Live data from Hacker News

Study: Immigrants Founded 51% of U.S. Billion-Dollar Startups

wsj.com

31–40 of 235 posts

Re: Study: Immigrants Founded 51% of U.S. Billion-Dollar Startups

#31

"These 44 companies, the study says, are collectively valued at $168 billion and create an average of roughly 760 jobs per company." Firstly, that's 33,000 jobs or about 0.0003% of the US workforce, so hardly the backbone of the economy. Secondly, the H1B program, the subject of the article, is not an immigration program but a guest worker program. Generally, H1B workers leave the country and don't go on to start com…

>Generally, H1B workers leave the country and don't go on to start companies.

Do you have any stats on this or is it just a gut feeling?

Re: Study: Immigrants Founded 51% of U.S. Billion-Dollar Startups

#32
post #21
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure H1B visas are relevant here? I would imagine EB-5 (investment) visas would be the more common route for upper class immigrant entrepreneurs coming to the US.

Elon Musk was an H1-B.

No, he was OPT, at least initially.

Re: Study: Immigrants Founded 51% of U.S. Billion-Dollar Startups

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because many of them came to the US to study because of being able to work here through the OPT/H1/GreenCard/citizen route. Same with many top professors, researchers and tech execs like Nadella, Gundotra, Pichai etc.And many people on this list too like the inventor of USB etc. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_Americans

The three people you listed are not known for founding billion dollar startups. They are known as employees of Google and Microsoft (unless you meant somebody else with the same last names as Google and Microsoft CEO and Google's former VP of engineering).

Alright. Let me list down some immigrants who came here on H1B visa.

1. Jyoti Bansal - Founder of AppDynamics The guy in the above mentioned article was on H1B.

2. Kevin Systrom - Cofounder of Instagram was on H1B visa.

3. Jay Scaler - Founder of ZScaler an unicorn, was on H1B visa

4. Vinod Khosla - Founder of Sun Microsystems and well known VC was on H1B visa initially

Will list down some more in some time.

Re: Study: Immigrants Founded 51% of U.S. Billion-Dollar Startups

#34
post #6

These are not the downtrodden masses. Immigrant does not mean poor. These are wealthy upper class people coming to the most logical place to create a successful technology company, because they can afford to do so. Poor people are usually stuck wherever they are. Investors in Silicon Valley care a lot about status and pedigree. A foreigner that can afford elite credentials is far more likely to get funding than a poo…

> These are not the downtrodden masses. A lot of them are, if not downtrodden, at the least unable to earn a wage in the labor markets that is commensurate with their skill set.

Isn't that the limitation of the current immigration system, rather than anything on the immigrants themselves?

Re: Study: Immigrants Founded 51% of U.S. Billion-Dollar Startups

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The three people you listed are not known for founding billion dollar startups. They are known as employees of Google and Microsoft (unless you meant somebody else with the same last names as Google and Microsoft CEO and Google's former VP of engineering).

Alright. Let me list down some immigrants who came here on H1B visa. 1. Jyoti Bansal - Founder of AppDynamics The guy in the above mentioned article was on H1B. 2. Kevin Systrom - Cofounder of Instagram was on H1B visa. 3. Jay Scaler - Founder of ZScaler an unicorn, was on H1B visa 4. Vinod Khosla - Founder of Sun Microsystems and well known VC was on H1B visa initially Will list down some more in some time.

> 2. Kevin Systrom - Cofounder of Instagram was on H1B visa.

I don't think that's correct.

Re: Study: Immigrants Founded 51% of U.S. Billion-Dollar Startups

#36
post #17
post #11

They could do with a startup founder visa really. Maybe allow people to hang out and launch companies for a year or 2 and allow conversion to a long term visa if they employ a few Americans. Bit like a relaxed version of the E2 visa. Edit - I read to the bottom of the article and see they tried to bring something like that in with the "EB-JOBS Act of 2015" which didn't get through the political system.

This already exists in the EB-5 visa[0] assuming you start with .5 million funding. You get to stay forever too. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EB-5_visa

The trouble is most startup founders don't have $500k lying around.

Re: Study: Immigrants Founded 51% of U.S. Billion-Dollar Startups

#37
post #9

It's no secret that the continuing economic dominance of the US is not due to a post-WW2 windfall or the unique capabilities of Americans, but more to the ability of the US to attract and retain the very best, and then subsequently give them unique opportunities. Few nativists are opposed to the best and the brightest (and the already-wealthy) coming to the US in very, very small numbers, but what they don't realize…

"few" ?

http://www.cnbc.com/id/100593528

"Yet when Americans are asked about raising or lowering the number of immigrants coming into the country, only a small portion favor higher immigration levels and a very sizable plurality favor lower levels. A 2006 study by the Pew Hispanic Center, for example, found that 40 percent of those surveyed said legal immigration should be reduced and just 17 percent favored an increase. (Apparently Pew stopped asking that particular question after 2006.)

This chart from Pew shows that as recently as 2012, 69 percent of those surveyed agree that "we should restrict and control people coming to live in our country more than we do now."

Americans are divided over immigration. The lobbyists in Washington? Not so much."

Re: Study: Immigrants Founded 51% of U.S. Billion-Dollar Startups

#38
1. Many want it to be true that it's an objectively good idea to allow more immigration, or for there to be a broad consensus that more immigration is objectively good, or for there to be more ammunition to conduct moral posturing upon the outgroup when the outgroup has negative valence about immigration, or maybe two or all three. (I don't particularly disagree, immigration is fine.)

2. One great way to accomplish all of those is to create an association between "immigrant" and "success" or "innovation" in people's minds.

3. People gloss over the difference between P(A|B) and P(B|A) all the time. If you can show that P(B|A) is surprisingly high, and there's sufficient motivation to do so, people will instead think something much more like "A and B are associated" than "A often implies B though not at all necessarily the converse".

4. So, just show that {thing you want people to have positive valence about} is overrepresented in {tiny set of things with positive valence}. This will probably be easy, since there are lots of tiny sets of things with positive valence.

This strategy is far more used in the negative case -- "people who do bad thing Y are often from group X, don't concern yourself with the base rate of bad thing Y among all members of group X" -- but either way it's very effective and very insidious.

Re: Study: Immigrants Founded 51% of U.S. Billion-Dollar Startups

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why does the U.S. need to depend on the ~80.000 odd first order immigrants per year to generate that amount of wealth. The U.S. doesn't need them - Silicon Valley was created by Americans. However, companies have tasted what mass immigration does to engineering salaries (stagnant since 2000) and labor mobility (almost none for H1B's) and are as addicted as heroin addicts.

>companies have tasted what mass immigration does to engineering salaries (stagnant since 2000) Do you happen to know if there were studies done to link these two?

This is basic supply and demand. Not everything needs a peer reviewed study to make a valid assumption.

Re: Study: Immigrants Founded 51% of U.S. Billion-Dollar Startups

#40
There aren't many Billion Dollar startups out there (44 as said in the article) so the apparently precise percentage (51%) is slightly misleading (base size is small so not so representative). If they had looked at, let's say, 500M startups, the actual figure would have been more telling.
Post reply on HN