A high school friend and I decided to try and port the .NET Compact Framework to Symbian OS, specifically Series 60. The company (https://web.archive.org/web/20100112091803/http://www.redfiv...) was based in Johannesburg, South Africa and although we raised funding, we just took way too long.
We were lucky enough to be able to bootstrap some things with the Mono/Xamarin .NET implementation. Initially we created an interpreter but then created a full JIT compiler. It was not easy, to say the least, getting things to work on that platform.
What also didn’t help was the level of support we got from Symbian/Nokia; our project/startup was mostly met with indifference. By the time we had a viable, mostly functioning .NET Compact Framework v2 running the writing was on the wall vs iPhone.
Unfortunately it went with it. There were some superficial talks about it winding up in the Symbian Foundation, but those didn’t materialize.
And yes, it probably points to a major problem with a small company developing critical framework or tool components when the codebase isn’t participating in an open source license.
There were many mistakes made along the way, in retrospect.
Back in 2008/9 I was a co-founder at a company (Red Five Labs) that created a .NET Compact Framework runtime for Symbian OS (featured on most Nokia & Samsung smartphones at the time). We got to a .NET CF 2.0 level of compatibility.
It was a venture-backed startup out of Johannesburg, South Africa.
Although we wrote the runtime ourselves, we made extensive use of some of the mono libraries until we were able to rewrite most of these optimized for Symbian.
Do you have personal evidence of a good exit leading to an EB-1? You would think it would, but that category seems difficult for entrepreneurship/business.
I'm not saying it's all roses. I'm talking about risk/reward.
I'm trying to compare it to the potential upside of any immigrant category. Entrepreneurs present some downside, but no more than any other visa/immigrant category. One heck of a lot more upside though, IMO.
EB-5 you can do for $500k plus transactional costs and probably shouldn't go into the business anyway.
E2 absolutely agree it just feels like deferring the problem to a later date. A lot of exposure for not as much in return.
I think the bottom line is you don't need to be in the US as much as you needed to before, given your track record. Here the US should need/want you more than the other way round.
L-1A is probably quite doable though and it's dual intent. You need to wait a year, but that may have passed already anyway.
If you've studied O-1 recipients in non-business's categories, I think founders have it hard. I certainly know of some recipients in other industries and honestly the burden of proof was just not as difficult.
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If you mean the latter please show us some examples of public cos with a 90% net profit margin. I don’t think there are many.