Study: Immigrants Founded 51% of U.S. Billion-Dollar Startups | Hacker News Reader

Study: Immigrants Founded 51% of U.S. Billion-Dollar Startups

blogs.wsj.com

2 pointsOsiris302 comments

A year ago the statement "Most high tech companies are founded by founded by First/2nd gen immigrants" was going around the various tech circles. In the thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9085970 I dug into the numbers and found that that is what we would expect from population statistics. That is, immigrants and non-immigrants are equally likely to start high tech companies.

This new analysis - and yes, I read the report - does not attempt to assess if the numbers are more or less than expected. If a company has 10 founders and only one is an immigrant then that counts as one of the companies founded by an immigrant.

Let's say that all 87 companies had 10 founders (which is obviously false, but I'm making a point about the limitation in the analysis), and of the 44 companies with an immigrant founder, all of them had only 1 immigrant founder. Then of the 870 founders, only 44 are immigrants, or 5%.

Immigrants make up about 13% of the US population. If only 5% of the founders are immigrants then that means immigrants are significantly less likely to start $1B valued companies than non-immigrants.

I'm going to go one step further. The report DID NOT include the overall number of founders, which makes it impossible to determine the significance of the findings. By classifying a company with a single immigrant founder as being founded by an immigrant, it almost certainly overemphasizes the impact of immigrant founders. I believe this was done deliberately, in order to influence matters regarding the H1B visa. I do not believe this to be an honest analysis.

FWIW, the author, Stuart Anderson, was former policy director of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, former director at the Cato Institute (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=National_Foundati... ). Both are "part of the stable of conservative think tanks" http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Alexis_de_Tocqueville_I... .

Further analysis of 65 companies on the list of 87 (it was too boring to finish everything) finds 161 founders, for an estimated founder population of about 215.5.

You'll notice that the report doesn't come out and give the number of immigrant founders. Summing up table 3 gives 61, and 61/215.5 => 28% .

This is indeed higher than the 13% of the US population who are immigrants, though not as eye-catching of a number as 51%.

Part of the argument for immigrant co-founders is the increased diversity. For example, "Michelle believes the diverse backgrounds of CloudFlare’s founders has contributed to the company’s success." If that is an important criteria, then you should note that some of the companies only have immigrant founders, which by that logic should count against them.

I'm not sure how to judge a U.S. company where one of the founders lives overseas. For example, Oded Comay of ForeScout appears to live in Israel. I don't know which of the founders are non-American and also non-immigrants.

Unlike the report, I'll give my list of companies (from the same WSJ source, though I have one more company than the report does) and my attempt at finding the number of founders for each company. I assert that not giving that data makes it harder to understand, much less replicate, the significance of the results.

  Uber - (2) Travis Kalanick, Garrett Camp
  Airbnb - (3) Joe Gebbia, Nathan Blecharczyk, Brian Chesky 
  Palantir - (5) Peter Thiel, Joe Lonsdale, Alex Karp, Stephen Cohen, Nathan Gettings
  Snapchat - (2) Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, (and Frank Reginald "Reggie" Brown IV?)
  SpaceX - (1) Elon Musk
  Pinterest - (3) Paul Sciarra, Evan Sharp, Ben Silbermann
  Dropbox - (2) Arash Ferdowsi, Drew Houston
  WeWork - (2) Adam Neumann, Miguel McKelvey
  Theranos - (1) Elizabeth Holmes
  Lyft - (2) Logan Green, John Zimmer
  Stripe - (2) Patrick Collison, John Collison
  Stemcentrx - (3) Brian Slingerland, Scott Dylla, Daniel T. Reiner
  Zenefits (YourPeople) - (2) Parker Conrad, Laks Srini
  Cloudera - (4) Jeff Hammerbacher, Mike Olson, Amr Awadallah, Christophe Bisciglia
  SoFi (Social Finance) - (4) Mike Cagney, Dan Macklin, James Finnigan, and Ian Brady
  Credit Karma - (1) Kenneth Lin
  Tanium - (2) David Hindawi, Orion Hindawi
  Fanatics - (1) Alan Trager
  DocuSign - (1) Tom Gonser
  Moderna - (4) Robert Langer, Noubar Afeyan, Ken Chien, Derrick Rossi
  Wish (ContextLogic) - (2) Peter Szulczewski, Danny Zhang
  Bloom Energy - (1) K. R. Sridhar
  Slack - (4) Stewart Butterfield, Eric Costello, Cal Henderson, and Serguei Mourachov
  Mozido - (1) Michael A. Liberty
  Houzz - (2) Adi Tatarko, Alon Cohen
  DraftKings - (3) Jason Robins, Matt Kalish, Paul Liberman
  Nutanix - (3) Dheeraj Pandey, Mohit Aron, Ajeet Singh
  Magic Leap - (1)  Rony Abovitz
  Instacart
  Domo	
  Blue Apron	
  Github	
  Avant	
  AppDynamics	
  Prosper Marketplace	
  ZocDoc	
  AppNexus	
  Intarcia Therapeutics	
  Honest Co.	
  Oscar Health Insurance	
  MongoDB	
  Jawbone	
  InsideSales.com	
  MuleSoft
  BuzzFeed - (2) Jonah Peretti, John Johnson
  Mu Sigma - (1) Ambika Dhiraj
  Jasper Technologies - (3) Jahangir Mohammed, Daniel Collins, Amit Gupta
  Deem - (1) Patrick Grady
  Jet.com - (3) Marc Lore, Nate Faust, Mike Hanrahan
  Thumbtack - (4) Marco Zappacosta, Sander Daniels, Jonathan Swanson, Jeremy Tunnell
  FanDuel - (5) Nigel Eccles, Lesley Eccles, Tom Griffiths, Rob Jones, Chris Stafford
  Medallia - (2) Borge Hald, Amy Pressman
  Infinidat - (1) Moshe Yanai
  Warby Parker - (4) David Gilboa, Neil Blumenthal, Andrew Hunt, Jeffrey Raider
  Okta - (2) Todd McKinnon, Frederic Kerrest
  Sprinklr - (1) Ragy Thomas
  Automattic - (1) Matt Mullenweg 
  Actifio - (1) Ash Ashutosh
  Proteus Digital Health - (3) Andrew Thompson, George Savage, Mark Zdeblick
  Nextdoor - (4) Nirav Tolia, Sarah Leary, Prakash Janakiraman, David Wiesen
  Uptake - (2) Eric Lefkofsky, Brad Keywell
  Anaplan - (2) Guy Haddleton, Michael Gould
  Gusto (ZenPayroll)
  AppDirect	
  23andMe	
  CloudFlare	
  Evernote	
  Eventbrite	
  Tango	
  Kabam	
  Lookout	
  JustFab	
  Qualtrics	
  Razer	
  SimpliVity	
  Pluralsight	
  MarkLogic	
  Coupa Software	
  Twilio	
  Zscaler	
  Vox Media	
  Adaptive Biotechnologies	
  Apttus	
  Kabbage	
  Datto	
  Udacity	
  Docker
  Mode Media - (9) Samir Arora, Ernie Cicogna, Fernando Ruarte, Vic Zauderer, Dianna Mullins, Raj Narayan, Rebecca Bogle Arora, Susan Kare, Emmanuel Job
  ForeScout - (4) Oded Comay, Dror Comay, Doron Shikmoni, Hezy Yeshurun
  Fab - (2) Jason Goldberg, Bradford Shellhammer
  Gilt Groupe - (6) Kevin P. Ryan, Dwight Merriman, Alexis Maybank, Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, Michael Bryzek, Phong Nguyen
  Good Technology - (1) Richard Davies
  Legendary Entertainment - (1) Thomas Tull
  Pure Storage - (2) John Colgrove, John Hayes
  Square - (2) Jack Dorsey, Jim McKelvey
  Sunrun - (3) Lynn Jurich, Edward Fenster, Nat Kreamer
  Beats Electronics - (2) Dr. Dre, Jimmy Iovine
  Box - (4) Aaron Levie, Dylan Smith, Sam Ghods, Jeff Queisser
  Coupons.com - (1) Steven Boal
  Fisker Automotive - (2) Henrik Fisker, Bernhard Koehler
  GoPro - (1) Nicholas Woodman
  Hortonworks - (8) Alan Gates, Arun C. Murthy, Devaraj Das, Eric Baldeschwieler, Mahadev Konar, Owen O'Malley, Sanjay Radia, Suresh Srinivas
  Lending Club - (2) Renaud Laplanch, Soulaiman Htite
  Nest Labs - (2) Tony Fadell, Matt Rogers
  New Relic - (1) Lewis Cirne
  Wayfair - (2) Niraj Shah, Steve Conine

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