Salon.com > entrepreneur

“Startup” visas could be the next green cards

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 20:34:00 +0000

A cocktail shaker full of whiskey and juice marks the start of happy hour. But we are not at a bar. This is The Hatchery, a sprawling office space in San Francisco and an incubator for startups. It’s non-stop work here, so a weekly in-house cocktail hour is one perk.

Two entrepreneurs, James Richards, 25, and Michael Smith, 29, take a break. They met in Indonesia, where Richards is from, and now work on their startup called Advisable, an online marketplace for lawyers.

Will it work? It might.

Richards is one of Columbia Law School’s youngest ever graduates. He passed the New York bar exam at age 20. Co-founder Michael Smith is a programming whiz from Belgium. But there’s the snag. While Richards’ legal residency is taken care of, Smith’s visa isn’t certain and it could force him out of the country soon.

“It’s that period in between,” worries Smith. “It’s hard to tell what happens because we work best when we physically work in the same place and because of this visa issue we’re going to be in different parts of the world.”

They know that a wobbly outlook in the startup world is not good.

Are you the next Mark Zuckerberg?

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 17:28:00 +0000

Bankers around the world know there are profits to be reaped by making loans to promising small businesses that fall just short of traditional definitions of “creditworthy.” Ever since Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus’ Grameen Bank pioneered “microfinance” by making tiny loans to single mothers in Bangladesh, development policymakers also have believed that getting credit to small businesses—those too large for Grameen-style microloans but still lacking collateral or credit history—is not only possible, but the key to helping a nation’s economic growth. So how to figure out who’s a good risk for a loan—and who isn’t?

Simon Cowell and Will.i.am want to find the next tech entrepreneur

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 12:10:00 +0000

Rapper and "Voice" judge Will.i.am and longtime reality TV judge and producer Simon Cowell are teaming up to launch another "X Factor" type show -- except this one will focus on finding the next Steve Jobs. Will.i.am told the Sun, “We’re working on a project called X Factor for Tech — and it’s going to be out of this world.”

The 37-year-old rapper is a vocal advocate for science and math education. In August (after NASA's Curiosity Rover blasted Will.i.am's "Reach for the Stars" on Mars), he told Mashable: