So logically I can agree with this however in practice at my startups this is just not true. Maybe it is because we never got that big before I went to do the n

So logically I can agree with this however in practice at my startups this is just not true. Maybe it is because we never got that big before I went to do the next startup. I left at around 500 people in the last big one that IPO'd. (They are now over 3K - I was in the 1st 30). At my current startup we are ~50. In both startups finding qualified engineers was the issue always. We did not care if where they came from, just that they could pass the interview process. We would interview 250 and maybe find one person. The goal was top 1%. I once asked the VP of Software if we could make it the top 5% and he said "can you tell me how to tell the difference between the top 1% the top 5% vs the rest? 1% is simple, anything below that you make mistakes." For the 1st ~250ish people the difference between top 1% and the rest was huge and those top people made a world of difference to the success of the company. I guess if you are a company with 1000s then the H1-B money game makes more sense. For a small startup, it is the talent that counts, not where they are from.