QSBS stands for Qualified Small Business Stock. At a high level, QSBS means founder's stock and stock bought early in a company's life.
Since 1993, the Federal Tax Code has had benefits for buying, owning, and selling QSBS. Currently, there is a full Federal Tax exclusion for the first $10mm of capital gains on QSBS.
Recently, the New York State Senate introduced a budget proposal in which NYS opts out of recognizing QSBS in its tax code. Historically, NYS has recognized the QSBS tax exclusion similarly to the Federal one.
There is a fair bit of misinformation and heat on Twitter about this and I thought I'd explain what is really going on.
Like the Federal government, there are three seats at the budget table in Albany. At this time, only the New York State Senate has taken this position on QSBS. The New York State Legislature, and most importantly, the Governor, have not taken a position on it yet.
So if you've read something on Twitter about QSBS and NYS, I recommend you relax and wait for all of this to pan out before making any rash decisions.
What you can do, if you are a NY founder or startup investor, is to sign onto Tech:NYC's letter to the Governor and the leaders of the Senate and Assembly. They will close signatures at noon ET today (Monday) so you need to act quickly if you want to sign it.
One of my favorite days of the year is the NYC Computer Science Opportunity Fair. The idea behind the CS Fair is pretty simple: Put students together with companies, universities, and organizations that care about technology and opportunity and let the conversations happen. The energy in the room is always incredible. The CS Fair has been going on for thirteen years now, and as a result, over 25,000 NYC public school students have been exposed to the opportunities that a career in tech in NYC offers.
Here is the 60 second video from last year so you can see what I mean.
This year's Fair will take place at the 168th Street Armory in Washington Heights on April 21st. We are expecting 2,400 high school students who will walk the track meeting engineers, founders, college representatives, and nonprofit leaders and learn about career paths and continued learning opportunities. More importantly, they will see how the coding and AI skills they are learning in their classrooms today can turn into real opportunities tomorrow.
That kind of exposure matters a lot. When students can see themselves in the field, it changes what they believe is possible.
New York City has made a big commitment to computer science and AI education in public schools over the past decade. The CS Fair is one of the places where you can really see the results of that effort.
If you are part of the NYC tech community, you should get involved. Become a sponsor. Host a booth. Send engineers. You can sign up on this form, or contact Jennifer, jennifer@gothamgives.org, at Gotham Gives to learn more.
Your team will leave inspired.
I always do.
Michael Dempsey has a great framing for the secret sauce in the founder/VC relationship. He calls it "vibe alignment" in this excellent and far-reaching post about where we are in the startup/VC world right now.
It is certainly possible and probably quite common to build a successful company with an investor syndicate you don't relate to and don't like. But it is not fun.
The rare thing is to build a successful company with an investor syndicate you love working with. I've had the pleasure of doing this many times in my career. It is what I seek out. It is the primary thing I like about VC and startups. It is what keeps me engaged after all these years.
When vibe alignment happens between a founding team and their investor group, it is magic. It makes it easier to correctly make those five to ten hard decisions that determine the trajectory of a company.
As Michael points out in his terrific and timely post, the institutional revolving door nature of VC right now makes finding vibe alignment harder and many founders just opt for the best financial deal. That's entirely rational behavior.
But it takes all of the fun out of it, unfortunately.