[sachinag]

There are a bunch of issues with the proposal, but hey:

#Let's say someone comes over, starts a company with $500K and it fails. Then what? Legally, they would have to leave at that point, right? If not, why not? Brad says no, they just have to found another company. That makes me squeamish; while they may be working for themselves, it's not that different than bonding to a trade.

#How many founders can you bring over for one company? What's going to stop them from setting up a consulting shop instead of a product company? We've seen that consulting jobs are very clearly 1-to-1 displacement of American citizens.

#There are a lot of issues with the verification of "bona fide founder" status. I get that VCs are OK with being gatekeepers (yeah, I plead guilty for my one year on the dark side), but it's really distasteful to hand over any part of immigration to non-government officials. More here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=556908

#The pro arguments now are based on anecdotes, not data. There is no data on how many jobs we're "losing out on" by not having a more founder-friendly immigration system.

#Lastly, there's a solution that works right now: find an American co-founder. It's not pretty, as you have a distributed company in the early days, but it works.

I acknowledge the intelligence of the tactical decision to give up on H1-Bs and go after changes to the EB-5, but America would be a better place if we actually reformed the H1-B process. I do wish Brad, Eric, Dave, etc. would tackle the H1-B elephant in the room publicly. We shouldn't be trying to steal startups from other countries; we should be trying to cultivate an environment where everyone here legally - citizens and immigrants on their path to citizenship - can start one and have it thrive.

Also, and everyone's heard me on this before - this group would do a lot more for startups if they channeled this energy into healthcare reform. Job lock-in is real and affects many, many more potential startup founders than immigration policy. VCs/investors from outside SF/NY (cough Brad Feld cough Josh Kopelman cough) would especially be credible, useful voices on a matter that's actually front and center right now.

[gruseom]

These "objections" are just getting out of hand.

How many founders can you bring over for one company?

That's hardly an issue. The optimal number of founders is basically known. You can argue about 2, 3, or 4, but it's obviously way less than 10.

The pro arguments now are based on anecdotes, not data

The proposal is based on reasoning, not anecdotes, and it seems like pretty clear reasoning to me. The anti arguments are a lot of spaghetti thrown at a wall. The current thread is a good example.

There are a lot of issues with the verification of "bona fide founder" status.

That's not an argument against the proposal, it's an argument in favor of sensible policy design - something that is lacking in the status quo.

there's a solution that works right now: find an American co-founder.

A profoundly ignorant statement. Arbitrary co-founder relationships are a predictor of failure. "Marry an American" would be better advice, and it's horrible advice. (Edit: I mean horrible advice for startup immigration! I'm all in favor of marrying Americans generally :))

We shouldn't be trying to steal startups from other countries

Yes "we" should. That's one of the most intelligent things a country that wants to build wealth could do.

this group would do a lot more for startups if they channeled this energy into healthcare reform

Visa issues are a huge obstacle facing startups (edit: and startup investors); there are many, many examples. How many times does "health care" appear on such a list? I've never heard it cited once.

[jhancock]

If I were an immigrant from China or India under this new visa program, the first thing I would do in hiring programmers is fly back home and crank up a top quality, low cost team. As things progressed, I would take it further: anything not absolutely necessary to be within 50 miles of my investor would be done back in my home country.

As an investor, I would fully expect/encourage these founders to behave like this.

The typical cultural and communication problems of outsourcing do not apply in this case. You are taking someone from their home country that will have experience working with their own people and processes.

> "Visa issues are a huge obstacle facing startups (edit: and startup investors); there are many, many examples."

Can you please provide these examples?

> "How many times does "health care" appear on such a list? I've never heard it cited once."

Quite a bit actually. Given how much Health Care reform is in the news, I find it surprising the proponents of the founders visa didn't think about this issue already.

[gruseom]

Can you please provide these examples?

I know at least a dozen people who have personally experienced this, but I'm not going to name anybody. I also have read and heard many statements by people like PG, Fred Wilson, Brad Feld - people who really know about startups - who mention this as a key issue. I have not ever heard anyone bring up health insurance as this specific kind of impediment before, until a few moments ago when people suddenly started mentioning it on HN as a way to monkey-wrench a completely different issue. Find me someone who's made 20 or more angel investments who agrees that the visa issue is less significant to new startups than health care, and I will grant the legitimacy of the objection.

(This is not to say that health insurance isn't a big issue in general, though personally it strikes me as more of an issue for people who want to switch jobs than found startups - that's important, but not the same thing.)

Edit: in fairness, I should add that many of those people I know personally did eventually get visas, but it was expensive, difficult, and distracting - to such a degree that everyone who goes through the process says it is insane.

[jhancock]

I have heard from a few investors that immigration issues caused problems. When I query about what percent of founders this applies to, I hear numbers like 10% or 20%. What numbers are you hearing?

Unfortunately your challenge is flawed of finding investors that have experienced health care as more of a problems than immigration. The health care argument is that people won't consider quitting their day job because of this problem so they never reach the point of showing up on an investor's radar. I know far more well qualified U.S. citizens that would love to start their own business than there is money to fund them. Health care is generally the number one reason cited for them not leaving BigCo.

The founder's visa argument is there are not enough founders to invest in in the U.S. Some people, myself included, are simply trying to point out that not only may there be far more than immigration reform could provide, but that legislation is currently in progress that might alleviate a big part of the reason they are not "on the market".

I am commonly "self-employed", at least from the perspective of Health Care insurers. I have insurance, but mostly to appease my wife. Do you know the stats on cancellation for an "individual" policy if you actually do get a serious illness? Its well over 50%. I know my insurance is most probably useless, as I said, I pay for it to appease my better half who is more risk averse. Most founder-wanna-bes do not have enough money socked away to spend as I do.

I agree that immigration process is insane and unfair to the immigrant. One big problem I have with this proposal is it is highly self-serving to investor desires and doesn't put leverage on the more important issue of simply treating all legal skilled immigrants more appropriately.

[gruseom]

This is one of the few comments in the thread that makes sense to me.

I haven't asked anyone about percentages, but one thing we can say is that whatever the percentage is of foreign-founded startups trying to relocate to the US, that would be roughly the number who are having trouble doing so.

As I pointed out in another comment, the best investors say that their bottleneck is finding good startups to invest in. Objections that reduce to the idea that these people don't know their own business (or are lying) don't hold much water with me. It also seems obviously true that a demographically small number of new startups (a few thousand) would provide huge economic leverage. (Sure, their investors would get richer, but the whole country would get richer. This isn't a financial shell game, it's about creating value by making things.) So the question reduces to the design problem of figuring out a good way to identify authentic startups and minimize gaming of the system. That isn't prima facie insoluble, so all these arguments that it can't be done, at the very beginning of the discussion, just seem disingenuous to me.

What you say about health care from your own experience is very clear, and I certainly hope that that situation gets replaced by a more rational and sustainable one.

Edit: by the way, there's a problem with this:

Unfortunately your challenge is flawed of finding investors that have experienced health care as more of a problems than immigration

That's not my challenge. My challenge was "Find me someone who's made 20 or more angel investments who agrees that the visa issue is less significant to new startups than health care" (emphasis added), in other words, a leading investor who has gone through the same thought process as you guys and arrived at your conclusion that the HC impediment is more important than the visa one. If the argument is a good one, it ought to be possible to find someone who knows early-stage startup investment inside-out and agrees with it. This is a significant point because one thing we know about the business of startup investment is that it doesn't work the way most people think it does. By the way, I'm quite willing to change my mind about this, but not as long as I see all the most credible people lined up on one side of the issue.

[jhancock]

This has been a healthy debate. I only harp on the HC issue because I think its symptomatic of the community not thinking outside the box enough. I don't think its the only issue or possibly the largest one. Usually, the weekend posts on HN are a bit anemic, but not so this weekend. Here are two other articles and threads discussing troubles in startup-land: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=833234 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=832672

Taken as a whole, there is much room to discuss how to create a more effective environ for innovation, job, and wealth creation.

[ajju]

The percentage of founders that immigration issues cause problems for is a flawed metric. A very large number of potential founders do not go beyond seriously considering starting a startup once they look into how complicated the immigration issues are. So you need to look at potential founders.

I know, I am personally going through this right now and went to grad school with or worked with 10 different people who had the technical chops and a strong desire to start a startup but decided against it when they saw the risks it entailed from an immigration stand point.

[dcurtis]

Health care is fixed easily with money, which investors have. Visas are not as easy, so they're a bigger problem.

[jibiki]

> How many times does "health care" appear on such a list? I've never heard it cited once.

It comes up occasionally. Here's an example I found with searchyc:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=764255

[gruseom]

I grant you that it's a data point (well, sort of), but what I meant is that I've never heard it being cited by people who know a lot about startups, and they cite visa issues all the time.

Anyway, bringing up health care in this context is the very definition of a red herring. Nothing stops one from being in favor of both sensible health care and sensible immigration.

[jhancock]

Your right, it would be great to fix both health care and immigration. But this founders visa plan doesn't do either. It attempts to create a new category of immigration to fix one issue that certain investors have. If you really want to fix immigration, at least start by dissecting the problems with H1-Bs. I do see that the current proposal claims that an easiest route would be to modify the EB-5. But this is really creating a new type of visa for this special purpose.

[gruseom]

It attempts [...] to fix one issue that certain investors have.

That seems disingenuous. This isn't about a few rich people's personal convenience. It's about lowering an absurd impediment to the creation of innovation and wealth.

The investors you mention must be really dumb to waste their time on foreign founders, let alone immigration reform, if they could just go and find better startups some other way. They say their bottleneck is the supply of good startups to invest in. Are they lying or incompetent?

[jhancock]

"Are they lying or incompetent?"

If this ever gets in front a Senate committee, hopefully they will have to disclose hard numbers so we can find out. I don't see why they don't go ahead and publish their data right now if they want encourage more support.

[netsp]

That's not an argument against the proposal, it's an argument in favour of sensible policy design - something that is lacking in the status quo.

It is if you are arguing that a sensible policy is not possible.

[tptacek]

Also, and everyone's heard me on this before - this group would do a lot more for startups if they channeled this energy into healthcare reform. Job lock-in is real and affects many, many more potential startup founders than immigration policy.

Absolutely. The "founders visa" thing isn't bad because it's scary policy; it can't be scary since it will never happen. It's bad because it's diverting our attention from the real issues.

[fnid]

Exactly! And the real issues are that our society isn't concerned with producing bright scientists, engineers, and researchers. They are concerned with producing more pop stars, tv stars, athletes, etc...

The inventors, innovators, and scientists have made life so easy, we've forgotten how necessary they are to provide us with the life we live. I'd say the intellectual contributors to life improve it immeasurably more than a basketball star, but the admiration is completely flipped.

When China and India become the super powers through a direct concentration on study, science and technology and we are left in the dust the equation will flip again. It was the space race and the cold war that made scientists sexy and we'll get back there when we realize we are not so powerful anymore.

The founder visa concept is just a band-aid. It's a farce. It's a ruse created by investors to give themselves more power and opportunities to fund companies, but I don't really see a lot of positive benefit to society coming out of the companies I'm seeing funded lately.

Most of the startups that have been promoted since the web 2.0 fiasco are pretty stupid ideas really and if they do succeed we will continue to be worse off as a nation. Ad networks? Upload a photo today? Show my location 24/7? 140 character messages? Really people? Is that the direction we want to take our country? We need more visas for that nonsense?

I don't think so.

[jacquesm]

> It's a ruse created by investors to give themselves more power and opportunities to fund companies,

I doubt that investors are looking for more power or opportunities to fund companies, there is rather a glut of ideas and companies that could be funded than a scarcity, so that can't really be the deciding factor here.

What I think drives this whole idea is that to regain the lead in innovation you have to make it possible for innovators to get in on the game. And America is the country to be in for that.

I only have to look at my own history to see how much difference location can make when you are just out of the 'seed' stage.

Whether it would work or not is a different thing, but I definitely don't see it as a ruse. Merely a nice idea but probably ultimately too hard to execute properly so that it is only an all across the board 'win', instead of a 'win' for some and a 'loss' for others.

[joe_the_user]

I don't think that the Founder's Visa is ruse. I think it's a not particularly well-thought-out idea that resonates with the start-up community because it seems to address some problems and, even-more, seems to validate the identity 'Founder' as something worthwhile.

I do think that start-ups provide something of worth to society. However, I think it's a problem when public policy starts to be about massaging some groups identity.

[jhancock]

Well said, if something like this actually got passed, which I doubt, it wouldn't be one of the many things that I "fire" my representative for come election time.

[ilkhd2]

"Job lock-in is real and affects many, many more potential startup founders than immigration policy. VCs/investors from outside SF/NY (cough Brad Feld cough Josh Kopelman cough) would especially be credible, useful voices on a matter that's actually front and center right now."

Totally agree.