From The Times of India
US pushes for Start-up Visa to keep immigrant entrepreneurs back in the country
By Rituparna Chatterjee
Dhawal Mujumdar and Satish Polliseti, students at the University of California, Berkeley's campus have just completed their thesis on a new anti-spam software for smart phones . This software will help web pages verify that the user is a human and not an automated program. (Remember the distorted text you read and key in at the end of many online forms?)
The two hope they can soon start a company and spin a business around this software....
In spite of the bright prospects for both startups - especially in apps-obsessed America - there is a good chance they might not survive. Reason? The founders are international students who will have to go back to their home countries if they cannot get a visa. This could easily put off some venture capitalists (VCs), who otherwise might have funded them. Foreign students in the US get a year after graduation to get a work visa, which in most cases is the employer-funded non-immigrant H-1B visa....
The UC Berkeley duo of Mujumdar and Polliseti reckon they can hire at least 12 technical and sales people over the next year. "We want to hire locally, which means that these will be American jobs," says Mujumdar....