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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.

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.

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.

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 6113 days ago

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 6113 days ago

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 6114 days ago

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

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

jibiki 6114 days ago

> 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:

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.

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.

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?

"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 6114 days ago

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.