Guest post by Eric Ries, Lessons Learned and co-founder of IMVU.
It’s been an exhilarating first day here in Washington DC for the Geeks on a Plane tour. We met a number of policy makers from the White House and State Department, and had a solid Startup2Startup all about government policy and entrepreneurship. After a full day of talking, debating, thinking, and strategizing, we feel about read to take some good old-fashioned action. Will you join us?
In a previous post, I asked readers for suggested topics that the US government needs to know about startups and entrepreneurs, and got
some really interesting responses. I’ve done my best to represent those perspectives in the meetings I’ve had here over the past two weeks. In my presentation this morning, I emphasized three key areas: reducing the personal cost of failure for entrepreneurs, innovation-friendly legal reforms, and access to the digital means of production (slides from my White House presentation are available at the end of this post).
However, there’s one additional issue that has come up throughout the day today. It’s something that Brad Feld and Paul Graham have termed the Founders Visa. The idea is to enable up to 10,000 people per year to enter the United States if they are here to found a company that will employ US citizens. I think the benefits here are a no-brainer.
Let me quote from Paul’s original essay:
The biggest constraint on the number of new startups that get created in the US is not tax policy or employment law or even Sarbanes-Oxley. It’s that we won’t let the people who want to start them into the country.
Letting just 10,000 startup founders into the country each year could have a visible effect on the economy. If we assume 4 people per startup, which is probably an overestimate, that’s 2500 new companies. Each year. They wouldn’t all grow as big as Google, but out of 2500 some would come close.
By definition these 10,000 founders wouldn’t be taking jobs from Americans: it could be part of the terms of the visa that they couldn’t work for existing companies, only new ones they’d founded. In fact they’d cause there to be more jobs for Americans, because the companies they started would hire more employees as they grew.
Brad Feld has been working on promoting this idea inside the halls of Congress. Today at Startup2Startup, an idea emerged to try and generate some grassroots momentum to help out. It’s actually part of a lean startup story.
David Binetti is an entrepreneur with some credibility in this area, having worked to create the original USA.gov. Recently, he’s been
engaged in a customer validation exercise around a new concept for a political action-oriented social network. When that concept didn’t pan out, he decided to pivot. His latest effort, called 2gov.org, makes it easy to contact your local, state and federal governments with just a tweet. For more on his lean startup journey, you can take a look at this slide presentation. 2gov.org automatically routes your tweet (aggregating it with everyone else who’s expressed a similar point of view) to the right legislator or agency. Because it checks your
registration against voting rolls, members of congress know that the contacts being received are from actual voters, not just astro-turf. In other words, the service transforms tweets into professional reports that are sent by snail mail, fax, and email – the channels that actually have attention paid to them.
He was at today’s event, and the Geeks on a Plane had a brainstorm. Let’s use 2gov.org to raise awareness of the Founders Visa movement in congress. To that end, we’re tweeting about it, and would like to ask you to join us. If you are a US citizen, tweet your thoughts on the
Founders Visa, using the #FoundersVisa hashtag and including @2gov. 2gov.org will take care of the rest. In order to have your tweet included in the printed packet that your representative will receive, you’ll need to register at 2gov.org (it really only takes a minute).
The Geeks are doing their part. Will you lend us a hand (or at least a tweet)?
Tags: DC, Government, Startup2Startup, Tweeting