Right now, there's no startup visa of any kind. The closest thing is the EB-5 investor visa, but that requires investing $500k-$1mil of your own money (not investor money). And, the H-1B work visa prohibits starting your own company and self-sponsoring.
If they figured out a way to move here and start a company under the current U.S. immigration system, it would benefit a lot of people to know how they did it.
I don't know their story, but I imagine that they took similar route as others:
- start on ESTA or B1/B2
- switch to E2
- once successful-ish go for O-1
Actually these days there are lawyers specialized on obtaining O-1 in a pretty short period of time (3-5 weeks) for founders that get into incubators or raise >$300k.
Working on ESTA or B1/B2 would actually be considered "working without authorization" as neither permits gainful employment or self-employment (incl. remote/contract work).
The O-1 seems more plausible. You do have to be very impressive to get an O-1, but raising $300k in funding probably qualifies you.
They've been over there a while I believe. The Collison bros have for a long time been known as valedictorians - could well be they found some other means to get a visa.
>I’m sometimes asked whether Stripe could have been started in Ireland. It’s impossible to really know the counterfactual, but I suspect not.
-p. collison (blog)
I think he was on a US bound circuit as soon as he was done with Leaving Cert. I don't think they "tried" Ireland despite selling a company siopa when they were 16 or what not.
pg was aware of the two lads from an early age and recognized their talent quickly. I have no doubt they would have done well though I doubt very much as well as they have and theres something for ourselves in the Irish scene to reflect on that.
Patrick mentioned in a tweet that they met with a bank in Ireland, and they essentially laughed him out of the room (can't find the link, it was a few years back).
He elaborates further on his blog:
>I’m sometimes asked whether Stripe could have been started in Ireland. It’s impossible to really know the counterfactual, but I suspect not.
>Stripe wasn’t easy to get off the ground. It required convincing banks to work with us, and to take a bet on an unproven startup. I actually spoke to some banks in Ireland when we were starting out, and it was pretty clear that getting them to work with us would have been a very tough battle. I doubt we’d have been able to pull it off.
> But I’m not sure that asking whether Stripe could have been started in Ireland is the right question. Most technology start-ups don’t have to convince banks to work with them. The interesting question is probably “how hard is to start a successful start-up in Ireland compared to doing so in Silicon Valley?” (I’m not claiming that Stripe itself is yet successful—it's still very early days.)
There are some counterexamples, but every single one of those I can think of is self-funded and doesn't rely on VC or bank funding beyond what would be strictly necessary for any business.
You can do it, but it's a hard slog, and many of the success stories (Intercom, for instance) end up relocating out of the country once they look for VC funding because Irish (and European) VCs are so damned risk averse.
They tried to start in Ireland, but without much success (e.g Enterprise Ireland hasn't allocate them funding to previous vencture).