Who is having trouble getting a Visa exactly? Just curious, trying to separate fact from hysteria
Me
YC will hold interviews in Vancouver for founders who can’t get US visas
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Re: YC will hold interviews in Vancouver for founders who can’t get US visas
#32As much as the tech world wants to "disrupt" they want to stay "cozy" in their California corner with their known business environment and English speaking places and their way of doing things.
To which I can assume there is cultural shock even when they go to the East Coast
But the world is big and not everything that happens appears on HN (or even on English speaking media).
Re: YC will hold interviews in Vancouver for founders who can’t get US visas
#33Mexico could capitalize on this as well. Guadalajara is a mini tech hub.
I visited Guadalajara for a few days and it was great! People were extremely friendly and tolerant of my 100 word spanish vocabulary. Housing and living is very reasonable, food is quite cheap, the weather is mild and the city is lively, if a bit spread out. I didn't feel more unsafe than I did in Istanbul. I didn't get a chance to see the tech stuff but there were a bunch of companies and also a reasonably lively meetup scene too!
Re: YC will hold interviews in Vancouver for founders who can’t get US visas
#34Why not just open a EU branch?
Participate remotely - bad idea :(
Re: YC will hold interviews in Vancouver for founders who can’t get US visas
#35May be this is a dumb question, I will ask it anyway, Tijuana Mexico is about 500 miles from Bay Area, where as Vancouver Canada is 1000 miles. Que Canada?
My obvious thought: YCombinator is in English (based on what I've seen, at least as their primary language) and Canada is an English speaking country.
Also a homicide rate of 2/100k vs 40 might be indicative of other problems one city may have that the other doesn't.
Re: YC will hold interviews in Vancouver for founders who can’t get US visas
#36This is great news for both Canadian and international founders. Is the next step having an additional Canadian office for those that can't get US visas? Canada has a generous startup visa for founders coming from other countries [0]. [0] http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/immigrate/business/start-up/
Alright, now if I work like a dog and make a successful company (chances of this are in the low single digit %), after I hand back the YC cut I can get me a small family home in Vancouver that a regular factory worker could afford 30 years back!
If you're complaining about the price of Vancouver real estate, it hardly makes sense in this context where San Francisco is the alternative.
Re: YC will hold interviews in Vancouver for founders who can’t get US visas
#37"Move fast and break things" indeed :-/ https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/839608371686801410
For context, the full quote from the article is:
“Trump is the Silicon Valley candidate in every way except that the ideology is flipped,” said Sam Altman, a prominent technology leader, chief executive of Y Combinator and a major Hillary Clinton donor. “He’s an outsider. He took on a system he thought was broken and then disregarded the rules, he got to know his users well and tested his product early and iterated rapidly. That’s the start-up playbook. That’s exactly what we tell our start-ups to do.”
Re: YC will hold interviews in Vancouver for founders who can’t get US visas
#38"Move fast and break things" indeed :-/ https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/839608371686801410
That Altman quote seems terribly out of context. I haven't found a full reference yet, but it seems to me that he's not endorsing Trump's policies, he's explainging that Trump won because he (perhaps accidentally) appropriated the "startup playbook".
Re: YC will hold interviews in Vancouver for founders who can’t get US visas
#39Who is having trouble getting a Visa exactly? Just curious, trying to separate fact from hysteria
Nationals of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, or Yemen that do not currently hold dual nationality with another country, an existing visa, or another document permitting entry. No hysteria there.
Re: YC will hold interviews in Vancouver for founders who can’t get US visas
#40The lead the US has had in science/engineering/technology over the past 70+ years is in no small part due to the massive brain drain from Europe, and the rest of the world, due to fascist regimes.
If the US's new shiny fascist regime keeps progressing at this pace, you can bet that things will reverse quickly. Good bye, world leading startups, nobel prizes, top universities, etc. These things can happen faster than one tends to think.
The best thing countries like China could do right now is heavily open up to English, and fund things such as foreign PhD students. Everyone is fighting to get into Harvard and MIT right now, but a half decade of Trump policies could have drastic consequences a few decades down the line and give us a very different world.
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Edit: some followup to this comment further below https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13831085
People also seem to get stuck on "China" in my comment. If that makes you unhappy, replace that word with Brazil, Japan, Singapore, Estonia, whatever you want... the point is, viewed under the "startup lens", this new administration makes the dominance of the US in STEM/entrepreneurship ripe for disruption by a more nimble, flexible entity.