Foreign-Born Entrepreneurs Drive America's Unicorn Boom

(news.crunchbase.com)

20 points | by USTECH_WORKER 15 hours ago ago

15 comments

  • Cakez0r 13 hours ago ago

    > 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

    • comrade1234 13 hours ago ago

      If anything they would love to stick it to them and maybe even steal a bit of those billions for themselves.

    • happytoexplain 11 hours ago ago

      Yeah, I don't think people of any country would appreciate being told that foreigners are better than them in some way, and that's why they should be brought in. I think most people would not assume that successful companies would be much rarer without those people - only that other people would be founding them.

    • pasquinelli 13 hours ago ago

      beyond not caring. that little factoid would turn a lot of people into xenophobes.

    • kylecazar 13 hours ago ago

      I think they would likely use it as further evidence

    • watwut 13 hours ago ago

      You use Elon Musk as argument there and everyone left of center will join call for retroactive immigration restriction.

  • yahway 5 hours ago ago

    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.

  • lostmsu an hour ago ago

    How many of them immigrated illegally?

  • pluc 13 hours ago ago

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

  • zetanor 13 hours ago ago

    Wow, I love foreign-born entrepreneurs.

  • jongjong 13 hours ago ago

    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 13 hours ago ago

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

  • analognoise 3 hours ago ago

    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?

  • jingpostmedia 13 hours ago ago

    [flagged]

  • USTECH_WORKER 15 hours ago ago

    [flagged]