Ask HN: People who are / were on H1B and founded companies how'd you do it?

9 points·andher··4 comments

Basically the title.

Also interested in your story of navigating periods without pay.

Took a delayed approach... I started an open source project, that got popular, while I was on H1B (while still working)... then I monetized it / formed a formal company once I got a green card.

Ah interesting. Did you have plans to monetize from the start, or was it a side-project initially? Were you aiming at growing a project to become a larger product?

Tangential: How'd you decide on starting the project? Was it related to work? A tool you built out of general interest?

It was an experiment- scratching an itch / problem I saw at work at first. But I knew I wanted to be self employed (“entrepreneur”) since I was nine... so had the goal from the start to eventually start a company. It just so happens that doing an open source product turned out be great way to test the idea without the risk of actually starting the company from the get go.

Throwaway because I'm a bit unsure. I simply registered a company using stripe atlas. Technically I don't work for the company, I just own it. It doesn't have any revenue or employees yet, but the day it starts getting serious, I'll talk to a lawyer to figure out how to transition to working under this company with some GC cofounder as the ceo probably.

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