I'm A Millionaire. Tax Me More.

Wealthy Canadians like me can afford to pay extra for the greater good

- By Avi Bryant Tech entrepreneur

EARLIER THIS YEAR, I was in the plush boardroom of the wealth-management division of a major Canadian bank. My investment manager wasn't happy. The strategy I'd recommended, she explained, could lead me to pay quite a bit more money to the CRA. "That's okay," I responded. "I'm comfortable paying more in taxes." She laughed nervously: "Well, this is the first time I've ever heard that."

I'm rich. At 30, I sold my small Canadian tech company, Dabble DB—an early online database tool—to Twitter. For the next decade, I worked in senior technical roles at Silicon Valley startups, sometimes in person but mostly remotely from Galiano Island in B.C. I retired at 40 with enough wealth to do pretty much anything I wanted for the rest of my life. When I confided my financial status to a friend from high school, she looked puzzled. "I'm sure you're good at what you do," she said, "but why would they pay you that much? It's not like you're a basketball star." The truth is, I got lucky. After leaving Twitter, I was an early hire at Stripe—at that time, a small, unknown payment-processing company. It's common for startups to pay their employees partly in stock options, so when Stripe unexpectedly grew to hundreds of times its initial size, my equity grew in value along with it.