Many startups these days, big and small, funded and bootstrapped, find themselves desperately in need of quality engineers. As a non-engineer, I’m always secretly jealous of this fact, but that’s not the point. Finding the talented “talent” plays a huge role in the success of a company being able to build a quality product/service as well as effectively scaling it as it (hopefully) grows. This technical talent is often coming from places like Stanford, MIT, Caltech, etc and these usual suspects have become the hunting grounds for said talent. An overlooked source of tech talent is abroad though. The thousands of engineers, developers and designers working in Pakistan, Russia, Vietnam, etc can bring a lot to the table but are limited to working virtually through Elance and oDesk (good services). Having the ability to work physically next to these guys would be incredibly valuable for both the startup and the foreign tech talent. Why not bring them here? A variety of challenges are in the way to get them work permits etc but it’s not impossible. Someone (maybe me) needs to make this process of granting green cards to technical talent as easy as possible. A simple web form to aid foreign talent in submitting the proper documentation to receive a work permit could hypothetically increase the supply of foreign tech workers in the US. Increasing access to this technical talent could be a huge boon for both the US startup community and the rest of the world that benefits from the innovations they dream up. I’ll think about this more . . .
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