In 2003, Akshay Kothari, a 17 year-old student from India, took a flight to the United States to pursue new opportunities at Purdue University in Indiana. During his first semester of college, Kothari took an exciting Physics class taught by a Nobel Laureate. Weeks later, it was that time of the year when hundreds of recruiters line up with brochures and smiles, trying to convince why you should work at Goldman Sachs or Google.
But for students with F1 visas, this week means that more than 90% companies wouldn’t speak to you. The pressure to get a job upon graduation is overwhelmingly high. Kothari knew this so he ended up focusing on the few companies that did. At the end of senior year, Kothari moved to California, worked for a VC firm for a year, but didn’t get sponsored for an H-1B visa.
Pursuing a graduate degree at Stanford University was his solution and against all odds, Kothari decided to build a news aggregator app. Kothari and his team raised an $800,000 seed round from Greycroft Partners and Redpoint Ventures, but the immigration problem was hanging over him the entire time. Luckily, the stars aligned and Kothari’s startup - Pulse - got sold to LinkedIn, becoming LinkedIn Pulse. After long 11 years, he finally received his permanent residency card. His story is an exemption because thousands of talented students and entrepreneurs leave the country because they can’t find a legal way to stay and build a startup.
“In Silicon Valley, [the number of tech companies created between 2006 and 2012 that had an immigrant founder] was 44%. Among [other] founders are WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum and Instagram’s technical lead, Mike Krieger. Kunal Bahl returned home to India to build e-commerce company Snapdeal after failing to secure a U.S. visa upon graduating from Wharton. Snapdeal was valued at $5 billion by investors last year and employs more than 4,000 people.”
Jeff Bussgang of Flybridge Capital and Brad Feld of Foundry Group know that the H1-B visa system is broken and that there’s no immediate fix to pass a bill in Congress to launch a founder visa program. Thus, they are working on their own solution to not lose incredible talent like Akshay Kothari.
In April 2015, and in collaboration with universities and organizations like Venture Politics, they launched The Global Entrepreneur-In-Residence (EIR) Coalition, “a 501(c)3 nonprofit that supports expanding opportunities for immigrant entrepreneurs, universities, and cities across the United States.”
How does the Global EIR program work?
The Global EIR program allows high skilled immigrant entrepreneurs to start their businesses in the United States. American universities and their centers for entrepreneurship will employ these founders as mentors for the university.
The program works with both pre- and post-funded startups, and for the latter, the companies should have an independent board of directors as well as a 12-month runway. If you're a post-funded startup, you'll be offering internships or giving guest lectures instead of hourly work. Generally, pre-funded founders will work for the university 8-10 hours a week as mentors, but if you want health insurance, there are some programs that offer that in exchange for 20 hours a week.
You’ll be getting access to a cap-exempt H-1B visa, which lasts for three years. So far, the program has had 5 successful cases. They’ve obtained either a cap-subject H1-B for a total of six years, an O-1 extraordinary talent visas, or a green card. Only two startups have failed out of our 29 founders. Since the launch, they’ve had 100% visa application success rate.
“Ultimately, we want to see a startup visa/green card pass Congress that Global EIRs will use as their next visa,” says Craig Montuori, Global EIR Coalition’s Executive Director . “A six-year effort to create one died in Congress last year as a startup visa bill has been introduced and failed to make progress every year since 2009. Legislation won’t have a chance at passing until at least 2017 and more likely not until 2022…. We got a lot of support on Capitol Hill and very little opposition, but few people were willing to make it a priority,” he said.
Trying to get involved? Here is how:
As a 501(c)3 nonprofit, The Global EIR Coalition accepts donations and sponsorships. They’re looking for great founder referrals from VCs and startup community organizers. Introductions to universities’ decision makers would help the program launch faster in all 50 states. Get involved here.
Founders who are interested should sign up for their mailing list and take a look at where launched programs are. “We don't want great founders working on anything other than finding product-market fit and scaling up, so there are no other qualifications on their startups beyond building great companies. We're also industry-agnostic! “Founders need to have a bachelor’s degree or equivalent, though it doesn’t have to be from an American university,” says Montuori.
The Global EIR Coalition team has open-sourced the program to encourage other states and universities to open their doors to immigrant entrepreneurs.
What will be the impact in the tech industry?
Based on The Kauffman Foundation estimates, in 5 years, Global EIR Coalition will facilitate the creation of 65 new companies and about 300 new jobs in just a single city, St. Louis. Overall, The Kauffman Foundation estimates 10,000 new entrepreneurs a year at full scale, and over a 10 year period, between $70-240 billion in new economic growth and between 500,000 and 1,300,000 new jobs created.
I agree with the folks at Global EIR Coalition. Immigration problems should never kill a startup.
On November 1st, the Global EIR program launched at San Jose State University as their first Bay Area program. They currently operate in St. Louis, Alaska, Boston, and Boulder.