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Alba Orbital’s mission to image the Earth every 15 minutes brings in $3.4M seed round
Orbital imagery is in demand, and if you think having daily images of everywhere on Earth is going to be enough in a few years, you need a lesson in ambition. Alba Orbital is here to provide it with its intention to provide Earth observation at intervals of 15 minutes rather than hours or days — and it just raised $3.4 million to get its next set of satellites into orbit.
Alba attracted our attention at Y Combinator’s latest demo day; I was impressed with the startup’s accomplishment of already having six satellites in orbit, which is more than most companies with space ambition ever get. But it’s only the start for the company, which will need hundreds more to begin to offer its planned high-frequency imagery.
The Scottish company has spent the last few years in prep and R&D, pursuing the goal, which some must have thought laughable, of creating a solar-powered Earth observation satellite that weighs in at less than one kilogram. The joke’s on the skeptics, however — Alba has launched a proof of concept and is ready to send the real thing up as well.
Little more than a flying camera with a minimum of storage, communication, power and movement, the sub-kilogram Unicorn-2 is about the size of a soda can, with paperback-size solar panel wings, and costs in the neighborhood of $10,000. It should be able to capture up to 10-meter resolution, good enough to see things like buildings, ships, crops, even planes.
Image Credits: Alba Orbital
“People thought we were idiots. Now they’re taking it seriously,” said Tom Walkinshaw, founder and CEO of Alba. “They can see it for what it is: a unique platform for capturing data sets.”
Indeed, although the idea of daily orbital imagery like Planet’s once seemed excessive, in some situations it’s quite clearly not enough.
“The California case is probably wildfires,” said Walkinshaw (and it always helps to have a California case). “Having an image once a day of a wildfire is a bit like having a chocolate teapot… not very useful. And natural disasters like hurricanes, flooding is a big one, transportation as well.”
Walkinshaw noted that they company was bootstrapped and profitable before taking on the task of launching dozens more satellites, something the seed round will enable.
“It gets these birds in the air, gets them finished and shipped out,” he said. “Then we just need to crank up the production rate.”
Image Credits: Alba Orbital
When I talked to Walkinshaw via video call, 10 or so completed satellites in their launch shells were sitting on a rack behind him in the clean room, and more are in the process of assembly. Aiding in the scaling effort is new investor James Park, founder and CEO of Fitbit — definitely someone who knows a little bit about bringing hardware to market.
Interestingly, the next batch to go to orbit (perhaps as soon as in a month or two, depending on the machinations of the launch provider) will be focusing on nighttime imagery, an area Walkinshaw suggested was undervalued. But as orbital thermal imaging startup Satellite Vu has shown, there’s immense appetite for things like energy and activity monitoring, and nighttime observation is a big part of that.
The seed round will get the next few rounds of satellites into space, and after that Alba will be working on scaling manufacturing to produce hundreds more. Once those start going up it can demonstrate the high-cadence imaging it is aiming to produce — for now it’s impossible to do so, though Alba already has customers lined up to buy the imagery it does get.
The round was led by Metaplanet Holdings, with participation by Y Combinator, Liquid2, Soma, Uncommon Denominator, Zillionize and numerous angels.
As for competition, Walkinshaw welcomes it, but feels secure that he and his company have more time and work invested in this class of satellite than anyone in the world — a major obstacle for anyone who wants to do battle. It’s more likely companies will, as Alba has done, pursue a distinct product complementary to those already or in the process of being offered.
“Space is a good place to be right now,” he concluded.
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Advanced tax strategies for startup founders
As an entrepreneur, you started your business to create value, both in what you deliver to your customers and what you build for yourself. You have a lot going on, but if building personal wealth matters to you, the assets you’re creating deserve your attention.
You can implement numerous advanced planning strategies to minimize capital gains tax, reduce future estate tax and increase asset protection from creditors and lawsuits. Capital gains tax can reduce your gains by up to 35%, and estate taxes can cost up to 50% on assets you leave to your heirs. Careful planning can minimize your exposure and actually save you millions.
Smart founders and early employees should closely examine their equity ownership, even in the early stages of their company’s life cycle. Different strategies should be used at different times and for different reasons. The following are a few key considerations when determining what, if any, advanced strategies you might consider:
- Your company’s life cycle — early, mid or late stage.
- The value of your shares — what they are worth now, what you expect them to be worth in the future and when.
- Your own circumstances and goals — what you need now, and what you may need in the future.
Some additional items to consider include issues related to qualified small business stock (QSBS), gift and estate taxes, state and local income taxes, liquidity, asset protection, and whether you and your family will retain control and manage the assets over time.
Smart founders and early employees should closely examine their equity ownership, even in the early stages of their company’s life cycle.
Here are some advanced equity planning strategies that you can implement at different stages of your company life cycle to reduce tax and optimize wealth for you and your family.
Irrevocable nongrantor trust
QSBS allows you to exclude tax on $10 million of capital gains (tax of up to 35%) upon an exit/sale. This is a benefit every individual and some trusts have. There is significant opportunity to multiply the QSBS tax exclusion well beyond $10 million.
The founder can gift QSBS eligible stock to an irrevocable nongrantor trust, let’s say for the benefit of a child, so that the trust will qualify for its own $10 million exclusion. The founder owning the shares would be the grantor in this case. Typically, these trusts are set up for children or unborn children. It is important to note that the founder/grantor will have to gift the shares to accomplish this, because gifted shares will retain the QSBS eligibility. If the shares are sold into the trust, the shares lose QSBS status.
Image Credits: Peyton Carr
In addition to the savings on federal taxes, founders may also save on state taxes. State tax can be avoided if the trust is structured properly and set up in a tax-exempt state like Delaware or Nevada. Otherwise, even if the trust is subject to state tax, some states, like New York, conform and follow the federal tax treatment of the QSBS rules, while others, like California, do not. For example, if you are a New York state resident, you will also avoid the 8.82% state tax, which amounts to another $2.6 million in tax savings if applied to the example above.
This brings the total tax savings to almost $10 million, which is material in the context of a $40 million gain. Notably, California does not conform, but California residents can still capture the state tax savings if their trust is structured properly and in a state like Delaware or Nevada.
Currently, each person has a limited lifetime gift tax exemption, and any gifted amount beyond this will generate up to a 40% gift tax that has to be paid. Because of this, there is a trade-off between gifting the shares early while the company valuation is low and using less of your gift tax exemption versus gifting the shares later and using more of the lifetime gift exemption.
The reason to wait is that it takes time, energy and money to set up these trusts, so ideally, you are using your lifetime gift exemption and trust creation costs to capture a benefit that will be realized. However, not every company has a successful exit, so it is sometimes better to wait until there is a certain degree of confidence that the benefit will be realized.
Parent-seeded trust
One way for the founder to plan for future generations while minimizing estate taxes and high state taxes is through a parent-seeded trust. This trust is created by the founder’s parents, with the founder as the beneficiary. Then the founder can sell the shares to this trust — it doesn’t involve the use of any lifetime gift exemption and eliminates any gift tax, but it also disqualifies the ability to claim QSBS.
The benefit is that all the future appreciation of the asset is transferred out of the founder’s and the parent’s estate and is not subject to potential estate taxes in the future. The trust can be located in a tax-exempt state such as Delaware or Nevada to also eliminate home state-level taxes. This can translate up to 10% in state-level tax savings. The trustee, an individual selected by the founder, can make distributions to the founder as a beneficiary if desired.
Further, this trust can be used for the benefit of multiple generations. Distributions can be made at the discretion of the trustee, and this skips the estate tax liability as assets are passed from generation to generation.
Grantor retained annuity trust (GRAT)
This strategy enables the founder to minimize their estate tax exposure by transferring wealth outside of their estate, specifically without using any lifetime gift exemption or being subject to gift tax. It’s particularly helpful when an individual has used up all their lifetime gift tax exemption. This is a powerful strategy for very large “unicorn” positions to reduce a founder’s future gift/estate tax exposure.
For the GRAT, the founder (grantor) transfers assets into the GRAT and gets back a stream of annuity payments. The IRS 7520 rate, currently very low, is a factor in calculating these annuity payments. If the assets transferred into the trust grow faster than the IRS 7520 rate, there will be an excess remainder amount in GRAT after all the annuity payments are paid back to the founder (grantor).
This remainder amount will be excluded from the founder’s estate and can transfer to beneficiaries or remain in the trust estate tax-free. Over time, this remainder amount can be multiples of the initial contributed value. If you have company stock that you expect will pop in value, it can be very beneficial to transfer those shares into a GRAT and have the pop occur inside the trust.
This way, you can transfer all the upside gift and estate tax-free out of your estate and to your beneficiaries. Additionally, because this trust is structured as a grantor trust, the founder can pay the taxes incurred by the trust, making the strategy even more powerful.
One thing to note is that the grantor must survive the GRAT’s term for the strategy to work. If the grantor dies before the end of the term, the strategy unravels and some or all the assets remain in his estate as if the strategy never existed.
Intentionally defective grantor trust (IDGT)
This is similar to the GRAT in that it also enables the founder to minimize their estate tax exposure by transferring wealth outside of their estate, but has some key differences. The grantor must “seed” the trust by gifting 10% of the asset value intended to be transferred, so this approach requires the use of some lifetime gift exemption or gift tax.
The remaining 90% of the value to be transferred is sold to the trust in exchange for a promissory note. This sale is not taxable for income tax or QSBS purposes. The main benefits are that instead of receiving annuity payments back, which requires larger payments, the grantor transfers assets into the trust and can receive an interest-only note. The payments received are far lower because it is interest-only (rather than an annuity).
Image Credits: Peyton Carr
Another key distinction is that the IDGT strategy has more flexibility than the GRAT and can be generation-skipping.
If the goal is to avoid generation-skipping transfer tax (GSTT), the IDGT is superior to the GRAT, because assets are measured for GSTT purposes when they are contributed to the trust prior to appreciation rather than being measured at the end of the term for a GRAT after the assets have appreciated.
The bottom line
Depending on a founder’s situation and goals, we may use some combination of the above strategies or others altogether. Many of these strategies are most effective when planning in advance; waiting until after the fact will limit the benefits you can extract.
When considering strategies for protecting wealth and minimizing taxes as it relates to your company stock, there’s a lot to take into account — the above is only a summary. We recommend you seek proper counsel and choose wealth transfer and tax savings strategies based on your unique situation and individual appetite for complexity.
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Is there a creed in venture capital?
How should venture capitalists and corporate innovators assess Din Djarin, the protagonist of The Mandalorian? He’s introduced as a bounty hunter, a mercenary vocation in the Star Wars mythos that has been reserved primarily for villains.
One of the most interesting aspects of Jon Favreau’s show is how Din Djarin wrestles with the orthodoxy of his Mandalorian beliefs. His insistence on honor makes the character an appealing hero, and his character’s growth is demonstrated by when he chooses to be flexible versus when he holds fast to the rules he believes.
Although “This is the way” emerged as the show’s quotable soundbite, there is another line that’s more relevant to venture capital and corporate innovation: “You’re changing the deal.” Din Djarin uses this phrase to spar with adversaries who try to advance their objectives by disregarding clearly understood agreements.
Enforcement is so unusual in the world of startups that I consider it a mostly dead-end path.
Of course, terms change in venture capital and entrepreneurship all the time, with investors and entrepreneurs finding themselves in Din Djarin’s position.
This challenge is built into the very structure of venture capital fund raising, in which a Series A financing is usually followed by Series B, and then Series C, and each of these transactions frequently adds, subtracts, and modifies terms, changing the deal from the perspective of the startup and existing investors.
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Software subscriptions are eating the world: Solving billing and cash flow woes simultaneously
Although recurring revenue businesses have been around for a long time, the trend toward a subscription economy has escalated rapidly in the last few years. IDC expects that by 2022, 53% of all software revenue will be purchased with a subscription model. Even the car subscription market is set to grow by 71% by 2022.
Many types of businesses are looking for ways to earn recurring revenue — and it has gone beyond business-to-consumer companies like Netflix and Dollar Shave Club. Business-to-business companies are also joining in, even those with products that last a long time. For instance, elevator-maker Otis offers Otis ONE, a subscription-connected elevator solution that offers predictive maintenance insights.
Subscription billing options should make it easy to manage all types of subscriptions, including integrating analytics to provide a more complete picture of the subscriptions landscape.
Promising, but there are pitfalls
Subscription business models are attractive, but there are two major pitfalls. At the top of the list is payment. Regardless of company size, there’s an ongoing need to convince customers to sign up long term.
Companies also need to accommodate new payment methods and ensure ongoing compliance with interstate and international tax laws. As a result, the payment process can quickly become painful.
As any company with recurring revenue scales, it becomes increasingly challenging to manage subscriptions, especially with homegrown systems, changing subscription offers and the complexities of converting customers from free trials to paid subscriptions. Subscription billing options should make it easy to manage all types of subscriptions, including integrating analytics to provide a more complete picture of the subscriptions landscape.
Businesses also have to keep in mind that every time they add more product categories or expand into new geographies, they need to tack on extra software code to change their operations and stay sales-tax-compliant. As they expand globally, this can become an obstacle to rapid growth and flexibility.
To keep the company focused and maintain growth without having to expend resources, subscription businesses need a specialized billing system so they can focus on customer acquisition and revenue growth rather than staying on top of billing complexity.
The CAC payback gap constrains growth
The second issue: How do businesses cover the funding gap between when customers sign up and when they pay? In the subscription economy, companies that would previously receive a customer’s payments all at once now earn revenue spread across a monthly or quarterly subscription fee.
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Chef Robotics raises $7.7M to help automate kitchens
A year and a half’s worth of global pandemic has had a profound impact on virtually every sector of the workforce. When it comes to future automation, food prep isn’t quite at the top of the list (that distinction likely goes to warehouse fulfillment, for the time being), but it’s certainly up there. And it’s easy to see why the events of 2020 and beyond have left many kitchens looking for alternative sources of labor.
San Francisco-based Chef Robotics today announced that it has raised a combined $7.7 million pre-seed and seed round, with the goal of helping automate certain aspects of food preparation. The list of investors is pretty long on this one (with seed and pre-seed rolled up into one), including Kleiner Perkins, Promus Ventures, Construct, Bloomberg Beta, BOLD Capital Partners, Red and Blue Ventures, Gaingels, Schox VC, Stewart Alsop and Tau Ventures, among others.
The product team includes ex-employees of Cruise, Google, Verb Surgical, Zoox and Strateos. Chef’s team isn’t quite ready to show off its robot just yet (hence generic kitchen stock photo #8952 up top) — not entirely unusual for a robotics company still in the early stages. What it has outlined, thus far, is a robotics and vision system destined to increase production volume and enhance consistency, while removing some food waste from the process. Fast casual restaurants appear to be a key focus for this sort of tech.
The company describes it thusly:
Chef is designed to mimic the flexibility of humans, allowing customers to handle thousands of different kinds of food using minimal hardware changes. Chef does this using artificial intelligence that can learn how to handle more and more ingredients over time and that also improves. This allows customers to do things like change their menu often. Additionally, Chef’s modular architecture allows customers to quickly scale up just as they would by hiring more staff (but unlike humans, Chef always shows up on time and doesn’t need breaks).
More details on the underlying tech soon, no doubt.
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Legionfarm, pairing pro gamers with amateurs, raises $6 million Series A
Legionfarm, the gaming platform that lets gamers play with pro players in their favorite games, has today announced the close of a $6 million Series A round. Investors in the round include SVB, Y Combinator, Scrum VC, Kevin Lin, Altair Capital, Ankur Nagpal and more.
Legionfarm launched out of Y Combinator at the beginning of last year with a mission to give pro players a way to generate income and amateur players the chance to get better by playing with a pro coach. It started out with an à la carte business model but has since added a subscription product.
It either costs $12/hour to play on an individual session basis (one hour of play) or you can pay $25 or $50/month. That gives gamers access to discounted prices for pros and unlimited sessions with pros who are brand new to the platform, which Legionfarm calls “rookies.”
The company was founded by Alex Beliankin, who is a former pro gamer and was once in the top .01% of World of Warcraft players. There are many, many pro caliber players out in the world who can’t necessarily make a living off of gaming. They either have to be signed by an org (super limited supply) or play in as many tournaments as possible (unreliable) or stream on Twitch.
Legionfarm gives these pros the opportunity to earn a living playing the games they love.
Meanwhile, gamers are always looking to get better but don’t often have the environments in a game to do so, particularly in Battle Royale games. Legionfarm, which supports a couple of the biggest BRs (Call of Duty: Warzone and Apex Legends), allows these players to team up with pros and learn from them.
The startup is also running a hardware support program, which lets pros on the platform effectively rent gear by paying for it over time in installments that come directly out of their earnings each month.
“Recently, we’ve learned that one pro player can acquire seven or more new customers to the platform if we work with the pro properly,” said Beliankin. “That’s the biggest growth point for us and the biggest challenge. We don’t need to demand in the performance channels, but through existing supply. If we manage to build some sustainable processes here, I think we’re going to skyrocket because we see some huge potential here.”
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Sylvera grabs seed backing from Index to help close the accountability gap around carbon offsetting
U.K.-based startup Sylvera is using satellite, radar and lidar data-fuelled machine learning to bolster transparency around carbon offsetting projects in a bid to boost accountability and credibility — applying independent ratings to carbon offsetting projects.
The ratings are based on proprietary data sets it’s developed in conjunction with scientists from research organisations including UCLA, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and University College London.
It’s just grabbed $5.8 million in seed funding led by VC firm Index Ventures. All its existing institutional investors also participated — namely: Seedcamp, Speedinvest and Revent. It also has backing from leading angels, including the existing and former CEOs of NYSE, Thomson Reuters, Citibank and IHS Markit. (It confirms it has committed not to receive any investment from traditional carbon-intensive companies.) And it’s just snagged a $2 million research contract from Innovate UK.
The problem it’s targeting is that the carbon offsetting market suffers from a lack of transparency.
This fuels concerns that many offsetting projects aren’t living up to their claims of a net reduction in carbon emissions — and that “creative” carbon accountancy is rather being used to generate a lot of hot air: In the form of positive-sounding PR, which sums to meaningless greenwashing and more pollution as polluters get to keep on pumping out climate changing emissions.
Nonetheless, the carbon offset markets are poised for huge growth — of at least 15x by 2030 — as large corporates accelerate their net zero commitments. And Sylvera’s bet is that that will drive demand for reliable, independent data — to stand up the claimed impact.
How exactly is Sylvera benchmarking carbon offsets? Co-founder Sam Gill says its technology platform draws on multiple layers of satellite data to capture project performance data at scale and at a high frequency.
It applies machine learning to analyze and visualize the data, while also conducting what it bills as “deep analytical work to assess the underlying project quality”. Via that process it creates a standardised rating for a project, so that market participants are able to transact according to their preferences.
It makes its ratings and analysis data available to its customers via a web application and an API (for which it charges a subscription).
“We assess two critical areas of a project — its carbon performance, and its ‘quality’,” Gill tells TechCrunch. “We score a project against these criteria, and give them ratings — much like a Moody’s rating on a bond.”
Carbon performance is assessed by gathering “multi-layered data” from multiple sources to understand what is going on on the ground of these projects — such as via multiple satellite sources such as multispectral image, radar, and lidar data.
“We collate this data over time, ingest it into our proprietary machine learning algorithms, and analyse how the project has performed against its stated aims,” Gill explains.
Quality is assessed by considering the technical aspects of the project. This includes what Gill calls “additionality”; aka “does the project have a strong claim to delivering a better outcome than would have occurred but for the existence of the offset revenue?”.
There is a known problem with some carbon offsets claimed against forests where the landowner had no intention of logging, for example. So if there wasn’t going to be any deforestation the carbon credit is essentially bogus.
He also says it looks at factors like permanence (“how long will the project’s impacts last?”); co-benefits (“how well has the project incorporated the UN’s Sustainability Development Goals?); and risks (“how well is the project mitigating risks, in particular those from humans and those from natural causes?”).
Clearly it’s not an exact science — and Gill acknowledges risks, for example, are often interlinked.
“It is critical to assess these performance and quality in tandem,” he tells TechCrunch. “It’s not enough to simply say a project is achieving the carbon goals set out in its plan.
“If the additionality of a project is low (e.g. it was actually unlikely the project would have been deforested without the project) then the achievement of the carbon goals set out in the project does not generate the anticipated carbon goals, and the underlying offsets are therefore weaker than appreciated.”
Commenting on the seed funding in a statement, Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas, partner at Index Ventures, said: “This is a phenomenally strong team with the vision to build the first carbon offset rating benchmark, providing comprehensive insights around the quality of offsets, enabling purchase decisions as well as post-purchase monitoring and reporting. Sylvera is putting in place the building blocks that will be required to address climate change.”
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BluBracket nabs $12M Series A to expand source code security platform
BluBracket, an early-stage startup that focuses on keeping source code repositories secure, even in distributed environments, announced a $12 million Series A today.
Evolution Equity Partners led the round, with help from existing investors Unusual Ventures, Point72 Ventures, SignalFire and Firebolt Ventures. When combined with the $6.5 million seed round we reported on last year, the company has raised $19.5 million so far.
As you might imagine, being able to secure code in distributed environments came in quite handy when much of the technology world moved to work from home last year. BluBracket co-founder and COO Ajay Arora says that the pandemic forced many organizations to look carefully at how they secured their code base.
“So the anxiety organizations had about making sure their source code was secure and that it wasn’t leaking, from that standpoint that was a big tailwind for us. [With companies moving to a] completely remote development workforce, and with code being so important to their business as intellectual property, they needed to get that visibility into what vulnerabilities were there,” Arora explained.
Even prior to the pandemic, the company was finding they were gaining traction with developers and security pros by using a bottom up approach offering a free community version of the software. Having that free version as a top of the funnel for their sales motion was also helpful once COVID hit full force.
Today, Arora says the company has multiple thousands of developers, DevOps and SecOps users across dozens of organizations using the company’s suite of products. The big reference company right now is Priceline, but he says there are other big names that would prefer not to be public about it.
The company currently has 30 employees, with plans to double that by the end of the year, and he says that building diversity and inclusion into the hiring process is part of the company’s core values, and part of how the executive team gets measured.
“We’re big believers in putting our money where our mouth is and one of the OKRs for me and my co-founder [CEO Prakash Linga], or one of the things that we’re actually compensated for, is how well we are doing in building diversity and inclusion on the team,” he said. He adds that the recruiters that they are using are also being held to the same standard when it comes to providing a diverse set of candidates for open positions.
The company launched in 2018 and the founding team came from Vera, a startup that helped secure documents in motion. That company was sold to HelpSystems in December 2020 after Arora and Linga had left to start BluBracket.
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36 hours left to apply to Startup Battlefield at TC Disrupt 2021
Do you and your early-stage startup have what it takes to be a modern-day gladiator and compete in Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021? You won’t know unless you apply, and time is running out. You have only 48 hours left to throw your helmet into the ring.
If you want to compete for glory, global exposure and $100,000 in equity-free prize money, apply to Startup Battlefield here before May 13 at 11:59 p.m. (PT).
Not familiar with Startup Battlefield? It has launched 922 companies — including the likes of Dropbox, Vurb, Mint and a bunch more — that have collectively raised $9.5 billion and produced 117 exits.
We can tell you what it’s like to compete in Startup Battlefield and about the benefits and opportunities that come from it. But Stacey Hronowski — co-founder and CEO of Canix, the winner of Startup Battlefield at Disrupt 2020 — describes it best.
“Our experience in Startup Battlefield was excellent. The rigorous training was specific and tailored to our individual business and presentation. I was particularly impressed with the Q&A training. I’ve fundraised numerous times and the practice questions were some of the most insightful and specific questions I’ve faced. I feel extremely well prepared for future fundraises.
“Post Startup Battlefield, we received significant press coverage and reach outs from notable investors. The experience was one of the most special of my life; I never thought I’d get the chance to share the story of Canix with investors and media across the globe.”
And guess what?! It won’t cost you a thing to apply or to compete. You can be from anywhere in the world and in any industry — but you should have an MVP. Are you detail-oriented? Read more about how Startup Battlefield works.
We’re tapping top VC talent to judge the Battlefield. Here are just a few of the experts you’ll need to impress:
- Terri Burns, partner at GV
- Shauntel Garvey, general partner at Reach Capital
- Sydney Thomas, principal at Precursor Ventures
- Alexa von Tobel, co-founder and managing partner at Inspired Capita
TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 takes place on September 22-23, and if you want a shot at massive exposure and $100,000, you need to apply to Startup Battlefield before the deadline expires — in just 48 hours — on May 13 at 11:59 p.m. (PT). Go, gladiators, go!
Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt 2021? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.
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Dear Sophie: Does it make sense to sponsor immigrant talent to work remotely?
Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.
“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”
Extra Crunch members receive access to weekly “Dear Sophie” columns; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one- or two-year subscription for 50% off.
Dear Sophie,
My startup is in big-time hiring mode. All of our employees are currently working remotely and will likely continue to do so for the foreseeable future — even after the pandemic ends. We are considering individuals who are living outside of the U.S. for a few of the positions we are looking to fill.
Does it make sense to sponsor them for a visa to work remotely from somewhere in the United States?
— Selective in Silicon Valley
Dear Selective,
Thanks for reaching out — I’m always happy to hear about another fast-growing startup! If some of your leadership team is also abroad, check out the recent announcement about the new International Entrepreneur Parole program for founders.
It can make great business sense to sponsor international talent for a visa even if the position involves working remotely from a location inside the U.S. With the right legal setup, your team can work from home in Silicon Valley, nearby in California, or in another state where the cost of living is not quite as high. We’ve received this question from many employers, and many of our clients are proceeding with sponsoring international talent with visas and green cards for work-from-home positions.
I discussed this and other issues related to recruiting and work trends with Katie Lampert for my podcast. Lampert leads the talent acquisition and infrastructure group at General Catalyst, a VC firm that invests in seed to growth-stage startups in the U.S. and abroad. She advises companies in the General Catalyst portfolio on all things talent-related, including establishing company culture, creating a company’s infrastructure for recruiting and retaining talent, and planning for the future.
“Recruiting is going to be more global, which is exciting,” Lampert said during our discussion. “This will have a really positive effect on cultural diversity in the workforce. Studies show that a more diverse workforce leads to greater financial success.”
In fact, the latest McKinsey & Co. report on diversity, “Diversity wins: How inclusion matters,” found that companies with ethnically and culturally diverse executive teams are 36% more likely to achieve above-average profitability than companies with less diverse teams. McKinsey has issued three reports on diversity, and with each subsequent report, the business case for ethnic and cultural diversity and gender diversity in corporate leadership has grown stronger.
In addition to boosting profitability, bringing international talent to the United States to join your startup offers a host of other benefits as well.
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