406 karma · joined May 14, 2007
feel free to contribute to other efforts to promote your ideas. however, hope you don't feel the need to tear down our (complementary) ones that may be achieved practically & expediently.
light a candle, don't piss on ours.
if you create 5 US jobs, you get to stay.
if you don't create 5 US jobs, but can generate EITHER $1M in revenue (at break-even or better), OR raise $1M in additional capital from ANY qualifying investor (doesn't have to be the original one), you get to stay.
please read the language carefully -- it does cover the situation adequately.
we did take quite a bit of time to consider the exact language, and worked hard to get it to be functional.
there are obvious penalties which would be incurred if someone intentionally abused this system.
legislation does not prevent all types of abuse, however we have attempted to reasonably make it unlikely that such abuse would not occur without great cost and risk to the perpetrators.
we believe we have done a responsible job in drafting the legislation to avoid this. exact language will depend on how the bill gets negotiated before final vote.
altho the legislation as proposed is not final, it was clearly drafted and stated with each of the 3 potential rqmts being sufficient on their own, not together.
raising capital, creating jobs, or making revenue are very OB-jective metrics, and are much less easily abused or compromised (read: determined easily by provable data, likely to not be interfered with or misinterpreted by bureaucrats, and likely to streamline / reduce processing times).
in other words, market data & stats are provable & will likely speed up the process.
there is nothing quite so unfair or undemocratic as an INS official who has had a bad day, is misinformed, or is behind on paperwork -- or heaven forbid all of the above.
we hope to avoid this situation by making the Startup Visa rqmts very easily objective & provable based on verifiable data.
the rest of your argument is perhaps interesting from a theoretical standpoint, but not likely very relevant from a practical perspective.
it's very simple: create 5 full-time jobs in the US in 2 years time, and you get to stay. if you can't do that, at least get to break-even on $1M in revenue. if you can't do THAT, then find an investor willing to back you for another $1M every 2 years.
the rqmts are quite lenient and reasonable. the fate of the entrepreneur is very much in their own hands (& heads).
however, our proposed legislation simply focuses on making visas available to people who can help 1) create jobs, 2) create innovation, and 3) create economic output.
the two are not mutually exclusive, and are likely even complementary. however, this does not mean they have to be merged, and they can be worked on indepedently.
(that said, it is likely all such legislation will be considered in a comprehensive immigration bill supported by the left & the right sometime this year... we hope :)
entrepreneurs who fail to meet the bar are not being unfairly punished by investors, rich or otherwise.
these rqmts are simply the proposed bar for qualification. meet them, and you can stay. nothing more, nothing less.
this is a considerably better situation than what we have currently.
we can attack the problem by focusing on improving INS processing times, rather than excluding other valid applicants (of any type). we are certainly not suggesting StartupVisa green card applicants "move to the front of the line" ahead of anyone else, simply that their application be considered fairly & reasonably along with others.
1) people who want to "buy a VISA" (aka have the money to invest in a new business already) wouldn't need any new legislation. the existing EB-5 handles this.
2) VCs have no specific control over entrepreneurs ability to qualify / remain in the US, however the entrepreneur is initially required to get at least one sponsoring US entity (VC or qualifying angel) to support the application and invest at least $100K. for renewal, they would have to qualify either by reaching profitability at a $1M revenue run rate, creating a minimum of 5 US jobs, or achieving a subsequent round of financing of at least $1M. True there are a few edge cases which might not qualify, however we're doing the best we can to draft legislation which is reasonable in most cases. (creating 5 US jobs in 2 years is a fairly low bar, which should be substantially easier than getting to break-even on at least $1M revenue, or raising subsequent capital).
3) it is not my understanding that creation of this new class will put substantial hardship on processing other types of visas, altho obviously the cost in time & resources is non-zero. that said, since most of the rqmts for the application process in this new visa class are market-based, not based on bureaucratic review, we expect to have a faster processing time than for other types of visas (and hopefully would not slow down existing visa processing much if at all).
for more info, please see http://StartupVisa.com
but between sleepless redeye blogging and my usual retardedness, "i didn't have time to write a short letter"
my apologies, and thanks for hanging in there if you got to the end. my condolences if you didn't
1) financial sites have more secure / higher-friction password recovery techniques than non-financial sites
2) more inside-baseball point that i didn't get into -- PayPal security questions weren't in the acct signup flow, they were in the after-txn flow of email confirmation. HOWEVER, since many people either a) intentionally or accidentally didn't provide the right email, or b) even if they entered the right email, they didn't go thru email confirm, then
result: MANY MANY people -- i estimated at least 10%, possibly up to 25-50% -- never entered their security reminder Q's. this subsequently resulted in limited ability to recover password info without having to FAX IN driver's license or other paper info, which most users screamed about.
in short: it's a long story, but password recovery for financial sites is much harder than non-financial sites, and for PayPal is even harder still than other normal financial sites due to the way we had implemented mandatory acct creation workflow and security reminder Q'n workflow.
needless to say, this was a fucked-up situation that resulted in a lot of customer service hassle... which i got to experience first-hand on many occasions.
(sorry for the long-winder explanation, but you asked, so... but it's not your fault. even many people who worked there didn't understand this very well. it used to frustrate the hell out of me)
b) even if they don't type their passwords in "much", they certainly do so relatively much more frequently.
whether or not my post was a rant, this is a fairly simple point based on simple frequency of use.
it was deemed to be "cheaper" to just not deal with a minority % of password recovery cases (that might also occasionally be fraud) than to provide high-cost customer support for low-value average users.
think about it: if you can cut a minority % of your customer base that causes a large % of the cost (or simply just more than they are worth) then you can make more money.
this wasn't such a big mistake in itself, except that PayPal probably didn't consider the network effect of negative brand damage due to not providing very good customer service for such a large # -- though still minority -- of users.
i'm saying this: 1) telephone support is expensive, and doesn't offset low-value ARPU 2)
nope, wrong again. ARPUs for PayPal users are probably only around $5-25 per year (excluding the minority of fanatic eBay regulars), and you can easily eat up all of that cost or more in telephone customer support.
nope, sorry you're wrong & yes you have no data to back this up. even with "100's of millions of account", it's likely PayPal has never been used by a large % of internet users -- perhaps even a majority -- and it's certainly not used frequently (ie, >1x / month) by more than tens of millions of users. even without me being there for 5 years i'm pretty sure any recent eBay quarterly stmt will back me up on that (note: accts != users != frequent users).
trust me: "the forgotten password problem" is STILL a huge issue for PayPal today, as it is with almost every large site... even one as frequent as PayPal (or Amazon).
if you think i'm mistaken, i suggest you talk to any major tech blog site that has switched to using Facebook Connect or Twitter oAuth for comment authentication, and the subsequent increase in comment activity.
it's not too much of an extrapolation to draw a similar conclusion around 3rd-party auth integrated with payments (which is what PayPal has been doing for 10 years).
in fact, most likely a common model would be: 1) free for most users 2) low-cost txn for first paid use 3) convert initial txn users into frequent use / regular subscription later, but continue txnl model as well.
perhaps in mid-rant I failed to explain this clearly; possibly due to lack of sleep, or the cocaine-heroin speedball I shot up before getting on the redeye to NYC.
then again, maybe you guys just need to read that little part where I say "AND" between subscriptions & transactions, not just draw your conclusion from the headline... but I digress.
for me, both entrepreneurship & technology are about passion. to remove that passion from my writing would seem to miss the point.
and while likely more than half of all acquisitions don't actually "work", enough do to make it worth doing.
(btw, it's been my experience that when people find something fun, they are more likely to spend time educating themselves on what they're having fun about ;)
i don't need to apologize for swearing... and similarly, you don't have to perform semantic acrobatics to find a different definition for "bending over".
jason certainly meant the headline in a "don't drop the soap" fashion, just like i meant to use the word "fuck" for emphasis.
get over yourself and get off your victorian soapbox. people swear. they've been doing it for hundreds of years.
if you can't get past the use of either as a literary form of emphasis, then you're the one being juvenile.
re: the 2-week delay, as one other person noted i was leading a group of ~20 entrepreneurs & investors around europe for http://GeeksOnaPlane.com and decided to wait until getting back home to pen the rebuttal.
anyway, my style isn't for everyone. hopefully some folks found it useful. if not, then hey at least it made for some entertainment this morning.
peace out,
it applies somewhat, but less well, to long-latency businesses that involve enterprise products / offline sales.
and yes, I know the slides violate every rule of good presentation design (color, bullets, etc). it's intentional, and I'm pretty immature. seriously.
if changed as we suggest -- so that any entrepreneur talented enough to attract funding can get the visa, not just the investor -- then it's actually anti-elitist, and in fact democratizes access.
currently, a modified form of the EB-5 in economically targeted areas requires only $500K, and an equivalently smaller # of jobs.
the goal would be to structure the EB-5 modification around the typical seed-round startup investment size & team.
please cite a link or reference.