As an H1-B holder in a similar situation, I advise you not to do this. It's not as simple as Europe. The USA makes it very hard to get a visa. Also, even if yo

As an H1-B holder in a similar situation, I advise you not to do this. It's not as simple as Europe. The USA makes it very hard to get a visa. Also, even if you do get a job, working on your startup part-time is yet harder. Valley jobs typically take much more than full-time hours and have little time off. Welcome to the USA. Also, you haven't really defined what your goals are, other than just being in SF and working on a prototype. Without the motivation of being in a program like Y Combinator (not to mention all the introductions and networking they can arrange) this doesn't sound like a great plan to me. If you want to sprint for a prototype in some cheap apartment, you can do that anywhere. I'd advise you to do this instead. 1) You seem to want to soak up SF & Valley culture, so do that first. - Get an internship at one of the better companies, ideally Google - Participate in one of Google's Summer of Code projects. - Visit SF on a tourist visa and just hang out. Meet a lot of people in the hacker and startup scene. Then: 2) Invigorated with all these new ideas and contacts, go home, get some partners, and work on the prototype. You may not appreciate how much simpler this is right now, but you will if you try to live here for a short while. You can probably even live with your parents, since you're so young. Or go to one of the cheaper European countries, and hack by day, enjoy yourself by night. You're only young once so why not do it in style? It's called the World Wide Web for a reason. 3) IF you think you're picking up momentum then try to find people who can bring you into the USA again. Hopefully you will have met enough people in stage 1 to do this. P.S. There are a few tricks out there to establish an American startup with non-American workers, but they are very high risk. Even if the INS buys it, you will end up signing most of your rights over to someone American. For obvious reasons I will not detail the legal tricks here, nor do I advise that you get into this without advice from a lawyer. But just be aware that there are possibilities if you find someone here that you can really, really trust.