StartupCentral

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. Read the full story

Forbes reports that ace Silicon Valley venture capitalist Vinod Khosla is raising two new funds worth an aggregate $1 billion. One is a $250 million seed fund and the other, $750 million, is for later stage investments — read the report here. The report doesn’t say much about what exactly the two funds will invest in but, clean technology, which has been Khosla’s passion for most of this decade, is likely to be a big focus.

Khosla has been investing in startups from his own capital pool through Khosla Ventures for the last few years. In India, one of his early bets was SKS Microfinance, in which he led Small Industries Development Bank of India and others to invest Rs 11 crore ($2.5 million) in 2006. Khosla Ventures has a wide range in terms of investment ticket sizes (investment per company) from $100,000 to $20 million (or more) and particularly likes companies in the mobile, alternative energy and bio-refineries spaces. That should be a pretty good indicator of what Khosla’s new funds are going to invest in. No doubt that India will be on his radar. Read the full story