Brad, as you know, all the hard work, you, Dave and the others, have put into building the Startup Visa movement was the inspiration behind the @StartupCanada Visa program, but it was also the “threat” that help accelerate the process. The group behind the Canadian Startup Visa initiative had gone through real life examples of the negative impact caused by slow immigration administrative procedures and red tape. Once we pulled together, then pulled the community support followed by CVCA, NACO and CABI support, we not only got the government attention, we got their understanding of the situation. I’m really please with how fast this all came together and where its heading. Program opens for Immigrant Entrepreneurs April 1st 2013! I posted some extra details here: Canada increases its competitiveness in attracting Entrepreneurial talent
Again, thank you for the kick-in the ass.

I guess we all need to play our part to make this happen for the USA. I’m based in the UK and have started numerous successful businesses over the decades. Actually, my first business was when I was nine, collecting newspapers to sell for recycling. Ever since then, I’ve always run my own businesses, creating jobs, wealth and security for myself, my family and my employees, as well as paying taxes of course.
I’d love to launch my new startup in the USA, but there’s no easy way to do it. There are some “shady methods” (i.e. fraudulent) that several people I know have used, but I’d want to do it properly. I’m pretty confident that my new startup will be successful and will employ hundreds, perhaps eventually thousands, of people. That’s a lot of taxes to be paid, but it seems that the USA is not open for business.
I understand that the US government has urgent things to address, but it seems reasonable to me that securing jobs for the future should be top of the list.

Anyway I’ve written to President Obama a couple of times, to ask him to support the Startup Visa initiative, but never received a response. I hope it does happen, as I love the USA and I’d love to raise my family there, but in the meantime, I’m happy to launch in London and just visit the USA on holidays.

I think that the Canadian start-up visa is a step in the right direction for sure, but its major flaw is that entrepreneurs require funding from local investors before they can apply. A better filter would be successful entrepreneurship elsewhere – use an expert panel to screen and focus more on the quality of the people than the fundability of projects. Repeat entrepreneurs are like gold. The way the program is set up now, it’s more like a sop to local VCs as opposed to a true productivity generating machine, which is what we would have if we rolled out the red carpet for experienced foreign entrepreneurial talent. Give them a year to get funded or profitable if there is worry about abuse.

Singapore has a fantastic system that does just this, called the EntrePass. They are attracting terrific entrepreneurial talent and I predict that you’re going to see some great companies coming out of there in the next few years.

Brad, I wish you well in your campaign, we at the Startup Canada Team learned a lot from your teams work, Vivek Wadhwa research was helpful (52% companies in the silicon valley formed with immigrant founders) and Mayor Bloomberg “We must stop telling foreign entrepreneurs to build their companies in other countries…”. In meantime we do have some beautiful mountains, with gorgeous coastline up here in Vancouver, BC you would be very welcome to move here, maybe finish off a couple more great books and setup a TechStars office?!