it's crazy to think that like hundreds of thousands of people's lives depend on a lottery ticket system and the future of America depends on a lottery ticket system so some of the world's best talent is applying for the H-1B and they don't get it because of a lottery you can imagine like a Pioneer in AI a leader in Quantum they apply and if they don't get it they have to leave the United States and then there's the 01 Visa which I think is one of the best secrets for people who are looking to build in the United States we've built a tech enabled service which streamlines the petion production process that you can get a Visa delivered within four weeks the end product is like a 500 page document that we physically ship so you can't submit this electronically no someone just flips through the pages and reads it this is I think Plymouth secret source is that we really focus on conciseness and precision to the criteria so we try and make it as straightforward no jargon like this is how this individual meets the criteria and essentially we've created this like playbook for getting technologists approved at a much higher rate and then uh if you opt for premium processing you get an answer within 15 business days so Allin your immigration experience could take less than two months and you could be in the United States [Music] working welcome to the Peele where we explore the world's greatest startup stories I'm your host Turner Novak founder Alana Capital Venture Capital firm that loves the 01a Visa today I talk to Lisa Wen founder of Plymouth Street building fast and simple immigration for technologists as an immigrant to the US myself this is an important topic to me personally it's an extremely outdated system is the most talented of us immigrants rely on an employment-based Lottery that accepts less than 10% of applicants each year and it's all random it's a daunting stat considering 55% of unicorn startups are founded by immigrants luckily Lisa and Plymouth have built a way to FastTrack approval for a secret Visa used by less than 5,000 applicants per year with a 99% approval rate we talk all things US immigration how the process involves 500 page physical paper applications and how she gets a Visa approved in as fast as 15 days Lisa also talks through her journey building Plymouth including living in a sawmill building her first climate Tech startup giving those in their money back then raising grant money to build Plymouth an inside how she broke into Silicon Valley as an outsider and a Playbook to do it yourself a thank you to zephy at seoa and Moran at interact for suggesting great questions for Lisa let's talk US immigration after a quick word from our sponsors the tech World Turns to the brave browser for its unbeatable privacy protections but did you know that brave also has a private ad platform Brave ads offers first-party targeting and it's been Cookie list since day one so you you can relax while third-party tracking cookies disappear from the web today millions of people turn to ad blockers to avoid being tracked and pestered online for bra's new ad model aligns incentives for users and advertisers users earn rewards for viewing ads which they can save spend or pass along to their favorite creators an advertisers score points for respecting user privacy generating Roi without invasive tracking so whether it's high impact announcements on the new tab page or keyword targeted ads in Brave search Brave search offers diverse private futureproof ad formats for all your business goals join the future of advertising at brave.com slads mention turpentine to get 25% off your first [Music] campaign this episode is brought to you by warp if you're a Founder with employees in multiple States you know managing state tax compliance is complicated warp not only automates state tax compliance but also offers a user-friendly experience tailored to the need of startups with a robust in-house team of experts warp ensures your startup remains compliant across all 50 states giving you the peace of mind you need to focus on scaling your business they also make it easy for startups to provide health benefits for employees hire International contractors and even claim R&D tax credits hundreds of startups trust warp to handle their payroll and compliance needs you can go from zero to payroll live in Just 2 days don't let payroll and compliance hold your startup back visit join.com peel or tap the link in in the description get started and receive a $1,000 gift card when you run your very first payroll that's join.com [Music] peel Lisa how's it going welcome to the show uh hi TNA thanks so much for having me thank you so much for coming on I thought we could kick things off and get started can you give us a super highlevel crash course on kind of the state of US immigration yeah it's big question I'll try my best so there is two different routes for immigration it's employment based immigration and non-employment based immigration so you have know marriage green cards Asylum all that sort of stuff we focus on employment-based immigration at Plymouth Street and the most common route that people will know about is called the H1B and the H1B is this FEA category that was designed in the 1990s to bring specialist immigrant Talent over to the US when it was designed they set a cap of 65,000 people and one of the most interesting things is that Visa category has been so heavily over subscribed ever since it was created last year we had 780,000 people apply for the H1B for 65,000 slots and so there's this enormous demand for talent to move to the United States but the Visa category that most people come in on is just not fit for purpose and so there are all these other kind of specialist or unique Visa categories that are available that people are unaware of underexplored sometimes complicated there are Visa categories for specific countries so you have the Tenn for people coming over from Canada and Mexico you have a Visa category for Australian Nationals not all countries have a special relationship with the United States so you can get a Visa there are Visa categories where if you've been working for a company internationally for a year you can come over and then there's this Visa C called the J1 which is this amazing Visa category which is called the cultural exchange Visa where you could come to the US for between 12 to 18 months and spend time here learning American best practices and then return to your home country and share those best practices um and then there's the 01 Visa which I'm super excited to talk a bit more about today which I think is the most like one of the best secrets for people who are looking to build in the United States why do you think it's so hard to figure out this whole process you know I think when systems are designed they make a lot of sense but very quickly bureaucracy and understanding of those systems can get very confusing like I said with the H1B it's like when it was designed like it's was like okay like there's this cap limit yeah 65,000 and the H1B is a lottery right like you just it's kind of random is that true yeah you put your name in in and you either get it or you don't and it's crazy to think that like hundreds of thousands of people's lives depend on a lottery ticket system and the future of America depends on a lottery ticket system so some of the world's best talent is applying for the H1B and they don't get it because of a lottery you can imagine like a Pioneer in AI a leader in Quantum they apply and if they don't get it they have to leave the United States or they can't get into the United States yeah you just think of I don't know like Elon Musk if he didn't get his Visa he maybe wouldn't have built SpaceX pretty important company Tesla pretty important company I think there there's a stat too and I think I've heard you say the stats like 55% of unicorn startup Founders are immigrants just it's insane and like it's just a random process that then they might not even get to build their company yeah it's I mean elon's a great story because he actually went from South AFA am to Canada first and then came to the United States is that kind of a common hack because Canada has a little bit more convenient immigration setup yeah so I hear a lot about immigrants like stepping to like the UK or Canada before coming to America because America is so hard and just in terms of like economic Innovation like if you can get the most talented people to the locations where they could be the most productive you can unlock a norm economic progress and so what if Elon Musk actually didn't have to go via Canada but could come straight to the United States like how much further along you might have like a fourth or a fifth unicorn startup that you know Sav solved a different problem exactly exactly and so I think a lot about that is like how what's like the fastest path to talented people being able to access the resources that they need to to access to build so do you have any thoughts on on why are immigrants such good Founders like 55% of like we talked about the the Unicorn startups are built by immigrants that seems like very large compared to you know the percentage of people in the country like in the US do you know why they're so good yeah I think the very nature of being an immigrant like you are a risk taker like you are willing to take risks you're moving from your home country know people moving from India Europe Asia coming all the way over to the United States to build like you've taken a huge amount of risk starting a company is a risky bit like it's a risky Enterprise like it the the odds are not in your favor and I think immigrants can withstand a lot of pain and if there's one thing I've learned about building a company it's like you have to have it's painful a high tolerance for pain yeah exactly I think there's something around like you know they come to America like you don't have any other option to fall back on so you build and you build and you build so it's a very I think optimistic lens of creating things and innovating and that's I think it's something about the psyche yeah and it's fascinating because if you just think about the US in general go back 300 400 years it was built by immigrants like that is for a Melting Pot I think that's what I remember they said in elementary school and we learned all those like songs and stuff like we are like the home of IM immigration really at the end of the day totally I think that's what has made America such an incredible place for Innovation I think immigration is America's superpower in moments of great crisis America has used immigration as a very successful lever to enable greater Innovation like if you look at World War II and the Manhattan Project I think even if you look at this moment right now I'm based in San Francisco in the AI communities you see just some of the most talented immigrant Builders coming here to build the future I think of the technology industry and so I do think America has that superpower and I would love to see the government use that really effectively to drive progress so you mentioned this really interesting acronym I think it was 01 a and or B can you go a little bit deeper on what that Visa is and you know how to get it yeah this is my bread and butter so I spend all my my time talking about the o1a Visa I think the o1a is so special compared to the H1B because it's an uncapped Visa category you can apply any time in the year you can get premium processing which means you can get an answer within 15 business days there's no minimum wage requirement and no minimum degree requirement and so compared to the H1B it's this amazing category that you can apply for the 01a is for people who have extraordinary ability in science business technology and those fields I think art education Athletics also or you're a celebrity basically is what it said so the o1b is for individuals in the Arts and the entertainment industry oh got it okay so 01a for people you can think about it like people in stem 01a o1 B is for people in the entertainment industry okay yeah that's a good that's a good framework yeah and the o1b actually is like the more popular Visa like more people in the entertainment industry apply for that Visa than the people in the 01a and so the core Insight at Plymouth is that we should get many more people to apply for the 01a Visa because it's uncapped so the people who are missing out on the H1B Lottery the people who don't want to take a lottery ticket with their lives that they can actually prepare an application and put forward a case relatively quickly is what we focus on and the insight as well is that many more people could be qualified or already qualified for an 01a than they know and so you can imagine that the PhD students who are graduating from top American schools they are likely to already be qualified for an 01a or very soon to be qualified for no onea and it's just you need to have extraordinary ability that's kind of how they Define it pretty open-ended yeah so I think it's better to see it as expert ability I feel like extraordinary ability people like when I was looking at the Visa category I was like tensing up I was like I don't think I'm extraordinary yeah there's no way yeah but there's eight criteria and you have to meet three out of the eight criteria to be considered someone of extraordinary ability and some of the criteria I think are quite accessible to people so judging hackathon so there's one called judging and if you judge hackathons you could meet the criteria that's pretty that seems very istic for someone to do exactly if you've been a software engineer at a company where you've contributed critical code you could meet the critical role criteria there's a membership criteria so if you have joined like a top accelerator like YC entrepreneur First South Park Commons you could meet the membership criteria too and so there are five others and I won't go one by one in each of the criteria but they're much more accessible than you think and you could actually if you're looking at the criteria and you say like oh I've got one I've judged a hackathon you could work on improving your eligibility for the other criteria so it's all like it's possible for lots of people to take kind of a six-month lens on their career and improve their eligibility for an 01 visa and it's it's pretty crazy then when you think about the difference between the capped and uncapped like that 700,000 applicant difference between the H1B and the the the people that want to get it it's just okay if they're all qualified or most of them we can just shift them over like is it do you think it's realistic for that to to happen there's no reason why not like I think it won't happen today like it's not going to happen today it's not going to happen this year but I do see a future where the US really takes immigration and talent scouting incredibly seriously to bring over the best and brightest to built here like I I think it's not unrealistic to unrealistic to 10 times the number of people coming in on the 01a visa to give you a statistic there's less than 5,000 stem individuals using the 01a Visa today like less than 5,000 and you have like a whole magnitude multiple magnitudes doing the other version exactly exactly and so I think you could see a future not too distant future where you 10 times the number of people applying for this Visa category and that is very strategic for the United States like you could imagine the economic growth that will be driven by those individuals it's really interesting when you just think generally like the the people that that are getting these visas that are coming in they have extraordinary abilities like they're top whatever percent of of humans like we probably want them in the country hopefully like contributing to society and making the world a better place right yeah I mean just some of the customers we've worked with recently and I'm allowed to sh because they've posted publicly on Twitter about their approvals so JC Bach is the founder of fuse energy they are accelerating energy abundance through nuclear fusion and they're building these small reactors they have relationships with the government uh they've hired top CIA offic former officials JC is 24 and he's raised millions of dollars in Venture Capital funding to fulfill this vision and he is the type of Innovator I think that's really leading one of the most critical fields in America today and he's just one example of an innovator coming to build an America the other individual that we worked with is called Gabriel Peterson he's this incredible programmer from Sweden 22-year-old Dropout and now working at Mid Journey which is one of the most prominent AI companies in Silicon Valley and you know I wish I could take a bet on his career right now like in best in his career because I think he's one of the most talented individuals I've been lucky to work with they're kind of dozens of other examples of people that we've worked with who are just really Pioneers in their field another example is a company called living carbon that's doing bioengineered trees oh yep heard of that one yeah and we've worked with them on multiple visas for top scientists who are basically bioengineering trees to do more carbon capture to help solve carbon removal which is one of the you know largest problems in tackling climate change today yeah we've got dozens more examples like AI engineer from repet madav is coming moving from Canada to transform kind of coding accessibility to more people and yeah I feel like I could talk about our customers all day because they are just very inspiring individuals so it sounds like some of them are founders some of them are employees or early hires at companies that are significantly impacting like making the world a better place solving pretty urgent problems contributing to the economy again it's like probably people we want living here right in the US I think we not only do we want them we want them to like move quicker and faster and be here because they are contributing to one of the most successful Industries America has which is the technology industry and I think the other side of it is that immigration is driving the US economy right now like immigrants who come over they also spend and so they are there's like this really incredible relationship where not only are they building but they're also spending the US has an aging population and we need immigrants to come in and fulfill critical jobs and so yeah my my work at Plymouth is really all about how do we get them to move faster and more productive so that we can drive economic growth okay so question on that then just generally this whole process of getting a Visa like it kind of sounds scary so if I'm sitting here I'm like I gotta I gotta do this but like you've thrown out all these acronyms you talked about like show I'm an extraordinary person takes a long time there's a cap uncap whatever like it just sounds a little daunting can you just kind of take us through like what do the kind of just the process look like like what all goes into it and then I mean I guess this is like an interesting place to kind of pitch Plymouth also but if you can kind of talk us through all this yeah totally so like the whole product experience is driven around fast and simple immigration and why we focus heavily on the OA Visa is that we can prepare an application within four weeks how long does it usually take compared to other attorneys four months so we're doing it significantly faster so taking a full month process that's been complicated you spend a lot of time going back and forth with attorneys we've built a tech enabled service which streamlines the petition production process that you can get a Visa delivered within four weeks and then uh if you opt for premium processing you get an answer within 15 business days so Allin your immigration experience could take less than two months and you could be in the United States working and you do it for me instead of me figuring this out by myself exactly you can think of Plymouth as your guide like our goal is to make it as straightforward as possible we're not exactly the same as like turboxs like I think it's like a false analogy but yeah that's kind of a little bit of a derogatory analogy almost I don't want to use it the same but it's like we make it as streamlined as possible we bake into your systems we pull all the information about you online and so one of our customers they compared it to like having a research report about you like they like has the FBI done a research report about me because the end product is like a 500 page document that we physically ship to USCIS yeah I saw that that's insane yeah yeah it's it's funny in the early days of building pmer I think a lot of Founders talk about shipping product I mean we're in the tech industry I stood by a printer and printed out this copy of someone's application and I carried it across the Streets of San Francisco and I was like terrified that one of the papers would would be like like lost you lose page like 315 out of the 400 I I was like so stressed and like I carried it shipped it the woman looked at me at FedEx and she was like what are you shipping I was like oh like something to the US immigration and now we have a whole system that does that but that was the first shipping of the product basically so you can't submit this electronically at all no so let's say get to the immigration office like someone just flips through the pages and reads it yeah that's that's insane and this this is I think Plymouth secret source is that we really focus on conciseness and precision to the criteria so we try and make it as straightforward no jargon like this is how this individual meets the criteria and we' created this very specific methodology in partnership with our VP of legal who's been in the field for 10 years she has I think more experience than like any other attorney working with Founders and technologists over the coures course of her career and essentially we've created this like playbook for getting technologists approved at a much higher rate I mean our approval rating is 99% wow what's the what's kind of the average like if I was just to go do this by myself working with an attorney yeah so national average is between 90 to 93% and so it is a very good odd if you're applying for it but I think typically attorneys will take a long time in getting these cases approved okay so really your value prop is like speed really yeah exactly correctness I guess accuracy speed speed and customer experience like you don't have time as a busy founder to spend hours on your immigration paperwork we're going to remove that problem and get you your approval as quickly as possible makes sense and you what what if I'm doing this without Plymouth I'm paying attorney and I'm paying like an application fee that decent amount how much do I usually pay it varies within the industry if you go for kind of like a smaller provider you're looking at paying like $9,000 if you're going for like a large Law Firm you could be paying somewhere between like 9,000 to 15,000 and then how do you guys do all the pricing at Plymouth yeah so we have pricing for working on like whether you want to do premium processing or not and then essentially you know if you are a small company like we have pricing for that provider and then if you're a larger company there is also pricing on that okay and then even when you apply they do this thing called request for evidence so like you might get a response and you have to give them even more information is that am I understanding that right yeah so there's three outcomes basically either you get your visa approved or for some reason like clerical error gets denied if the government wants wants to see more evidence so maybe they say like look you I know that you judged a hackathon but prove to be why that hackathon is like the best hackathon for AI engineers and so they want more evidence to substantiate your extraordinary ability doesn't sound that bad but just takes longer right exactly like there's slowdowns there's delays and if you are you know like a company that really cares about your talent you want this done very very quickly makes sense so a lot a bit different topic but why do you care so much about immigration this is a great question the the real reason is that I went through this problem and I spent two years of my life not seeing my family stuck inside the United States not being sure around whether my application was in the best hands I actually got rejected for my first Visa which one did you do I did the o01 and I got rejected wow so you in like the the 10% to 7% that gets rejected yeah wow do you know what happened my attorney didn't this is what I think like didn't do a good job at explaining my story like and at that point I decided to take matters into my own hands I think everyone has a CO hobby like mine was US immigration I've never heard that one before for a CO hobby yeah like I was just obsessed with figuring this out like I was like I'm not going to let someone control my ability to build an America because they don't understand my story like I'm going to write my own story so I spent six months writing my story my narrative understanding the criteria and that pain of going through that I felt so lonely and it was just like such a hard experience I was like no one should have to go through this like it felt like every like the system was against me and I actually think it's because I had bad immigration advice like that was I don't think it was the syst like us like I think it was actually like it wasn't clear immigration advice they didn't tell my story really effectively and going through that pain I was like I have to help people now like I have to go out and like help people who I think are like very competent in their lives and like talented like solve this problem and so I didn't actually think when I started to think about company building I would build a company in the space uh I actually was really passionate about carbon removal climate technology and so when I got my green card I I was like I'm going to take a year spend all my savings that I've earned in America and like build a company and I started building a climate company and I followed all the kind of VC advice like it's like big market like find a like really ambitious problem like you know investors are like really excited about this space like a go and like I actually went and lived a sawmill in Northern California to like understand my customers like I really like lived hit us Sawmill like that takes logs and like chops them up yeah yeah I went to go live at a sawmill in Northern California like there's a room in the mill that you like slept in or I I became friends with The Sawmill owners like it was like the second largest Lumber Company in California and and yeah I was like building this company and in the back of my head I was like just casually talking to people about immigration I'd written this essay that lots of people found very helpful around my own immigration experience and yeah I just every conversation I had like I had conversations about climate but I was also like hey do you know there's this problem about immigration yeah I was like this side hustle that just kept persisting yeah it like just kept on coming back and six month into building the climate company I'd raise a preed round I'd written quite a big essay on this topic I'm like an essay writer and I had a product for the climate tech company but every day I woke up I was just like I can't like I don't think I can build this business like I don't think I'm the best person to build this company because ultimately it was a manufacturing company that I was building and what were you trying to do I was trying to create a better version of biochar like build a better Pizer to create biochar which is this form of carbon removal and yeah you basically take Woody biomass and you put it within a paralyzer and you convert it into biochar which ultimately you store in the ground which removes carbon from the atmosphere what is biochar should I know what that is I've never heard that word before yeah you could think about it as like a form of charcoal like it's basically like black material that you store in the ground and it takes carbon from the atmosphere interesting okay so so you you like spent all this time working on it then you're like I can't do this I'm not the right person to build this kind of company yeah I just I looked at myself I think for me at the very least company building is you know the amount of time dedication and like commitment to building something like I want to build something that is an institution and I think that I just like looked at myself in the mirror every day and I was like I can't build this um and so I gave all the VC funding back yeah how do you how do you do that by the way I because not people don't talk about that very often but how do you like raise VC funding and then like give it back to them can you just talk through that for a minute yeah I I had amazing investors like I was so lucky and I just had honest conversations I was like look I really care about you know the commitment that I've made to you to see this through and I don't believe that I can return your Capital which was the commitment I set out to to do that was like the Endeavor I set like I I felt like very obliged I thought of it as like a serious job and so I had honest conversations with my investors and I said like look I want to give you all this money back because I don't think this is the best allocation of your capital and so just wired it back and back to spending my savings like couldn't I was like back to being unemployed it was not very amous honestly and I felt like a massive failure like I remember feeling like what am I doing like I've spent like time is your most pre precious resource and I don't have a company to show for it I have this like idea that I'm obsessed with but I don't think anyone's going to give me any money for this idea because VCS didn't really like immigration at that time and so yeah at that point it was really actually a like a community of people who stepped in and supported me through that like that period yeah what happened so there's this community in San Francisco called interact run by Marin Nelson and it's a really special group of technologists who join not necessarily because they are trying to build companies but because they want to impact the technology industry with ideas and projects that might not necessarily become Venture back some do like some amazing companies like JC's part of the community casa have from Lum ey but the real focus of the community is like what problem do you want to solve and Marin was running this fellowship with Devon zugal for mid-career technologists to go and spend a summer in New York and during that summer they were like you know you can work on any problem you want it felt like being at school again it was like being at University again you were like oh my gosh like no one tells me that like I'm a mid-career professional and I can do whatever I want yeah you're like like you said you're kind of a failure if you don't know what you want to do you have this clear Direction yeah yeah exactly you have to tell this Narrative of like I'm super like super clear yeah I'm crushing it and everything is up into the right and it's rocket ships all the time yeah and I was like I do not have a job I don't know if this Project's going to work out and I'm going to run out of my savings in six months time like I'll yeah so anyway like I started like working on this problem I was like okay I want to solve US immigration it's crazy not sure what shape it will take but let me see if I can get like the outline of how I would build a product around this and I met Alex STA and Caleb Watney from The Institute for progress and they initially reached out to talk about climate work and we spent the whole lunch together talking about immigration and they said to me like look go go work on this like this is what you care about and yeah we basically like after that lunch I wrote up a one pager around around what I thought Plymouth could be and they said like hey you could probably raise some Phil philanthropic grants for this and that's what I did and started building Plymouth amazing so then I think you told me you were a paralal for a couple months to just learn how this all works that's what happened next right yeah so basically like the first version of this is like I would just go and tell people my own immigration journey and I would say like hey you can do it too and so one of the things I did for my Visa application is I ended up writing an essay which was published in TechCrunch and I also like looked at different hackathons that I could judge and so I would go out and like help people like we'd have like 20 minute chats where I'd say like look you know this is what is possible and like this is how I prepared the application and that became really really popular like I think I must have had over 150 calls within like 3 months of just like talking to people constantly it's a packed calendar it was like back to back I would like post on slack channels I would Post online I'd be like hey just have a chat and during that time basically we like built a lot of customer relationships and they said to me like hey can you actually just do the petition and I was like I'm not an immigration attorney like I cannot write your petition but then I met like an amazing immigration attorney who's plymouth's VP of legal today day and we we basically like parted up where I would you know go backwards and forwards on emails with people like to collect their information and she would create like a much more like streamlined version of it to actually prepare the application and together we were able to move through cases much faster so I basically became a legal assistant and yeah it was like funny I I remember like thinking like a year and a half ago I used to be in VC I think VC is like quite a high status thing people like I think it's like outsized high status yeah people think people think a lot higher of it than it actually is but yeah exactly exactly and it's like like scen is like kind of like cool maybe not cool but like it's like sexy like if someone's like what do you do I'm a venture capitalist right like oh that is that's badass exactly like really sexy and it's like okay I've gone from being a VC to a legal assistant and I was like okay like this is like like the lowest or the biggest change you could possibly have exactly but I knew I was solving a problem like I could really feel it I was like wow like you know and then we got this approval for this guy called Alexi goozy who spends a lot of time on Twitter like writing about metascience sometimes Ai and he posted he was like Hey like I just got my approval through this like method and it was at that moment I knew it was pretty special doing something very quickly and enabling more people to understand that they were eligible and I think at this point you've kind of built like a pretty big community just in terms of I think it's like three digits of customers that you've helped at this point can you just kind of talk about how it's all evolved over time yeah it's been kind of unbelievable the demand for what we've been building is so from that initial approval we now had over 115 cases approved and I didn't realize it when I started building plumouth you know I I started I was like okay I just want to solve this problem and now with over 100 individuals who've gone through this process we've been doing more community events and so we do dinners we've done fireside chats with Patrick CIS amjad mad you know icons in the tech industry who are also immigrants and our community comes to these events come comes to these private dinners conversations and they're all sharing advice and insights and kind of helping each other out and yeah this this community I think is very very special in nature I've been in a lot of tech communities during my Venture career and I think again like people coming here they're big Risk Takers they're very ambitious they're going through similar problems like how do I figure out my taxes and they all want to kind of give back to each other and so we're trying to nurture that Community as much as possible I think longterm Plymouth wants to be the onramp to the American dream so you come here we support with immigration but we can also help with Community other services that can really help you build your life here and ultimately those individuals I hope give back to the ecosystem of Builders who arrive and ultimately kind of create a generation of people who are contributing growing and innovating in America yeah sounds sounds awesome so you mentioned getting some grant funding how how exactly does that work if somebody's never gotten a grant before yeah I didn't know anything about the grant funding process so you're in San Francisco and you just think like VC is like the default way to exactly yeah raise Capital right but I'd done that and I had given that money back so I was like okay what what's next what are my other options yeah like how do I race this I like couldn't afford to do it like long term without having a salary and I was really fortunate Alec and from ifp they had raised capital from philanthropist and one of their core focuses was immigration and so they were able to back this project they said like you know look this is a focus area for us Eric Schmidt's philanthropic Foundation Schmid Futures which is now now Renaissance Collective so it's like slightly different now but they also backed us because stem talent in particular is a real Focus for arir I think because you know he's been a Titan of the technology industry for decades and he knows how important Talent is Tyler Cowan's emergent Ventures I think Tyler Cowen is the most unbelievable backer of early stage people that I have ever seen like he just believes in people he supports them he gives them Capital which is a huge unlock and he gave some money to support plmouth in the early days and he also just has an amazing network of you know brilliant immigrants from like India or the UK or Europe more generally who were all working on like incredible projects um and so he gave he invested in Plymouth and finally the talent Mobility fund so this is a fund that was set up by Amy nice who is like the person from the Biden Administration who wrote the clarifications for the 01a visa for stem individuals to apply for it yeah so basically in 2022 the Administration came out and said like we want more stem individuals to apply for the 01a Visa here's how you can do it and Amy nice was the person who wrote those clarifications and so she invested in Plymouth because she really believes in increasing the number of talented stem individuals to apply for the1a that's awesome so so with a grant for somebody who doesn't know like is a grant like they invest it they own part of the entity do you have to like pay the money back like how how does a grant work somebody doesn't know like because they're really familiar with the VC side like how does it work on the grand side yeah so it's nilus of capital so there's no equity exchange it's purely like a grant like it's just like you do get taxed on it though so that is a surprise that I didn't know oh jeez okay what happened yeah I was just like taxes were really tough this year cuz I was like oh gosh like okay we have to pay taxes on the ground yeah so it's like a little bit shortened Runway but yeah it was it was fine it was just I didn't know that from gr funding and maybe other gr funders like know that but I didn't know that I did not know that either so I will keep it in mind if I ever get a grant from someone I say maybe you start a project where you need some grant funding yeah for the podcast or maybe maybe instead of raising money from investors I'll just get grants that way I don't have to pay any of it back yeah well it's funny Tyler has backed like a ton of podcast like dawes's podcast was backed by Tyler Cowen and I think that's become like a really important podcast in Silicon Valley like breaking down what's happening in AI so I just feel like Tyler Cowen like he doesn't get enough praise even though he he does get praise but I think like he should get more praised really yeah that's fair I there are definitely people who are like very underappreciated if that's a fair way to put it like people know about them but it's like dude this guy's like the should be much more popular than he is it's like the person yeah yeah well so you mentioned something I thought was really interesting that Talent was kind of this bottleneck to Tech development can you kind of expand on that because that's a pretty fascinating concept Talent is a resource that is not like the most talented individuals a resource that are not easily replicable like you can't actually find the best Minds easily and I think that finding especially for America's key Industries finding the best and brightest and bringing them to America is absolutely Mission critical I think like at least in the AI industry right now what I see speaking with our customers is that the biggest bottleneck for them to move faster to get to a future which ensures America is the leader in AI is finding the right talent and so I think about it as even more than important than compute like having the right people to to innovate and so yeah I think you know I spend my days talking to some of the best AI companies in silic and Valley like trying to help them understand like how do they bring their best people over faster and how do they find even more of those incredible individuals to build in America yeah you said you you think AI will actually benefit the best Engineers the most can you expand on that my mental model of this is that AI is a huge accelerant of human productivity and if you are incredibly skilled at utilizing tools to augment your own intelligence AI is this unbelievable technology to enable you to become faster better quicker at getting to your insights and so from what I'm seeing is that the best Engineers are utilizing it and they're becoming even better exactly like they're like getting through like their manual tasks like so much faster like they're getting their Co like they can be much more specific about the prompts that they're generating because they have the right ability to or they have the ability to craft prompts that really get them to the answers quickly uh so that's what I'm seeing right now I'm not an AI engineer but I get to work with a lot of really incredible ones and so that's what I'm yeah that's what I've seen so talking about getting more Talent into Silicon Valley working on Tech working on AI you have a pretty cool story about how you kind of got into Silicon Valley can you hit on that and then maybe give us like a maybe like a crash course on you're a complete Outsider how do you get in yeah so I was totally obsessed with the idea of coming to San Francisco and building here I'd met a bunch of technologists when I was a student and these technologists were Pioneers in their fields like Jack dorsy Eric Schmid Brian chesky and I was like I have to get to San Francisco because that's where the builders are so I was actually living in Berlin for two years before I moved to San Francisco and I took a plane like I took a flight I was actually going to see some friends in Utah and what I did is I cold emailed a ton of different people so I cold emailed VCS Founders people working at tech companies I also asked all my friends I was like does anyone know anyone in San Francisco like can you connect me with people that I can meet and just have coffee with and ask them you know how do I get a job here and it was actually through one of my friends who had connected me to a partner at Bloomberg beta which was the VC fund I ended up joining he did the introduction I was in s and I S and I had like I think like five back-to-back meetings and I was running late for this meeting and I had to like run across town because I couldn't get an Uber because you were just trying to cram as much as you could in right yeah exactly I was just like trying as hard as possible and yeah I was running late for this meeting which ended up being the meeting where I got a job offer um and basically I think my strategy was reach out to many people like contact them on Twitter LinkedIn you know maybe there are some people in your network that you can ask for intros and conversations with and be genuinely interested like I was really interested in being the in the technology industry and so I was asking a lot for advice around how do I break in which ultimately led to a job offer so what do you think really stuck out to people like the Lisa back a couple years ago why do you think they hired you like was there anything specific that maybe other people could learn from yeah I mean I think I at the time like a lot of my friends in in England were going into Consulting banking law and I decided to go into the technology industry and working at entrepreneur first and it was kind of an unusual career path like lots of people in my cohort of very talented people didn't see it as a viable career option and so I think having done the work for two years in Europe building up entrepreneurial ecosystems spending time with entrepreneurs like it was genuine that my interest in working with this group of people was was clear my job at EF was actually just to run around Germany and recruit top engineers and scientists and convince them to build companies because it wasn't culturally common for for people to consider startups as a natural career path so in San Francisco it's like very common for people to start companies in Europe it's less so and so I was talking to PhD students with like backgrounds in biochemistry and nuclear physics and like all these things and convincing them to start companies and so I think that showed a level of hustle and think grit which I I think resonated with people and you were kind of not just showing up in San Francisco with no relevant experience you were kind of doing some similar things just in in Europe like in Berlin and and the UK exactly like there was a clear Arc from what I was doing in Europe to what I want to do in America and I think you can do that you know maybe you have a specific interest you can start working on it wherever you are and then come to San Francisco and continue building there I think showing authentic interest in something does resonate with people who over all so interested in it so it's kind of have some kind of relevant experience or track record that is clearly related to what you're trying to do and then just be super passionate about it work really hard I mean it sounds like there's not a ton of shortcuts you you mentioned cold emailing and reaching other people how did you do that yeah I just I found people's emails online it was kind of like a Shameless strategy like I would just look people's emails up online um did just Google like turn or no back email or is it that easy you can find people's emails in like the weirdest places like I remember finding an email for a CEO of a very prominent company he said it in a talk like at the end of his I think like lecture he said said like hey here's my email if you want to reach out and I was like okay I'll I'll use that nice and then like just writing a really concise email so like an introduction about you why you're reaching out why you want to talk to them and like some evidence of like what you've been working on and if you can get those key points over in an email you you start a conversation already around like this is why I want your time that was my strategy I actually work with a lot of developers who are relatively in their career and one thing that I've seen actually from someone that I worked with is he started posting demos online on things that he he's built the other thing that he did was he found bugs on their website or in their product and he would say like here's how I'd fix your bug and I thought that was really clever like you know actually solving an immediate problem for the company and so I think like it depends on what your skill set is like my skill set a lot of it is writing and you know sharing stories whereas if you are an engineering background maybe you actually do work that more resonates with people in your field yeah I've heard some people say like if you're if you're emailing a Founder you almost like build a product or like like figure out a problem for them and like solve the problem when you reach out like found a bug or you know I heard you're launching this new product in the future like I built this and here's a demo of it or it's like something like that it's kind of hard to just ignore right like you solved a problem that they had exactly it just shows that you really care you've gone out of your way you've done something creative and shows you about some hustle and so I think it's actually just like can you show not tell someone why they should be speaking to you so you you have this interesting framework around hiring you just kind of think about as like hopes and fears can you expand on that a little bit I like to think keep things like super simple like maybe I'm just like not able to handle like super sophisticated Frameworks but yeah with hiring I really want to get to the Crocs of what is the conversation we're having around your hope for the future like you're taking a job right so you have to think through you know what is the best case scenario here like what does this help you fulfill you know what are your personal like goals here like is it money is it status is it ideas is it people like is it the product like there's lots of different things but like what is your biggest hope for the future and how can we help you build that like fulfill that at the company and then fears is like you know like what's your biggest fear like does it like is it that you this like crashes and burns like is it that you don't have enough autonomy him is it that you won't be entertained or won't be fun or something yeah exactly exactly and I think that like everyone has them like it's just like human to like have like a hope and a fear like it's a very easy language that you can talk to someone and I try and be as transparent as possible I'm like what is your hope and what is your fear here and I found that like leads to much deeper conversations like yes like money and equity and all these things about like hiring is important but actually like what do you really care about and yeah especially with an early stage company like the people that you end up hiring initially like shape the like the course of the organization and so I really want to get to know that person on an individual level and if this you know is their home I think it's like a good a good perspective to have I feel like people are too there's a lot of people like skills-based it's a lot of these like hard interview questions or insane case study take themes especially recently with the recent hiring market like everyone I hear is like I you know I do these like I do this like full projects and I don't even hear back because that the Market's so intense right now yeah and I I think it's different obviously like if you're going for like a larger company like at the early stage one of the the best things that we've done is like contract to hire like you know spend 3 months with someone get to know them super well and that means that we can access like way better Talent than a company at our stage and that has actually been really successful for like three of our key hires I just like spending a lot of time yeah and then they have all actually ended up joining because they've really enjoyed the mission and the company and our growth yeah I mean it's an it's an awesome Mission I think is really interesting so you have this other kind of framework write it down make it happen what does that mean I think I may maybe have an idea but can you expand on that yeah I actually took this from one of our parts called Tom khil he was the chief Innovation officer at Schmid Futures and now he has started his own philanthropic organization called Renaissance Collective and basically like if it's in your head it's not necessarily going to get done and so every plan needs to be written down and actioned and in doing that you know you can have kind of an objective document that says like has it happened yes or no and so pulling ideas out of your head making them into plans giving them a timeline ensuring that those timelines are hit is has just been transformative like when I'm thinking about an idea I'm like just write it down and like try it and if it doesn't work that's fine but at least you've done it so it's kind of like a to-do list but maybe a little bit more in depth I'm a huge fan of to-do list like I've got every day I've got a to-do list hey I've got one I won't open it but I got I've got my to-do list right there so amazing and then you do these things like these calendar audits I've heard of people doing those before like just like can you explain that and then just like practically walk us through how you do that and and what the benefits are yeah like I think I must have I think it was elad Gill's high growth hanburg where I got this idea from and I think yeah your most pre precious resource is your time and one week I just felt super energy drained I was like oh I'm so tired like what did I do this week and as a best practice like I would sit down actually did it on a Saturday morning um I try and do it on Fridays now because I do think it's important to do it like in the flow the week and I would just look back on how I broke down my time like was it in a meeting was it in deep work was it like outbound conversations was it with the team like like where was I spending my time and in doing that like basically I could figure out like do I have to be doing this could I automate this do I need someone else on the team like an additional resource to take this off my plate and it's just yeah I think way more people should do a calendar audit is if you're not identifying where you could save time each week that means you're doing the same thing again and you're not moving the business forward and so I think it's like a great practice so you basically go through look at where you're spending your time figuring out if you're getting energy if you're losing energy figuring out ways to just optimize how you're spending your time and make changes hopefully going forward yeah like you know is does this have to be me does this have to be be done like was this a useful meeting like should I say no like when you know an opportunistic conversation happens what am I not doing more of and I also share this with a few people on my team as well because I think it's important that they have visibility and where you're spending time to decide whether that actually is like the most important thing for the business to move forward I've definitely gone through some similar exercises and it it was it basically just came down to just eliminating wor lless meetings if that makes sense like I'm probably just so much more strict on you know everyone gets these emails of like hey pick your brain or what as is a VC like you could easily fill up your day with a lot of stuff I think I just kind of had this realization there's probably like two years ago where it was it was like a similar where it's like I just feel like I'm wasting so much time on stuff that's just not really that important and I think it was it just huge like it was probably hard at first to kind of like eliminate so many things and then and then like learning to say no probably more often than most people would I don't know what have you what have you learned just in terms of like how to say no like limiting unproductive time on your calendar yeah like I just feel like so yeah like lots of people asking for advice and sometimes I'm like I don't think I'm the best person to give this advice like there's so many great blog posts like I sometimes I just like share blog posts from other people I'm like this is like a great resource my former partner at Bloomberg beta wrote this amazing blog post on like how to write introduction emails and I share that blog post all the time I'm like this is a great resource like this is how you should do it and I think saying no is like saying you know what are you focused on like my priority is like I'm focusing on customers this quarter or am I focusing on like I'm always focusing on customers but like product or customers or podcast interviews podcast interviews like celebrating Plymouth like advocating more and yet also like content like this is great because now if someone asks me like you know how do you spend your day I'm going to be like this is how I spend my day listen to this podcast episode yeah no well I think I do get a lot of people asking me like you know how do you find a problem you really care about like because lots of people are very entrepreneurial but might not have a problem that they want to solve and I don't know what you can apply for my own Journey but I tried to build a company that I thought was like the right VC fair and I decided actually it wasn't the right fit for me and I decided to build this company because I really care about the problem and I think you don't have to build a company to solve a problem like you can solve it in many different ways and so just find the problem you want to solve and yeah I don't like I don't want to give general advice because everyone's different but that's my big takeaway from my own Journey yeah I'm trying to think of how to how to summarize or synthesize that it's like it's maybe less think about like what other people tell you you should be working on necessarily or trying to fit it into a box that you know me or fit your your peg your square peg through a round hole or something and it's more of just like what's something you actually get energy from and actually enjoy thinking like tying it back to earlier you just kept coming back this immigration thing that like no one else was really talking about like I've not met very many people that are as passionate about immigration it's super unsexy yeah this just like uncool unsexy but I just wanted to solve it yeah well you also had this other hot take that I heard you one so I thought was really interesting you think anyone or everyone can be an entrepreneur you kind of just alluded to a little bit right there I feel like a lot of people would actually disagree with that can you just expand on that a little bit Yeah well I don't want to like start some Twitter Wars hey that'll be that's good for the podcast when we got everybody referencing your hot take that they disagree with yeah um let's try to start some beef here I'm just kidding oh gosh I I guess like I I believe there are so many problems to solve in the world like and you people see problems every single day and Entrepreneurship is not a one-size fits all startup like lens of looking at things you could apply the principles to your day-to-day and so you could do social entrepreneurship you can do policy entrepreneurship you can solve a problem in your local community and or you could like solve a problem like by writing a Blog about a top topic that you really care about like giving people more education these are just like examples of you can solve problems in so many shapes and forms and VC and startups are just one way of solving a problem and so my yeah my belief is like everyone has entrepreneurial skills and can build something they care about but it might not be the shape that right now people see as like the most obvious shape for building a company yeah that's fair we like I mean I just see it to just with like people close to me family members like you they might be really really good at video games and you think oh this person's not motivated or driven but then there's like job that's like taking the exact same function that they're maybe really good at in the video games and then suddenly they're like an amazing quality like QA engineer because they're like so good at like testing things or they're so good at like driving like my brother has a job where he just drives all day and he loves it and it's like who would have thought but it's like everyone has something that they're really good at so yeah and like taking that passion to you know maybe create content around it maybe create guides like I don't know like helping others discover like what you found like you didn't know that that was a real career path like you can do something like take that to the next level to inspire people to solve a problem that you really care about so that's that's kind of how I think about taking your entrepreneurship to the like next level yeah well on that point it's like I don't think anyone like went through High School saying like oh what are the possible career paths like a podcaster a VC or like helping people immigrate to the US like none of those are things that we learn about growing up but yet here we are exactly yeah no one told me about VC no one told me about immigration yeah and now I think we both get to do what we love and yeah and it solves problems for people yeah and you had this really interesting com that you had to that I I I've never really thought of this before it's kind of like it's almost like countered to how I think about it but it's an interesting way of thinking you basically say you do work only from your laptop you avoid work on your phone can you like well how did you come about that and how how and why does it work so I try to I can't say that I'm like you know I can like I'm perfect cuz like I do sometimes send messages on my phone I just think I like what I've observed myself is like I'm so much more productive on my laptop like I can move way faster and so and I also think like the phone can be extremely distracting for like personal messages or you know notifications from like platforms that you know don't have anything to do with like what I'm in like when I'm thinking about work um and so I think a lot about productivity and like being actually productive as opposed to being like the illusion of being productive I think especially when your time is so like doing so many things and so yeah I've just found that if I can like really zoom in on things on my laptop I get through work way faster so that's that's how I think about it so when I'm like thinking about just like sending messages on my phone I try and come back to my laptop because I am just way faster do you go on airplane mode during the day or do you like flip your phone over so you can't see the screen or are you not that extreme sometimes I do for serious deep work go on airplane mode but I do I do have calls to work like I try to do kind of you know if there's a real problem like I'll just have a call and so sometimes I do have to take it off airplane mode Fair okay so I I have one last question for you about the immigration system obviously we've talked about it a bunch you know a bunch about how it works if you could pick one thing to change or like a fix like if you were given like a soap box to like give some policy changes What would change just kind of fix US immigration as a whole yeah so I think there's like some tactical things where a lot of Visa categories are not dual intent so the 01a is not a dual intent Visa but you can apply for a green card but what this causes is that when you apply for a green card you have to stay in the country whilst you're waiting and so that means that like people can stay in the country for like a year sometimes a bit longer and so I would just make these V Visa categories dual in 10 like it's a super low lift thing and would enable people who have the 01a classification of extraordinary ability the ability to travel whilst they're waiting for their green card and that I think would unlock huge amounts of crossb trade because of how special these individuals are I think making it much easier for graduates from US schools to apply for green cards you know if you've been a graduate from a US University you should have a FastTrack path to a green card like that like feels like an obvious thing to do and yet that's still not the case like you have people graduating from phds from Stanford University who I don't have a fast track to a green card and like have to think like figure out that path which is I think pretty crazy for me and then yeah I think like electronic filing like it would make everyone's Liv so much faster just like you could move much quicker if you could just file electronic s that so blows my mind that it's 2024 and we're sending 500 page literal pages of of applications that's nuts it's like with taxes like it's like why do we spend all this time doing our taxes like the government already knows what we owe right it's just like it's it's like a tax on people who can't afford to do all the optimization I guess totally different topic no but I think that that's know one of the real like real reasons for building Plymouth is like Gatekeepers for information like immigration that was like Gatekeepers on this information and our goal is to make it as accessible as possible so people can navigate this journey much faster much easier and come build an America yeah so what's the best way to learn more about this yeah so please reach out to this if you're a talented immigrant Builder you want to come build in America you're working in the technology industry please reach out to us we want to help you you can contact us at ww. plimouth street.com at Plymouth Street on Twitter um my handle is Lisa Wen so find Us online um and we'll get back to you as soon as we can on your application amazing well this is a super cool conversation thank you so much for taking the time and hopefully people learned a lot great Ching thanks so much for having me thank you for listening to the peel if you want to support the show share this episode with a friend and check out our wonderful sponsor in the show notes if you don't want to miss future episodes subscribe to my newsletter in the show notes and you'll get new ones plus the transcripts in your inbox every week thanks again for listening see you next [Music] time hey everyone Eric here at turpentine we're building the First Media outlet for tech people by tech people we're the network behind the show you're listening to right now we have a slate of hit shows across a range of topics in industries from our Ai and investing cluster of podc pods to shows that drive the conversation in Tech with the most interesting thinkers Founders investors and influencers like econ 102 with Noah Smith we're launching new shows every week and we're looking for industry leading sponsors if you think that might be you and your company email me at er turpentine doco that's e i k turpentine doco and let's partner together [Music]