Billion Dollar Seattle Business Leaving for Austin, TX | -Here's Why | Seattle Real Estate Podcast

Join Sean Reynolds of the Seattle Real Estate Podcast as he discusses yet another big investment company moving out of Seattle, Washington to Austin, Texas.

Amid the chaos of Washington's economic shutdown, the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or Occupy Zone and proposed big business taxes by the Seattle city council, businesses are choosing to leave Washington and go elsewhere. Partly due to business but partly due to personal freedom choices as well.

Here are our highlights from a recent Wall Street Journal article:

I’m moving my business headquarters off the West Coast. We tried San Francisco. We tried the Seattle area. Both were wonderful in their own ways, especially in natural beauty and personal friendships. But both have become hostile to the principles and policies that enable people to live abundantly in the broadest sense.

That’s why my company is in the final stages of purchasing office space in Austin, Texas. By the end of the year, I hope to move dozens of employees to the Lone Star State and to be ready to hire hundreds more. While uprooting a big part of a billion-dollar company isn’t easy, the decision to move to Texas wasn’t hard. Our staff and their families will be able to flourish to a much greater extent.

Leaving the West Coast might seem strange for a company focused on tech ventures and related investments. It’s true that the company has benefited greatly from the larger pool of forward thinkers and industry disrupters in the tech hot spots of San Francisco and Seattle. But the best places to be in tech have now become some of the worst places to raise a family, practice a faith, or even think freely. This hurts my team and the business.

These areas are culturally diverse but increasingly monolithic in terms of ideology. In the past few weeks, radical protesters took over a portion of Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. The mood in the area was that this experiment in anarchy was acceptable and even praiseworthy. Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan even issued a statement commending the “First Amendment activities” of the occupiers.

The response to the Covid-19 pandemic has been similarly disheartening. The West Coast’s progressive policymakers imposed some of the nation’s most regressive lockdown measures. While their one-size-fits-all approach may have worked for those with flexible jobs and few other commitments, they utterly neglected the millions of employees who couldn’t work from home, the families that needed to get out of the house, and the religious believers who wanted nothing more than to worship. Those concerns were treated as secondary.

Even in normal times, San Francisco and Seattle go to great lengths to make life hard for families. Both cities, with governments dominated by crypto socialists, are notorious for enacting policies that raise the price of housing, drive out jobs, and punish innovative companies in ways that hurt workers. With the Seattle area as a whole becoming more radical on economics by the year, it seems foolish to hope that the situation will improve for my company’s workers and their families.

Perhaps my biggest concern is that the region’s political orthodoxy has left little room for religious belief. In both San Francisco and Seattle, many of our Christian and Muslim friends and employees have expressed concern that their deeply held views are being driven from the public square. They worry that stating their views publicly will lead to being shunned or attacked. It has been disheartening to learn how closed the most “open” minds can be.

I’ve talked with many entrepreneurs in California, Washington, and Oregon who have encountered similar issues. Most aren’t sure how to respond. Generally, the amount of tech talent and funding on the coast leads them to conclude that they have no choice but to stay put and stay silent.