Cybersecurity
How Tech Startup Founders Are Hacking Immigration
Forty-four percent of Silicon Valley startups have an immigrant founder. Many tell horror stories.
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Standing under fluorescent lights at a San Francisco hospital, employees of Medisas Inc. were celebrating the debut of their medical records software. It was the product of two years of planning, coding, and countless meetings with hospital administrators, all driven by Gautam Sivakumar, the startup’s founder and chief executive officer. But Sivakumar spent that day at a computer in his childhood bedroom in England.
His face appeared on an iPad via video chat as colleagues toted him around the hospital “like a baby,” he recalled. “I’d say, ‘I need to talk to that person. Can you take me over there?’” The awkward arrangement was a byproduct of an all-too common phenomenon among U.S. tech startups: immigration limbo.