Nearly Half of US Unicorns Have Foreign-Born Founders | Hacker News Reader

Nearly Half of US Unicorns Have Foreign-Born Founders

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22 pointsohjeez16 comments

Of these, half of the founders came to the US for university[1] (25% of all unicorns). That would be a pretty wealthy or non-representative group to begin with, since international tuition is very expensive, no? As a whole, immigrants have higher poverty rates in the US than native-born residents[2], which is also an interesting data point to juxtapose with this.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2022/07/26/most-...

[2] https://www.irp.wisc.edu/publications/focus/pdfs/foc262e.pdf

As I understand it, the tuition differential is only for public universities, not private ones. Private universities/colleges may cover the full financial need of international students if they cannot afford tuition.

Source: I was an international student and got nearly a full ride to a private SLAC.

My understanding is that even in private universities, the magnitude of financial aid available is much less for international students because of the lack of government financing in many cases

This isn't surprising to me since most of us upend our lives just to be in US, so we have more of an incentive to try harder to make it.

And people know that the US is friendlier to startups/business than other countries, so founders will come to the US. They didn't just happen to be here.

Does the "I can always go back whence I came" also lower the perceived risk? If a domestically-born founder fails they aren't apt to have anywhere else they can go, thus having to stick around to deal with the fallout.

I can imagine the opposite "This place is so nice and I don't want to go back to what I perceive as a hellhole", and so they work harder to succeed.

A significant number of these founders are from Canada. It is not that much different from the USA. Canada is less business friendly, perhaps, but that isn't important after you've failed.

Ah yeah, if lazy Americans would just try harder, they’d be richer.

tons of studies show children of bottom income quintile immigrants have far more economic mobility than non-immigrants children in the bottom quintile, so there is something to it, even if it is not as simple as laziness.

The US is only 5% of global population, so this suggests we're leaving a lot of would-be unicorn founders on the table.

Do you not think it would be more informative to look at the global percentage of people who are wealthy enough to take multiple bites of the unicorn apple?

Someone who is capable of building a unicorn company but cannot attempt it because they are too poor is still "left on the table".

> this suggests we're leaving a lot of would-be unicorn founders on the table

A good fraction of Asia's unicorns came to the U.S. to be highly educated before being kicked out because our visa process is broken.

How many are h1b1?

The vast majority of foreign born founders and CEOs have come from the H1B or L1 programs (L1Bs tend to transition over to H1B most of the time unless they get their GC early). The ones with an easier avenue to acquire a GC do so before they become founders. If not, they tend to go with the transient H1B program, or move to another VISA that is more appropriate for entrepreneurs.

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