Hey - This is Dave, the http://www.shopobot.com/ founder from the article. Yup, you're basically right. your points A - D are pretty much spot on.

Except I don't really blame either party for what they're trying to do...
-- California wants sales tax $, that makes sense.
-- Amazon (and other online stores) had a choice of collecting sales tax, or stopping working with their CA affiliates. Seems like an easy choice to me!

So the annoying thing is that this all played out slowly and publicly.. with the law being passed, then the predictable Amazon reaction, then the negotiated agreement last week. For us, it just made more sense to move somewhere with less uncertainty while we were small, instead of hiring people in CA and then having to possible relocate at some time in the future. So we just moved to put the issue behind us.

Not so sure I'd say we're "leaching" off our investors though.. :) Besides our investors are from all over, so it's not really relevant in our case. We chose to start in CA because we got into an awesome accelerator called AngelPad, and that really help get us going. Now that we're up and running and funded, it was a fine time to move to Seattle.

No - it was weirder than that...
basically..
1) online stores like Amazon would prefer not to collect sales tax. And they've been able to do that because they're not a "California company"
2) California would love to get some more tax revenue. So they made a law saying: if you work with a CA affiliate, that's basically the same thing as being a CA company.

So Amazon had a choice.. start collecting sales tax in CA, or stop working with CA affiliates. The choice was pretty easy for them! But for us (shopobot) that meant that we had to leave the state to keep working with the online stores. It wasn't the end of the world, but it was annoying.

Hey! - one of the http://shopobot.com/ founders here.. We chose Seattle because we've both lived there before, and we like it, and it has a pretty good startup scene. I actually just moved to SF from Seattle to when we started the startup, so it was a quick return home for me.

btw, this is the first time we've been on /. so I was excited about having the servers melt.. but unfortunately most people just went to the blog on not our site. Maybe next time :)

Hi everyone - This is Dave, one of the http://www.shopobot.com/ founders! Let me know if you have any questions.. Happy to chat! (you can also contact me at davem at shopobot.com)