

 A religion to get foreign entrepreneurs into Silicon Valley? - sprovoost
http://sprovoost.nl/2011/09/03/an-entrepreneurial-religion/

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iamelgringo
Startups are a religion. Founders are zealots.

Let me explain. In 1967, my parents received a letter from a missionary who
taught at a school in rural Honduras. She asked them to help her run the
school.

9 months later, my parents packed up all their worldly belongings into a Chevy
pickup truck, and drove south 5,000 miles. Their 3 children under 5 rode along
side my parents in the front seat.

My parents worked for 20 years in Central America, running schools, starting
at least 10 churches, rehabbing 3 youth camps, doing refugee work ( Nicaraguan
revolution happened then ), started a seminary, did literacy work, etc...

Most of their time was spent building community, getting people together to
talk about shared values and beliefs, and helping people work together to
build organizations that could help others.

I've spent most of my life hanging around missionaries. I actually dropped out
of Bible school 20 years ago. My original plan was to be a missionary in the
middle of a jungle somewhere. (True story). Last thing in the world I wanted
to do was to stay in the US and start a business. Oops. Point is. I know
missionaries.

Five years ago, my wife and I moved to Silicon Valley with all our wordly
possessions in a moving van. And, we started work on our startup. Hackers &
Founders is all about building community, helping other people connect and
talk about shared values (building startups, and hacking cool stuff together),
and enabling them to build startups that can help themselves, and their
customers.

We're going to be building educational resources: Hackers & Founders
University, a physical coworking space (at some point), small groups ( Hackers
& Founders @ Lunch ), large events with a speaker (preacher?), and general
community building at our networking events.

Missionaries and founders are zealots. They generally take huge risks for the
sake of their quixotic beliefs and ideals. They are passionate and
evangelistic about promoting what they believe in. They build communities of
customers, and try their best to serve them.

Misionaries == Founders && Startups == a religion.

Laura (my wife and H&F cofounder) and I often joke around that we're building
the Church of the Startup with Hackers & Founders.

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patio11
_Could there be some special religion related visa?_

The Mormons generally use Religious Worker (R) visas in the United States (and
often similar ones internationally).

Please do not actually attempt to convince a consular officer that you are the
representative of an entrepreneurial religion. The time it takes to reject
your application -- which is as-night-follows-day _inevitable_ \-- is time
that the officer could have been using to examine and approve someone who has
a legitimate case for a visa.

~~~
mkramlich
I find it amusing/insane that a government gets to decide what is and is not
an allowed religion.

Q: Do you worship someone?

A: Yes.

Q: Good! Does he live in the clouds or in some Great Beyond?

A: No he lives in Palo Alto.

Q: Sorry, that's not allowed. We reject your religion on the ground of not
being spooky/irrational/superstitious/ambiguous enough. Next please!

A: I believe in faeries!

Q: Too late. Plus that's not a serious religion. Faeries aren't real. Don't be
silly.

~~~
michael_dorfman
_I find it amusing/insane that a government gets to decide what is and is not
an allowed religion._

The government gets to define _everything_ for government purposes. I'm not
sure why this should surprise you.

------
Hyena
On a more realistic note, I've often thought that combining hacker/maker
spaces, good digital libraries and some communal living would make an
excellent, low-cost fellowship for people looking to experiment for a couple
of years. Related as I characterize the arrangement as monastic.

~~~
mentat
I have been thinking similarly as have some friends. I think the time for this
concept will be very soon.

~~~
sswezey
A modern age guild

------
VladRussian
How did the organizations which have amassed unimaginable wealth through not
being taxed manage to get preferential treatment in the immigration law and
its implementing system? Tough question...

Btw, remember the religious worker visa being officially excluded from GC
petition Premium Processing (15 days fast track) implemented for various
employment based categories in the 2007 for the exact reason of being the
category with the highest fraud found by the official investigation? One can
imagine how bad the situation have been for the government to start officially
"discriminate" against religion :)

<http://www.murthy.com/news/n_prorev.html>

Why it isn't surprising that self-righteous people who think that they are
owners of highest and the only truth [ and thus entitled to not pay their fair
share ] are also the most fraud perpetrating?

------
Alex3917
I've actually been joking about wanting to start the first YC-funded religion
for a while. I think there are a lot of good idioms and paradigms from
religion that one can use to tackle a variety of secular problems. I'm
particularly inspired by the open source religion movement that's currently
gaining momentum. That said, I'm not convinced that religion is the best
approach for the particularly problem that you're trying to solve here. And
even if it is, I think you're making the mistake of assuming that all
religions have to basically look or feel like Christianity.

In any case, silicon valley already has its own set of highly evolved
spiritual beliefs. And no matter how much research you did I think it would be
very difficult to impose some sort of external religion on top of that without
changing the sorts of relationships that people have with each other, which
I'd be hesitant to mess with too much since that is sort of the secret sauce
of the place.

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danbmil99
Of interest: for legal and tax purposes, some Humanist groups declare
themselves religions, and this has been upheld in various court proceedings.

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deerpig
Did I read this article wrong? Why would American Mormons need to go through
American immigration to work in another country?

I live in Northeast Thailand, and there is a hive of Mormons not too far from
here who always travel on bicycle in pairs, and always wearing black trousers,
white shirts and little black name tags. Local people just think they are
crazy and ignore them. I have know idea how they work out visas out here. But
I do know they have a lot of under the table political clout in many countries
mostly because of money paid over many decades. When I lived in Hong Kong, I
remember someone telling me that in 50 years they had only converted a handful
of people.

~~~
sprovoost
American Mormoms in Thailand deal with Thai immigration, foreign Mormoms in
the US deal with US immigration. In Utah you can get a tour in dozens of
languages, so there's a lot of people in that second category. Of course
there's also American Mormoms going from state A to B; they don't need to deal
with immigration at all.

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Mz
My view of this is that it is intended as humor and is kind of tossing out the
idea of "surely, there must be some sort of hack available for the visa
problem". I was hoping it would inspire serious discussion of that piece of it
rather than having people focus on the part of it that looks to me like it is
tongue-in-cheek. (I get that kind of reaction a lot myself, which is sometimes
frustrating, so it's possible I am projecting rather than being insightful.)
Serious discussion of immigration options would be an interesting discussion
to me. Busting people on the idea of "you can't be really serious about this"
is pretty meh.

Peace.

~~~
sgentle
This isn't really going to move the tongue farther from the cheek, but here
goes:

Why not a mail-order spouse programme for founders? Surely there must be a lot
of Americans, especially with the financial crisis, who would be willing to
take a bet on a founder's future income in exchange for a green card. You
could make proposal pitch decks with Lessons Learned from previous marriages.

And if it doesn't work out there's always Series B.

~~~
sprovoost
Unfortunetaly a.f.a.i.k. you need to be in a relationship for two years in
order to apply for a greencard, but I love the idea of a russianbrides.com for
entrepeneurs :-)

------
jaekwon
who's John Galt?

------
bugsy
I don't understand why people in the Netherlands are so gung ho about
emigrating to the US. All I hear from europeans is how the US is a
warmongering nation that has health care only for the rich. I think that's
largely true, but then why is there such a big rush to come here to work.
Could it be that The Netherlands is not the paradise that it is commonly
promoted as?

I'd also like to see a list of nations that Americans with some sort of
programming background can emigrate to with no hassle. Nothing special, just
the sort of ease of moving in that they expect the US to provide to their
people.

~~~
VladRussian
>I'd also like to see a list of nations that Americans with some sort of
programming background can emigrate to with no hassle.

Have University friends who immigrated to Sweden, Great Britain, Netherlands,
Germany, Canada, mathematics or programming, and their immigration hassles
were less/faster or comparable to mine (for example no double labor
certification like for H1 and GC in the US, and some of them even did 2
immigrations one after another while i was doing one). On the other side
nobody of them has made such money like some of my friends here in the US :)

