Tim Draper is a man known for his bold ideas — ideas like, for example, divvying California up into six separate states.

At Vator Splash, a startup conference in Oakland on Tuesday, the venture capitalist put forth one such idea that did not go over so well: California, he said, needs to be divided into six separate states, because its current government is headed toward “slavery.”

“The government always used to work for us,” he said during an on-stage interview, according to the San Francisco Business Times. “Over the last 15 to 20 years, I feel like the government is saying, ‘You’re working for me.’ We’ve gone from, in effect, a very free country to one where it’s moving toward, I guess it’s slavery.

Draper, not one for mincing words, continued.

“When you work for your government, when your government forces you to do something, it’s slavery. We need to take it back.”

It is not clear, however, how creating six separate governments would solve the apparent slavery problem.

The VC today reached out to the Business Times to say he regretted “misusing the analogy of slavery.”

At the startup conference, Draper also said that his proposal to divide the state now has enough signatures to get the initiative on the 2014 or 2016 ballot.