[mahyarm]

I'm talking about the USA. I work for one of those VC funded smaller companies, and they provide comparable services by just hiring immigration lawyers. The fee per employee are around several thousands of dollars and $10-20k for green cards. The new hiring firm also hires the lawyers to switch you over to make it relatively painless on your side. Compared to getting a new H1B visa hire, the switchover employees are much easier to hire.

A smaller startup company will ask more hours of you and wont provide such things as an on site kindergarden, but the benefits can be fairly comparable. Some of those startups also have a foreign office you could work at for a year or two and do the L1 visa thing for you too.