VCs to Trump: Don't lock out our meal tickets! Save startup visas!

A gang of venture capital firms and startup funds has asked the Trump administration to save an immigration rule that allows foreign startup founders to come to the US in order to build their companies. Exactly 60 companies and organizations on Thursday signed a letter [PDF] asking the President to scrap plans to rescind the …

[Anonymous Coward]

Need more info

> "Tech's rich aunts and uncles beg the President to delay end of the Entrepreneur Rule"

Um, this rule does not yet exist and never has. How can it end? Seems a bit misleading.

I tried to research this issue, since it's unfamiliar to me, and got basically zilch. Lots of VC's want it to happen, and no one else (apparently) cares about it at all, one way or the other. If it's so obviously great, it would seem Trump is just being obstinate.

Maybe he is, but I have a sneaking suspicion that there's more to the story than this. Normally Trump lets his pro-business stance override most other considerations. It's one of the big criticisms against him, isn't it? Very odd.

I wonder if the rule would import competition against domestic startups, and that's what Trump is worried about? A future where what would have been many US-owned companies end up as foreign-owned?

[a_yank_lurker]

Re: Need more info

Trump was in real estate, a rather different business than these vultures. One major difference is Trump's business depends on the physical plant being used/rented at decent rates for time periods measured in decades. It is not easy to move a hotel or office building. Most the vultures are not looking to make a viable business but to make a killing on the IPO. After they sold out to the suckers they could careless about the long term viability of the company.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: could careless

Oh shit yank, what are doing!

Not only do you drop the negation, to form the meaningless "could care less", but you contracted care with less.

"I could careless" - What is this ungrammatical abomination supposed to mean in your corn syrup addled brain?

[diodesign]

Re: Big John

Explained in the story, mate. Second sentence. Ta.

C.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Big John

Okay, I read it again. What exactly does the second sentence say that isn't apparent on the surface?

Oh, and what about that subtitle?

[Geoffrey W]

Re: Big John

There's a proposed rule. Trump doesn't like the proposed rule and wants to stop it coming into effect. Some other people want Trump to let the rule come into effect. I'm not quite sure what it is you're up to here Big John. You aren't making a comical point about something inadvertently present in the article. You aren't pointing out an inaccuracy in the article. You aren't being sarcastic or satirical or ironic. What the heck is it you're up to? It's like you have a trigger in your brain that sees the word Trump in an article and your knee jerks and hits you in your jaw and your typing fingers unclench from the trigger of your law giver and out into the interwebs more words are issued. To what end? The emergence of President Trump has done some very odd things to a lot of people in the USA. I hope there's a cure.

[Perry the platypus]

Once apon a time Americans were good at startups here in the Bay Area... hp, Apple, and others, and no one is stopping people coming... just got to provoke your worth it but you actually have to do that for h1b anyway - the difference is many h1b are company sponsored which is a form of indentured labor also sometimes called slavery...

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

This is for startups, you can't sponsor yourself for H1B. And nobody except megacorps and Tata get H1Bs anyway.

To stop the investor visa trick where you bring $1M investment from china and then immediately pay someone in China $1M for services - this required you to have investment from US VCs. This gave the VCs a small advantage in negotations - since the founder's visa was dependent on accepting the deal the VC offered.

In reality the system was so incompetent you have to think conspiracy. Here in Canada there are lots of US startup visa "refugees". Stories of applications being rejected because they didn't have a fax number, or had to have a US bank account before being allowed into the county, or their name on their paperwork didn't match the US online forms - which wouldn't allow non-Latin characters.

[Buzzword]

Canadian startups

So why isn't Canada a hotbed of startup talent and entrepreneurship? I'm struggling to think of major Canadian tech companies other than Nortel (bust) and Blackberry (slowly going bust).

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Canadian startups

Two straight of the top of my head.

MITEL, one of the leading comms companies in the world (they also bought out Aastra, another big phone hardware company, also Canadian)

KIK

If you want start ups, a quick search will reveal plenty.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Canadian startups

Money. VCs don't travel and their lawyers don't like to do an work - so the US funding vastly outnumbers Canadian sources. So most good people head south.

[big_D]

Big Idea: The Internet!

Are these tech investors so tech illiterate? Explains a lot about Silicon Valley, I suppose.

Do they not know that there is now this thing called the Internet and that you don't actually have to sit in Silicon Valley to build a new business.

If the VCs are really serious, they should speak with their feet and money and invest in the startups where they already are, instead of uprooting them.

[James 51]

Re: Big Idea: The Internet!

The cluster effect kicked in a long time ago in the valley. It is where the VCs and a lot of the talent already are and other companies you might need to form an eco-system with and if you make it slightly difficult for them to do business with you or work for you there are plenty of other companies that aren't doing that.

[big_D]

Re: Big Idea: The Internet!

There are plenty of other startup centers around the world, I'm sure they'll be glad to help - London, Berlin, Paris, Barcelona, for example.

[ckm5]

Re: Big Idea: The Internet!

That may be so, but having lived in 1/2 those in your list plus another 3-4 not mentioned, I can def. say that the startup ecosystem in Silly Valley is unique and very, very hard to replicate. If you believe in the startup myth and you want to follow that route, few other places in the world will do.

This might change with the sunset of American influence/power/money, but for the moment, it's still where it's at. Anyone saying otherwise is just wishful thinking.

[Ralph the Wonder Llama]

"VCs are hoping to appeal to the President's business sense"

lol - nice one Centurion.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, entitled VCs or Trump?

I'm trying to figure out who I would rather see as the villain in this piece, but so far I can't choose a side.

[Anonymous Coward]

Abhishek Gattani perfect example of criminals allowed under these rules

Abhishek Gattani should have been deported but rules like this kept him in America. He beat his wife publicly for years and when it was shown in court with videos, tapes, etc... The judge slapped him on the wrist and said money is more important than public safety.

[Arthur the cat]

Caption competition needed

That photo at the top of the article is calling out for one.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Caption competition needed

Can't think about one, but the duck faces are mesmerizing (in a bad sense).

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Caption competition needed

Good duck faces, great, the best duck faces ever. Even got a call from the president of Mars praising my duck face. Did I tell you I won the election?

[smudge]

Re: Caption competition needed

You don't get many of them to the dollar. 0.01% of them, in fact. True fact!

[John Smith 19]

The challenge is setting up the eco system that California did

A very extensive Cold War funding on RF systems (EW, ECM) helped a lot as well.

[hellwig]

Well...

Also known as the "Startup Visa," the rule would allow temporary residency for foreign nationals who enter the US expressly to found or grow a company they have started or want to start.

Why don't you start the company in your own country, you filthy foreigners?! I mean, you like the abundance of US dollars and US corporate-friendly laws, but you weren't willing to be born here? Nope, sorry, we don't need your kind here.

My "serious" question is, what happens after their temporary residency ends? Are we allowing foreign nationals into the US to fund companies, and then kicking them out and taking their companies, or are they taking advantage of US funding and then taking ownership (and potentially jobs, etc...) back home with them?

The last thing we need is another avenue for corporate inversions. You start a U.S. company, then when you get successful enough, it just automatically becomes a foreign company when your visa expires.

I guess we needed a lot more detail on how this would work exactly. Seems like a giant tax loophole if nothing else. What better way to launder your money than invest in a "US" company that automatically becomes foreign at some point?

[Kurt 5]

Buy your visa

The only visas that Trump cares about are the ones that let a (rich) person purchase one for $500,000 -- that his family has been pushing in China. Those are the visas that should be shut down IMHO.

[TheElder]

Excellent picture

That is the best picture I have seen of the Trumpeter. He really does have short fingers...

[Andromeda451]

H1B visas

Are being and have been used to depress wages in the tech industry. H1B is another form of indentured servitude and are taken advantage of in the USA. You can't tell me that there are not enough good engineers in the USA to fulfill the needs of the vultures. The US Engineers are a troublesome, expensive rabble after all.

[ckm5]

Re: H1B visas

Well, as someone who has been hiring engineers for 10+ years, I can tell you for sure there just are not enough engineers in the US. More than once I have advertised for a position at a competitive salary (in several markets) and could not fill it. And I'm not particularly picky, just need someone capable of doing X job, regardless of background/education/etc.

Also, the stats for H1Bs pretty much show otherwise https://qz.com/1041506/new-data-on-h-1b-visas-show-how-it-outsourcers-are-short-changing-workers/ - despite the clickbait title, the average salary for an H1B is $91k/year, which is $20k higher than the average IT salary in the US (around $78k - http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Industry=Information_Technology_(IT)_Services/Salary).

Not saying that certain H1B abusers aren't awful sweatshops, but the data speaks to a much murkier picture than 'H1B depress US salaries' which is simply not born out by the data.

[Hugh McIntyre]

Re: H1B visas

Coincidentally the Mercury News had an article on this on Friday, at http://www.siliconbeat.com/2017/08/02/apple-h-1b-workers-average-139000-pay-outsourcers-dominate-visa-program-pay-far-less/

This claims 59,184 visas for major outsourcers (Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Accenture, and Wipro) versus only 7,248 for Amazon,Google, and Apple for example, which seems kind-of lobsided. And it claims those 3 tech firms paid an average of $115K-$139K versus $72K-84K for the outsourcers.

So maybe treat outsourcers differently from H1B's for full-time engineering jobs? Although it may be difficult to define criteria for this :(

The other comment is that it's possible for both things to be true: regular employers struggle to hire junior/mid-level engineers (I have seen this as well as ckm5) but at the same time senior/older people can't find senior jobs, and/or there may be vacancies in software/RTL design but engineers with different types of hardware of software experience maybe can't find jobs.

Ideally there wold be a way to separate the visas for full time engineering jobs from outsourcers though, since the latter seem to be more of the problems.

[TheElder]

Something I just remembered

I stumbled on something in my Brain Mapping research. This is the real thing.

There is a new study showing how they have found at least 50 new genes that affect intelligence. The is a very big thing. Intelligence is widely distributed through the entire genome, perhaps even the X and Y genes ☺

See the actual study HERE

In the study go to page 1111 (number at the bottom right of study page)

Then look at section D on that page. That is a list of the negative and positive correlations with intelligence. The upper part is negative. Keep in mind that Trump's father was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Check down the negative list.

Then look at the positive list at the bottom. That mostly describes me including being 6'2", weighed 8 pounds and 14 ounces at birth, have great difficulty finding hats that fit, have never smoked cigarettes (addictive behaviour, I do not drink alcohol or use any drugs at all), My father is 97, mother a bit less in a few weeks and also have 3 more relatives in their 90's. The anorexia and autism do not apply to me but they are lower probability anyway. I also weigh 150 lbs, same as when I was 20. I happen to have quite long fingers too. ☺

This explains a lot.

The source link is where I have also been published, HERE

My current work will most like be published there in the next season.