Those in Silicon Valley looking to have a bigger impact on the policymaking machinery of Washington, D.C., should take a close look at the genesis of the legislation behind the “Startup Visa.”
The bipartisan bill, which would create a special visa for anyone wanting to start a company in the United States, was introduced in late February and is the result of a yearlong campaign by a loose affiliation of entrepreneurs that started with a blog post, morphed into a savvy social media campaign, and became reality thanks to a planeload of techies who traveled to Washington to knock on some congressional doors.
The effort should be a model for other policy issues dear to the hearts of the Silicon Valley. And folks here need to put some muscle behind this bill, which is just starting its way through the legislative process.
It started with a blog post written in April 2009 by Paul Graham, one of the partners at Y Combinator, a Mountain View-based early-stage venture partnership.
In his post, titled “The Founder Visa,” Graham explained that foreign-born students who graduate from a U.S. college can’t stick around to start a company. Or, if they are here under an H-1B visa, they’re tied to the company that sponsored them, making it hard to jump ship to start a company.
Graham’s post was passed around by tech bloggers, entrepreneurs and venture industry insiders until it got some traction in September thanks to Brad Feld, a Boulder, Colo., entrepreneur and investor who runs a startup mentoring program there called TechStars.
Feld discovered that founders of two of the 10 companies accepted into TechStars last year couldn’t get visas to stay in the U.S., and would probably have to go elsewhere to launch their companies.
“I cannot come up with a single reason why this makes any sense from a U.S. perspective,” Feld wrote on his blog. “They are in the final process of raising their first rounds of financing. Post-financing they will be creating U.S.-based high-tech jobs. If they are successful, they will create a lot of jobs.”
Feld’s post landed just a week before an ad hoc entourage of 32 entrepreneurs, engineers and venture investors arrived in Washington as part an event called Geeks on a Plane. Silicon Valley was represented in the group by folks like Dave McClure of the Founders Fund and startup adviser Eric Ries.
Their trip combined hacking events with the local startup community and briefings with congressional and White House staffs. After one long session batting around some policy ideas, Ries recalled that the Startup Visa seemed to be the idea that generated the most excitement.
“We came away from that meeting with a pretty clear set of marching orders: To give them the ammunition to make this thing a reality,” Ries said.
That they did. Upon their return, the geeks launched a social media campaign asking people to tweet the idea, watch a YouTube video they made, and join a Facebook page for the idea. Using the latest social media monitoring tools, they tracked the responses and sent the data back to Washington to demonstrate the breadth of support. They also sent a letter signed by more than 160 venture capitalists in favor of the concept.
This got the attention of congressional staffers in the offices of Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Richard Lugar, R-Ind. On Feb. 24, they introduced the StartUp Visa Act of 2010 which is now pending in the Judiciary Committee.
If passed, the bill would create a new visa category dubbed EB-6 for immigrant entrepreneurs. To qualify, entrepreneurs have to demonstrate they have raised $250,000 from a recognized venture capital firm in the United States. Rather than ask for new visas to be allocated, the bill would reallocate unused visas from another category for foreign investors.
Passing this is a no-brainer. Even in the tortured politics of immigration, it’s hard to imagine all but the most hard-core anti-immigrant activists opposing a bill that costs no money, takes no jobs away from people in the U.S., and rewards people who want to create jobs here.
That said, even if passed tomorrow, the Startup Visa bill isn’t going to attract hordes of entrepreneurs right away. It will help at the margins. But just as important is the message it sends to budding entrepreneurs from outside the United States: We want you to bring your ideas and your startups here. In the past decade, with the rise of anti-immigration sentiment in this country, that message has been muddled.
Last week, some of the Geeks on a Plane alums returned to the nation’s capital to build momentum for the bill. They’re shooting more videos about entrepreneurs who would have benefited from the bill. And they created a “TweetHall” Web site that allows people to verify they are a registered voter, identify their congressional representatives, and tweet about the visa bill.
Although a lot of work remains, Ries is still amazed at how far they’ve been able to push the idea in just a few months.
“Given how cynical people can be about the political process, I was surprised at how much access we could get as outsiders,” Ries said. “And I was surprised at how much the response from constituents really seemed to matter to people in Congress.”
That’s a tribute to the innovative policy idea they developed that gets around the usual partisan squabbling that surrounds an issue like immigration. And in the process, they’ve built a prototype for how Silicon Valley can use grass-roots politics and the Web to have a bigger impact on the national policy stage.
Contact Chris O’Brien at 415-298-0207 or cobrien@mercurynews.com. Follow him at Twitter.com/sjcobrien and read his blog posts at www.siliconbeat.com.
