Alec Stapp

It’s incredible that we’ve never had a Gen X president and if we play our cards right we can skip the paint chip generation entirely

Nearly half of the founders of billion-dollar tech startups are immigrants

Most people don’t understand that the Indian bigco CEO phenomenon is mostly an immigration story. Indians are FAR more likely to be tied to employment visas than other nationalities, so they couldn’t easily start companies. The 1990 Immigration Act created the modern H-1B/EB green card system. As Indian demand exploded, the 7% per-country cap turned into decades-long backlogs for Indians. Indian tech workers stayed tethered to sponsoring employers in a way Europeans, Russians, Taiwanese never had to. Founding a company means risking your status, resetting a green card path, or finding another workaround (now usually O-1 or EB-1). European/ Russian /Taiwanese immigrants don’t face the same trap. Their countries don’t hit the 7% per-country cap, so demand stays under the limit. A German or Russian engineer on H-1B can get a green card in 1-2 years and leave to found a company. An Indian engineer doing the same job has to wait 20+ years. The 1965-1989 Indian cohort was much smaller but not yet trapped by today’s H-1B lottery and India backlog machine. That’s why you see so many Indian founders from that era: Vinod Khosla (Sun Microsystems), Sanjay Mehrotra (SanDisk, before becoming CEO of Micron), Kanwal Rekhi (Excelan), Suhas Patil (Cirrus Logic), Desh Deshpande (Sycamore Networks), Pradeep Sindhu (Juniper Networks), etc. My dad is a 1972 IIT grad who came to America for a PhD. Most of his IIT friends are successful entrepreneurs. My cousin took the same exact path (IIT>CMU) in the 1990s and most of his friends worked their way up corporate jobs because they needed employment sponsorship. IMO this is bad for America. We took the highest-conviction risk-takers on earth, people who crossed an ocean and left their families behind, and forced them into the lowest-risk career path. Fortunately this has been loosened in the 2010s with O-1 and EB-1A workarounds but it’s still much more challenging for Indian or Chinese founders.

The US tech industry would be a shadow of itself without immigrants. First 10 examples that come to mind: 1. Elon Musk (South Africa) 2. Andrej Karpathy (Czechoslovakia) 3. Sergey Brin (Russia) 4. Jensen Huang (Taiwan) 5. Satya Nadella (India) 6. Ilya Sutskever (Russia) 7. Sundar Pichai (India) 8. Lisa Su (Taiwan) 9. Fei-Fei Li (China) 10. Sanjay Mehrotra (India)

And Mehrotra was the founder of Sandisk before taking over at Micron. Another $219 billion tech titan. What a legend.

People in the replies pushing back that “Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai & Sanjay Mehrotra didn’t found their companies.” True… they’ve all only just >10x’d the value the their companies since taking over as CEO. Creating massive wealth & prosperity for Americans in the process.

Nearly half of the founders of billion-dollar tech startups are immigrants

People in the replies pushing back that “Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai & Sanjay Mehrotra didn’t found their companies.” True… they’ve all only just >10x’d the value the their companies since taking over as CEO. Creating massive wealth & prosperity for Americans in the process.

People in the replies pushing back that “Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai & Sanjay Mehrotra didn’t found their companies.” True… they’ve all only just >10x’d the value the their companies since taking over as CEO. Creating massive wealth & prosperity for Americans in the process.

People complain about corporate "short-termism", "chasing quarterly profits" and so on but what makes them really angry, what truly enrages them beyond all reason, is seeing corporations with an actual long-term vision willing to endure years of losses in pursuit of a goal.

Surveys claim up to 79% of attorneys use AI at their firms. That number measures exposure, not integration. My piece in the inaugural issue of Diffuse AI explains why the gap is structural and what we can do about it.

Nearly half of the founders of billion-dollar tech startups are immigrants

Nearly half of the founders of billion-dollar tech startups are immigrants