Ask YC: Immigration Vs App Store approval, Share your thoughts, here are mine
App store approval is like a bad winding bumpy road around the mountain, its raining, you lost your cell phone signal and your fuel is running low.
Immigration is like you have no roads around the mountain, before you even reach the mountain you have to cross a lake filled with bionic alligators. These animals have sharp teeth made of a special neodymium alloy which have twin functions of both keeping the teeth sharp for ever and also as antennae for picking up radio signals which transmit intruder location and other vital statistics straight into their reptile brain stem. So you cross this lake to get to this mountain which has some territory struggle. Well the Mafia, the Taliban and Khmer Rouge are battling for territory over this area. But they have just one common thing that unites them together in harmonious oneness and joy, and that is you. You belong to a tribe which they have some historic baggage with. And this goes to around 3000 years with each of them. So if they catch you and kill you they declare cease fire for a year and release all mutual prisoners and they give children candy. Yes, before you start wondering I am talking about _LEGAL_ immigration. So basically things are not looking good for you. Suppose you manage to cross both these I am sure you can take care of minor issues like forming a company and proceeding to laugh your ass of to your IPO.
Am I worked up, hell no. I just found PGs comparison of Immigration to App Store very amusing. The same way some one who has lived under Taliban or the Khmer Rouge might find my rant and the resulting comparison amusing. (If they haven’t managed to make peace with their past they might even find it infuriating).
YCombinator itself did not start out with a purely profit motive. I have observed it over the last 5 years and I sincerely do not think so. But I am also aware that to sustain the core and to thrive YC has to be a business in the end. I would argue that being a business gives you a more stable moral center than being a non-profit organization. I am thinking there is a business opportunity for a YC that specializes in Candidates from you know, the whole wide world. Some thing tells me that their is a gold mine of locked talent in the rest of the world simply because it is so freaking big. But you have to do some muck work to get to it. Hey, they dug through dirt to get to gold itself. It goes by the fancy term mining. But its basically digging earth.
My first thought of how one could achieve such a thing is to have an incubator in Canada with strong ties to US investors. Maybe the companies which get to a certain point can slide into the US immigration system based on financial strength. For eg. Drop box cannot have made it with 17K YC investment past the Immigration Mountain, but I am sure right now they can easily qualify for any number of 18th century rules that qualify them as a company.
PG has commented in the past that he started web based business to stay away from having to work in Windows. I am sure other US Investors also do not want to muck around with immigration. They are aware of the huge problem and they sympathize. But it feels like the same kind of bystander sympathy which you get when you are involved in a terrible road accident.
On the other hand I see PG on a relentless crusade against investors treating founders badly. In fact the whole YC platform seems like it is geared towards giving the founders a fair place in the whole investor-founder game. And PG has talked for hours and repeatedly about how investing is a huge drain and the #1 cause of most of founders’ problems. I feel that he gets the motivation to carry on from his own experience on working with both good and bad investors during his viaweb days.
So someone who feels the same motivation but against the immigration system should take up this cause. And it will of course be a for profit cause and a damn good bet to make. I can see myself starting such a YC down the years, right now I am just a grunt moonlighting to make quantum electro bionic alligator neutralizers.