
Study: Immigrants Founded 51% of U.S. Billion-Dollar Startups - Osiris30
http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2016/03/17/study-immigrants-founded-51-of-u-s-billion-dollar-startups/
======
dalke
A year ago the statement "Most high tech companies are founded by founded by
First/2nd gen immigrants" was going around the various tech circles. In the
thread at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9085970](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9085970)
I dug into the numbers and found that that is what we would expect from
population statistics. That is, immigrants and non-immigrants are equally
likely to start high tech companies.

This new analysis - and yes, I read the report - does not attempt to assess if
the numbers are more or less than expected. If a company has 10 founders and
only one is an immigrant then that counts as one of the companies founded by
an immigrant.

Let's say that all 87 companies had 10 founders (which is obviously false, but
I'm making a point about the limitation in the analysis), and of the 44
companies with an immigrant founder, all of them had only 1 immigrant founder.
Then of the 870 founders, only 44 are immigrants, or 5%.

Immigrants make up about 13% of the US population. If only 5% of the founders
are immigrants then that means immigrants are significantly less likely to
start $1B valued companies than non-immigrants.

I'm going to go one step further. The report DID NOT include the overall
number of founders, which makes it impossible to determine the significance of
the findings. By classifying a company with a single immigrant founder as
being founded by an immigrant, it almost certainly overemphasizes the impact
of immigrant founders. I believe this was done deliberately, in order to
influence matters regarding the H1B visa. I do not believe this to be an
honest analysis.

FWIW, the author, Stuart Anderson, was former policy director of the Alexis de
Tocqueville Institution, former director at the Cato Institute
([http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=National_Foundati...](http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=National_Foundation_for_American_Policy)
). Both are "part of the stable of conservative think tanks"
[http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Alexis_de_Tocqueville_I...](http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Alexis_de_Tocqueville_Institution)
.

~~~
dalke
Further analysis of 65 companies on the list of 87 (it was too boring to
finish everything) finds 161 founders, for an estimated founder population of
about 215.5.

You'll notice that the report doesn't come out and give the number of
immigrant founders. Summing up table 3 gives 61, and 61/215.5 => 28% .

This is indeed higher than the 13% of the US population who are immigrants,
though not as eye-catching of a number as 51%.

Part of the argument for immigrant co-founders is the increased diversity. For
example, "Michelle believes the diverse backgrounds of CloudFlare’s founders
has contributed to the company’s success." If that is an important criteria,
then you should note that some of the companies _only_ have immigrant
founders, which by that logic should count against them.

I'm not sure how to judge a U.S. company where one of the founders lives
overseas. For example, Oded Comay of ForeScout appears to live in Israel. I
don't know which of the founders are non-American and also non-immigrants.

Unlike the report, I'll give my list of companies (from the same WSJ source,
though I have one more company than the report does) and my attempt at finding
the number of founders for each company. I assert that not giving that data
makes it harder to understand, much less replicate, the significance of the
results.

    
    
      Uber - (2) Travis Kalanick, Garrett Camp
      Airbnb - (3) Joe Gebbia, Nathan Blecharczyk, Brian Chesky 
      Palantir - (5) Peter Thiel, Joe Lonsdale, Alex Karp, Stephen Cohen, Nathan Gettings
      Snapchat - (2) Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, (and Frank Reginald "Reggie" Brown IV?)
      SpaceX - (1) Elon Musk
      Pinterest - (3) Paul Sciarra, Evan Sharp, Ben Silbermann
      Dropbox - (2) Arash Ferdowsi, Drew Houston
      WeWork - (2) Adam Neumann, Miguel McKelvey
      Theranos - (1) Elizabeth Holmes
      Lyft - (2) Logan Green, John Zimmer
      Stripe - (2) Patrick Collison, John Collison
      Stemcentrx - (3) Brian Slingerland, Scott Dylla, Daniel T. Reiner
      Zenefits (YourPeople) - (2) Parker Conrad, Laks Srini
      Cloudera - (4) Jeff Hammerbacher, Mike Olson, Amr Awadallah, Christophe Bisciglia
      SoFi (Social Finance) - (4) Mike Cagney, Dan Macklin, James Finnigan, and Ian Brady
      Credit Karma - (1) Kenneth Lin
      Tanium - (2) David Hindawi, Orion Hindawi
      Fanatics - (1) Alan Trager
      DocuSign - (1) Tom Gonser
      Moderna - (4) Robert Langer, Noubar Afeyan, Ken Chien, Derrick Rossi
      Wish (ContextLogic) - (2) Peter Szulczewski, Danny Zhang
      Bloom Energy - (1) K. R. Sridhar
      Slack - (4) Stewart Butterfield, Eric Costello, Cal Henderson, and Serguei Mourachov
      Mozido - (1) Michael A. Liberty
      Houzz - (2) Adi Tatarko, Alon Cohen
      DraftKings - (3) Jason Robins, Matt Kalish, Paul Liberman
      Nutanix - (3) Dheeraj Pandey, Mohit Aron, Ajeet Singh
      Magic Leap - (1)  Rony Abovitz
      Instacart
      Domo	
      Blue Apron	
      Github	
      Avant	
      AppDynamics	
      Prosper Marketplace	
      ZocDoc	
      AppNexus	
      Intarcia Therapeutics	
      Honest Co.	
      Oscar Health Insurance	
      MongoDB	
      Jawbone	
      InsideSales.com	
      MuleSoft
      BuzzFeed - (2) Jonah Peretti, John Johnson
      Mu Sigma - (1) Ambika Dhiraj
      Jasper Technologies - (3) Jahangir Mohammed, Daniel Collins, Amit Gupta
      Deem - (1) Patrick Grady
      Jet.com - (3) Marc Lore, Nate Faust, Mike Hanrahan
      Thumbtack - (4) Marco Zappacosta, Sander Daniels, Jonathan Swanson, Jeremy Tunnell
      FanDuel - (5) Nigel Eccles, Lesley Eccles, Tom Griffiths, Rob Jones, Chris Stafford
      Medallia - (2) Borge Hald, Amy Pressman
      Infinidat - (1) Moshe Yanai
      Warby Parker - (4) David Gilboa, Neil Blumenthal, Andrew Hunt, Jeffrey Raider
      Okta - (2) Todd McKinnon, Frederic Kerrest
      Sprinklr - (1) Ragy Thomas
      Automattic - (1) Matt Mullenweg 
      Actifio - (1) Ash Ashutosh
      Proteus Digital Health - (3) Andrew Thompson, George Savage, Mark Zdeblick
      Nextdoor - (4) Nirav Tolia, Sarah Leary, Prakash Janakiraman, David Wiesen
      Uptake - (2) Eric Lefkofsky, Brad Keywell
      Anaplan - (2) Guy Haddleton, Michael Gould
      Gusto (ZenPayroll)
      AppDirect	
      23andMe	
      CloudFlare	
      Evernote	
      Eventbrite	
      Tango	
      Kabam	
      Lookout	
      JustFab	
      Qualtrics	
      Razer	
      SimpliVity	
      Pluralsight	
      MarkLogic	
      Coupa Software	
      Twilio	
      Zscaler	
      Vox Media	
      Adaptive Biotechnologies	
      Apttus	
      Kabbage	
      Datto	
      Udacity	
      Docker
      Mode Media - (9) Samir Arora, Ernie Cicogna, Fernando Ruarte, Vic Zauderer, Dianna Mullins, Raj Narayan, Rebecca Bogle Arora, Susan Kare, Emmanuel Job
      ForeScout - (4) Oded Comay, Dror Comay, Doron Shikmoni, Hezy Yeshurun
      Fab - (2) Jason Goldberg, Bradford Shellhammer
      Gilt Groupe - (6) Kevin P. Ryan, Dwight Merriman, Alexis Maybank, Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, Michael Bryzek, Phong Nguyen
      Good Technology - (1) Richard Davies
      Legendary Entertainment - (1) Thomas Tull
      Pure Storage - (2) John Colgrove, John Hayes
      Square - (2) Jack Dorsey, Jim McKelvey
      Sunrun - (3) Lynn Jurich, Edward Fenster, Nat Kreamer
      Beats Electronics - (2) Dr. Dre, Jimmy Iovine
      Box - (4) Aaron Levie, Dylan Smith, Sam Ghods, Jeff Queisser
      Coupons.com - (1) Steven Boal
      Fisker Automotive - (2) Henrik Fisker, Bernhard Koehler
      GoPro - (1) Nicholas Woodman
      Hortonworks - (8) Alan Gates, Arun C. Murthy, Devaraj Das, Eric Baldeschwieler, Mahadev Konar, Owen O'Malley, Sanjay Radia, Suresh Srinivas
      Lending Club - (2) Renaud Laplanch, Soulaiman Htite
      Nest Labs - (2) Tony Fadell, Matt Rogers
      New Relic - (1) Lewis Cirne
      Wayfair - (2) Niraj Shah, Steve Conine

