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August 18, 2008 07:04 AM UTC
11 Comments
Why the state should should place a higher priority on providing high-tech startups what they need more so than other businesses. Otherwise, its hard to tell the difference between this and “What global oil conglomerates need from the state.”
To be honest, things run pretty well as I said above. That’s why it never occured to me to write a post like this before. So view this as an FYI, but no, there is no compelling need to move helping high-tech startups to the top of the list.
On the flip side, I think most (all?) of the items above would be helpful to a lot of different industries.
It would be helpful to a lot of different startups.
That’s the biggest difference between this and global oil conglomerates. Allowing small business to better succeed keeps revenue in the state rather than sending it off to a corporation in New York or China.
High tech startups are generally clean, high-paying industries, where workers tend to make more than median wages. This is what every state wants to increase.
I would add an item to your list: most start-ups don’t want to stay start-ups. They want to grow, and you need a current, well-funded higher education system to support that kind of growth – not just for the primary jobs created, but for all of the secondary jobs.
Setting aside all your other ideas for the moment, there’s something the state can do.
Colorado businesses that ship to customers in-state have about a million different tax districts they have to collect taxes for. In order to accurately tabulate the tax, they pretty much have to have a ZIP+4-coded tax table, which the government does not provide. So small businesses have to spend a bunch of money on software and data, or they have to accept audits and adjustments and potential fines as the cost of doing business, or they have to overcollect, which is what most do.
I was talking about this on another thread. It’s total insanity, and it drove me to stop selling product directly to customers, finding it less troublesome and risky to pay a distributor instead.
Assuming all these tax districts are necessary (and I think there’s an argument for that), the state could set up an API that takes address and taxable sale amount as parameters and returns the taxes as results.
Something similar could be done on the federal level for interstate taxes making the process transparent without requiring a flat rate.
But a way to make the payments to that same single API rather than having to cut a check to 18 million different jurisdictions.
And for us it’s even worse than that – we have sold into 84 (I believe) different countries. There’s no way we can set up payment to each of them individually.
has legal jurisdiction to force you to collect sales tax and pay them directly. Generally taxes are levied as import tariffs and you pay that at the time of shipment, or the recipient pays it on delivery. My memory is hazy on that though because it’s been a few years since I’ve sold internationally.
It’s not like they can come after us here 🙂
And since are deliveries are all downloads over the internet, there’s no shipment or delivery for a country to levy against.
The thing is, the number of dollars of goods sold this way is substantial and increasing. So we will hit a point where the countries jointly come up with a way to tax these purchases. And that’s fair. But when they do – please keep it simple.
Of course, you’re a person of high integrity, so Brad didn’t pay you (LOL).
Seriously, it’s all good stuff you’re promoting in your post – at least from the high-tech point of view. I’d like to expand the thinking here to ensure some balanced perspective. Let’s start from the missed opportunities from both sides.
Public Policy Missed Opportunities – 2001-2006: Owens and his then forgettable State CTO (or whatever that lackey called himself) couldn’t get their act together to do something real to help the high-tech industry in 2001-2002 as “Colorado was burning (sic)” with forest fires. There was so much that could have been accomplished in those years instead of photo ops posing and letting the legislature deal with Guns, Gays, and God.
Private Industry Missed Opportunities – 2001-2006: During this same time, even the high-tech self-anointed VC clowns fell all over themselves refusing to “up their game” and selected instead to continue acting like little guilds/fiefdoms while Silicon Valley and other places worked towards recovery.
For example, David, if you were at the VC in Rockies conference in Beaver Creek in 2003, the Harvard University guest speaker laid out a blueprint about how the VC’s/private industry could do a better job of helping start ups by being less adversarial, quit being holier than though, work better with their state/local gov’ts, and ultimately become more professional with better shepherding and metrics. VC’s like Brad Feld and Catherine Merigold were polite to the Harvard speaker, but basically they ignored his advice.
Then Tech Stars came along (maybe something from that 2003 speech sunk in?). It was a good try, although it became, like American Idol, a farce despite the high PR value and good intentions. Of course CTEK is another joke. Start ups once had to pay up $3k to give a floor show with wine & cheese to potential angel investors with poor advanced vetting and support (in 2007, it’s my understanding that $3k presenting fee is gone for the Angels).
To balance it out, let’s then ask this question: What does the state/federal entities require from high-tech startups? Short answer: House-cleaning and re-arranging of priorities. The VC’s need to grow up and become more professional and less egoistical in working with the people who come up with these new business ideas. Take a page from Silicon Valley and the respectable re-born spirit along Sand Hill Road. The high-tech community needs to stop acting like Mr Trump’s “The Apprentice” or BBC America’s business plan competition and instead start fostering mutual development instead of funding stupid ideas and wasting investors precious resources.
It’s a two-way street betwen high-tech and government Therefore, if David marries his high-tech wish list with positive/dependable/respectable local business leadership, then infuse it with a comprehensive high-tech public policy, then I think we’ll get closer to making this a win-win.
David: keep up the quality posting from the high-tech arena and seriously think about applying pressure on your high-tech compatriots to do the same. Doing that will give us all a balanced win-win approach.
You’re right about CTEK – it was more of a leech on the startup community than anything else. It has changed but I don’t know if it provides anything of value.
There’s a new group in Boulder called the Boulder Innovation Center and while it’s main role seems to be to find jobs for it’s volunteers, it provides useful help at a very low price.
I think you’re right about how it would help if the VCs, angels, state all worked more cooperatively. But there is also great value in all of them trying different approaches as a single approach, if it’s poor, is worse than the present mess.
But finding places to cooperate – that would be good. And a lot of it is helping in non-financial ways. What has been gigantic for us is the advice I get – but I have some really good contacts. Many people don’t have that.
What also could be gigantic is entre into the CIOs of the large companies, & governmental agencies in the state. A lot of the startups (including mine) have a great product, but don’t have the salespeople that can get in to talk to those CIOs.
Note: Brad Feld was an advisor to my company but has no money in it.
But I don’t think Just Cause will harm our economy, business or state overall. The idea that this ballot initiative will somehow scare business away and cripple the economy is completely overblown. I think it’s one of those things that they want you to be afraid of that you shouldn’t be.