness there is by the city and state of the tech sector in New York, how little effort there is to try to grow that sector. So when Mike was mayor, he worked very hard to build a tech sector in New York. And you know, he's. He, that's who he is. He was a tech entrepreneur. That's where Bloomberg lp, you know, it doesn't feel like a startup anymore, and it's not, but it was, right? And de Blasio went the other way with it and did everything he could to say that he hated technology. Adams had the right kind of views on tech but was too inept to do anything with it. And so if New York does not make some effort to at least make the tech industry feel like they want them here, then our competitive position is going to become even worse. Because, you know, Miami beckons, Austin beckons, the taxes are a lot less, the regulations are a lot less. Housing in many ways becomes a lot cheaper because you aren't, you know, as we said with Houston, encumbered by so many absurd restrictions that make it impossible to build. And so New York, it's probably not vulnerable to the same type of death spiral that despite some growth recently that a Baltimore or Detroit, a Newark or Cleveland found because it's New York, but ultimately New York is to even just to serve and help poor people, is dependent on 1% of the population pays 50% of the taxes in New York City. And that 1% is the 1% that is the easiest to leave. Right? Everyone probably has homes already elsewhere and can pick up and move. And so I think that if we don't take this Seriously, it will grow worse. And I do worry that you have a mayor who clearly sees things the other way and a governor who I think has the right intentions. But I don't think she really understands what the tech sector is in New York or has done much in a, you know, she's done some stuff in a big way to get like microchip factories here and that's great. But it's not just about economic growth in upstate New York. It's got to be how do we grow the entire sector. And we haven't seen that.
