As a part of the Entrepreneurship Week at Stanford University, a panel of innovators connected to the school, and all born overseas, spoke to almost 200 students. The Peninsula Press says that the event, which took place on 3 March, had the aim of teaching students how to create a start-up company while at the same time acquiring US citizenship.
The people on the panel, all of whom have managed to acquire legal, permanent status in a number of very different ways, paid particular attention to the importance of getting a lawyer and commencing the green card process as early as possible.
The co-founder of software company Appfluence, a company that develops multi-platform products to help people plan and increase productivity, Pablo Diaz-Gutierre told the Stanford students that there are actually a lot of benefits to being a foreigner when it comes to innovative industries, including have the connections to being able to outsource work to their home country. In an extremely competitive world economy, having professional contacts all across the globe working together on a start-up can be extremely beneficial.
“If you’re going to start a start-up you need to be ready to do everything yourself,” says the co-founder of Jetlore, computer specialist Montse Medina. “But you do want a lawyer that is going to give you ideas, who’ll say, of course this is what everybody does, but there’s also this other option. This is the lawyer that you want.”