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In my personal experience, designers tend to wear more thick plastic "hipster" style glasses than the general public. Therefore, hipster glasses make you a better designer.

I'd submit that it's not about "more to lose", but rather, it's a move of safety. You see a lot of the same businesses operated by the same types of people. Why? Is that group of people in a caste system that requires them to operate that type of business? No. There's safety in numbers, and birds of a feather flock together (and may work to protect the hatchlings as well).

Perhaps VCs have found that there's a certain profile they like for a company. If I was founding a company and thought having an immigrant co-founder could make the funding process easier, you'd better believe it would affect my choices of co-founders. Are there also tax incentives? I know in Oklahoma, there's a ton of businesses "owned" by Native Americans, even though the company is usually run by someone else. Keep in mind that you only need one immigrant founder to make it an immigrant founded company. (What would the % be like if 100% were the requirement?) Is Barack Obama considered black or white?

If you look at the profiles of these companies, I think you'll find a lot of the good ole business practices in place. (tongue planted in cheek here) Immigrants? yes. American minorities? less so. Women? less so.

I'd love to see a breakdown of bootstrapped companies as well. I suspect it's a different story.




I think it is much simpler than that. Over and beyond not having a safety net and not having a high aversion to risk once you've immigrated to somewhere assuming you didn't do that to go to work for some specific company you're behind the rest of the pack when it comes to applying for jobs. So immigrants have a strong incentive to found a company, they won't have a gap in their CV if they do, they already have the largest gap possible. Nothing to lose is an excellent position to be in when you're confronted with the choice to start a company or not.




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