[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.