Foreign-Born Entrepreneurs Drive America's Unicorn Boom

Cakez0r

> The next time someone talks about restricting immigration, show them this: Nearly half of America’s billion-dollar startups were founded by people born outside the United States. I don't think the people that talk about restricting immigration care about the number of billion dollar companies that immigrants create

zetanor

Wow, I love foreign-born entrepreneurs.

pluc

To be fair, they now have about half the time to make it before you deport them so they have to be more productive.

jongjong

This seems more like a reflection of existing tech power structures and social dynamics rather than innovation. The bottleneck to being a unicorn isn't so much innovation as it is access to capital. The chasm between the two seems to keep growing. Soon enough, they will be totally independent. If current trends continue, I predict that in 5 years, for every unicorn startup, there will be many bootstrapped startups valued at peanuts providing far superior products for far lower costs. But they won't be able to access either capital or user traffic.

dominotw

spent way too much time looking for raw data for the graphs . is it in the article?

yahway

Foreign born people who come from generational wealth can and do exploit'disadvantaged' business enterprises (DBE, MOBE, etc.) I am not tech field but AEC and the amount of businesses that exploit this is insane. It was created for blacks mostly, but used almost exclusively by Indians.

analognoise

Counterpoint - this just indicates how screwed up things are. If you’re saying this as a positive thing, it isn’t. Most people don’t want to compete with the global 1% - to import students from the Stanford of every country. Having policies your own population fails to thrive under does nothing but stoke division. This is just ammo for the anti-immigration people, and they’re already at the “elect Trump, turn ICE into a military” point. How tone deaf do you have to be to see this as a positive thing?

lostmsu

How many of them immigrated illegally?