If you support the Startup Visa and have a blog or a website, put the Startup Visa Twitter Widget up on your site.

And – on March 2nd at 12 noon Pacific / 3 pm Eastern – we are going to do a Tweet Hall for the Startup Visa.  All you need to do is tweet @2gov supporting #startupvisa exactly at Noon Pacific on Tuesday March 2nd.  We’ll collect your Tweets and deliver them during our visit to the White House on March 4th.

Today, Senator John Kerry (D-MA) and Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN) introduced the StartUp Visa Act of 2010.  The group of us behind the Startup Visa project have been working closely with key members of each Senators’ staff on this and we are incredibly pleased with the proposed bill. 

Following is the text from the press release announcing the bill:

“Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the Chairman and Ranking Member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, today introduced legislation to drive job creation and increase America’s global competiveness by helping immigrant entrepreneurs secure visas to the United States.

The StartUp Visa Act of 2010 will allow an immigrant entrepreneur to receive a two year visa if he or she can show that a qualified U.S. investor is willing to dedicate a significant sum – a minimum of $250,000 – to the immigrant’s startup venture.

“Global competition for talent and investment grows more intense daily and the United States must step up or be left behind,” said Sen. Kerry.  “Everywhere Dick Lugar and I travel for the Foreign Relations Committee, we see firsthand the entrepreneurial spirit driving the economies of our competitors.  Creating a new magnet for innovations and innovators to come to the United States and create jobs here will offer our economy a double shot in the arm – robust job creation at home and reaffirmation that we’re the world’s best place to do business.”

“Our country should strive to attract to the United States the most talented and highly skilled entrepreneurs.  We should channel the power of innovative thinkers from around the world and American investors towards creating jobs and encouraging economic growth and future prosperity,” said Ranking Member Lugar.

The StartUp Visa Act of 2010 would amend immigration law to create a new EB-6 category for immigrant entrepreneurs, drawing from existing visas under the EB-5 category, which permits foreign nationals who invest at least $1 million into the U.S., and thereby create ten jobs, to obtain a green card.  After proving that he or she has secured initial investment capital and if, after two years, the immigrant entrepreneur can show that he or she has generated at least five full-time jobs in the United States, attracted $1 million in additional investment capital or achieved $1 million in revenue, then he or she would receive permanent legal resident status.

More than 160 venture capitalists from across the country have endorsed the senators’ proposal.  That letter of support is attached.”

The support from the venture capital and super angel community has been fantastic.  Now that we have both a sponsored house bill (HR 4259 – sponsored by Jared Polis (D-CO)) and a sponsored senate bill, it’s time to crank up the grassroots support.  Look for a few specific things to do in the next few days on both this blog and the Startup Visa blog.

As the Startup Visa initiative continues to pick up momentum, we are now collecting stories from immigrants who have either started or tried to start their company in the US.  We are interested in any aspect of your story and – while we’d like to be able to have your contact info – recognize that some people will want their story to be anonymous (which is ok with us.)

We’re looking to collect as many stories as we can by February 27th (11pm) so that we’ll be able to put them together in an appropriate format for the Geeks on a Plane trip to DC on 3/4/10 – 3/6/10 which will include a delegation of folks (including me) talking about the Startup Visa.

If you have a Startup Visa story about your immigration challenges to tell, please help us out!

As we finish up the year, I’m really pleased with the progress the Startup Visa gang is making.  I started thinking about, writing, and working on this on 9/10/09 when I wrote the post The Founders Visa Movement.  One quarter later, we’ve:

• Put together a core group of entrepreneurs, angels, and VCs who are working on this.
• Received a tremendous amount of positive feedback from entrepreneurs and investors who have struggled with this issue.
• Verified that this is a real issue, there is no current solution under the existing visa system, and even though there are plenty of immigration lawyers who say “no problem, I can get around this”, there aren’t clean solutions.
• Engaged with a number of Congressmen in both the house and the senate.
• Found a member of the house who is sponsoring a bill addressing the issue.
• Talking to several folks on the senate side to find a sponsor.
• Codified a first clean draft of language around this.
• Build lots of grassroots support and enthusiasm.
• Gotten plenty of discussion going in the blogosphere and mainstream media.

Shortly after I started talking to people in Congress about this it became clear that this wouldn’t be a 2009 legislative issue given the massive financial and health care reform issues being worked on in Congress.  So – we decided to use Q409 to “figure this out” with a goal of launching aggressively in Q110 with the goal of having this be part of whatever immigration reform activity happens next year, especially in the context of a renewed push for job creation activity in the US.

In addition to the Startup Visa OpEd that Paul Kedrosky and I wrote and published in the Wall Street Journal, several other high profile thinkers have written great essays on this issue.

The Startup Visa And Why The Xenophobes Need To Go Back Into Their Caves: Vivek Wadhwa (Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University) wrote a great piece in TechCrunch.

Immigrant Scientists Create Jobs and Win Nobels: Susan Hockfield (MIT President) wrote a WSJ OpEd that – while not talking directly about the Startup Visa – clearly supports that overall effort and also reinforces my belief that any graduate with an advanced degree from a US college or university should get a green card stapled to his diploma.

While there are plenty of other articles in the mainstream media swirling around, ones in CNN Money such as Want to create jobs?  Import entrepreneurs does a good job of laying it all out.

Many of you have asked how you can get involved.  Look for a variety of easy ways to do this in Q1.  And – a huge thank you for everyone out there that has helped in any way so far.  In the mean time, feel free to add to the Wikipedia page of American Startups with Immigrant Founders.

After having a few conversations yesterday about the Startup Visa, I realized that I never posted the Wall Street Journal OpEd on the Startup Visa that Paul Kedrosky and I wrote and had published on 12/2/09.  I don’t know the rules about reposting OpEd’s – I assume that since we wrote it I can republish it.  If that’s not true, I’m sure some one will tell me.  In the mean time, here it is:

Start-up Visas Can Jump-Start the Economy

Immigrant entrepreneurs are an engine of jobs and growth. We need more of them.

While fast-growing companies have long been the main source of new jobs and innovation, this country makes it outrageously difficult for immigrants to launch new companies here. This doesn’t make any sense. After all, Google, Pfizer, Intel, Yahoo, DuPont, eBay and Procter & Gamble are all former start-ups founded by immigrants. Where would this country be today without their world-changing innovations?

Immigrants have not only founded big, well-known companies. Foreign-born residents made up just 12.5% of the U.S. population in 2008. But nearly 40% of technology company founders and 52% of founders of companies in Silicon Valley.

Yet we don’t seem to care. We send recent, foreign-born university science and engineering graduates back to their own countries after their student visas expire—unless these creative sorts are willing to spend some of the most entrepreneurial years of their lives working in a big company under an H-1B visa after they finish their studies.

For those who studied elsewhere, but who nonetheless want to bring their job-creating ideas here, American policies treat them—the job-creating, trouble-making innovators that they are—as a cross between deadbeats and queue-jumpers. Why can’t they wait in line like everyone else to get a visa in five years or so? What’s their hurry?

Their hurry is Joseph Schumpeter’s hurry: They want to hustle out and disrupt markets when the opportunity arises.

In the 21st century those opportunities don’t wait for our interminable, employment-based visa programs. As a result rather than saying "Come and create jobs here" we, in effect, tell them to shove off. Come back when you have a few million in sales— at which point they will be rooted elsewhere and creating jobs somewhere else.

That needs to end now. Immigrants who come here to create companies create jobs. We need the jobs.

One good idea to make this process easier is to create a new visa for entrepreneurs, something that is increasingly being called by venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and angel investors a "start-up visa." It might work like this: If immigrant entrepreneurs want to start a company in the U.S. and are able to raise a moderate amount of money (perhaps as little as $125,000) from an accredited U.S.-based venture capital firm or qualified U.S.-based angel investors, we should let them start a company here. It could be a couple of founders with an idea—that’s it. We would give visas to the founders and welcome them in to our country.

Would it work every time? Of course not. It would fail more often than not. Start-ups often fail.

But having failed, the immigrant entrepreneurs could try again, and again. And as long as they are trying, raising money, creating jobs, and making sales, we would let them stay here. Founders of new companies are precious for a vibrant economy, and we should welcome them. Indeed, the country would be better served to find more of them.

Some will say a start-up visa program will be abused. They will say that it will become a way to end-run immigration rules, to jump the queue if you have money.

There are at least two answers to these objections. First, to get such a visa you would have to raise money from real investors. Second, Canada and other countries already allow entrepreneurs to start a company in their country. Shouldn’t the U.S. stop worrying so much about keeping these people out, and start worrying about bringing them in?

We also think science and engineering graduates should get visas stapled to their diplomas. You complete your higher education here, you get to stay so that you can get out and create jobs, innovate, and grow the economy. Uncle Sam wants you, if you’re a prospective entrepreneur.

The U.S. remains one of the most attractive countries for entrepreneurs. It has a culture of risk taking, capital formation, and an economic dynamism that is the envy of the world. This gives us a competitive edge that we should not let slip through our fingers.

Last week I did an hour long interview with Jon Hansen on the Startup Visa Movement titled Diminishing Prospects: How U.S. Policy is Undermining Entrepreneurial Vision. The interview is embedded below and Jon has a longer post up on his blog titled Snakes in a Playpen: Why U.S. Policy Regarding H-1B and EB-5 Visas is Outdated and Ineffective.

I haven’t done any long form interviews on this topic yet.  I thought Jon did a great job of steering the conversation, pulling out some important perspectives, and helping cycle back to make sure the appropriate points were covered. If you are interested in this topic, I’d love to hear your reaction to this interview.

I’m getting three to five Startup Visa stories a week at this point.  A few are straightforward but most are complex and intellectually frightening, including one I read through yesterday that almost caused my head to explode.  When I was in Boston a few weeks ago I met with someone who told me their particular story very passionately and clearly.  He then followed up with a short essay that he asked if I’d post publicly.  While the story is a general one, it is short and sweet and nicely captures the sentiment that I’ve heard so many times since writing The Founders Visa Movement post.

Every night after I’ve checked off the task list for the startup I work on, followed-up with the people I’ve networked with, finished all my school work, I’ll stay up reading documentation on how I can stay in the country I have fallen in love with over the last nine months. I come from a culture in Sydney where my peers will become doctors, bankers and lawyers; where the idea of being a startup founder is correlated with merely being unemployed. Being familiar with the first generation immigrant story of my own parents escaping poverty in Communist China to Australia, where they’ve created wealth and jobs from their small grocery business, I was inspired to adopt my own journey to a foreign country. When I came to the United States, to take an opportunity to do a one year study abroad at Babson College, a school with a premier entrepreneurship program, I was optimistic.

Being in Boston, having visited both Silicon Valley and the Research Triangle, I mourn the fact my visa expires in December, the conclusion of my studies. Why is it so good here? How is it so different to back home? It’s not about the number of venture dollars, or the size of the business plan competitions, it’s not even the size of the market. It’s about an intangible in the ether. It’s about culture. For a first-time, young entrepreneur, environment is so fundamentally key. The couple of web tech, social media, or general startup networking events I go to every week act as shots in the arm. I always come back that much more energetic; that much more inspired. I speak with a serial entrepreneur who has seen the pattern many times before and provides me advice and encourages me to keep fighting. I meet another first-time entrepreneur suffering my pain, sharing that experience is motivating. I come across someone passionate about their vision, that energy is contagious. The startup journey is rarely a straight line and this keeps me going as a first-time entrepreneur.

And I’m one of the lucky ones. Currently I am looking at all options, but because I’m an Australian citizen, I’m most likely to immigrate to Toronto, as it’s the closest city with an entrepreneurial community to Boston. Many of my international peers at Babson, who hustle, who fight, who innovate and create, are forced home every year. Do they go and create wealth and jobs in their home country? This would be unfortunate for America not to capitalize on the investment in education. Worse still, because they no longer are tapped into the unique American culture of risk and creation; are we as a global society just entirely worst off?

As Stephen Colbert might say, “America, we are blowing it.”

Last week I was interviewed by the Denver Business Journal for an article on the StartupVisa Movement.   Congressman Jared Polis (D-CO) – who represents the district in which I live – was also interviewed.  Kevin Mann – the founder of Take Publishing (one of the TechStars 2009 companies) and a UK citizen – talked about his story.  Good – and important – stuff – Polis wants foreign company founders to be allowed to stay in United States.

Eric Ries also put together a short two minute video describing the issue and highlighting Eric Diep, the co-founder of Quizzes (a very popular early Facebook app).  The Eric’s explain the issue around visas for founders of companies and talk briefly about some of their activity on a recent trip to Washington DC.

As each day passes, I continue to get a steady flood of positive feedback and constructive suggestions about this from a wide variety of people.  Thanks to everyone for engaging in this important conversation.

In the few weeks since I wrote the post The Founders Visa Movement there has been a ton of positive momentum, input, ideas, and support.  Thanks to the efforts of Dave McClure and Eric Ries, we shifted the name to the StartupVisa, figured out that the EB-5 visa was the most logical one to try to “modify”, and got a web site up about it.  In the mean time, I’ve now had extensive conversations with three of my congressmen, all of whom get it, including one who is deep in working on some draft legislation around it.  I’ve also gotten a CU Law JD/MBA student to work with us as an intern to help put some substance around the approach and proposal.  I’ve also been taken to task by some folks who think I’m naive, misguided, or simply are against increasing the number of legal immigrants into our country.

I have no idea how to address the entire immigration issue in the US.  However, I strongly believe that we should make it easy for people to start new entrepreneurial ventures in the US.  As a result, the EB-5 is an interesting visa to consider.  The simple version is that if a foreign national invests up to $1,000,000 in a US company that creates at least 10 jobs, the foreign national can apply for the visa.  This seems backwards to me.  Rather than grant the visa to an investor, let’s grant the visa to the entrepreneur.  If we change the EB-5 so that foreign nationals starting US companies that are backed by qualified US investors can apply for the visa it seems like we can preserve the general construct of the EB-5 while applying it to a more compelling recipient (the entrepreneur).

From the various conversations I’ve had, the biggest issue – not surprisingly – is figuring out ways to create an efficient and fair evaluation process for the visa that does an effective job of preventing people from gaming the system.  In thinking this through, it seems like there are two goals: (1) use as much existing SEC and IRS filings as possible as the basis (so as to not create new filings) and (b) create appropriate thresholds to make the definitions and parameters easy to test and validate.

Following are some items for discussion.  This are not a firm proposal, but rather my synthesis of a bunch of different conversations, including an attempt to synthesize the comment threads on the various blogs posts such as Fred Wilson’s that I’ve seen.  I encourage an open discussion of these – please tell me why these are constructs or thresholds that won’t work and feel free to suggest better ones.  I’m definitely still in “figuring this out mode” and the more input I get – both positive and negative (preferably constructive) is really helpful.

Proposal: An entrepreneur applying for a StartupVisa can be sponsored by a qualified VC or a qualified Super Angel who is investing at least $100,000 in an equity financing of at least $500,000. 

Definition of a Qualified VC: Whenever a VC raises a fund, they have to file a Form D indicating that they are a venture capital company and disclosing the amount of funding that has been committed to them.  For purposes of the StartupVisa, this form can be amended to include the disclosure that the VC firm is a US-entity comprised of US citizens. To eliminate the chance that anyone can set up a VC fund for this purpose, the VC fund needs to have a minimum amount of capital commitments (say – $5m). 

Definition of a Qualified Super Angel: For angels, let’s define a category called “Super Angel”.  A “Super Angel” is an accredited investor (as per the SEC accredited investor rules) and has to have made at least five angel investments in the preceding three years totaling at least $250,000.

Duration: The StartupVisa is valid for two years. 

Renewal: For the StartupVisa to be renewed, the company needs to either (a) create 5 new jobs every two years, (b) raise at least $1m every two years, or (c) generate at least $1m in revenue and be profitable. 

Ok – have at it.  What’s wrong with these parameters?  How can the system be gamed?  What am I missing?

The Startup Visa movement is picking up a lot of speed.  I’ve had more positive conversations about it than I have about any other government related thing I’ve been involved in or worked on in the past few years.

David Binetti and the gang at @2gov have set up a way for anyone to make a $50 contribution to the Startup Visa effort.  This is an anonymous donation and you have to be a US Citizen to make the donation – just go to the contribute page.  If you want to contribute more than $50, just email donate@2gov.org. 

Thanks in advance for any and all support.

I received an overwhelming response to my post last week titled The Founders Visa Movement. There were tons of comments – both positive and negative (many constructive on both sides), lots of emails, and plenty of tweets.  I sent the comment thread on to the senior staffer in my congressman’s office who I was talking to and got a thoughtful response from him.

I’ve got a series of calls set up this week to talk with several other of my congressmen (and women).  In addition, we are in the final stages of getting a CU Law student to intern with us at Foundry Group on this project to help pull together more substantive material, options, data, and support (we hope to announce this next week).  There is no question in my mind, after hearing the response and thinking about this more, that the time to do something about this is right now.

This morning I woke up to Eric Ries’ post titled Support the Startup Founder Visa with a tweet. Eric is in DC with Dave McClure and the GeeksOnaPlane DC/Europe 2009 trip.  In his post, Eric talks about the Founder Visa idea, discusses an approach to modifying the EB-5 visa, and points to a project called @2gov where you can register your support for this via Twitter.

So – if you want to help and get involved, go take a look at @2gov and tweet away.

In April, Paul Graham wrote an inspired post titled The Founder Visa.  In it he proposed the idea of creating a US Visa for founders of startup companies – 10,000 / year for founders of companies that are started in the US.  There was some chatter around this at the time (I think it’s a brilliant idea) but then the discussion died down.

I sent the link to Paul’s essay to a few congressmen (congresspeople?) that I know with an offer to discuss it further and give some substantive examples.  I just got off the phone with a senior staff member of one of my congressmen who had read the essay and was interested in hearing more.

This issue has come up over and over again – in 2008 I wrote a post titled Solving the H-1B Visa Issue where I suggested that “the US should grant permanent residency to anyone who graduates from a qualified four year university with a computer science degree.” I didn’t put any energy behind this at the time (beyond a blog post) because of where we were in the election cycle.

Now I’m ready.  I was hit squarely in the face with this over the summer.  Two of the ten TechStars Boulder teams were comprised of non-US founders – two from Canada and two from the UK.  Both lived in Boulder for the summer and want to relocate here and build their businesses in the US (and – specifically – in Boulder).  Over the summer we struggled to figure out ways to get them Visas – all of the proposed approaches were expensive, risky, and tiresome.  Both companies are still trying, but each are now seriously considering returning to their home countries to build their businesses.

I cannot come up with a single reason why this makes any sense from a US perspective.  These are young, talented entrepreneurs that have come out of a three month program with amazingly interesting startups.  They are in the final process of raising their first rounds of financing. Post financing they will be creating US based high tech jobs.  If they are successful, they will create a lot of jobs.  Plus, they are young so they will do this multiple times in their lifetime.

It should be trivial for them to stay in the US.

In an effort to flesh out this thinking, a few questions came up on the call.

How Do You Determine If Someone Is a “Founder”? Two easy approaches: (1) set up a non-government board consisting of credible VCs, entrepreneurs, and lawyers to vet applicants.  (2) the founder has to own at least 10% of a company that has raised $250,000 within the same year as the application for the Visa.

How Do You Deal With Failure? The founder gets to keep the Visa.  Startups fail.  That’s part of the experience.  Some of the greatest companies were not the “first” that an entrepreneur did.  If the entrepreneur doesn’t start another company with a year, then the Visa expires.

I’m looking for more feedback on this as I work with a few people to actually create a movement around this (rather than just an idea, blog post, or essay).  So – if you have positive or negative feedback, along with suggestions about how to make this more powerful as a construct, or more palatable to people in our government who will have a negative knee jerk reaction based on “illegal immigration” or “jobs to immigrants” concerns, please weigh in.