Recently, I’ve been following the development of the Startup Visa in the news. The basis of the Startup Visa is to give green cards to any foreigner who starts up a company in the United States that creates jobs. While there are certainly valid points against some of the technical details about how such a plan is implemented, I’m a big fan of the concept. Now that it has been officially introduced, I’m looking forward to watching it progress and hopefully become reality.
I think we need to find ways to extend the concept of a Startup Visa to benefit all entrepreneurs. Why not create incentives for anyone who has the ideas and willpower to create jobs? Our government needs to focus more energy on creating financial and regulatory benefits for small companies. Here in Arizona, city governments are funding startup seminars and training in hopes of creating new jobs. Gangplank, a local tech-oriented non-profit, recently announced they were working with Chandler, AZ to expand their workspace in order to attract more businesses and create growth. If only we could allocate more money to similar endeavors I believe we’d see returns many multiples greater than our initial investment.
It would require a definite shift. A friend of mine is a programmer from India and to listen to how much they have to go through in order to continue working inn the US was surprising. Very indentured servantish to the company that is sponsoring them.
The jobs created, even by Americans, sometimes tap into other global economies to buildthose jobs. For example, I know a company that creates geographic searches for online classifieds that outsources all their programming and support to the Philippines because of the lower operating costs. This has allowed them to start-up.
I know with a recent website I was putting together I had the logo designed by someone in Indonesia, the website design by a team in Romania, and some basic programming done by another team in Vietnam.
The first two were done using a crowdsourcing methodology so talent was more important than cost but not the case for the last part.
I echo your call for more incentives to foster entrepreneurism.