Yo! Tried to reply to your post about a visa (thread locked now).
I'm a Canadian, founder, been through the process multiple times, and am helping people with visas. @loganullyott on twitter, loganullyott @gml dot com
USCIS is the best place for authoritative info... but it can be really hard to navigate through all their different programs and find what you need.
Chatting with an immigration attorney like Peter and his team, or our team at Legalpad, will help you understand what your options are, as well as the grey areas and nuance in some of the rules.
Sometimes what the government says, and how they actually respond to cases, can be pretty different - experience in the field matters, you need to see a number of cases to get a feel for what works/ doesn't work.
Check out supervisa.ai for Canadian options.
What country were you born in, what countries do you have citizenship?
H-1B is going to be super expensive for a pre-revenue company to hire you at (with the new H-1B changes). If you've raised money for the startup, you might be able to afford it, but the O-1 is a better visa to look at (and cheaper for the company).
Take a look at the requirements for an O-1 and you can see if raising VC helps you. get.legalpad.io/legalpad-webinars-and-events
E-2 visa and green cards are other popular routes.
One way to do it: incorporate the company (Stripe Atlas), raise funding, apply for the O-1. Can smoothly move from H-1B to O-1 without leaving the country.I've helped a number of people do this over the last year.
If you have cofounders it is slightly easier, but solo founder is certainly possible.
EB-1 is a logical extension of the O-1 - same "exceptional ability" criteria. The EB-1 isn't any easier at a big company vs a little company; it's all about your professional accomplishments. Arguably, raising money and building a startup shows you've accomplished more than being engineer #600 at BigCo.
I'm not Peter but I'm happy to walk any founder through the different visa options available to them or potential employees. Have helped dozens of YC founders and hundreds of founders - [email protected]
You can move to an O-1 or other visa, if you want to move from H-1B employer to doing your own thing. Since you've got a priority date already, you can keep that when you move to the new company, so the wait isn't completely lost.
I've helped 10ish founders go from H-1B employees to being a founder on O-1 this year, would be happy to chat through the playbook.
DroneSeed is bringing tree-planting drones, remote-sensing data, and predictive analytics to the forestry industry. We're building a fleet of 15 drones to fly over forested areas and fire seed capsules into the ground with pneumatics. It's pretty cool. We're a 4-person TechStars company in Seattle right now, we've got our first customers, and we're looking to hire in two positions.
We're looking for a Co-Founder CTO. Ideal candidate will have experience working with either GIS and Image processing, or UAV flight planning, as well as working with large data sets. Capable of leading a team, the candidate will be designing backend architecture, can estimate hours and evaluate talent. You're keen to provide the software element to our hardware and business skills. Helpful but not required experience includes:
ArcGIS or QGIS, PixHawk, Pix4d, AgDrone, Python, Q Ground Control, ArduPilot, Python.
https://angel.co/droneseed/jobs/115308-cofounder-cto-drone-s...
UAV Mission Planner: This position will be charged with owning the software stack to allow 15 drones to be pre-programmed on how to plant tree seeds, where to go, and how to land autonomously. You have 1-4 years experience working writing code for mission planning software. https://angel.co/droneseed/jobs/114965-software-engineer-uav...
If you're motivated by the problem, equity, and are comfortable working at a fast pace in an aspiring startup in a prestigious accelerator (TechStars Seattle), we would love to talk. Candidate should consider moving to Seattle for 1-4 months. (Housing may be provided depending upon need.)
I didn't particularly love the last one, on Musk's "secret sauce," but the rest of the Musk series was absolutely fantastic. You could give it to someone that has never seen a car or rocket, and by the end of it they'd understand the majority of the energy, auto, and space industries.
I was just imagining an autopilot lane with cars flying into the city to pick up their owners.
You could also have parking garages with a much higher capacity per sq. foot if all the cars were smart and could work together. (Or even sections designed for this) Instead of single or double car rows, you could have them 4 or five cars deep, and self-rearranging to let each other out.
I was thinking more of something like "I'm drunk, so I'm going to voluntarily give my car control to take me home." Basically turning it into a driverless taxi.
"No seatbelt, no car move" is restricting in that it's always enabled. Something like what I've dubbed "drunk mode" or "taxi mode" gives you more options.
Thinking about your last sentence: Elon has been tweeting about Tesla's summon feature - tap your phone and your car will come to you, across the street or across the country. If a car can drive LA to NY legally, without a driver, there should be a way for it to carry a drunk passenger. Whether that means enabling "drunk mode" so you can't grab the steering wheel, or that you have to sit in the back seat, there's surely room for a compromise between the automakers and lawmakers. Technology like this will save lives.
That was my first reaction. I played Draw Something for a week or so, 3 years ago. I know many people still play Candy Crush Daily. The purchase to get Draw Something was probably premature, whereas this is a more established market.
There have been lots of articles mentioning Dorsey taking sewing classes, sketching classes, going sailing, etc while running Twitter. (And in moments that outsiders consider crises, and employees were working longer hours to hit deadlines). The 6/4/1 is an exaggeration, but still...
From what I've read in the Musk biography and elsewhere, he is involved in really really low level decisions, to the point that he's been labelled a "nano-manager." Surely he's not involved in absolutely every decision, but by all accounts he is much, much closer to the details than you would expect a CEO to be. Especially when it comes to design/ engineering details.
I saw Ben (I think it was Ben) speak at the Solidworks conference in San Diego, about 4 years ago. I was familiar with Quirky before his big talk, (I'm an industrial designer) but walking away from the talk I was thinking, "This is fucking brilliant. They set up a system to get free ideas, gauge interest, receive feedback, iterate a product, and have a batch of initial customers ready to buy something once its developed. They're outsourcing a decent amount of work to the customers, and the customers are happy to get small royalty checks."
They told the story of the kid that led that power strip's development through Quirky, and how it paid for his college - but it was easy to see that most customers or contributors or Quirks or whatever they called them would not be making big money by choosing a new product's name or color or whatever.
As everyone else has pointed out, they got halfway to successful with a bunch of products. Their connected products had people excited about them, and many could have turned into legitimate businesses or product lines. But when you're making a new product every week,( 50+ a year) from concept thru development to production, your focus and execution will stray.