Seattle CEO announces he is stepping down after being charged with misdemeanor assault
A Seattle CEO once hailed for cutting his salary to raise the wages of all his employees has stepped down amid misdemeanor assault and reckless driving charges.
Dan Price, 38, announced on Wednesday that he is resigning from Gravity Payments, the credit card processing company he founded back in 2004 at the age of 19.
‘My No. 1 priority is for our employees to work for the best company in the world, but my presence has become a distraction here,’ he wrote in an email to employees, which he shared on Twitter.
‘I also need to step aside from these duties to focus full time on fighting false accusations made against me,’ Price added, noting: ‘I’m not going anywhere.’
The CEO has been accused of trying to force a woman to kiss him following a business dinner in January.
The allegations follow similar complaints by his ex-wife who said in a TED Talk that he would waterboard her.
Price pleaded not guilty to the accusations in May, and the case is now ongoing.
Dan Price, 38, announced on Wednesday he is stepping down from Gravity Payments, the company he founded in 2004 at the age of 19
Court documents obtained by the Seattle Times say the 26-year-old woman called Seattle police on January 24, saying she met Price at a restaurant on Capitol Hill four days earlier.
The two had communicated on Instagram about work, and the woman said she reached out to Price to discuss ‘professional matters.’
But Seattle prosecutors say Price instead cornered the woman in his Tesla after dinner, attempted to kiss her and then grabbed her by the throat when she refused.
The woman claims Price then drove her to a North Seattle parking lot, where he proceeded to drive ‘doughnuts’ with her in the car.
Company executives now say they thought it would be in the best interest for Price to step down amid the allegations.
‘The company supports [Price’s] decision to step aside,’ COO Tammi Kroll said in a statement. She is now set to take over the company, saying: ‘I am grateful to lead Gravity through this new chapter.’
He said in an email to employees his ‘presence has become a distraction here’ amid allegations he forced a woman to kiss him after a business dinner in January. He has been charged with misdemeanor assault and reckless driving as a result of the encounter
Price first founded Gravity Payments in 2004, using seed money from his older brother Lucas to build out the startup in his dorm room at Seattle Pacific University.
He has said he got the idea for the credit card processing company while playing in a rock band at a coffee shop in his hometown outside Boise, Idaho, where the coffee shop owner would often complain about how much she had to pay for credit card processing fees.
Over the years, Price made a name for himself in the Seattle business community, and by April 2015, he earned national headlines when he announced he was cutting his roughly $1 million salary to $70,000.
He said he would then use the company profits to ensure that every employee would earn at least that much within three years.
That amounted to a 46 percent jump from Gravity Payment’s average annual salary of $48,000 at the time.
About 70 employees got raises as a result, with 30 doubling seeing their salaries double, CBS News reports.
Price said in follow-up interviews that he came up with the idea after reading a study showing that extra income improved the happiness of people who earn less than $75,000 a year.
‘It’s not about making money; it’s about making a difference,’ he told the TODAY Show in one of his many interviews after the big announcement.
He also told ABC News that he did not need the extra money, saying: ‘I’m a big believer in less: The more you have, sometimes the more complicated your life gets.’
The company now pays a minimum wage of $80,000 to all employees, and executives announced earlier this year they would give employees a $10,000 raise.
As a result, Gravity Payments now receives over 300 applications per job opening, the Seattle Times reports, and Price has bragged that he has never had to lay off a worker.
Meanwhile, the company serves over 13,000 merchants, helping them to avoid fees and simplifying credit card processing at the point of sale. It also helps them with mobile and ecommerce payments, according to the Seattle Times.
It markets itself as a service for ‘the little gal or guy who believes in the American Dream and is willing to work to chase it.’
Price made a name for himself when he announced in 2015 he was cutting his $1.1 million salary to boost all of his employees wages up to $70,000
In follow-up interviews, he said he got the idea after reading a study showing that extra income improved the happiness of people who earn less than $75,000 a year. He is pictured here with NBC anchorman Lester Holt
But behind the scenes, Price has faced some backlash over the years.
In fact just about two weeks after he announced he was giving all of his employees raises, he was sued by his brother Lucas, who owned a 30 percent share of the company at the time.
Lucas had argued his brother was overpaying himself and mismanaging the company, while Price insinuated Lucas was upset about his announcement.
But according to Bloomberg, Price’s salary was atypical for a company of its size, as it is required to pass on most of its revenue to credit card networks and issuers.
At similar companies, Bloomberg reports, executives were earning about $400,000 a year — not anywhere close to the $1.1 million Price was taking in.
Yet, Bloomberg reports, Price was able to afford a $900,000 home with a pool in Seattle, a rarity for the area.
Attorneys representing Lucas told Bloomberg he had been overpaying himself for years, and said the lawsuit was the culmination of ‘years’ of efforts to resolve Lucas’s concerns.
They said they filed the lawsuit before Price announced he was slashing his salary.
Still, a King County judge ultimately ruled that Price had not violated Lucas’ rights as a minority shareholder.
Price has been accused, though, of misusing funds to inflate his salary. He is pictured here on the cover of Entrepreneur following his big announcement in April 2015
And months after Price’s big announcement, Price was accused of abusing his ex-wife Kristie Lewellyn, who had by then changed her name to Kristie Colon.
The two were married in 2005, one year before Price bought out his brother to become CEO of the company.
Then on October 28, 2015, Kristie gave a TEDx Talk at the University of Kentucky, where she spoke about the power of writing to overcome trauma.
Bloomberg reports that she read from a journal entry she said she wrote in May 2006 about her then-husband, without naming Price.
She read: ‘He got mad at me for ignoring him and grabbed me and shook me again. He also threw me to the ground and got on top of me.
‘He started punching me in the stomach and slapped me across the face. I was shaking so bad.’
Later on in the TEDx Talk, she recounted how she once locked herself in a car ‘afraid he was going to body-slam me into the ground again or waterboard me in our upstairs bathroom like he had done before.’
In the aftermath, Price told Bloomberg: ‘The events that you described never happened.’
Still, as of last summer, the Seattle Times reports, there were flyers spotted around Gravity Payments headquarters that read: ‘Have you been abused by Dan Price?
‘We hear you. We believe you. We support you.’
