9 Questions for the Spanberger Administration and the 2026 General Assembly
Got Answers?
Todd Stottlemyer’s address to Virginia FREE’s Annual Luncheon:
As some of you are aware, John Backus, an outstanding business and community leader, recently passed away unexpectedly. John started on the West Coast in Silicon Valley before making Virginia his home. He was one of the commonwealth’s most successful venture capitalists and technology leaders, and he cared deeply about our state and his community.
John had an uncanny ability to see around corners, anticipate disruptive change, and then meet the moment with innovative and bold solutions. He was also a passionate believer in our free enterprise system.
John spoke often about what he characterized as virtuous and vicious economic cycles, and what was necessary to create and sustain the former. He believed strongly that investments in education and infrastructure were foundational to creating and sustaining economic success. As a venture capitalist, he invested in people and ideas, and he knew that capital was critical to the growth of every business. These were the key ingredients for John’s virtuous economic cycle.
For much of Virginia’s recent history, federal spending and investment have been an important part of Virginia’s virtuous economic cycle. In many ways, the federal government has been a very large and robust venture capital firm supporting federal workers, contractors, university research, and other federally funded programs, including spending on health care, transportation, and education. We now face a very different future.
This future will require Virginia’s private and public sectors to think differently, act boldly, and compete aggressively for talent, businesses, and investment. If John was with us today, here are some of the questions I believe he would ask us to consider:
How do we strengthen our ability to compete for talent, businesses looking to expand or relocate to Virginia, and private sector investment?
What actions and no regrets investments do we need to take and make now to ensure that we are the top state for talent and the best state for business?
What are the commonwealth’s competitive advantages? How do we leverage these? What are our competitive weaknesses? How do we mitigate these?
How do we ensure that future generations of Virginians are prepared to succeed in a dynamic and rapidly changing employment and labor market?
What is the brand we want to project for the state? While I enjoy “Virginia is for lovers,” we are much more than this.
How do we unleash the full innovation capabilities of Virginia’s private sector working in partnership with our public sector?
Are we prepared to harness the benefits from autonomous and agentic artificial intelligence, or AI?
What is our talent strategy to ensure that we have a skilled workforce capable of developing, deploying, and managing AI technologies across all our business sectors and across our state and local governments?
Finally, how do we make it less costly and easier to start, run, and grow a business in Virginia?