I have some experience living close-offshore of a larger country for legal related reasons :) (Sealand/HavenCo, around 2000)
I'm glad they picked something relatively inoffensive to governments (visa regulations for people who would otherwise be H1B/O1 or not local at all, supporting local popular high-tech businesses). There has been a lot of talk about offshore drugs and other things which would have been really quickly shut down.
If they're smart, they'll regulate everything ELSE more strictly than the US/California, and just focus on one very PR friendly "one thing" -- the visa/immigration rules, which they'd be 100% in compliance with by being offshore. You absolutely do NOT want to put that at risk by fighting drug laws, environmental laws, underaged sex laws, prostitution laws, etc. all at the same time.
I'd love it if you told your story with respects to sealand. I was fascinated with it when I first heard about it many years ago, especially to learn that the UK govt seemed to have allowed it to exist without shutting them down.
For others reading this who don't know the story my recollection of events is that it goes something like this:
(1) UK builds large offshore firing platforms in the english channel to target german bombers in WW2 then abandons them after the war.
(2) A military family moves to one of the platforms after the war and declares it to be an independant state. The UK government lets them get away with it.
(3) Over the years they remain there and allow others to come and live on the platform. They issue passports etc. At one point they were the base for a pirate radio station. At another point they fended off an armed invasion/attempted coup of the platform.
(4) In the late 90's havenco set up a business on the island. The idea was to provide secure hosting outside the scope of any legal harassment from authorities. The business didn't work out.
(5) A few years ago the platform burned down in a fire.
I'd love to hear accounts from people who have actually been there & seen it for themselves.
In between (1) and (2), the "military family" had experience with fishing in the area, and with pirate radio (from boats, and from other platforms (unambiguously in UK waters).
Pirate radio was big because there was no popular music or commercials on UK public radio at the time; pirate radio was largely killed by removing both of those conditions in the UK by the government, not through regulation. (although they did increasingly ban it)
(4) didn't work out for a combination of internal reasons and the macro implosion of both tech and the bandwidth/colo market (we started working on it in 1998/1999 when stuff was going for $2k/mo; by 2002 it was $150/mo, and our cost basis was high.
Our biggest fundamental problem was not having a payment system option; I wanted to fund an anon ecash development thing out of our first investment, but cofounders vetoed that. This led to really limiting the kind of businesses which could operate "purely offshore"; they all had to incorporate in places like Nevis just to get a bank account, at which point they could just host there (or in Canada, or whatever) for a whole lot less.
5) The platform was basically restored to the mothballed condition it had between the end of pirate radio (early 1970s) and HavenCo (2000) after 2002; there was a fire, which caused damage, but didn't destroy it. It's still there; just irrelevant.
I'm still sort of interested in interesting jurisdictional arbitrage (free trade zones, differences in laws across places, multi-national structures), but I'm much more interested in purely technological solutions to problems (i.e. using crypto, hardware, etc. to solve the same problems as sealand)
As crazy as it sounds, ideas like this might be necessary to save America from completely trashing its own economy and position in the world.
If putting innovators on boats 24 miles of the coast is what it takes to maintain America's innovation edge, so be it.
Regular Americans have no understanding of how wealth is created and how once dominant empires can lose the very things that originally put them on top. They somehow imagine that, even in the face of imminent systemic collapse, America will always remain on top and always be somewhere that immigrants will clamor to get into.
American life is MASSIVELY subsidized by the fact that the dollar is the world's de facto reserve currency, but that will only remain the case if American continues to lead economically and China is already playing a far longer, far smarter game.
American industry is MASSIVELY subsidized by the fact that, for now, the U.S. is where the investment dollars gravitate to - but that can change overnight.
American power in the world is ultimately dependent upon economic power but, ironically, cripplingly expensive and completely unnecessary militarily adventures over the past decade have hastened the day when China becomes the world's preeminent economic power by approximately two decades.
America has become wholly dependent upon the manifold privileges and advantages of being Number One. That means that there can be no graceful decline; once an unknown tipping point is reached and it becomes clear that this is no longer the case, the advantages currently supporting everything that Americans take for granted will slip away in rapid succession.
So, yes, today, it is possible to treat foreign innovators and highly-skilled workers with disdain, to force them to jump through hoops and subject them to bizarre, dehumanizing visa processes, Hell, you can even force them to sit in boats off the coast of San Francisco ... but it is already true that the best and brightest are at least looking at what is available elsewhere, that countries like Singapore and Chile are waking up to the possibilities and I wonder how many more economic crises it will take before the proposition of dedicating your hard work and talent to a people that clearly hate you begins to look less attractive.
So, embrace this seemingly crazy notion and any other idea that routes around self-destructive tendencies of the American voter, do all you can to put tomorrow's breakthroughs as close as possible to American soil but, just remember ... we're going to need a bigger boat.
Living at sea full time even surrounded by bright, talented and driven peers comes with many challenges that a start-up probably does not need to deal with (not even addressing the cost issue).
My credentials for saying so: I am a "geek" and a Yachtmaster 200t Ocean Instructor who worked on yachts and sailed across 2 oceans.
On the other hand, using a yacht in a harbour in SF bay, with "crew" on a b1/b2 visa working on startups should be investigated (yet again boats are expensive :P).
I think there may be some merit to your idea about the "live aboard" concept. It might work best someplace like Anacortes, where the boat could be moved across the border to Vancouver for a period of time.
Sailor here as well (out of Morro Bay, CA) and sail offshore regularly on my own boat.
I'm not sure what the point of living off the coast of SF is if you can't go in to land now and then. The whole point of being in SF is the networking possibilities, not some magical sphere of influence that surrounds the area.
If you still can't enter the country you might as well be in your own country working in comfortability.
A few weeks off on 'shoreleave' every couple months might be both practical and compliant with border controls.
Oil platform 'roughnecks' spend 2-4 weeks working 12-hour days, then get 2-4 weeks off on shore, for work that's much more physically draining and dangerous than tech work.
Not sure why you think they couldn't go to land. It is much easier to enter the US as a tourist or on a short-term visa than to get a work visa to live and work here. I think that coders living on a ship that isn't legally part of the US could still enter regularly on a tourist visa for meetings.
Think of the other direction - if you can't go on land (actually you can, but let's assume you couldn't), then folks from Silicon Valley can visit the ship. Project managers can sync periodically with developers on the ship, fellow developers can be sent on the ship for training sessions etc.
Working in your own country just doesn't seem to produce the amount of innovation that happens in Silicon Valley. Otherwise, we should be able to see lots of successful geographically-distributed startups made of software developers who use teleconferencing and other online tools. While that does happen with many open-source projects, it doesn't seem to work as well for commercial ventures.
The guys are from the Seasteading Institute team. Patri is essentially resigning from operations and getting ready to focus on related commercial ventures (start-ups). You can get the full story in the latest newsletter: http://seasteading.org/blogs/main/2011/07/31/the-seasteading...
There are several companies that allow people to live on cruise ships for >3 months (like the "Semester at Sea" offerings). And, there is at least one cruise ship that sells cabins as condos and is essentially a permanent residence.
Keep in mind that you can spend a good amount of time on US soil and still avoid paying income tax or needing a resident/work Visa. I expect the ship will speed a good amount of time at port in California if they're able to get funding and execute.
I think this is a great alternative to say opening an office in London or Dublin to deal with immigration problems for EU people. Leasing and operating such a cruise ship probably (I'm just guessing here) wouldn't cost much more than leasing and operating an office in London. This has the added benefits that country of origin doesn't matter (it's not just EU), that the people would be in the same time zone, and that it is so close by that travel to SFBA would be relatively inexpensive (compared to travel from London).
When I saw the story, I thought, "I wonder if Patri knows about this?" Then I clicked on "About Us" and immediately recognized Max and Dario from The Seasteading Institute. These guys are the real deal.
"live, work, and play in close physical proximity to the fertile grounds of the Bay Area"
Among other problems, how will people on this ship take advantage of the "fertile grounds of the Bay Area" when the CBP agents at the port catch on to the fact that anyone coming from that ship is probably coming into the city for business meetings (as opposed to touristic purposes) and purposefully skirting various bits of immigration law?
I know to be wary of DHS/CBP arbitrariness, but they aren't against all visits, just those that run afoul of often-stupid regulations.
If they know...
• the ship itself has no contraband
• the business visits are short in duration
• the presence of the ship (and the ship's economic interests) makes it even more likely you'll stay exactly for your stated duration and no longer
• the employment technically is outside US jurisdiction
...they might actually prefer orderly visits from a ship, over more complicated less-understood visits from faraway. Provide CBP with a non-threatening, transparent, technically-compliant model they can understand, and they may not be your enemy.
You can I believe go to business meetings on a tourist visa if you are not being paid. Eg as a UK citizen I have often been to the US for meetings. Not paid work though. So meeting your VC or customers is fine. Service businesses would be out.
I'd believe it if every online community hadn't already fantasized, written, prepared wikis, appointed Financial Ministers and plotted to buy the Principality of Sealand at one point or another for this same goal. Thanks for the chuckle though, it was nice to daydream about visa-less US entrepreneurship.
Exactly. If someone was going to do actually this, instead of fantasizing and appointing Financial Ministers, they would have to be doing international law research, engineering studies, raising millions of dollars, talking to real entrepreneurs....which is exactly what I've been doing at The Seasteading Institute has been doing for the last 3 years, to pave the way for ventures like this.
When something is usually done as a fantasy, I can understand why you'd pattern-match it to fantasy. But just because it's usually done wrong doesn't mean it can't be done right.
So instead of improving on the state-of-the-art of telepresence and have people work remotely from any place in the world, certainly possible with today's global communications infrastructure, they want to put actual physical boat with developers on it close to shore, to avoid immigration laws?
And from all places it's a silicon valley enterpreneur proposing this? This is so bizarre and inefficient I don't have words for it... It's crazy in an anachronistic way like putting a horse in front of your automobile to avoid fuel taxes.
What laws govern ships in international waters (or planes flying in international airspace)? From my quick research, it seems like the laws where the ship is registered applies, is that right? (and that many ship are registered in a sovereign state, known as "Flags of Convenience" which seems to have no real law?)
I'm glad they picked something relatively inoffensive to governments (visa regulations for people who would otherwise be H1B/O1 or not local at all, supporting local popular high-tech businesses). There has been a lot of talk about offshore drugs and other things which would have been really quickly shut down.
If they're smart, they'll regulate everything ELSE more strictly than the US/California, and just focus on one very PR friendly "one thing" -- the visa/immigration rules, which they'd be 100% in compliance with by being offshore. You absolutely do NOT want to put that at risk by fighting drug laws, environmental laws, underaged sex laws, prostitution laws, etc. all at the same time.