Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
Foreign-Born Entrepreneurs Drive America's Unicorn Boom (news.crunchbase.com)
13 points by USTECH_WORKER 2 hours ago
5 comments

> The next time someone talks about restricting immigration, show them this: Nearly half of America’s billion-dollar startups were founded by people born outside the United States.

I don't think the people that talk about restricting immigration care about the number of billion dollar companies that immigrants create

If anything they would love to stick it to them and maybe even steal a bit of those billions for themselves.
beyond not caring. that little factoid would turn a lot of people into xenophobes.
I think they would likely use it as further evidence
You use Elon Musk as argument there and everyone left of center will join call for retroactive immigration restriction.
To be fair, they now have about half the time to make it before you deport them so they have to be more productive.
Wow, I love foreign-born entrepreneurs.
This seems more like a reflection of existing tech power structures and social dynamics rather than innovation.

The bottleneck to being a unicorn isn't so much innovation as it is access to capital. The chasm between the two seems to keep growing. Soon enough, they will be totally independent.

If current trends continue, I predict that in 5 years, for every unicorn startup, there will be many bootstrapped startups valued at peanuts providing far superior products for far lower costs. But they won't be able to access either capital or user traffic.

spent way too much time looking for raw data for the graphs . is it in the article?