As a foreign (British) entrepreneur looking to make the move next year I appreciate both this movement and those in the US pushing this. I don't see why this hasn't passed yet. Especially because this is beneficial for the US economy.
Why do you need to go to the US to start a company?
Starting a company in the UK costs £18.
Programmers are cheaper in the UK and if you want really cheap ones you can get them from the new additions to the EU block. There's also London or Cambridge if you want startup hubs.
All of the incubators in the UK are mediocre from what I've seen, some in fact ask the applicants to repay the investment yet still take a big chunk of equity. The only real exception I've seen is Seedcamp, which is great. Some others take half of the company in equity. There's a lot more investment in the valley.
I have no restrictions, so I can work from anywhere I want at this point in my life. A lot of it is personal, I know a lot of like minded people in the bay area.
If I had to stay in the UK then I'd definitely look at raising some angel money from the UK or some other programmes.
Mostly It's just personal choice and looking at which is the best fit for me.
Note: Expecting to get downvoted as I'm insulting England a bit but really the startup scene isn't fully developed yet although in parts is thriving. I'd rather be honest how I feel than not.
If you have a full team, talent, etc then this doesn't matter but if you're just starting out it puts more carriers in your way.
That's a broad brush you're painting with there. I've not really looked and have no idea who you're talking about, all the ones that have been on HN are nothing like you're describing.
The only one I remember is http://springboard.com, but there was also a northern based one I can't remember the name of now that had similar terms.
Out of interest which ones are you talking about that have these onerous terms?
Yes you're right but the reason I am is because there are so few even if there's only a couple using these methods they make up a large percentage of incubators in the UK.
There's no personal guarantee on that loan. If the company fails, you don't pay it back. They are not especially onerous terms and it's the same amount of cash that YC gives for the same equity.
I'd have to respectfully disagree, or at least suggest the situation is a lot more nuanced than that.
Dems (well, Obama) 'clarified' (read: changed the law slightly in a way that didn't need new legislation) the USCIS guidelines for self-sponsored H1Bs for startup founders and also the requirements for EB2 visas for entrepreneurs. They've also been very attentive to the Startup Visa movement.
The GOP continue to pursue a blocking stance across the board on all legislation in Congress (essentially as a punitive measure for electing Barack Obama) and they don't seem willing to support any real immigration reform - high or low skilled - that I can see.
Hell, I'll respectfully disagree with me that there's nuance :) But from a first-order analysis perspective, that's it. I didn't think this was the audience to go much farther beyond that.
However, if you want more...
The Obama administration was the same administration that advanced the Neufeld memo in 2010 strictly restricting H1-B to founders by making the 'employer work certification' a hard requirement. With the H1-B/EB-2 and EB-5 liberalization this past August, the Neufeld memo is all but overturned, but it could come back at any time, which is why we need Startup Visa legislation. All the same, the big positive in that the Obama administration is willing to consider it a jobs bill and not an immigration bill, which we've got from Valerie Jarrett after sending a briefing off to the White House.
The administration been pretty attentive to Startup Visa (Facebook and Twitter town hall mentions and vague reference in the El Paso immigration reform speech in May), but the lack of mention in the LinkedIn speech last month pissed off Conway and has made it much harder to pull in VC attention since. Conway's now focusing his time and effort on the Ed Lee campaign for SF Mayor, such as with the 2Legit 2Quit video.
However, Senate Dems, specifically Sen. Menendez of NJ, are much more hard line on the "nothing but comprehensive immigration reform" than the President. While we have the support of 6 Senate Dems—lead sponsors being John Kerry and moderate Republican Richard Lugar of Indiana—we haven't yet come up with any strategy to overcome the comprehensive roadblock.
The Chamber of Commerce and Bloomberg administration has 'nudged' the Republican position sufficiently that rumbles are coming out that horribly anti-immigration Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith is said to be putting together an extremely watered down STEM green cards bill: http://www.vdare.com/articles/national-data-by-edwin-s-ruben...
Interestingly, Utah is also a big driver of high-skilled immigration reform, according to friends in the Bloomberg administration. Rep. Chaffetz's bill rebalancing H1-B visas to change the flat per-country % changing the status quo of China and Luxembourg having the same number of H1-Bs available is advancing with Smith's support. It has just passed Smith's Judiciary Committee and awaits action on the House floor: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d112:HR03012:@@@C
Finally, also note the Obama administration's recent effort to set up a 'Tiger Team' or Skunkworks to cut through red tape in USCIS to make more administrative changes to make the immigration process easier: http://www.uscis.gov/portal/site/uscis/menuitem.5af9bb95919f...
As someone moving from New Zealand all the way to the states for my business, I'm just starting my research on visas. What's the problem you guys are actually trying to tackle?
I'm a British national in NYC right now on an H1B visa. It locks me down to one employer, and the process for transferring the visa between employers is an absolute nightmare (that I am currently in the middle of).
I'm very happy at my startup employer, but you can't be surrounded by startup culture without wanting to do it for yourself. I've got tech skills, ideas and business-minded friends and a couple of potential investors- but I can't act on any of this because I can't start and work for my own company.
So, I'm here for now. But I don't see a career path ahead of me, just a ton of dead ends. So as it stands right now, if I ever want to get serious about an idea I'll have to take it to London. Arguably, that's not in my interests (I'll have to rebuild a network from scratch) and it's not in the interests of the US for me to leave.
The Startup Visa would allow me to form my own company, work for it and hire local employees. Maybe I'm biased, but it seems like a win-win to me.
I'm a foreigner in the UK on the UK equivalent of an H1B visa (the tier 2 killed migrant visa). I'm also tied to my employer, though it's a consultancy and I'm based at different clients on different projects so it doesn't get too dull. That said, I'm also frustrated that I can't start a business here. There is an entrepreneur visa, but you need either £250,000 of cash that's under your control (no loans) or £50,000 from a UK based VC, and even with that it's not easy to get.
I doubt, politically, that it will become easier to get startup visas in the US and the UK. People actually don't want entrepeneurs from foreign cultures in their country. They don't want people from the Middle East and Asia open restaurants, take-aways, tailors, mechanics and other small businesses that employ them and their relatives. They don't want these people to have lifestyle businesses. People are racist and xenophobic. This is why they set the bar either high, so it's someone who will set up a large business that is likely to employ a lot of local people (or pay a lot of taxes) or they limit it to VC funded companies since these invest in certain more desirable types of businesses from a cultural perspective, like hi-tech.
It's not racist or xenophobic to give priority to your own citizens over others. We're not racists or xenophobes just because our great-great-great-great-grandparents did a better job at setting up a country than yours. We're not obliged to fix the world just for you, we just want to live our own lives. Our unemployment is high enough to need to give priority to the children of the people who paid for it all, because that was the promise of the struggle.
Start a business in your own country. If it's such a crap country, work on fixing it for the next generation. That responsibility's fallen to your generation, stop moaning and stand up.
>> We're not racists or xenophobes just because (...)
Still xenophobic, though. I've lost count of how many strawmen you raised here:
- No one is asking for you to "fix the world" for me or other immigrants. Like you, I just want "live my own life", without having to be artificially tied to one piece of land.
- Who says that immigrants do not pay taxes? They pay just like you, and one could argue that they are actually subsidizing your welfare. Undocumented immigrants with jobs pay taxes like everyone else, yet they are not eligible for benefits. For example, I paid two years of Social Security here, and there is zero chance that I will see this money back.
- Skilled immigrants are more likely to solve the problem of unemployment in your country. "They are taking our jobs" is a ridiculous fallacy.
Xenophobia is defined as "an unreasonable fear of foreigners or strangers or of that which is foreign or strange
Don't ever call someone you don't know a xenophobe, you know absolutely nothing about me. I fear UK white trash more than I ever have johnny foreigner.
To be clear, I'd be deeply hurt and insulted by this, but you don't actually seem to know what it means.
From the BBC:
The unemployment total for 16-24 year olds hit a record high of 991,000 in the quarter, a jobless rate of 21.3%.
They are the ones our government should be caring about, not you. Sorry. It's just that there aren't enough opportunities to go around and in the end a Government should be helping its citizens, not someone else's.
That's the point of them.
The original comment I replied to is calling his hosts vile names, as you are, just because you can't get that you're not entitled to anything in this world. You've been given an opportunity in this country and just because our citizens are naturally prioritized over you, why are you complaining and throwing names?
My point about taxes is that your parents didn't pay any. Do you think all this infrastructure appeared yesterday? All this case law was invented last week? That the freedoms afforded were given willingly by kings or queens? It's all been invested in generation to generation. All those unemployed kids? Their parents worked here, paying towards a future for their children. An unwritten contract of pay it forward. Go back a generation or two and you find parents dying, blood, fear, struggle to give their children and their childrens children this opportunity. To ask the Government to give the same opportunities to someone who just turned up is naive at best.
Calling them racists or xenophobes? Total lies and totally out of order. Britain is a liberal and tolerant country compared to many I've been to. There are bad eggs, no denying that, but we're one of the most progressive countries in the world.
I fully admit our forefathers are to thank for this and I feel very lucky to have had the random luck to have been born here, but on the other hand your totally unrealistic sense of entitlement doesn't make everyone else a xenophobe or a racist.
Xenophobia and racism are specific, vile states of mind. Every country in the world prioritizes their citizens. Twisting those words to mean that is, frankly, pathetic.
It may not be conscious for you, but until you are dividing things between "your country" and "someone else's", I will consider your statements xenophobic. We are both in agreement about honoring one social contract, the main difference is that you don't think that others should have any choice of which contract to establish in the first place.
Also, it strikes me as odd for you to defend all the progress made by your ancestors in bringing freedom to people, but not realizing that there is more that could be done. My "complaining and throwing names" about immigration law today would be equivalent to your ancestors complaining about them being exploited by some feudal lord.
More importantly, you don't realize that isolating people based on their country of origin (instead of their potential to contribute to society) is the opposite of progress.
You may think that Britain is one of the most progressive countries, but oddly it has been surpassed in many indicators of quality of life by Canada and Australia. These countries have far saner immigration policies. What's stopping your generation to try to bring this level of progress to Britain? The unwritten contract of "pay it forward" also applies to you, doesn't it?
I'm sorry if you feel offended by any of what I said, I just wish there was a way to disabuse the notion that "country of birth" is some valid parameter to assess an individual. It could have been true a couple of generations ago, but the world of today can (and should) get away from these physical barriers.
P.S: I just realized my bad wording on the original comment. I'm not in the US as an undocumented immigrant. I wanted to say that even being in the US with a H1B visa, I still will not get access to what I paid to Social Security.
Please invent another word. That's not the meaning of xenophobic.
If you gave every single person a choice over which social contract they could choose do you think they'd all be living in Iran, the Congo or the US? Do you think the US could cope with 5 or 6 billion people living there? Or Switzerland or whoever's topping the quality of life list atm.
You're calling people xenophobic because you want the US or the UK to suddenly turn into a meritocracy, but not a real one where we kick out the failures out and let more deserving in. No just the one where you get let in but most other people don't.
But you're not xenophobic or racist? Because it's based on a criteria of merit that you qualify for but the starving child in Africa doesn't.
Is that hypocrisy?
The world today can't get away from those physical barriers. There's not enough money in the world to pay for the UK's social security system for every person in the world. A worldwide NHS? A dream many years from being realised. There's not enough schools spaces in the world for every child. There's not enough houses or roads or cars or yachts or lear jets or iPhones or big screen TVs to go around.
We're nowhere near that point, not even vaguely close. There's not enough. And you're complaining that you've almost managed to break through to the top 5% but they won't let you be a full member of the club. And by Jove you deserve it, and the guy who got me riled in the first place deserves it because you say so. There's enough for you, but only if they let that magical door open a teeny-tiny bit more.
I was lucky in my birth, you were almost as lucky as you've obviously landed on your feet. You got opportunities denied to most of the world. I got, and probably wasted, more. But are either of us xenophobes for benefiting from that luck or wanting to keep that situation for ourselves and our families?
Step back and reflect, really reflect if your desire for this 'sane' immigration isn't totally selfish. Why are you deserving more than any other being on the planet? Because you ticked some boxes? Passed some exams? Dream of starting a business? And why should I even be allowed to stay in the UK?
The term "xenophobic" might be overloaded, much the same way that "homophobic" is. You don't need to actively hate homosexuals to actually hold homophobic views. I still stand by the point that discriminating someone based on their nationality or citizenship is holding a xenophobic point of view. But let's agree that the term might be confusing.
>>If you gave every single person a choice (...) they'd all be living in Iran, the Congo or the US?
As if the only thing to factor in when choosing where to live is the "social contract". There are many people that are allowed to live in Canada and Australia, and yet they don't.
You'd be surprised by how averse to change most people are. Even in places where people have more opportunities to come and go, they still prefer to stay where they are over risking for better opportunities elsewhere. Not all Americans from flyover states want to move out, no matter how bad the environment might be. The same applies to Europeans in the EU, or South Americans in the Mercosul.
>> (...) There's not enough money in the world to pay for the UK's social security system for every person in the world(...)
I can see that we hold many different values about other things, and these might be contaminating the main topic of discussion. I don't want "government benefits". What I want is "free flow of people and services, so that they don't grow up to be dependent on these government benefits in the first place".
>> Why are you deserving more than any other being on the planet?
I am not more deserving to anything, neither I am any less deserving to anything.
>> And why should I even be allowed to stay in the UK?
Why shouldn't you? Are you dangerous? Are you denying someone to their freedoms? It doesn't seem to be the case.
In my value system, you should be allowed to stay anywhere where your presence (or your actions) do not cause direct harm to society. In yours, the country of origin takes precedence over the individual.
To me the irony of this argument is that my ancestors were European, I have already spent well over £150k on taxes in the UK, and the business I would like to start would be employing 19-24 year olds.
Why should we want these immigrants to start a business in their own countries? They 'grow the pie' there, create jobs there, and build internationally competitive businesses there?
I love the StartupChile folks, but I want the US to crush them out of existence for being economically uncompetitive. We're not; we're losing. I'm standing up to make sure America stays economically competitive. We've got the capital, so let's make sure it stays here and doesn't follow great founders who want to come here and can't because of dumb immigration policies.
As I allude to above, the Obama administration did significantly loosen restrictions on H1-Bs for founders who raise money and have a board that can fire them, therefore counting as an 'employer': http://www.uscis.gov/portal/site/uscis/menuitem.5af9bb95919f...
If you're able to transition between your current startup as an employee in a way that gives you time to develop a new startup as a founder and gets you enough runway to raise a round, you may be eligible for an H1-B as a founder under these new rules.
It's certainly not in the interests of the US for you to leave. We've got the ear of the administration, and they're doing what they can to help despite a locked up Congress, as well as some friends in Congress, like former VC and current Rep. Jared Polis.
I read about that, and was encouraged- until I started the visa transfer process from my old employer to my current one. It's been dragging on for five months now, and has been a complete nightmare. My latest instruction is to get confirmation letters from every employer I've had since college to confirm that I am, in fact, a developer and not some sort of international imposter.
I've been working in the US for three years now. I have to prove to the immigration department that I am qualified to do a job they already approved me to do. It's led me to be incredibly cynical about whether US immigration is actually interested in me being in the country or not.
Basically, the clarification provided by the Startup Visa would be amazing.
Yes, it would be amazing :) Any help is appreciated to make it happen!
One political hack to make the system more responsive is to ask your references to write a standard note to their elected officials (House Reps in particular) in DC, little time commitment on their part. Then, you should follow-up by phone call to the staff in the contacted offices.
This is a standard constituent service provided by DC reps to 'check-up' on these visa applications. While they can't order USCIS to approve you, which is a violation of federal law, since the Reps provide funding for USCIS, the departments tend to treat Reps words with weight. You should especially go through this process for the district you plan on setting up in. That Rep wants new businesses and will have the most incentive to help you out.
As a long shot, pitch Vivek Wadhwa to help out, since he's heavily invested in fighting for the tech community on visa issues.
I'd go back to London ASAP. That's not going to change any time soon. By any time soon I mean not this decade at the very least. If anything, they will introduce tighter legislation.
No visa exists for scrappy founders without their own money. You need an employer to qualify for H1-B or EB-2. You need $500k to qualify for EB-5. You need $50k and be from a 'treaty nation' to qualify for E-2.
American-educated immigrants get kicked out and start companies in their home countries or H1-B and work here until they get a green card, when they'd rather take the plunge and start a company? How many founders are camping in Vancouver, the closest urban non-US setting, jotting down the coast for investor meetings in Silicon Valley?
New Zealand, you can get entry status for a 3-month a year, no questions asked. What happens when you raise funding and the angel or VC wants you to locate your company close by to take advantage of their portfolio network? Do you return to NZ to work remotely like Amit Aharoni did? Do you spend your time and money that could be spent on building your company on lawyers to deal with your visas? What happens when an adjudicator rejects your visa, since 'CEO doesn't require a degree,' making it a much harder designation to apply under? Oh, the same adjudicator will be responsible for your appeal, btw.
