Obtaining Foreign Tech Talent & Visas Just Got Easier With PassRight.
Two months ago, I was speaking to the co-founder of a company that had just raised $140MM earlier that week. The founder, who is also Israeli, just went through the O-1 process. O-1 is the visa for Extraordinary Talent. Once I heard
I asked if his company has visa issues and he said that there are a few. But, he explained, that’s not relevant because immigration was not their biggest problem right now. Finding the best talent is. Earlier that week, I heard the same thing from the Head of Talent at Tesla. What he told me was, “We don’t hire talent without work authorization and we don’t actively pursue it. The ‘visa headache’ is too much.”
That’s when I realized that in order for us to win contracts with corporations, we needed to offer more than just the best visa software and immigration legal service.
At that moment, I said: “Ok, we’ll bring you the most extraordinary talent: the 1% who are O-1 eligible. Should you decide to hire them, you can use our innovative platform to work on their immigration cases.
Overnight, we became a tech recruiting agency where we were finding the top 1% of people through the O-1 Visa Process.
This is not some small- time hack executed in some guy’s basement. We have lawyers, paralegals, a CTO, and a full-time team of talented engineers working on this, solving a very real problem.
The Experiment Worked!
Since that night, we received thousands of
In two months, we’ve signed retainers with six new startups and we already found the best talent for them. We are now going bigger on “this”.
What is “this”?
We are now constantly pursuing and being pursued by enthusiastic, talented engineers who qualify for O-1 visas, have good communication skills, who answer the requirements needed by the employers, and who can be on a plane to the US tomorrow. Our pool of talent is unique, extremely motivated, and presents a much-needed workforce for the tech industry.
Meanwhile, others are taking notice. PassRight’s media coverage continues to make headlines.
Last month, Forbes featured PassRight and me. The story started trending
and we were on our way to being media superstars until the American Bar Association (ABA) got the story unpublished. However, it can be found at Harvard’s web blog.
It seems that the Co-Chair of the Immigration and Nationality Law Committee of the ABA alleged the article was riddled with unsupported and inflammatory statements.
I bring this up not to get into a fight with the ABA, but rather to underscore the problems many startups face from the mighty and powerful legacy organizations and companies they are looking to disrupt. As startups, which is what we are, begin to encroach on lucrative, money-making territory, in this instance, the ABA’s H-1B, they use their lobbying power, media connections, as well as bullying techniques to squelch competitor’s progress, and re-seize the turf that had long gone unchallenged.
The irony about great things is that they are unstoppable, and today PassRight is back on Forbes, this time with a new headline:
An Immigrant Tech Entrepreneur Helps Accelerate U.S. Access To Foreign Talent
In this instance, again, it is PassRight’s disruptive play as an Immigration Legal Technology Company. Through our system, which the Forbes article pointed out, we are helping to change the way immigrants can get into the US without the same price and bureaucratic legal hassles that plague many people.
With our mission of caring more about getting you to where you want to go, versus stopping you because of where you come from, I firmly believe that
