What about the opposite question. Do startups need to be in the US to be successful? And if so why? I'm sure there are non-US originated webapps that are popular in the US, but it seems the opposite tends to happen more often (Google, Facebook, etc etc...). Given that you can host your web app on EC2 from anywhere in the world with an internet connection as easily as from the US, what then are the barriers? My guess is that it is actually mostly cultural. If I write a webapp I am more comfortable knowing the target audience well. If it is a cultural barrier, then maybe the foreign founders don't really gain much from being in the US unless they are here to absorb the culture?
The Founder Visa
71–80 of 160 posts
Re: The Founder Visa
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably true when you look 4-5 years into the future and some of these seed companies start growing out into real, profitable, sustainable businesses.
Can you point to an example where a politician has received unequivocal credit or blame for something he or she did 4-5 years ago? It often seems that the look-back period is only about two weeks. The enormous cost of Sarbanes-Oxley to US competitiveness doesn't seem to have adversely impacted the careers of Sarbanes, Oxley, or the numerous other legislators who voted to enact the regulation.
The funny things is polititions who try to take credit for truly inovative ideas get laughed at: "Creating the Internet." But, those who find creative ways to waste money in their district can gain long term support.
Stranger still is the ability for politicians to take credit for bad / poorly implemented ideas that sound good: "No child left behind."
Re: The Founder Visa
#73Its a fine plan. If I were your congressman, I would support the bill ;).
But if you think the U.S. is already tapped out of top entrepreneurs, your not looking hard enough.
What would the costs be to enable those already in America? Things like school loan deferment and establishing incubation investment vehicles in at least 10 other cities could enable at least 10,000 Americans. Sure that costs something. But if you think it would be cheap to oversee a special program for 10,000 "entrepreneur visas" a year, then you haven't spent much time at immigration offices ;).
Re: The Founder Visa
#74This line made me smile: I think this would have such a visible effect on the economy that it would make the legislator who introduced the bill famous. It reminded me of "Law 13" of "The 48 Laws of Power": uncover something in your request... that will benefit him, and emphasize it out of all proportion. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=555691
A risk might be that if even one Al Qaeda terrorist gets in under this program, then the whole program will be shut down, and the sponsoring member of Congress's name will be infamous forever after.
There would probably have to be some monitoring that visa recipients are actually engaging in start-up activities; in which case there shouldn't be time for any terrorism...
Re: The Founder Visa
#75Currently, how difficult is it to get overseas founders into existing startup programs such as YC, TechStars etc? Is YC, for instance, turning down foreign applicants due to visa restrictions? If not, I don't see a problem.
Re: The Founder Visa
#76How would the government decide who's a startup investor? The same way they decide what counts as a university for student visas. We'll establish our own accreditation procedure. This part scares me. Accreditation boards are a bug, not a feature. Perhaps, like pg's idea, they started out as well intentioned. But today, their primary purpose is to erect arbitrary barriers of entries, thus propping of the salaries of p…
That is a worry. It would have to be super transparent. Originally I proposed a straightforward algorithm for deciding: to use Erdos numbers with Ron Conway as the seed. I took this out because I thought it was better not to go into this level of detail in the essay, but I'd advocate using something like this to decide who was a startup investor.
By definition these 10,000 founders wouldn't be taking jobs from Americans: it could be part of the terms of the visa that they couldn't work for existing companies,
This is a good idea because the expected outcome of adding 10,000 new people to the "pool of workers" by existing companies would be to see an increase in unemployment claims (even though not all unemployed people would file).
So by adding 10,000 Founder Visas to the pool of workers and then tracking the rate of decrease (or increase) of unemployment, a metric of immigrant-based job-creation startup foo could probably be determined.
Re: The Founder Visa
#77There is a simple alternative – remove the stupid restrictions on H1B visas. The restriction that if you loose/quit your job that you have to be out of the country in 60 days is bad for three reasons. The first reason is that the employer knows his worker is dependent on him – he can thus get away with a lower salary, etc... The second reason it is bad is that you cannot quit and start a start-up – if you do not have…
This might be a strictly American "politically correct" interpretation, but I think your last sentence assumes that being Mexican and being an engineer is exclusive, which it obviously isn't.
Re: The Founder Visa
#78[deleted]
Re: The Founder Visa
#79I usually avoid politics, but since we now seem to have an administration that's open to suggestions, I'm going to risk making one If your goal is to persuade as many people as possible, insulting the previous administration and by extension those that voted for Bush is a bad start. I was already opposed to your idea before the second sentence, despite the fact that I'm an advocate of increased legal immigration.
I'm always curious when people say they advocate increasing immigration. Right now, the United States takes about 1.2 million immigrants legally into the country every year. Does this seem too low a number to you? If so, do you see a practical need for some kind of limit, or are you in favor of limitless immigration?
Re: The Founder Visa
#80Sorry, but I don't think that this makes much sense. INS already has their hands full, and it wouldn't be much fun for them to have to check up on thousands of startup founders to be sure that they're in fact running their business (1) viably, and (2) according to their agreed business plan. The system would be unbelievably easy to cheat. It also would be stupid easy to turn a "startup" into a money laundering scheme…
Wow, who up-votes this junk?
Let's see:
The INS has their hands full...
PG said: 10,000 people is a drop in the bucket by immigration standards
For comparison, there were 591,050 student and exchange visas granted in 2007 [1]. If the INS can handle checking up on individual students following educations via Universities, they can do the same with 1/200th the number of startups via investment firms.
The system would be unbelievably easy to cheat
Oh, how? And why is accreditation a viable solution for Universities, but not investors?
I really wish... but it just isn't practical
Give one shred of evidence aside from senseless pontification and I might consider it.