Could you explain a little about the visa situation being an international founder. There is not much information about the issues faced by international founders and most advice comes down to "Contact a lawyer". It would be nice if you can share your experience.
Every case is different. Contacting a lawyer is the best advice to avoid getting distracted. You will anyway, but try to delegate as much as possible. Some countries have special quotas in the H1B, others have the NAFTA, some founders might do E2, others L1s, etc. And all the knowledge from achieving this is a good line to start a conversation with other international founders.
My cofounder went for the O1, I'm in the process of getting an L1.
A tourist visa is a good start as long as you know the rules and limitations. It's 100% legal to start and own a company in the US with a tourist visa.
I believe you need to make an investment out of your own pocket to apply for that visa. An immigration lawyer told me $200k, do you know if you can go lower than that?
The requirement is that a majority share of the company be foreign owned (I think it may have to be the founder's country but I don't recall the exact details), and that "substantial operational investment has been made in the United States". The latter represents having a office lease, having purchased equipment and furniture, etc.
The latter also will cause you to hear sums like $200k be quoted. Our number was higher than this when we applied (we raised our first round outside of the States), so I do not know if there is a lower bound. This whole process is not well defined and is very much an exercise in compelling storytelling to convince the Visa officer that you're not committing fraud.
I'm the author of the article. After being part of YC, I had a lot of things I wish I knew before doing it, from common mistakes to humble reminders. Specially being an "international founder".
I just wanted to say that I enjoyed reading your article. I wish you the best and keep up the good work. I especially appreciated the viewpoint of a non-american (as a non-silicon valleyian, which arguably has similar learning curves).
That's really good advice. There is a few people I'll forward this too(it doesn't directly apply to me being in Japan but the advice in general does!).
I know some YCF companies. They loved it. I wanted to move to Mountain View and do the full three month program. But if I couldn't, YCF is a great deal.
Fantastic, a whole post with useful advice from minority founders and no mention of their (supposedly) disadvantage status. We need more of this and less of the bullshit about how badly minorities have it in SV.
Can someone summarize the content, and specifically point out the lessons? The only thing I'm getting from reading it is "we come from far away, that's why it was harder" (true story but doesn't really help others in this situation) and "YC is so great" (which may or may not be true, but also doesn't teach us anything). I don't find any lessons.
Other ways, besides lying yourself, that you could know a person was a good lie detector:
* You've seen them catch others in a lie
* You've heard stories about the ability 2nd hand, either from people who have been caught themselves or from people who have seen others get caught.
In addition, there are many fuzzier, less reliable types of evidence:
* Somebody has so much knowledge and experience about something that you can safely assume irregularities would stand out to them.
* They just give off that vibe: soul-piercing gaze, etc.
* They tell you.
So logically, the question makes about as much sense as asking how you could know someone was a good cook if you've never tasted their food. And not only that, getting caught in a lie by someone isn't even necessarily good evidence of their lie detection abilities. Maybe you are just a terrible liar. Maybe they got lucky one time.
Indirect experiences and anecdotes. Also, it's inevitable sometimes to feel ashamed of certain things in your startup, so you actively avoid talking about it.
But they know. And you end up talking about it, which is a good thing.
Be interesting if they went into detail about what prompted this paragraph. Anyone can state generalities.
>Lying to YC partners is a waste of time. They won't ask for the money back, so tell them everything. All startups are chaotic shitshows. They know. They invented the phrase.
Most (all?) startups have broken things. Mine did and I tried to hide them at first. But I guess YC is at a point that, after thousands of startups, they've seen most of the patterns and just want to help you fix them. They'll help you no matter in what shape your company is.
Also, some startups plainly lie about their metrics, but those rarely get accepted to YC, from my limited experience.
I never lied about metrics but I've seen startups that do outside YC. Most of them don't do it out of malice but due to bad math. It's easy, for example, to miscalculate CAC in the early days of your company.
I didn't find any particular strong bias against me due to my race/ethnicity compared to my batchmates. There were ocasional subtle moments of doubt from certain people at first, nothing too obvious.
But I think fundraising was as hard for me as it is for most founders at similar stages. The fact that our company was profitable at Demo Day helped, I guess.
Could you explain a little about the visa situation being an international founder. There is not much information about the issues faced by international founders and most advice comes down to "Contact a lawyer". It would be nice if you can share your experience.