[skynetv2]

100% agree. Someone I know received an O1 EO visa but they had worked on products that were shipping worldwide for 100s of millions of dollars, filed patents, had advanced degrees, worked at some high profile institutions, had 1000s of citations for their papers, papers published in high profile conferences and journals, and recommendation letters from CEOs, CTOs of high profile organizations from US and abroad. And they were employed in a domain which is identified as a critical technology. Their case was still far from being a high confidence case. The lawyers kept the regular process going, including NIV path.

No offense to OP and still a nice achievement but OP's listed criteria are not even close to what would qualify for O1 and would not hold up under scrutiny if the letter and spirit of the criteria is applied. It is possible that USCIS is instructed to encourage issuance for start up founders, which is totally fine and is necessary to keep the innovation going.

On a related note, the moment OP resigned from their L1B job, I am fairly certain they needed to leave the country in 60 days or so. It may or may not affect them when they pursue citizenship.

But if I were OP, I would not advertise this and count my blessings in private.

[returningfory2]

> On a related note, the moment OP resigned from their L1B job, I am fairly certain they needed to leave the country in 60 days or so. It may or may not affect them when they pursue citizenship.

Just a technical note that it won’t affect them at all. When you apply for an employment based green card you can actually have arbitrary amounts of “unlawful presence” before your most recent admission to the US. The Immigration and Nationality Act explicitly allows it. The challenge is generally recentering the US after being here unlawfully, but it seems OP already did this on their new O-1.

[marwis]

But OP didn't apply for green card?

And now they can't anymore. Pretty strange move to go from L1 to O1 since L1 allows relatively straightforward upgrade to green card but O1 is a non-immigrant visa.

Correction: they can. Looks like "non-immigrant" can still have dual intent of immigrating.

[cqqxo4zV46cp]

Yep. To look at this a different way: this feels like a fluke, and people should take this n=1 recount for what it is.

[dannyw]

It’s not a fluke. The new administration is very startup friendly. They’re even more so if you’re doing anything AI/ML.

Be a machine learning engineer, have published one paper, have peer reviewed code, work for a company, be paid typical MLE comp, and you meet 4/8.

From my anecdota it seems like they won’t really question it.

[kelnos]

I'm not sure I'd agree it's a fluke. Someone I worked with at a previous company did something very similar to this, and I recall reading an account on HN a couple years back about someone who did it using different criteria than OP, but still in a way that surprised me.

[aryamaan]

Can’t find that blogpost or link anymore. I was along the lines of how I hacked usa visa system