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