He needs to be starting a company. Philippe Kahn started Borland while he was illegal alien. He got to a $500 million run rate without venture capital! It was only when Borland was going public that he was able to obtain a green card!
http://articles.latimes.com/print/1992-02-23/business/fi-511...
I mean, it's not a must that a company would offer sponsorship, but if they didn't I think there'd be no use in an offer.
Good story about the Borland guy though.
I've got a Canadian friend who was keynoting a conference and couldn't get admittance to the US because he was getting a free hotel room in exchange for speaking.
A year or two some music artist got banned for 10 years because he was on the wrong visa and was doing business in the US.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160823205204/http://gawker.com...
http://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/2157/can-you-searc...
While on the ESTA you can conduct 'business meetings'. I've (tried) to raise VC, interview at YC and conduct job interviews on the ESTA and it's been fine. At least the border patrol people didn't seem to mind.
But you're right that the guy im the article is from Lithuania, so he might be using an ESTA.
> Here for just a few weeks, he knew it wouldn't be easy.
Borland was founded in 1983. It bought Ashton-Tate, Analityca, and Wizard Systems in the 1980s. It spun off JPI, too.
Then in the 1990s products (mostly office products competing with Microsoft offerings) were sold off to Corel, Novell, and KSoft while buying Open Development Corporation and Visigenic. The move was on to refocus the company on development tools rather than office applications. They changed their name to Inprise.
In the oughts, they tried to merge with Corel but that failed as no good fit between the two could be found. They changed their name back to Borland. They bought Legadero, Gauntlet Systems, StarBase, and TogetherSoft then spun off CodeGear into its own wholly-owned subsidiary. The also moved to Austin, Texas.
CodeGear was sold to Embarcadero Technologies and later Borland itself was sold to Micro Focus International (yes, of Micro Focus Cobol) for around a dollar and a half per share (around $75,000,000). and operates as a subsidiary of that company under the Borland name.
It's been said that if you do anything relating to software well enough long enough, you eventually get bought by Attachmate, IBM, or Micro Focus. Well, Attachmate (yes, the company that bought Novell and NetIQ) was also purchased by Micro Focus, as was SUSE. HPE Software is apparently up next (for a reported $8,800,000,000) after being spun off by Hewlett-Packard into HPE and HPE then spinning off the software side into HPE Software. I guess Borland did well enough to be in that crowd. Now you can get your Cobol, Pascal, other languages, terminal emulators, security and management tools, code auditing software, and a whole bunch more from the branches of one big company. They do consulting on all of it too.
https://borland.com/en-GB/Home https://www.microfocus.com/about/press-room/article/2016/mic... http://www.computerworld.com/article/3117709/cloud-computing...
Oh, and as part of that last deal mentioned, HPE's preferred Linux is now SUSE. So Borland is part of one of the largest software companies in the world, with about 4,000 employees developing for and supporting multiple product segments across multiple platforms including their own.