Sharing Scheduler App Buffer Raises $400,000, Gets Kicked Out Of US
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
The fact that wealth-builders, and innovative startup founders that seek to create new frontiers can't legally find a way of staying in this country is preposterous.
I actually now use Buffer regularly at my startup (I should actually start using it more), and to be honest, I never cared where you guys were based -- the product worked well. Just keep up the good work wherever you settle :)
I didn't think getting a H1B visa was that easy, though. You just move to the US and apply? It doesn't work that way, does it? Don't you need to have a job and somehow justify that you need a visa?
They didn't even move to the US to start this, it started in the UK and then, let's be frank, they went off to the US for a jolly holiday. Now they're going to Hong Kong for a jolly holiday.
All props to starting a business, etc. but if you can't sell Buffer from the UK and you can't sell it from the US, you're not going to be able to sell it from Hong Kong.
To everyone saying the US lost a great team, they didn't need to be there. The company was setup in the UK already running, it started in 2010. Joel was standing in front of me practically a year to the day in the UK advocating bootstrapping and now he's suddenly raised $400,000 for a trivial twitter app. How on earth can you spend $400,000 on a tweet scheduler?
The guy's great, I think the apps great for what it is, yes they're having a great time travelling the world. I appreciate people can change their minds.
Also they're probably a UK company and pay UK corporation taxes, not US ones, but I'm not sure as their terms of service and their website don't explicitly say who the legal owner of the app is or their registration number or registration address (illegally I might add if they're from the UK). If he's running it as a sole trader he should explicitly say so in his terms of service.
EDIT: Joel's deck from Dec 2010 advocating bootstrapping:
http://notttuesday.com/2010/12/17/joel-gascoignes-lean-start...
You're absolutely right, it's not a failure of the US immigration system. We looked into all our options, and we were working with a very good and well respected immigration lawyer to apply for H1B visas. Unfortunately, they ran out of visas on the quota for the year just before we applied. So, we never even applied for a visa, and we certainly weren't rejected visas or kicked out of the country, so it's not a failure of the immigration system. I do think perhaps the system could cater a little better to people in our situation who were very keen to stick around in the US and hire US citizens to build our company. Nevermind though, we'll hopefully be back soon enough to do exactly that.
I'm glad you saw me speak at NottTuesday just over a year ago. That's right after I launched Buffer, and at that point it was me by myself and just a few paying users and perhaps 100 users in total. I was still learning a huge deal at that point, and quite frankly I'm still making all sorts of mistakes to this day, but I think that will always be the case. I do like to think that now with over 1400 paying customers (85,000 users in total) and a $200,000 annual revenue run rate, we did sell Buffer from the UK, we did sell Buffer from the US, and I'm confident we'll continue on our non-linear growth path whilst we are based in Hong Kong.
As for needing to be in the US, that's an interesting point to ponder. Shortly after the NottTuesday talk I brought on board a co-founder. Then, a few months later, being in the US enabled us to gain a place on AngelPad and with the investment hire our first employee much faster than we would have otherwise been able to. I still advocate bootstrapping, and indeed Buffer was bootstrapped for 9 months to profitability before we thought about funding. Without a previous track record, having that kind of traction is essential in my mind. We're a US company.
We're having a great time travelling the world, but we're also working pretty damn hard. In my mind, I truly believe both need to go hand in hand to be truly successful.
Also, when is morning? people are in lots of different timezones that are following companies and celebs.