3 ms·

Study: Immigrants Founded 51% of U.S. Billion-Dollar Startups

2 points by Osiris30 11y ago

dalke 11y ago
A year ago the statement "Most high tech companies are founded by founded by First/2nd gen immigrants" was going around the various tech circles. In the thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9085970 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9085970 I dug into the numbers and found that that is what we would expect from population statistics. That is, immigrants and non-immigrants are equally likely to start high tech companies. This new analysis - and yes, I read the report - does not attempt to assess if the numbers are more or less than expected. If a company has 10 founders and only one is an immigrant then that counts as one of the companies founded by an immigrant. Let's say that all 87 companies had 10 founders (which is obviously false, but I'm making a point about the limitation in the analysis), and of the 44 companies with an immigrant founder, all of them had only 1 immigrant founder. Then of the 870 founders, only 44 are immigrants, or 5%. Immigrants make up about 13% of the US population. If only 5% of the founders are immigrants then that means immigrants are significantly less likely to start $1B valued companies than non-immigrants. I'm going to go one step further. The report DID NOT include the overall number of founders, which makes it impossible to determine the significance of the findings. By classifying a company with a single immigrant founder as being founded by an immigrant, it almost certainly overemphasizes the impact of immigrant founders. I believe this was done deliberately, in order to influence matters regarding the H1B visa. I do not believe this to be an honest analysis. FWIW, the author, Stuart Anderson, was former policy director of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, former director at the Cato Institute (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=National_Foundation_for_American_Policy http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=National_Foundati... ). Both are "part of the stable of conservative think tanks" http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Alexis_de_Tocqueville_Institution http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Alexis_de_Tocqueville_I... .
- dalke 11y ago
  Further analysis of 65 companies on the list of 87 (it was too boring to finish everything) finds 161 founders, for an estimated founder population of about 215.5. You'll notice that the report doesn't come out and give the number of immigrant founders. Summing up table 3 gives 61, and 61/215.5 => 28% . This is indeed higher than the 13% of the US population who are immigrants, though not as eye-catching of a number as 51%. Part of the argument for immigrant co-founders is the increased diversity. For example, "Michelle believes the diverse backgrounds of CloudFlare’s founders has contributed to the company’s success." If that is an important criteria, then you should note that some of the companies only have immigrant founders, which by that logic should count against them. I'm not sure how to judge a U.S. company where one of the founders lives overseas. For example, Oded Comay of ForeScout appears to live in Israel. I don't know which of the founders are non-American and also non-immigrants. Unlike the report, I'll give my list of companies (from the same WSJ source, though I have one more company than the report does) and my attempt at finding the number of founders for each company. I assert that not giving that data makes it harder to understand, much less replicate, the significance of the results. Uber - (2) Travis Kalanick, Garrett Camp Airbnb - (3) Joe Gebbia, Nathan Blecharczyk, Brian Chesky Palantir - (5) Peter Thiel, Joe Lonsdale, Alex Karp, Stephen Cohen, Nathan Gettings Snapchat - (2) Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, (and Frank Reginald "Reggie" Brown IV?) SpaceX - (1) Elon Musk Pinterest - (3) Paul Sciarra, Evan Sharp, Ben Silbermann Dropbox - (2) Arash Ferdowsi, Drew Houston WeWork - (2) Adam Neumann, Miguel McKelvey Theranos - (1) Elizabeth Holmes Lyft - (2) Logan Green, John Zimmer Stripe - (2) Patrick Collison, John Collison Stemcentrx - (3) Brian Slingerland, Scott Dylla, Daniel T. Reiner Zenefits (YourPeople) - (2) Parker Conrad, Laks Srini Cloudera - (4) Jeff Hammerbacher, Mike Olson, Amr Awadallah, Christophe Bisciglia SoFi (Social Finance) - (4) Mike Cagney, Dan Macklin, James Finnigan, and Ian Brady Credit Karma - (1) Kenneth Lin Tanium - (2) David Hindawi, Orion Hindawi Fanatics - (1) Alan Trager DocuSign - (1) Tom Gonser Moderna - (4) Robert Langer, Noubar Afeyan, Ken Chien, Derrick Rossi Wish (ContextLogic) - (2) Peter Szulczewski, Danny Zhang Bloom Energy - (1) K. R. Sridhar Slack - (4) Stewart Butterfield, Eric Costello, Cal Henderson, and Serguei Mourachov Mozido - (1) Michael A. Liberty Houzz - (2) Adi Tatarko, Alon Cohen DraftKings - (3) Jason Robins, Matt Kalish, Paul Liberman Nutanix - (3) Dheeraj Pandey, Mohit Aron, Ajeet Singh Magic Leap - (1) Rony Abovitz Instacart Domo Blue Apron Github Avant AppDynamics Prosper Marketplace ZocDoc AppNexus Intarcia Therapeutics Honest Co. Oscar Health Insurance MongoDB Jawbone InsideSales.com MuleSoft BuzzFeed - (2) Jonah Peretti, John Johnson Mu Sigma - (1) Ambika Dhiraj Jasper Technologies - (3) Jahangir Mohammed, Daniel Collins, Amit Gupta Deem - (1) Patrick Grady Jet.com - (3) Marc Lore, Nate Faust, Mike Hanrahan Thumbtack - (4) Marco Zappacosta, Sander Daniels, Jonathan Swanson, Jeremy Tunnell FanDuel - (5) Nigel Eccles, Lesley Eccles, Tom Griffiths, Rob Jones, Chris Stafford Medallia - (2) Borge Hald, Amy Pressman Infinidat - (1) Moshe Yanai Warby Parker - (4) David Gilboa, Neil Blumenthal, Andrew Hunt, Jeffrey Raider Okta - (2) Todd McKinnon, Frederic Kerrest Sprinklr - (1) Ragy Thomas Automattic - (1) Matt Mullenweg Actifio - (1) Ash Ashutosh Proteus Digital Health - (3) Andrew Thompson, George Savage, Mark Zdeblick Nextdoor - (4) Nirav Tolia, Sarah Leary, Prakash Janakiraman, David Wiesen Uptake - (2) Eric Lefkofsky, Brad Keywell Anaplan - (2) Guy Haddleton, Michael Gould Gusto (ZenPayroll) AppDirect 23andMe CloudFlare Evernote Eventbrite Tango Kabam Lookout JustFab Qualtrics Razer SimpliVity Pluralsight MarkLogic Coupa Software Twilio Zscaler Vox Media Adaptive Biotechnologies Apttus Kabbage Datto Udacity Docker Mode Media - (9) Samir Arora, Ernie Cicogna, Fernando Ruarte, Vic Zauderer, Dianna Mullins, Raj Narayan, Rebecca Bogle Arora, Susan Kare, Emmanuel Job ForeScout - (4) Oded Comay, Dror Comay, Doron Shikmoni, Hezy Yeshurun Fab - (2) Jason Goldberg, Bradford Shellhammer Gilt Groupe - (6) Kevin P. Ryan, Dwight Merriman, Alexis Maybank, Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, Michael Bryzek, Phong Nguyen Good Technology - (1) Richard Davies Legendary Entertainment - (1) Thomas Tull Pure Storage - (2) John Colgrove, John Hayes Square - (2) Jack Dorsey, Jim McKelvey Sunrun - (3) Lynn Jurich, Edward Fenster, Nat Kreamer Beats Electronics - (2) Dr. Dre, Jimmy Iovine Box - (4) Aaron Levie, Dylan Smith, Sam Ghods, Jeff Queisser Coupons.com - (1) Steven Boal Fisker Automotive - (2) Henrik Fisker, Bernhard Koehler GoPro - (1) Nicholas Woodman Hortonworks - (8) Alan Gates, Arun C. Murthy, Devaraj Das, Eric Baldeschwieler, Mahadev Konar, Owen O'Malley, Sanjay Radia, Suresh Srinivas Lending Club - (2) Renaud Laplanch, Soulaiman Htite Nest Labs - (2) Tony Fadell, Matt Rogers New Relic - (1) Lewis Cirne Wayfair - (2) Niraj Shah, Steve Conine

2 points by Osiris30 11y ago

dalke 11y ago

A year ago the statement "Most high tech companies are founded by founded by First/2nd gen immigrants" was going around the various tech circles. In the thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9085970 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9085970 I dug into the numbers and found that that is what we would expect from population statistics. That is, immigrants and non-immigrants are equally likely to start high tech companies. This new analysis - and yes, I read the report - does not attempt to assess if the numbers are more or less than expected. If a company has 10 founders and only one is an immigrant then that counts as one of the companies founded by an immigrant. Let's say that all 87 companies had 10 founders (which is obviously false, but I'm making a point about the limitation in the analysis), and of the 44 companies with an immigrant founder, all of them had only 1 immigrant founder. Then of the 870 founders, only 44 are immigrants, or 5%. Immigrants make up about 13% of the US population. If only 5% of the founders are immigrants then that means immigrants are significantly less likely to start $1B valued companies than non-immigrants. I'm going to go one step further. The report DID NOT include the overall number of founders, which makes it impossible to determine the significance of the findings. By classifying a company with a single immigrant founder as being founded by an immigrant, it almost certainly overemphasizes the impact of immigrant founders. I believe this was done deliberately, in order to influence matters regarding the H1B visa. I do not believe this to be an honest analysis. FWIW, the author, Stuart Anderson, was former policy director of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, former director at the Cato Institute (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=National_Foundation_for_American_Policy http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=National_Foundati... ). Both are "part of the stable of conservative think tanks" http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Alexis_de_Tocqueville_Institution http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Alexis_de_Tocqueville_I... .

dalke 11y ago
Further analysis of 65 companies on the list of 87 (it was too boring to finish everything) finds 161 founders, for an estimated founder population of about 215.5. You'll notice that the report doesn't come out and give the number of immigrant founders. Summing up table 3 gives 61, and 61/215.5 => 28% . This is indeed higher than the 13% of the US population who are immigrants, though not as eye-catching of a number as 51%. Part of the argument for immigrant co-founders is the increased diversity. For example, "Michelle believes the diverse backgrounds of CloudFlare’s founders has contributed to the company’s success." If that is an important criteria, then you should note that some of the companies only have immigrant founders, which by that logic should count against them. I'm not sure how to judge a U.S. company where one of the founders lives overseas. For example, Oded Comay of ForeScout appears to live in Israel. I don't know which of the founders are non-American and also non-immigrants. Unlike the report, I'll give my list of companies (from the same WSJ source, though I have one more company than the report does) and my attempt at finding the number of founders for each company. I assert that not giving that data makes it harder to understand, much less replicate, the significance of the results. Uber - (2) Travis Kalanick, Garrett Camp Airbnb - (3) Joe Gebbia, Nathan Blecharczyk, Brian Chesky Palantir - (5) Peter Thiel, Joe Lonsdale, Alex Karp, Stephen Cohen, Nathan Gettings Snapchat - (2) Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, (and Frank Reginald "Reggie" Brown IV?) SpaceX - (1) Elon Musk Pinterest - (3) Paul Sciarra, Evan Sharp, Ben Silbermann Dropbox - (2) Arash Ferdowsi, Drew Houston WeWork - (2) Adam Neumann, Miguel McKelvey Theranos - (1) Elizabeth Holmes Lyft - (2) Logan Green, John Zimmer Stripe - (2) Patrick Collison, John Collison Stemcentrx - (3) Brian Slingerland, Scott Dylla, Daniel T. Reiner Zenefits (YourPeople) - (2) Parker Conrad, Laks Srini Cloudera - (4) Jeff Hammerbacher, Mike Olson, Amr Awadallah, Christophe Bisciglia SoFi (Social Finance) - (4) Mike Cagney, Dan Macklin, James Finnigan, and Ian Brady Credit Karma - (1) Kenneth Lin Tanium - (2) David Hindawi, Orion Hindawi Fanatics - (1) Alan Trager DocuSign - (1) Tom Gonser Moderna - (4) Robert Langer, Noubar Afeyan, Ken Chien, Derrick Rossi Wish (ContextLogic) - (2) Peter Szulczewski, Danny Zhang Bloom Energy - (1) K. R. Sridhar Slack - (4) Stewart Butterfield, Eric Costello, Cal Henderson, and Serguei Mourachov Mozido - (1) Michael A. Liberty Houzz - (2) Adi Tatarko, Alon Cohen DraftKings - (3) Jason Robins, Matt Kalish, Paul Liberman Nutanix - (3) Dheeraj Pandey, Mohit Aron, Ajeet Singh Magic Leap - (1) Rony Abovitz Instacart Domo Blue Apron Github Avant AppDynamics Prosper Marketplace ZocDoc AppNexus Intarcia Therapeutics Honest Co. Oscar Health Insurance MongoDB Jawbone InsideSales.com MuleSoft BuzzFeed - (2) Jonah Peretti, John Johnson Mu Sigma - (1) Ambika Dhiraj Jasper Technologies - (3) Jahangir Mohammed, Daniel Collins, Amit Gupta Deem - (1) Patrick Grady Jet.com - (3) Marc Lore, Nate Faust, Mike Hanrahan Thumbtack - (4) Marco Zappacosta, Sander Daniels, Jonathan Swanson, Jeremy Tunnell FanDuel - (5) Nigel Eccles, Lesley Eccles, Tom Griffiths, Rob Jones, Chris Stafford Medallia - (2) Borge Hald, Amy Pressman Infinidat - (1) Moshe Yanai Warby Parker - (4) David Gilboa, Neil Blumenthal, Andrew Hunt, Jeffrey Raider Okta - (2) Todd McKinnon, Frederic Kerrest Sprinklr - (1) Ragy Thomas Automattic - (1) Matt Mullenweg Actifio - (1) Ash Ashutosh Proteus Digital Health - (3) Andrew Thompson, George Savage, Mark Zdeblick Nextdoor - (4) Nirav Tolia, Sarah Leary, Prakash Janakiraman, David Wiesen Uptake - (2) Eric Lefkofsky, Brad Keywell Anaplan - (2) Guy Haddleton, Michael Gould Gusto (ZenPayroll) AppDirect 23andMe CloudFlare Evernote Eventbrite Tango Kabam Lookout JustFab Qualtrics Razer SimpliVity Pluralsight MarkLogic Coupa Software Twilio Zscaler Vox Media Adaptive Biotechnologies Apttus Kabbage Datto Udacity Docker Mode Media - (9) Samir Arora, Ernie Cicogna, Fernando Ruarte, Vic Zauderer, Dianna Mullins, Raj Narayan, Rebecca Bogle Arora, Susan Kare, Emmanuel Job ForeScout - (4) Oded Comay, Dror Comay, Doron Shikmoni, Hezy Yeshurun Fab - (2) Jason Goldberg, Bradford Shellhammer Gilt Groupe - (6) Kevin P. Ryan, Dwight Merriman, Alexis Maybank, Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, Michael Bryzek, Phong Nguyen Good Technology - (1) Richard Davies Legendary Entertainment - (1) Thomas Tull Pure Storage - (2) John Colgrove, John Hayes Square - (2) Jack Dorsey, Jim McKelvey Sunrun - (3) Lynn Jurich, Edward Fenster, Nat Kreamer Beats Electronics - (2) Dr. Dre, Jimmy Iovine Box - (4) Aaron Levie, Dylan Smith, Sam Ghods, Jeff Queisser Coupons.com - (1) Steven Boal Fisker Automotive - (2) Henrik Fisker, Bernhard Koehler GoPro - (1) Nicholas Woodman Hortonworks - (8) Alan Gates, Arun C. Murthy, Devaraj Das, Eric Baldeschwieler, Mahadev Konar, Owen O'Malley, Sanjay Radia, Suresh Srinivas Lending Club - (2) Renaud Laplanch, Soulaiman Htite Nest Labs - (2) Tony Fadell, Matt Rogers New Relic - (1) Lewis Cirne Wayfair - (2) Niraj Shah, Steve Conine