Power to Immigrant Entrepreneurs

An interesting movement is gaining ground in the US entrepreneurial space, driven by a group of venture capitalists and entrepreneurs. Initially dubbed the ‘Startup Founder Visa Movement‘, the initiative now has a home at StartupVisa.com. It hopes to change US government policy around the EB-5-Visa to allow entrepreneurs from other countries to get a visa for starting up in the US.

At present, the EB-5-Visa is available only to investors from other countries and requires a minimum investment of $1 million ($500,000 in specific places that have a high unemployment rate) and the creation of 10 jobs. Advocates of the movement, among them Brad Feld, Paul Graham and Mark Speiser, reckon that by allowing entrepreneurs to also avail of the visa, many more US jobs can be created in the long term.

Feld, co-founder and managing director of venture capital firm Foundry Group, started pushing the cause with missionary zeal after being exposed to the experiences of two startups from the TechStars portfolio. TechStars is a mentorship-driven seed investment fund and Feld is one of the mentors there.

“I was hit squarely in the face with this over the summer.  Two of the ten TechStars Boulder teams were comprised of non-US founders – two from Canada and two from the UK.  Both lived in Boulder for the summer and want to relocate here and build their businesses in the US (and – specifically – in Boulder).  Over the summer we struggled to figure out ways to get them Visas – all of the proposed approaches were expensive, risky, and tiresome.  Both companies are still trying, but each are now seriously considering returning to their home countries to build their businesses.

I cannot come up with a single reason why this makes any sense from a US perspective.  These are young, talented entrepreneurs that have come out of a three month program with amazingly interesting startups.  They are in the final process of raising their first rounds of financing. Post financing they will be creating US based high tech jobs.  If they are successful, they will create a lot of jobs.  Plus, they are young so they will do this multiple times in their lifetime,” Feld wrote at Feld Thoughts on September 10. Read the rest of the post here.

Getting more non-US startups into the country does imply deal-flow for venture capitalists such as Feld. But more important than the volume is the quality of deal-flow. The US Silicon Valley’s legendary success with breeding some of the most iconic startups of our times owes much to immigrant entrepreneurs from developed and developing countries. Indians, for instance, can take a bow for a Sun Microsystems (Vinod Khosla) or a Sycamore Networks (Gururaj Deshpande) among many others.

Also, if the legislation does come through, it will help ease some of the tension around the protectionist rhetoric that has been emanating from US government quarters of late.

What’s most interesting about this movement is the collaboration between venture capitalists and entrepreneurs to create a powerful and united lobbying mechanism for legislative change. Makes sense because both stand to benefit immensely.

Hopefully, over time, we will see similar collaborative initiatives/movements take root in India.