Seattle Turns Hostile to the Great Businesses It Made
Starbucks is moving jobs from Washington state to Tennessee, and it isn’t alone in looking elsewhere.
By Howard Schulz
"Washington state has been my home for more than four decades. I arrived in Seattle with dreams and ambition and ended up building Starbucks into a company known around the world. Many Pacific Northwesterners joined me in shaping the culture, benefits and brand of Starbucks—contributing not only to a business, but also the civic and entrepreneurial life of the area.
I am no longer a resident of Washington. My decision to leave had much to do with family choices and my stage of life. Still, I feel a responsibility to speak up about the business and job climate in a city and state that gave me so many opportunities.
Washington’s economic story over the past half century is extraordinary. Microsoft, Amazon, Costco and a host of other new companies transformed the state into a global center of technology, innovation and logistics. Entrepreneurs exported ideas worldwide. Capital flowed. Wages rose. Imported and homegrown talent flourished.
That ecosystem worked because risk‑taking was rewarded, growth was possible, and civic leadership—while imperfect—understood that private enterprise wasn’t the adversary of the public good. It was one engine for improving the public sphere.
That ecosystem is fractured today. Seattle and much of Washington face serious problems: chronic homelessness, disorder in core business districts, persistent budget deficits, declining public-school outcomes and a slowing technology hiring cycle. These challenges aren’t unique to the state—but Washington’s response to them is.
Seattle’s mayor, Katie Wilson, has chosen to cast business as a foil rather than a partner. Her socialist rhetoric vilifies employers, even while she continues to rely on them for revenue. She has encouraged residents who disagree with her policies to leave.
In the state capital, the Legislature and governor have confronted difficult fiscal trade-offs by emphasizing taxation rather than reform or performance management. The theory appears to be that prosperity can be mandated through redistribution rather than generated through growth.
Washington has a broken tax system. The reliance on sales taxes—10.55% in Seattle—is deeply regressive. The state needs to rewrite its tax code across the board in a way that ensures people and businesses alike pay their share.
But instead of reform, those in power have opted to increase the burden on businesses and successful entrepreneurs in ways that discourage them from growing within the state—at a moment when Washington’s economic situation is growing more fragile.
Microsoft and Amazon—once hiring engines—have slowed recruitment and reduced head counts as they race to build data-center capacity and compete globally. Starbucks recently announced it will shift hundreds of corporate roles to Tennessee.
These companies imported global talent at scale for decades, anchoring an interconnected system of suppliers and startups. As those businesses reduce their local role, Seattle has no clear answer to the question of what will provide the next set of jobs and revenue growth.
Cities and states don’t decline overnight. They drift when public safety, fiscal stability and economic vitality deteriorate together. Downtown vacancies reduce foot traffic. Declining foot traffic weakens small businesses. Employment falls. Revenue shrinks. Services erode. Confidence—something that’s hard to build and easy to lose—begins to evaporate.
Entrepreneurs are accustomed to accountability: If we fail to deliver value, we lose customers. If we misallocate capital, we absorb the loss. Government, too, should be judged by results, not intentions. In Washington, steadily increasing government spending hasn’t delivered commensurate results on a range of issues, from addressing homelessness and drug addiction to poor prospects for new high-school graduates.
Entrepreneurs take risks others won’t. We build before certainty exists. We hire before revenue is guaranteed. We invest locally, pay taxes and support civic institutions. When our companies succeed, entire regions benefit. America can’t afford to forget that.
Leaving doesn’t mean abandoning. My family foundation remains invested in Washington’s future, seeking to help the next generation achieve economic mobility and prosperity. But that future is linked to economic growth and job creation. Across the country, other states are competing for capital and talent by simplifying regulation, reforming tax systems and investing in workforce development. One important initiative comes from the bipartisan National Governors Association, helping states craft pro-entrepreneurship policies.
I hope Washington’s leaders will embrace these policies and forge a new compact—one grounded in job creation, sensible taxation and accountable public spending. Washington once embodied the future of the U.S. economy, and it can again. But the current government needs to learn that future entrepreneurs won’t be attracted by ineffective public systems, especially when joined with policy and political rhetoric that demonize businesses.
Mr. Schultz is a former CEO and chairman emeritus of Starbucks."

Re https://www.latent.space/p/unsupervised-learning-2026
The amazing episode that inspired this article.
@swyx @jacobeffron

this article is long but worth chewing on. tldr:
last week garry merged 14 PRs in 72 hours. 29,000 new lines. he calls this a ratchet: every agent coding session ships tests, docs, and evals alongside the code. each change comes out more solid than the last. the pattern lives in gstack.
i've been seeing this in a few places lately. three weeks ago steipete (behind openclaw) ran 50 codex in parallel and closed 4000 issues. open-sourced it as clawsweeper. same shape, basically.
side by side: agents are loops, humans are events. humans get tired, get distracted, forget. agents don't. or really, the records they leave don't. the systems that actually compound in the agent era are all this shape: every loop ratchets forward one notch, and nobody knows where it stops.
result: faster, more reliable, complexity ceiling pushed up.
if the article felt too technical: just add "and write tests too" to every codex prompt. been doing it this week, the project feels totally different.
Garry Tan: http://x.com/i/article/2054062662225440768

Trump had one of his worst mental health episodes yet last night, posting over 55 times in 3 hours. Here is the list:
10:15 PM - Accuses Obama of attempting a coup in 2016
10:15 PM - Says Obama worked with CIA to overthrow Trump
10:15 PM - Reposts tweet saying Obama is a “traitor” and that he should be arrested
10:22 PM - Attacks dominion voting systems for 2020 election saying they switched votes
10:22 PM - Says Fulton County, GA had their 2020 fraud exposed (there was none)
10:23 PM - Accuses Obama of personally making $120 million from Obamacare (wtf?)
10:23 PM - Cites quack lawyer Sidney Powell on the 2020 election
10:24 PM - Posts fake JFK Jr account that says Obama wiretapped Trump Tower
10:27 PM - Demands Senator Mark Kelly resign
10:29 PM - Claims neither Biden nor Harris were in charge of the Biden admin
10:29 PM - Attacks Fulton County, GA again
10:29 PM - Posts Fox News clip of Rep Ro Khanna
10:30 PM - Demands Jack Smith be arrested
10:30 PM - Accuses Obama, Clinton, and Comey of treason
10:39 PM - Reposts a tweet from a MAGA account saying they have secret intel proving Clinton and Obama committed crimes
10:39 PM - Reposts a MAGA tweet saying Hillary Clinton should be sent to Haiti
10:40 PM - Says the DOJ is “working hard” to arrest his enemies for treason
10:40 PM - Reposts a tweet attacking his own DOJ and Todd Blanche for no arrests of political enemies
10:40 PM - Posts a TikTok video of people stealing from a convenience store
10:41 PM - Posts a TikTok of someone taking a Door Dash order
10:41 PM - accuses Obama, John Brennan, and Clinton of sedition and treason again
10:42 PM - Posts a video of a man on CCTV footage knocking over food a waiter was carrying
10:47 PM - Calls Obama the “most DEMONIC FORCE” in American politics
10:47 PM - Posts a tweet from Mike Flynn saying 2020 election wasn’t fair
10:49 PM - Attacks Dominion again claiming they stole the 2020 election (it wasn’t)
10:51 PM - Reposts a fake Charlie Kirk account that claimed Obama blocked Hillary Clinton from being prosecuted
10:53 PM - Claims Obama was part of Hillary Clinton’s emails in some way
11:28 PM - Claims a senior Democrat just testified under oath that Senator Adam Schiff leaked classified information
1:13 AM - Attacks the New York Times for reporting on the reflecting pool
This man is clearly not well.

A friend's startup is growing at 93% a month. I pointed out that her net worth is also growing at 93% a month, and that she can thus feel, in her own life, the falsity of politicians' claim that you have to do bad things to get rich. They're just focusing on making users happy.

Trump campaigned on bringing down the cost of living "starting on day one," and then: started a trade war; deported much of the farm workforce, bombed Iran, allowed healthcare subsidies to expire, cut food assistance, ran an interest-rate boosting deficit, and attacked fed independence.

We've raised a $50M Series B to keep making everyday calls extraordinary.
After 1,000,000,000 calls and 10x enterprise ARR growth, Vapi's platform approach to voice agents is becoming the standard for businesses building human interfaces.

Very important lesson for Blue Cities here: Every change Lurie has made has been opposed by screaming, bullying activists -- ignoring them has been the path to policy success and extremely high popularity. @skaushik100
https://www.sfchronicle.com/election/article/sf-voters-daniel-lurie-22244870.php

Superlog (@superlogYC) is the observability tool you're not supposed to open: a wizard sets up your logs, traces, alerts, and dashboards daily, and an agent investigates incidents and posts one mergeable PR per issue into Slack.
Sign up here: https://superlog.sh/
Congrats on the launch, @nicolomagnante and @arseniycodes!
https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/QKt-superlog-the-self-installing-observability-tool-that-fixes-your-bugs

Fast mode for Claude Opus 4.7 is now available in research preview on the API and in Claude Code.

What actually is GBrain?
(Y Combinator CEO's personal agent brain)
Every agent memory tool you've seen solves a simple problem: store facts, retrieve facts.
GBrain solves a different one. It gives your agent a knowledge system that wires itself, enriches itself, and compounds while you're not even using it.
Here's what makes it fundamentally different from Mem0, Zep, LangMem, or a CLAUDE.md file.
The standard approach to agent memory is vector-based. Your agent stores memories as embeddings, retrieves them by semantic similarity, and that's the loop. Some tools add a knowledge graph on top.
GBrain flips the model entirely. The source of truth is a folder of markdown files. One page per person, one page per company, one page per concept. Every page follows the same two-part structure:
𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗶𝗹𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗿𝘂𝘁𝗵 on top: your current best understanding, rewritten as new evidence arrives
𝗧𝗶𝗺𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗲 on the bottom: an append-only evidence trail that never gets edited
This is not a vector store with a markdown export. The markdown IS the system of record. You can open it in VS Code, edit it by hand, and 𝗴𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝘀𝘆𝗻𝗰 picks up the changes.
Now the part that makes this compound.
Every time a page is written, GBrain extracts entity references and creates typed relationship links: 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝘀_𝗮𝘁, 𝗶𝗻𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗱_𝗶𝗻, 𝗳𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗱, 𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗱, 𝗮𝗱𝘃𝗶𝘀𝗲𝘀. All deterministic, all regex-based, zero LLM calls.
The knowledge graph wires itself on every single write, without spending tokens.
So when you ask "who works at Acme AI?" or "what has Bob invested in this quarter?", the agent walks the graph instead of relying on vector similarity (which struggles with relational queries like these).
Search layers ~20 deterministic techniques in concert: intent classification, multi-query expansion, vector search, keyword search, reciprocal rank fusion, cosine re-scoring, compiled-truth boosting, and backlink ranking. Each catches what the others miss.
But the real unlock is the compounding loop.
GBrain has a 𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗱𝗲𝘁𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗼𝗿 that fires on every message and captures entities in the background. Person mentioned once? They get a stub page. Three mentions across different sources? Web enrichment kicks in. After a meeting? Full pipeline.
The agent runs a 𝗱𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗺 𝗰𝘆𝗰𝗹𝗲 overnight: scans conversations, enriches missing entities, fixes broken citations, consolidates memory. You wake up and the brain is smarter than when you went to bed.
This is fundamentally different from memory systems that only store what you explicitly tell them to store.
Garry Tan (President and CEO of Y Combinator) built this to run his actual AI agents. It ships with 34 skills, runs on embedded PGLite (no server, ready in 2 seconds), and works as an MCP server for Claude Code, Cursor, and Windsurf.
GBrain: http://github.com/garrytan/gbrain
Garry Tan: http://x.com/i/article/2042922188924424198

It's so weird how difficult it is for the left to understand that all you have to do to decrease housing costs is to let people build more housing.
M. Nolan Gray 🥑: For 45 years, Berkeley built virtually no new housing. By the mid-2010s, it was the most expensive college town in America. Shortly thereafter, YIMBYs took over and kicked off a building boom. Today, nominal rents are below 2018 rates—remarkable progress on affordability.