Hacker News Reader

Comment by marklyon | Hacker News Reader

Six questions, two about politics.

Not sure if you mean to be negative here, but they are two very relevant questions to everyone in tech. I love his answer regarding immigration:

> Well, it’s really important—and it hits close to home for us. My co-founder Arash Ferdowsi’s parents immigrated here from Iran. If these policies were in effect back then, there would be no Dropbox.

Who's to say he would not have developed it in Iran or some other third country? Or is he saying the secret sauce is US + foreign talent and that that formula is atomic?

I would posit that that is false as there are many world class tech companies which did not begin in the US nor need the US to succeed.

To be clear, I'm glad they both successfully founded the company and that it contributes to the economy, but that's altogether a different topic.

I'm going to stretch the comparison a lot, but a great deal of the people working on the Manhattan Project were not born in the US.

What the US is doing right now puts it at a competitive disadvantage, IMO.

True enough. Both the US and USSR benefitted from raiding foreign talent as well as from taking in sympathizers to our/their ideologies. Fortunately we got some of the best, however, we did not have a right to them. It was circumstance, a good circumstance for us. Better would have been that it had been unnecessary to acquire the talent in order to win wars, prevent further suffering and vanquish miserable ideologies.

Interestingly, we didn't raid Japan for talent so much and maybe that contributed to their post war performance.

Einstein was effectively a refugee, so a "great deal" is an understatement as well.

Counterfactuals are funny. Dropbox wouldn't exist either if Hitler had not invaded Poland.

I think he's just saying that a company is more likely to be founded after its cofounders have met.

No Dropbox! The horror...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com