9 ms·

44% Unicorn Startups in the US were founded by foreign workers

107 points by ZuckMusk 2y ago

qp11 2y ago
[flagged]
- ZuckMusk 2y ago
  This exactly!!!!! Thanks
- spxneo 2y ago
  yo take this comment down man we can't have people crowding this space also don't tell em about family offices
- yieldcrv 2y ago
  That’s true but it’s not as controversial or incendiary as you described it The assets are in US banks onshore, despite the master fund being in the Cayman Islands, this reality is not only palatable to brainwashed patriots, it is also tantamount to the markets that the US created and liquidity the US succeeded in doing that 2nd place trails at.
- reducesuffering 2y ago
  A nice fantastical theory but kind of easy to poke holes in when Google and Facebook are recent trillion $ behemoths who's employees out-earned the capital of physical companies like US Steel and the spectrum of perpetually declining ATT.
  - portaouflop 2y ago
    Did you read the comment? „Not paper wealth, but physical assets like land, steel, etc…“ I’m not saying I agree but the argument was that those unicorns (or behemoths) are just managing actual wealth - which is rooted in real, physical things not made up digital „money“. At least that is how I understood GP
    - reducesuffering 2y ago
      Of course I did. An $80 billion yearly profit stream is not “paper wealth.” Every year they could’ve bought ten US Steel, so who is managing who? If you don’t believe in the value of digital money, only “real, physical things”, by all means only own cars and tools, and buy your meals with gold bars.
    - hackerlight 2y ago
      It's not an argument. An argument contains reasons or evidence.
  - vasco 2y ago
    It's just conspiracy mumbo jumbo. Google was running a private airport that used to be ran by NASA, definitely outsiders lmao.[1] "At times, Google has appeared to get more out of the deal than the government. Before the fighter jet purchased by Brin, Page and Schmidt was ready to start collecting atmospheric data for NASA, Google executives had already turned Moffett into their corporate airport, flying into or out of the airfield nearly 600 times, according to FAA records. As the executives’ use of the airfield became increasingly controversial, NASA initially appears to have rejected their efforts to extend the deal beyond 2014. The space agency even explored the possibility of handing off Moffett Field to another government agency or a municipality. But members of the community and powerful Google allies in Congress intervened to lobby against such a move. In the end, NASA awarded a 60-year lease to a Google affiliate over a competing bid from a development firm that sought to open up the facility to more flights and outside tenants. " The truth is simpler, whoever has money can get influence and power and use it until they lose it, and the outcomes we see are a result of these complex interactions of many actors with their own incentives. [1] https://www.techtransparencyproject.org/articles/fighter-jet-and-friends-congress-how-google-got-access-nasa-airfield https://www.techtransparencyproject.org/articles/fighter-jet...
- blackhawkC17 2y ago
  [flagged]
- jl6 2y ago
  These Elites... one might describe them as rootless cosmopolitans, perhaps?
  - badpun 2y ago
    They usually are. Even a couple centuries ago, a lot of Europe’s elites back then didn’t even speak the language of their own country on a daily basis - they preferred French. The culture of their own country was often something they knew relatively little about. Also, they felt much stronger allegiance to the pan-European league of aristocrats, than to their own country. That’s the dynamics of having mega-wealth I guess.
- contrarian1234 2y ago
  in my limited experience the regulatory framework is such that it's hard to expand and get all the certifications/vetting/background-checks if you're not US based A startup I know has Chinese cofounders and it's basically a deathsentence. Investors all got spooked knowing any Chinese national has part ownership - b/c regulatory bodies are unpredictable these days If you're in the US with owners that are US nationals the whole funding pipeline is very streamlined by the lawyer armies. If you're transnational then nobody wants to deal with that. VCs are ultimately full of very lazy people that want to have everything cookie cutter
  - novolunt 2y ago
    [dead]
- pavlov 2y ago
  There’s clearly an association between randomly applied old-fashioned noun capitalization and conspiracy theorizing. Everybody in this scene does it, from Trump on down. Is it just because Capitals make things seem more Important and Ominous? As in this post, where the Elites control not just paper Assets but also the Fertilizer.
  - relaxing 2y ago
    Since it’s only 9am UTC, and thus still the middle of the night for the US, perhaps the poster is a native practitioner of German Noun Capitalization? Currently the rest of the replies exist in the gamut from merely tangential to extremely obtuse misreadings, which makes me wonder to what degree LLM-driven automation is involved.
  - goodpoint 2y ago
    [flagged]
- citrin_ru 2y ago
  I heard that public companies listed on NYSE valued higher than similar companies listed in other countries. So at least some investors do care about the country.
- hnuser847 2y ago
  Are the Elites in the room with us now?
a3w 2y ago
x% of Startups in the US were founded by foreign workers statistics is needed to show that this is lower or higher than average. Also, capital per startup or other factors could show why the percentage of success is plausibly higher or lower.
- zmgsabst 2y ago
  Also, is this a “one drop” rule — where a single foreign founder and three domestic founders counts as a “foreign founder”?
- n4r9 2y ago
  Foreign workers make up less than 20% of the US workforce according to: https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-immigrants-are-in-the-american-workforce/ https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-immigrants-are-in-the... Over twice that proportion founding startups sounds very significant. It's not too surprising though - if you're able and willing to take the risk of migrating for work, you're probably more likely to be able and willing to start a company.
invalidname 2y ago
I think a far more interesting bit of information is that Israel has 9M people yet ranks second behind India with 1.4Bn people. Ahead of far larger countries...
- ZuckMusk 2y ago
  [dead]
  - invalidname 2y ago
    Do you have that opinion with more antisemitism? Do Jews win more Nobels because of our control over Norwegians?
    - defrost 2y ago
      A three month old account with a Zuck | Musk nom de guerre will always have edgelord opinions with more <X> .. just not a life.
      - 082349872349872 2y ago
        That may be predictable, but I finally remembered to listen to Talking with the Taxman... and the YT algo decided I must be in the market for a Prada bag, so there still are some surprises in store, here under the sun. EDIT: BTW, I think I finally figured out why the older bloke in the All Blacks shirt calls Ŋarritj "uncle". I had been confused because I thought Ŋarritj had been found as a fledgling, so chronologically he'd be younger. However, if the bloke were Dhuwa, and specifically Gamarraŋ, then his mother would be Yirritja, and specifically Ŋarritjan, so Ŋarritj would be her brother and his uncle. Do I have that right?
        defrost 2y ago
        Maybe but not neccesarily by a long shot .. "Uncle" the english word used in any number of pidgin variation is a note of respect for an older man who isn't necc. a blood relative. In various tongues there are more precise words for more complicated blood | marriage relations .. so "uncle" is mostly generic, but often will mean an elder from the same group, whether family or not (but likely). Notable country wide uncles include https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archie_Roach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archie_Roach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Charles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Charles
rapsey 2y ago
However these are legal educated immigrants. The doors to these kinds of immigrants to the US are increasingly closed.
- portaouflop 2y ago
  So the doors are closed for legal immigrants - by the very definition people who are allowed to immigrate? Or do you mean that there is less immigration to the US in general? Or that only the illegal uneducated are „allowed“ to immigrate?
  - blackhawkC17 2y ago
    I think the OP means there’s now fewer opportunities for people to legally migrate to the USA. I don’t have data, so I don’t know if that’s true though.
  - Repulsion9513 2y ago
    Per https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2023-11/2023_0818_plcy_yearbook_immigration_statistics_fy2022.pdf https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2023-11/2023_0818_pl... (table 1, "PERSONS OBTAINING LAWFUL PERMANENT RESIDENT STATUS: FISCAL YEARS 1820 TO 2022"), legal immigration seems to have stayed pretty steady since the 90s. Compare to the 1900s though when the same amount became residents (per capita a much higher amount)... Lots of interesting stats in there actually - like the fact that "EXPULSIONS AND NONCITIZEN APPREHENSIONS" has actually doubled the record high in the last 2 years of data...
    - kgdiem 2y ago
      Anecdotal evidence of course but I’ve had coworkers who get masters degrees because that somehow helps their chances of getting permanent status or something similar. Is it possible that it’s more and more competitive as there are more people who are trying to immigrate?
      - natpalmer1776 2y ago
Joel_Mckay 2y ago
AmCham actively encourages investment into the US economy, and has some of the best people you could ever talk with regarding business. That being said, exporting tech products into the US economy is like giving your competitors a 2 year head start. The US trade and tariff system is expensive to navigate, restrictive on value-added services (free-trade doesn't apply to something sourced from 18 different origins), and constantly evolving on the state level to keep competitors out of domestic markets. Thus, many will choose to create legal entities inside the US to handle sales, taxes, and mitigate many trade/sales encumbrances (see Texas business registry for details.) Many of these firms also create zombie entities in the US and Germany for manufacturing tariff/anti-dumping reasons. Accordingly, most of the value added still occurs someplace offshore... It is very common for existing troubled known-brand companies on stock exchanges to undergo takeover by foreign firms to bypass domestic exchange rules. The new boards then acquire off-shore junk assets (China recycling depots or South American mines are popular), arbitrarily over-value whatever the junk holding is worth, and report the new "growth" valuation for "investors" to gamble on... From an investor perspective... you will see both healthy entity creation, and the dirty side of stock investment cons... Tip, if a firms reported cash-flow is inconsistent with reported growth, than one probably should dig deeper. The financial rhetoric of social-media and political mouthpieces should be parsed with great care... especially in an election year. Good luck, =3
YouWhy 2y ago
Disclaimer: I am not American. I have spent a total of 3 years in American corporate colonies in my country, and probably 3 times as much operating at various roles in local startups, many of which had major American funding. I observe that even for the most capable Americans, operating a startup is at best a phase. Across the general public, it is not considered prestigious vocation. Of course, academic stars can do so, but very often that's as a side gig (unlike Big Tech, which is a valid extension of one's academic career). And for people who could both work in tech and e.g. finance, working in tech is the odd choice. Since founding is premised on operating and having operating experience, a direct corollary is that extraordinary circumstances are needed for an American to be a participating founder (as opposed to e.g., throwing in the funding). P.S.: Even if they are "special", the sheer size of the US leads to an abundance of indigenous founders. It's just that in my society, being a founder is a universally aspired role, whereas this appears not to be the case for US-born Americans.
- vasco 2y ago
  This is not a difference in countries but in the age of money in the family line and what parents tell kids they should value. There's a natural transition from doing well at business in one generation to then shift the family focus to policy be it in politics, philanthropy, or technical (mostly law and finance) roles of prestige in the bureaucracy (ie SEC, district attorney office) which are roles that you can swing for if you don't care about money. If the kids revolt against this they'll do the same low reward / high prestige move except they'll try to impress their friends instead of their family, and go into art.
- rayiner 2y ago
  The mid-20th century completely hollowed out American culture, and immigrants benefit from not having been exposed to that. The people who invented the internet now need a stream of Indians and Chinese to run it so they can share instas.
jillesvangurp 2y ago
This is an interesting phenomenon that has happened before. You can look back at most ancient empires and find that at their peak they had vibrant cities, populated with the best and brightest from all over the world. Egypt, Athens, Rome, etc. People confuse cause and effect here. These places become so great because of the people that move there. That makes the current debates in the US and the EU about limiting migration so silly and backwards. I come from the Netherlands; a country that used to punch way above its weight economically, militarily, and scientifically in the seventeenth century when New York was still called New Amsterdam. That happened on the tail-end of the rest of Europe pushing out intellectuals, religious minorities, etc. a lot of whom ended up in Amsterdam. You might think of Amsterdam as the seventeenth century Silicon Valley. Modern day dutch politics are dominated by populists with an anti migrant sentiment. They are longing for the good old days when the Netherlands was so great without realizing that migrants were a big part of that greatness. Later London took over. And eventually the US ended up absorbing a lot of immigrants and became a world power. Twentieth century New York became the amazing place it is today. These events are not disconnected. You need a critical mass of migrants for stuff like this to happen. I currently live in Berlin, which has a lot of people moving to it from all over the place. It's too early to tell for sure but I wouldn't be surprised to see some beautiful things happen here over the course of the next decades. If it does, it will be despite of the locals. Silicon Valley increasingly feels like it has a lot of greatness in its past but not necessarily in its future. There sure is a lot of money there. And some good universities. But moving there is not the logical move it would have been twenty years ago. I never did but it could have easily happened.
- contrarian1234 2y ago
  > People confuse cause and effect here. These places become so great because of the people that move there. Not saying you're wrong.. but what's the proof? It's easy to think of counterexamples. Places like Malaysia that are full of immigrants and are not particularly successful. Or Japan, which is notoriously insular and successful. London has the whole industrial revolution and boom before colonialism and the wave of immigrants One would also expect a major difference between for instance the US siphoning off the world's top talent (ex: post USSR collapse immigrants from the scientific community) and undereducated economic refugees from Central America. For instance you're not exactly seeing a flood of Latin-America-born founders in the US (not the best metric, but still)
alexfromapex 2y ago
The result of many years of outsourcing?
snird 2y ago
By definition - if you want to immigrate to the US (legally) you must be successful. For example, L1 Visa, will require your company to employ at least 15 people in the US by the end of it. So you either start a company successful enough to hire at least 15 people, or you go home. If you aspire to live in the US at the end of it, it's a hell of a motivator. I'll just add - this beneficial system is largely being closed down due to illegal immigration in the US, which "fills" the caps in many places. It may be hurtful to the US long term.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
peteradio 2y ago
Unicorns that actually benefit people or just bullshit extractive tech? Show me the list. If I want to get less bullshit extractive tech maybe we should tighten up immigration?

107 points by ZuckMusk 2y ago

qp11 2y ago

[flagged]

ZuckMusk 2y ago
This exactly!!!!! Thanks
spxneo 2y ago
yo take this comment down man we can't have people crowding this space also don't tell em about family offices
yieldcrv 2y ago
That’s true but it’s not as controversial or incendiary as you described it The assets are in US banks onshore, despite the master fund being in the Cayman Islands, this reality is not only palatable to brainwashed patriots, it is also tantamount to the markets that the US created and liquidity the US succeeded in doing that 2nd place trails at.
reducesuffering 2y ago
A nice fantastical theory but kind of easy to poke holes in when Google and Facebook are recent trillion $ behemoths who's employees out-earned the capital of physical companies like US Steel and the spectrum of perpetually declining ATT.
- portaouflop 2y ago
  Did you read the comment? „Not paper wealth, but physical assets like land, steel, etc…“ I’m not saying I agree but the argument was that those unicorns (or behemoths) are just managing actual wealth - which is rooted in real, physical things not made up digital „money“. At least that is how I understood GP
  - reducesuffering 2y ago
    Of course I did. An $80 billion yearly profit stream is not “paper wealth.” Every year they could’ve bought ten US Steel, so who is managing who? If you don’t believe in the value of digital money, only “real, physical things”, by all means only own cars and tools, and buy your meals with gold bars.
  - hackerlight 2y ago
    It's not an argument. An argument contains reasons or evidence.
- vasco 2y ago
  It's just conspiracy mumbo jumbo. Google was running a private airport that used to be ran by NASA, definitely outsiders lmao.[1] "At times, Google has appeared to get more out of the deal than the government. Before the fighter jet purchased by Brin, Page and Schmidt was ready to start collecting atmospheric data for NASA, Google executives had already turned Moffett into their corporate airport, flying into or out of the airfield nearly 600 times, according to FAA records. As the executives’ use of the airfield became increasingly controversial, NASA initially appears to have rejected their efforts to extend the deal beyond 2014. The space agency even explored the possibility of handing off Moffett Field to another government agency or a municipality. But members of the community and powerful Google allies in Congress intervened to lobby against such a move. In the end, NASA awarded a 60-year lease to a Google affiliate over a competing bid from a development firm that sought to open up the facility to more flights and outside tenants. " The truth is simpler, whoever has money can get influence and power and use it until they lose it, and the outcomes we see are a result of these complex interactions of many actors with their own incentives. [1] https://www.techtransparencyproject.org/articles/fighter-jet-and-friends-congress-how-google-got-access-nasa-airfield https://www.techtransparencyproject.org/articles/fighter-jet...
blackhawkC17 2y ago
[flagged]
jl6 2y ago
These Elites... one might describe them as rootless cosmopolitans, perhaps?
- badpun 2y ago
  They usually are. Even a couple centuries ago, a lot of Europe’s elites back then didn’t even speak the language of their own country on a daily basis - they preferred French. The culture of their own country was often something they knew relatively little about. Also, they felt much stronger allegiance to the pan-European league of aristocrats, than to their own country. That’s the dynamics of having mega-wealth I guess.
contrarian1234 2y ago
in my limited experience the regulatory framework is such that it's hard to expand and get all the certifications/vetting/background-checks if you're not US based A startup I know has Chinese cofounders and it's basically a deathsentence. Investors all got spooked knowing any Chinese national has part ownership - b/c regulatory bodies are unpredictable these days If you're in the US with owners that are US nationals the whole funding pipeline is very streamlined by the lawyer armies. If you're transnational then nobody wants to deal with that. VCs are ultimately full of very lazy people that want to have everything cookie cutter
- novolunt 2y ago
  [dead]
pavlov 2y ago
There’s clearly an association between randomly applied old-fashioned noun capitalization and conspiracy theorizing. Everybody in this scene does it, from Trump on down. Is it just because Capitals make things seem more Important and Ominous? As in this post, where the Elites control not just paper Assets but also the Fertilizer.
- relaxing 2y ago
  Since it’s only 9am UTC, and thus still the middle of the night for the US, perhaps the poster is a native practitioner of German Noun Capitalization? Currently the rest of the replies exist in the gamut from merely tangential to extremely obtuse misreadings, which makes me wonder to what degree LLM-driven automation is involved.
- goodpoint 2y ago
  [flagged]
citrin_ru 2y ago
I heard that public companies listed on NYSE valued higher than similar companies listed in other countries. So at least some investors do care about the country.
hnuser847 2y ago
Are the Elites in the room with us now?

a3w 2y ago

x% of Startups in the US were founded by foreign workers statistics is needed to show that this is lower or higher than average. Also, capital per startup or other factors could show why the percentage of success is plausibly higher or lower.

zmgsabst 2y ago
Also, is this a “one drop” rule — where a single foreign founder and three domestic founders counts as a “foreign founder”?
n4r9 2y ago
Foreign workers make up less than 20% of the US workforce according to: https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-immigrants-are-in-the-american-workforce/ https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-immigrants-are-in-the... Over twice that proportion founding startups sounds very significant. It's not too surprising though - if you're able and willing to take the risk of migrating for work, you're probably more likely to be able and willing to start a company.

invalidname 2y ago

I think a far more interesting bit of information is that Israel has 9M people yet ranks second behind India with 1.4Bn people. Ahead of far larger countries...

ZuckMusk 2y ago
[dead]
- invalidname 2y ago
  Do you have that opinion with more antisemitism? Do Jews win more Nobels because of our control over Norwegians?
  - defrost 2y ago
    A three month old account with a Zuck | Musk nom de guerre will always have edgelord opinions with more <X> .. just not a life.
    - 082349872349872 2y ago
      That may be predictable, but I finally remembered to listen to Talking with the Taxman... and the YT algo decided I must be in the market for a Prada bag, so there still are some surprises in store, here under the sun. EDIT: BTW, I think I finally figured out why the older bloke in the All Blacks shirt calls Ŋarritj "uncle". I had been confused because I thought Ŋarritj had been found as a fledgling, so chronologically he'd be younger. However, if the bloke were Dhuwa, and specifically Gamarraŋ, then his mother would be Yirritja, and specifically Ŋarritjan, so Ŋarritj would be her brother and his uncle. Do I have that right?
      - defrost 2y ago
        Maybe but not neccesarily by a long shot .. "Uncle" the english word used in any number of pidgin variation is a note of respect for an older man who isn't necc. a blood relative. In various tongues there are more precise words for more complicated blood | marriage relations .. so "uncle" is mostly generic, but often will mean an elder from the same group, whether family or not (but likely). Notable country wide uncles include https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archie_Roach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archie_Roach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Charles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Charles

rapsey 2y ago

However these are legal educated immigrants. The doors to these kinds of immigrants to the US are increasingly closed.

portaouflop 2y ago
So the doors are closed for legal immigrants - by the very definition people who are allowed to immigrate? Or do you mean that there is less immigration to the US in general? Or that only the illegal uneducated are „allowed“ to immigrate?
- blackhawkC17 2y ago
  I think the OP means there’s now fewer opportunities for people to legally migrate to the USA. I don’t have data, so I don’t know if that’s true though.
- Repulsion9513 2y ago
  Per https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2023-11/2023_0818_plcy_yearbook_immigration_statistics_fy2022.pdf https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2023-11/2023_0818_pl... (table 1, "PERSONS OBTAINING LAWFUL PERMANENT RESIDENT STATUS: FISCAL YEARS 1820 TO 2022"), legal immigration seems to have stayed pretty steady since the 90s. Compare to the 1900s though when the same amount became residents (per capita a much higher amount)... Lots of interesting stats in there actually - like the fact that "EXPULSIONS AND NONCITIZEN APPREHENSIONS" has actually doubled the record high in the last 2 years of data...
  - kgdiem 2y ago
    Anecdotal evidence of course but I’ve had coworkers who get masters degrees because that somehow helps their chances of getting permanent status or something similar. Is it possible that it’s more and more competitive as there are more people who are trying to immigrate?
    - natpalmer1776 2y ago

Joel_Mckay 2y ago

AmCham actively encourages investment into the US economy, and has some of the best people you could ever talk with regarding business. That being said, exporting tech products into the US economy is like giving your competitors a 2 year head start. The US trade and tariff system is expensive to navigate, restrictive on value-added services (free-trade doesn't apply to something sourced from 18 different origins), and constantly evolving on the state level to keep competitors out of domestic markets. Thus, many will choose to create legal entities inside the US to handle sales, taxes, and mitigate many trade/sales encumbrances (see Texas business registry for details.) Many of these firms also create zombie entities in the US and Germany for manufacturing tariff/anti-dumping reasons. Accordingly, most of the value added still occurs someplace offshore... It is very common for existing troubled known-brand companies on stock exchanges to undergo takeover by foreign firms to bypass domestic exchange rules. The new boards then acquire off-shore junk assets (China recycling depots or South American mines are popular), arbitrarily over-value whatever the junk holding is worth, and report the new "growth" valuation for "investors" to gamble on... From an investor perspective... you will see both healthy entity creation, and the dirty side of stock investment cons... Tip, if a firms reported cash-flow is inconsistent with reported growth, than one probably should dig deeper. The financial rhetoric of social-media and political mouthpieces should be parsed with great care... especially in an election year. Good luck, =3

YouWhy 2y ago

Disclaimer: I am not American. I have spent a total of 3 years in American corporate colonies in my country, and probably 3 times as much operating at various roles in local startups, many of which had major American funding. I observe that even for the most capable Americans, operating a startup is at best a phase. Across the general public, it is not considered prestigious vocation. Of course, academic stars can do so, but very often that's as a side gig (unlike Big Tech, which is a valid extension of one's academic career). And for people who could both work in tech and e.g. finance, working in tech is the odd choice. Since founding is premised on operating and having operating experience, a direct corollary is that extraordinary circumstances are needed for an American to be a participating founder (as opposed to e.g., throwing in the funding). P.S.: Even if they are "special", the sheer size of the US leads to an abundance of indigenous founders. It's just that in my society, being a founder is a universally aspired role, whereas this appears not to be the case for US-born Americans.

vasco 2y ago
This is not a difference in countries but in the age of money in the family line and what parents tell kids they should value. There's a natural transition from doing well at business in one generation to then shift the family focus to policy be it in politics, philanthropy, or technical (mostly law and finance) roles of prestige in the bureaucracy (ie SEC, district attorney office) which are roles that you can swing for if you don't care about money. If the kids revolt against this they'll do the same low reward / high prestige move except they'll try to impress their friends instead of their family, and go into art.
rayiner 2y ago
The mid-20th century completely hollowed out American culture, and immigrants benefit from not having been exposed to that. The people who invented the internet now need a stream of Indians and Chinese to run it so they can share instas.

jillesvangurp 2y ago

This is an interesting phenomenon that has happened before. You can look back at most ancient empires and find that at their peak they had vibrant cities, populated with the best and brightest from all over the world. Egypt, Athens, Rome, etc. People confuse cause and effect here. These places become so great because of the people that move there. That makes the current debates in the US and the EU about limiting migration so silly and backwards. I come from the Netherlands; a country that used to punch way above its weight economically, militarily, and scientifically in the seventeenth century when New York was still called New Amsterdam. That happened on the tail-end of the rest of Europe pushing out intellectuals, religious minorities, etc. a lot of whom ended up in Amsterdam. You might think of Amsterdam as the seventeenth century Silicon Valley. Modern day dutch politics are dominated by populists with an anti migrant sentiment. They are longing for the good old days when the Netherlands was so great without realizing that migrants were a big part of that greatness. Later London took over. And eventually the US ended up absorbing a lot of immigrants and became a world power. Twentieth century New York became the amazing place it is today. These events are not disconnected. You need a critical mass of migrants for stuff like this to happen. I currently live in Berlin, which has a lot of people moving to it from all over the place. It's too early to tell for sure but I wouldn't be surprised to see some beautiful things happen here over the course of the next decades. If it does, it will be despite of the locals. Silicon Valley increasingly feels like it has a lot of greatness in its past but not necessarily in its future. There sure is a lot of money there. And some good universities. But moving there is not the logical move it would have been twenty years ago. I never did but it could have easily happened.

contrarian1234 2y ago
> People confuse cause and effect here. These places become so great because of the people that move there. Not saying you're wrong.. but what's the proof? It's easy to think of counterexamples. Places like Malaysia that are full of immigrants and are not particularly successful. Or Japan, which is notoriously insular and successful. London has the whole industrial revolution and boom before colonialism and the wave of immigrants One would also expect a major difference between for instance the US siphoning off the world's top talent (ex: post USSR collapse immigrants from the scientific community) and undereducated economic refugees from Central America. For instance you're not exactly seeing a flood of Latin-America-born founders in the US (not the best metric, but still)

alexfromapex 2y ago

The result of many years of outsourcing?

snird 2y ago

By definition - if you want to immigrate to the US (legally) you must be successful. For example, L1 Visa, will require your company to employ at least 15 people in the US by the end of it. So you either start a company successful enough to hire at least 15 people, or you go home. If you aspire to live in the US at the end of it, it's a hell of a motivator. I'll just add - this beneficial system is largely being closed down due to illegal immigration in the US, which "fills" the caps in many places. It may be hurtful to the US long term.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

peteradio 2y ago

Unicorns that actually benefit people or just bullshit extractive tech? Show me the list. If I want to get less bullshit extractive tech maybe we should tighten up immigration?