Tell your Startup Visa story | Hacker News Reader

Tell your Startup Visa story

startuplessonslearned.com

41 pointsTechnophilis6 comments

I guess the low number of points for this post indicates that there are few on HN who are not citizens of the US, or at least few foreign startup founders here. I'm an international student in the US myself, wishing there was such a thing as the Startup Visa.

Paul Graham has an essay basically saying that a startup visa would be great: http://www.paulgraham.com/foundervisa.html

He should probably be informed of the startup visa drive mentioned in this article, given the following extract:

If you're a startup investor, and you support the goals of the Startup Visa proposal, we'd like you lend your name to our efforts. You can read about the latest iteration of the proposal at StartupVisa.com. If you're willing to publicly sign on to a letter of support, please get in touch. If you'd be willing to talk to the press about your support, please leave a comment here as well.

HN was my first destination to share the article since I assume that there is no other community out there with as much startup founders as here.

There are plenty of us non-US-citizens here. Actually, about half (!) if we rely on this poll:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=527681

But relatively few HN users are actually founders overall -- there have been polls about that too. Besides, there's no reason to assume that most non-US founders are necessarily looking to move to US.

For what is worth: I'd likely move to US for a job if I could get a work visa. On the other hand, if I do decide to start a company then I'd be just as happy to do it in Japan (where I live) or in Brazil (my home country).

Don't forget, it was 5am in central Europe (or 4am GMT) when this was posted. I'm reading this over breakfast right now, and polls on this site have showed that (not terribly surprisingly) Europe has the most HN (active?) users after North America. (not that most of us actually located in Europe can contribute to this call for action anyway)

I hope some of the startup stories submitted there will be posted publicly - I've been trying to dig up information on this on the web in between frantic development of our proof-of-concept, but there's little useful information I could find. It seems that everyone who has done it and written about it has found some special loophole or trick that happened to apply to their specific set of circumstances.

A startup visa is certainly something that I would benefit from; the current situation seems pretty kafkaesque, and moving to the valley would probably give our startup a massive boost. I guess we'll have to find our loophole - for us there's no point waiting for politics to make things better. (after all, if that was a promising approach we wouldn't be trying to move to the US)

I like the idea of the startup visa, but as someone who has had an H1-B and dealt with US immigration, I have a feeling a startup visa will be anything but straightforward and easy to get.

Indeed, the proposed terms are extremely strict and I would not expect more than a dozen companies a year to pass them.

It is hard to imagine a scenario where it could be used other than an already successful company from abroad willing to relocate to the US by pitching their already viable product to US VCs (by coming here on a tourist visa).

http://startupvisa.com/modified-eb5-visa/

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