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Posts tagged with: politics
Oct 17, 2012    |       5 comments

The politics I dream of

  • I dream of when politic debates will be anonymous. The debate should be between ideas and plans, not between people and promises. We should have every candidate (possibly team of candidates) present their plan and values and vote based on that.
  • I dream of when politics will be based on data. We should run simulations against promises and plans. We should understand what every scenario implies in terms of risks and rewards and make decisions based on that.
  • I dream of when politics will be accountable. Promises should turn into contracts and contracts should be evaluated against results and facts.
  • I dream of when politics will be a group effort. How can we put the world in the hands of a single person? As entrepreneurs and investors we see this every day: teamwork is what matters. Why can’t we have that for politics? We should not have to rely on one single person. We should have teams making decisions, coming up with plans, collaborating. Sure we still need a C.E.O. and sure politicians already have huge teams, but instead of focusing on the president and his second, we should focus on the full management team as well as giving them more power and impact potential.
  • I dream of when politics will be coherent. If we really believe in representative democracy, then representatives should have online tools to ask their voters (and represented non-voters) on each matter they will vote on.
  • I dream of when we’ll have experts and not politicians trying to solve the world’s biggest problems. When we do startups, we  hire the best to handle specific areas of our companies. That should be exactly the same thing with politics.
  • I dream of when politic donations will mandatorily have to be anonymous. This is such a big and untackled problem, it’s just unbelievable.

It’s sickening that in 2012 we still have to suffer the problems of this stupid system and we are unable to get out of it. I love that we have startups trying to disrupt the space like Votizen, Votify, Popvox and many others but I think we’re still scratching the surface of what’s possible. We need more Seasteading Institutes.

Jun 11, 2012    |       4 comments

Startup Act 2.0 is a Fucking Joke

Yuri Assomov, a serial entrepreneur and University professor, posted on TechCrunch a very interesting article where he explains why the Startup 2.0 Act would hypothetically have had as a consequence the visa rejection for people like himself, Peter Thiel, Michael Moritz, Steve Chen, Linus Torvalds, Shai Agassi, Marten Mickos, Max Levchin, Elon Musk, Niklas Zennstrom, Stepan Pachikovand even Vivek Wadhva.

Washington has been great at creating hype on the Startup Act before elections and primaries, marketing to us that the act would help startups and most of all would help foreign entrepreneurs set up they companies in the USA. Nice marketing, extremely bad execution. I must say that it’s one of the most stupid things I read in a while. Check out the following Section 4, regarding visas for immigrant entrepreneurs:

Are you fucking kidding me?

At this point you should either be crying or laughing, both rolling on the floor. Let’s revisit this sentences in a timeline of a wannabe immigrant entrepreneur.

  1. You first have to get an H1-B Visa. There are only 65,000 per year (this year they are already over) and you need a 4-year degree from a university. No drop-outs whatsoever.
  2. After that, you have to start a business. Problem is that H1B visas are usually for full-time employment and so you have to start the business in your spare time. You have to do this in the first year after you get to the US, which is a period in time when you’re usually broke and have to figure out your new life (you can only come to the US 10 days prior to your start date). It’s a fun period, since you will have no credit score and most landlords will ask for one and will want 3 paystubs. Good luck explaining you don’t have debt.
  3. Then you have to hire 2 people, which is illegal to do as, for H1B rules, you can’t work for the company you started, you can only be a passive shareholder.
  4. Then you have to either invest or raise $100k, again while working full-time for another company. Good luck going to an investor and telling them that you will join full-time the company only when your visa is approved.

This my friends is what the people in Washington were able to come up with. I’m speechless. Sometimes I wonder how people that write this stuff can run a country.

The Economist is already warning the US that other countries actually get it, and are attracting the talent that instead could have come here.