The rules of this startup visa never made any sense. They basically ensured that very few potential immigrant founders would qualify and the ones that did were in a place where they probably didn't see the value in that path as opposed to other business related visas.
>The rules of this startup visa never made any sense.
Can you elaborate specifically on the rules of the USA startup visa that didn't make sense? For comparison and discussion, you can look at other countries' startup visa programs [1] like Germany, New Zealand, Sweden, etc.
Basically, the idea is to craft the visa rules such that the barriers are high enough that it allows legitimate foreign entrepreneurs with real business prospects to filter through. On the other hand, if you make the criteria "too easy", it becomes a "back door visa" for non-productive foreigners to abuse.
It's a balance between those two outcomes. Did any other country tune their visa policy correctly? If so, what did USA specifically get wrong and what did the other countries get right?
> Can you elaborate specifically on the rules of the USA startup visa that didn't make sense?
As someone pointed out a couple weeks ago [1]:
> From the article:
> "To qualify for the rule, entrepreneurs would have to meet high standards. A foreigner must demonstrate that he or she will contribute to economic growth or job creation and show that a reputable investor has put at least $250,000 into the company. Under this rule, they can stay in the U.S. for 30 months, with the possibility of a 30-month extension. They cannot apply for a green card during this period."
> This sounds like a pretty lame visa. How are you supposed to build a startup if you only have 30 months to do so? Why would investors risk $250k if the founder may be deported in 30 months? What happens after the extension period?
So from your link, that startup rule got wrong the 'Defining Success: Criteria for Permanent Residence' which states:
> Conditional entrepreneur visas can typically be renewed or converted to permanent residence after two to four years if the immigrant creates a successful business. (An exception is the Australian Venture Capital Entrepreneur program, which provides immediate permanent residence.)
But here the rule is simply: 'They cannot apply for a green card during this period.'. So even if your startup is successful, you're kicked out after 2.5 or 5 years.
This visa program deserves to be repealed. This is a big contrast to a couple of years ago when you could bring in 200k+ in to the country and start a business. Australia and Canada would grant a permanent residency.
I know everyone likes blaming Trump for everything but i’m happy when they decide to reform immigration programs that don’t make sense.
I'm not familiar with other countries entrepreneurship visas.
This rule originally required $345,000 in investment from US based investors before the visa is awarded. The amount was then revised down to $250k after comments from the executive and investor community. It then required $500k in recurring revenue and 20% annualized revenue growth in order to extend the visa after 2 years.
I'm not sure why a foreign startup founder with a product that raised $250k from US investors and can confidently say they will have $500k in revenue want to temporarily immigrate to the US? Nothing is stopping them from operating in the US and there are existing visas for business owners operating in the US they can use that don't have all of the related hoops.
I think ultimately this would be underutilized at best and gamed much like the EB5 program at worst.
>I'm not sure why a foreign startup founder [...] want to temporarily immigrate to the US?
To make sure I'm not misinterpreting that, you're saying startup founders would rather run their startup company remotely thousands of miles away? E.g. the foreign startup founder stays in France which is 6+ time zones away while his company and employees are working in the USA? To be clear, we're not talking about the mother ship of a mature company opening a branch office in another country but instead, an infant startup company with maybe the founder and 1 or 2 other people. Even if the majority of startup founders wanted that arrangement, what VCs would invest in that type of working structure?
>Nothing is stopping them from operating in the US and there are existing visas for business owners operating in the US they can use that don't have all of the related hoops.
If you look at the other USA visa options[1], they are not exactly redundant with the proposed startup visa. (E.g. EB5 requires higher amount of $1 million from the immigrant which basically means the immigrant is already wealthy instead of starving entrepreneur with no money.
The other visas are based on talent/skill such as advanced hard-to-find PhD or require employers to sponsor. The immigrant is his own employer.)
I think you and I have a different view of the type of entrepreneur this visa would apply to.
I don't think a foreign startup with 1 or 2 employees is going to attract $250k investment from US investors. (source: I once started a tech company in south america, US investors rarely invested outside of the US in early stage businesses) I think this would just be too risky for the US investor.
On the other hand if there was a startup that were within 2 years reach of $500k recurring revenue and 20% growth and were derisked to the point that US investors were interested in putting up real money then they are probably established enough that they wouldn't want to make the move for such a short time frame.
I think when people first read about this visa rule they imagined it'd be more ycombinator hacker types ("infant startup company with maybe the founder and 1 or 2 other people") when in reality that wasn't the case.
I wish I could remember where I saw the video (a guy with a bunch of gumballs representing population), but I remember he spoke about how the visa process is really beneficial for the USA but bad for other countries. The point being that we drain their talent pool while increasing our own.
The argument being that as we skim the top people from the talent pool of other countries we reduce their capability to push innovation and ideas within their own infrastructure. Instead the USA benefits in that we don't have to have the smartest people just the most attractive place for them to come and help our country. So while I disagree with his message behind this move, I think he inadvertently helped the rest of the world...
It is worth noting that productivity and innovation are a team sport.
If you place a single bitcoin programmer in the middle of, say, Yemen, that person would be a lot less productive than they would in the US.
This might be marginally improved with the internet (at least the person doesn't have to physically ask questions or purchase books), but only marginally.
Consider:
1. Tough time understanding the needs of paying business customers because the business are smaller and less tech savvy.
2. Tough time hiring other workers to expand because they are fewer schools that produce programmers, managers etc.
3. Tough time with internet, electricity and so forth because the infrastructure isn't there.
4. Tough time with knowing what the legal hoops are for setting up a company and a contract because the institutions have been weakened.
And so on.
Of course there are smart and innovative people there who can do useful work in that context. But that is not the same as the US context.
Isn't the response that for those businesses to grow, for those schools to produce more programmers, to build out the infrastructure, the top performers who are motivated to solve or improve such problems must stay in their country to work on them? If they go elsewhere, then elsewhere gets better solutions but their home doesn't.
/Until we learn to package the solution in a nice development kit and resale it back to their homeland at a nice markup.
I doubt that is accurate. Generally speaking, most places which are hostile to new business ideas aren't going to become less hostile if they retain more of "their" smart people, because the problems are not things that can be easily solved by simply having smart people around.
I mean, if smart people stay in Russia instead of move to the US, is that going to change that rampant corruption and government control make it hard to run a legitimate business in Russia? If smart people stay in China instead of move to the US, does that mean that the oppression that the Chinese Communist Party engages in is going to go away through magic? If smart people stay in Greece instead of move to America, is that going to solve their sovereign debt problems? If smart people stay in Venezuela, how will they solve the problem of there not being enough food to eat?
Those are all examples off of the top of my head. I'm certain less dramatic ones can be easily conjured up for any country where someone may decide to choose USA to start up.
Really? Please explain how having more smart people would fix the problem there.
I don't think they have a shortage of high IQ people in Greece. They seem to have a shortage of money to spend, and a culture that is hostile to spending less money because of trust issues within their society. How do you throw smart people at that problem to make it go away?
No, I said that more smart people would not fix the problems with Greek society that make starting businesses there vs. USA unpleasant. That doesn't say anything about whether or not "we need visas."
Maybe! After all, those "smart people" may turn to solving or changing the underlying limiting economic or business issues. Either as a focus of their efforts or by necessity of running a business. Or by contributing to innovation in more "traditional" channels.
On the other side of it, why would these "smart people" want to bother helping their homeland versus helping them and theirs?
Maybe it's worse for those countries, but in a world of globalisation, it's not irrational to pursue the opportunities in a place where you can get the most bang for your buck. You can always return if you want to, but that's not the path of least resistance.
For the context of this comment, this is if these "smart people" couldn't come to the U.S. instead. ("The argument being that as we skim the top people from the talent pool of other countries we reduce their capability to push innovation and ideas within their own infrastructure.")
Basically, if these "smart people" couldn't come to the U.S., there would be no option. They wouldn't have any where else to go, and would have to help their homeland in order to help them and theirs. No other option if they couldn't come to the U.S. instead (if the theory is correct).
Pretty much. 40% of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrant families. Likewise, 7 of the top 10 brands in the world were founded by U.S. immigrants or their children.
How many of those immigrants were sponsored by a corporation or investor and restricted in how and where they could work by the terms of their employment?
How many came here as free and full members of the workforce, allowed to pursue their own career paths as they saw fit?
There's a huge difference between supporting immigration and employer controlled visa programs.
The newest fortune 500 companies (founded last 25 years) are more likely to have an immigrant founder. Corporate sponsorship (H1B, etc.) was part of the Immigration Act of 1965, meaning that even in lieu of more restrictive immigration, immigrants are still heavy hitters for generating jobs and revenue.
Of course 40% of businesses were stared by immigrants. America is the land of immigrants. The articles states since 1850. Even the Trump families subsequent good fortunes were made possible by an immigrant.
Most of my friends and extended families have a grand parent or two who were immigrants. If not grand parent then great grand parent.
If you read the article, you'd see the criteria for which they describe it as being either an immigrant (18% of Fortune 500 founders) or the child of an immigrant (22% of Fortune 500 founders).
Grandchildren are not included, hence Donald Trump doesn't qualify.
The reason I quoted grand parents is because a good amount of Fortune 500s were created in the 1900s. That would be my parents to grandparents generations not millenials.
Fortune 500 companies founded since 1985 are more likely to be founded by immigrants (20%) than companies founded before 1985 (17%). This isn't about your grandparents.
The definition of immigrant founder, as others have pointed out, is an immigrant or a child of an immigrant. I wasn't born in 1985 so it is almost as much about my grand parents (17%) as it is about me (20%).
My definition of immigrant is not a child of an immigrant.
True, but on the other hand, if 5 people found a company, and one of them is an immigrant or the child of an immigrant, that counts as an immigrant founded company, even if the company would have been founded without that one person.
That's only tangentially involved in this discussion though. That video is about whether opening immigration pathways to the USA can reduce world poverty. I never reviewed the rules that are being overturned here, so I can't say whether they made sense or not, but they were probably targeted at increasing US economic growth, not reducing world poverty.
It's pretty obviously easy to game. Similar programs currently in place are basically funnels for rich foreigners from China and other countries to get green cards for doing marginally productive things like buying commercial property.
I think that the rules of this startup visa made perfect sense for the venture capital people who were pushing it. The rules basically boil down to, If a VC thinks that so and so has a good enough shot at a business that we want to fund him, don't make immigration a barrier.
It was never intended as a path for large numbers of good people to immigrate to the USA, and so makes no sense for that. It was just meant to get government out of the way of people who are likely to generate jobs here.
The goal of good government should be to make decisions that make the people's lives better, and not to make all decisions feel wonderfully democratic.
People with a likely decent track record are willing to put their money down on, "This person can create jobs." Would you prefer to have those jobs created or not? Saying yes to the option is very much not a zero-sum game.
Yes, in a democracy, we allow people other than the government to make decisions, because we understand that the proper scope of what should be voted on is not "everything."
I don't think you're recognizing a critical distinction between the type of decision being made.
The difference here is that a job offer or an investment is a decision made by an employer or an investor. US citizenship or work/residency, on the other hand, is a status not with an employer or an investor but with the US government and the citizens it represents.
Thinking back to my first startup job, the founder was exactly such a person who was in a place where according to you he probably wouldn't see the value in the startup path. Because he was eminently employable with the quality of his credentials and skills, so, why not just get a high paying job working for someone else? Why bother with all the work of a startup, right?
And yet he did see the value in the startup path. Which led to him starting a company that grew to a decent size and got acquired and continued to provide innovations and value for the new parent company. And kept many people employed. All because of what this one founder started.
So, from a jobs standpoint, and from an innovation and business expansion standpoint, I would say the visa made plenty of sense.
Well yes and no. On one hand, if you secure a 250K funding this is a good option to get inside the US. On the other, if your startup fails for whatsoever reason, you have to head back, can't work anywhere else.
As a hobby gardener and wannabe roboticist I've thought a lot about this problem. Before I continue I love this thing and am seriously thinking about getting one.
However, a concern that I'm sure they've thought a lot about is in it's technique. I really only care about making sure there are no weeds within, say, 8 inches of my plants (or put another way, my level of concern about a weed is proportional to it's distance from my vegetable or flower plant). This looks like it will weed everything except the 8 inches around the plant. Never mind things like cucumbers that spread out on the ground and have important bits that are short and can't be contained by the wire protectors. Still, an exciting place to start.
I do raised beds as well, so I have the same concern. But from my point of view the larger issue is that I'm almost never only weeding. Like, it's just not that big of a job.
But more importantly, time spent "in the garden" includes a lot of inspection and minor adjustments to all kinds of things— move plants on a trellis, pinching suckers off the tomatoes, clipping blighted leaves off of plants, ensuring flowers are getting fertilized, monitoring fruit growth, etc.
All of this stuff is an essential part of being in tune with what's going on out there, and I'm not sure that having a robot do one small piece of it is beneficial. Basically, this product doesn't really look like it was built by a gardener— it looks like it was someone who had a solution they wanted to apply elsewhere, and spent 15 minutes watching a gardener at work, without really understanding what they were doing.
In my opinion, that suffers from the same fundamental issue that it's covering a small portion of the visible work that a gardener is doing, but isn't accounting for all the observation and tweaks.
Basically I'm just not sure it's realistic to pitch this product to someone who wants to have an outdoor garden but spend little to no time actually tending it. I feel this kind of user might be better served by something like Aerogarden.
In any case, it's a much harder problem because watering even a small garden takes a _lot_ of water, so for it to be practical, you either need a robot with a huge (and very heavy) reservoir, or a base station at which it can fill up (which would almost certainly require leaving the garden bed itself, massively complicating the whole system).
I agree (as someone who spends all my time in my garden when I'm not at work). I enjoy being outside, getting fresh air, clearing my head, and tending to my own garden. There is something really refreshing about doing it and I'd have zero interest in automating away any portion of it. Just my 2 cents...
I brew up and spray compost tea in 5 gallon batches. A machine that would continuously brew tea and go walk around the garden spraying it everywhere would be pretty cool. But also far more of a niche.
what might be cool is a method by which the robot could tell you the garden needs to be watered. so some sort of sampler to make this determination. get really advanced with optics and we could eventually have it determine if there is a bug problem or disease.
the robot doesn't necessarily need to do all the work, just identify what needs to be done beyond its specialty
It would have to be a much stronger robot to haul around a garden hose. Those things can easily weigh several kilograms when they're full of water, not to mention they can get caught on obstructions rather easily.
There's always a sock waiting to be stuck on somewhere...
But I don't get it why they won't make the robot reverse a short bit and try to go around instead of just rolling over and die.
That would solve 99% of the situations I have rescued my old Roomba and current Neato from. It's very seldom they actually got something entangled in their brushes.
It already is damaging things as it is. The Neato have peeled a USB cable and an audio cable. It also have chewed on a few laptop charger cables but they seems to be tougher so no damage. Hopefully it won't peel something that could be dangerous.
I doubt it could be that hard to detect an unusually low rotation speed. Now it seems to chug until it really stalls. Instead it should stop the brushes immediately and retreat, then retry with just the fan running.
I'd settle for a garden hose that doesn't perish from UV damage after a season and doesn't kink every 7 seconds. Sounds like a pretty simple thing to get - it isn't.
Things would get tangled in a hurry with the hose getting caught up or stuck. Low pressure would help but I still don't think it's viable on anything but row based gardens.
My family kept a large garden for the duration of my childhood. I was made to weed it. It was absolutely that big of a job. It took a couple hours. Every day.
It looks like they started with a Roomba and went from there, which leaves them with a robot that can't deal with raised beds or (as you said) weeds integrated with plants. I have raised beds and then raised side gardens which would render this device useless to me. Same with the other hobby gardeners I know.
I always imagined something with long spindly legs that would cut, inject or spray things that it identified as weeds by leaves. For me, the weeds that are the most trouble are those close to or mixed in with plants. Anything on its own isn't that hard to pull out.
Roombas have to deal with stairs while this thing will probably get it's underside covered in mud (especially since it has that unshielded trimmer) and is supposed to run only inside a fenced area, so I doubt it has any provisions for that.
Easiest way to do it is to put layers of wet newspaper then black mulch. I left it for a month and it's as if the weeds were never there. I made holes in the mulch and planted some veges, they are doing great (except for the Shiso which something ate).
You do know you can buy weed barrier fabric and cover the beds. When you plant you put holes in the barrier where your plant goes. Work well for a few people I know and it's similar price to mulching every season.
Mulch worked for me but I am using pots at the moment.
My garden was literally only weeds (our house is my wife's grandparents and the house had sat mainly abandoned for about 3 years when we moved in). After doing the newspaper and mulch technique and leaving it for about 6 weeks the weeds had all decomposed into soil and haven't come back.
The bit that shouldn't surprise me but still does, is the volume change. Add 6 ish cubic metres of mulch and 5 years later is a thin layer of soil comprising maybe 1-2m.
Does Kubernetes support adding "middleware" between it and docker? ie when it comes time to do a container start, it calls my custom plugin instead of docker directly? I read the docs about extensibility and it didn't seem so.
That idea was proposed here:
https://github.com/kubernetes/features/issues/246 ;
there's a pretty thorough design doc linked to from the issue. The decision was made not to add it to the system for now (see the issue for discussion).
This is a very simple example. But we require setting the pid limit cgroup. Right now Kubernetes doesn't support this (again, just an example, there are a lot of things kubernetes doesn't support that we need beyond pid limits).
So it'd be nice to be able to proxy the call to docker to inject our own config before hitting docker. It looks like CRI is exactly what we'd need, possibly maintaining our own fork of the docker shim? Trying to figure out if there is a way to put in arbitrary data in the config sent to the docker shim[0]
I'm with you on this. Of all of the teams at Apple/Facebook/Stripe etc I can guarantee there are at least 25% I would not want to be on, 30% I might not want to be on, 30% I might want to be on and 15% I would definitely want to be on.
So now I need to start from scratch to get all of the information I'd need to make the decision of what position I am interviewing for fits. What makes this doubly difficult is I've been "fast tracked" to the interview process where those discussions aren't expected.
The more I read about triplebyte the more I think their heart is in the right place but they are creating a market for lemons.
If triplebyte can create a system where the final interview is a cultural fit interview of no more than 2 hours and both sides feel they have enough information to proceed, then they are onto something.
Akka FSM in and of itself does not address distributed FSM's. However, supporting such would likely involve their clustering[0] support and perhaps distributed data[1].
Why does the media keep calling Levandowski a plain old engineer? If Levandowski qualifies as a nameless engineer the title should read "Waymo filing says engineer knew engineer had Google info." Levandowski is a well known tech entrepreneur and was before this case, he wasn't just some worker bee Uber hired to sling code that stole IP from Google before leaving.
It sort of feels like the VW emissions scandal being blamed on "engineers". No, in both cases they were well compensated, well connected, seasoned tech executives and knew what they were doing and thought they could get away with it because of their position (and likely also from experience.)
Yeah, I always do a double-take when I read engineer, because I take it to mean that it was some other engineer, because obviously if it was Levandowski, they'd have mentioned him by name.
He's literally the protagonist of this whole drama, and they keep referring to him as 'engineer'. WTF.
The way Uber works now is it incentivizes the driver to give you a poor rating if you don't tip. By including the tip functionality in the app, and preventing the driver from seeing the tip before you are rated, it will remove this incentive.
I don't like tipping either but Uber had to do this and I'm confident the data showed it.
I used to tip in cash to avoid the bad rating especially if I am travelling to airport and have heavy luggage. I hate carrying cash and this is a very welcoming change. Anything that would make them look less evil(Although i don't think they are any worse than most companies.) is a good PR move.
I have literally never given an Uber driver a tip -- and have used them for many, many airport trips, and overall have easily taken more than a thousand rides since I joined in early 2012 -- and my rating is currently 4.87.
Perhaps you live in a market where Uber drivers are aggressive about asking for tips, though, which is not the case in SF.
I'm a bit jaded on this subject, but even not-profit dollars contribute to revenue dollars, which helps secure future funding. So not "not any part of the tips", just a complicated hedging game on those tips.
Why did the employee need to fill out any paperwork to be taken off of the performance plan? Shouldn't that happen at the direction of their manager? Feels a little bit like a deus ex machina.
Have you not worked at a big company? This is 100% normal for everything.
For the required training I do because my work touches health care: The company has a record of what training I need. It sends me a list of courses. I then have to register for those courses -- within the same company. They can't register me for it on their own. I take the course, get my passing grade and now the course and my training record know that I have a passing grade for the course. So naturally I have to print that out, upload it to another site and mark it complete. Someone in India (literally) checks this. Not done yet, I fill out a paper copy by hand with course numbers and dates and sign it. Upload that and turn in physical copies to my management. If I want credit on the number of hours training I have for the year, I need to update that manually as well. Expect these forms to be kicked back multiple times on the way because the date is in the wrong format or some other reason. Also expect to take multiple forms of the same training within the same training year because it has been repackaged (not new courses, regrouped same courses).
I currently work for a large corporation. This is not 100% normal for everything. This wasn't a training, this was the fundamental employment status of the employee. I don't need to sign any paperwork to accept a raise or promotion, etc. I've never been put on a PP but I'm guessing my company wouldn't require the employee to handle any paperwork if they came off of it either.
Luckily our training system sounds more streamlined than yours. Different strokes for different companies I guess.
Normally there is some form of acknowledgement which might just be a check box, but it sounds like the HR process was setup so that step could not be skipped.
If we accept your "unreliable worker" theory, have you considered that there are outside factors besides a lack of "work ethic" (which is some real quality bs to begin with) that would make a person unreliable? If you have, what were they and why were they ruled out?
I find that people that make the work ethic argument are the ones that don't want to acknowledge that they didn't exactly earn their place. They think they rose to their position purely by their own work ethic and that makes them intrinsically special and possessing traits that others are deficient in.
