International Entrepreneur Parole: or How I learned to stop worrying about the Green Card

This July 4th, I want to share a story of how I found the freedom to pursue my startup, and how I did that by giving up on my green card application. Fellow immigrant tech employees, this might be relevant for you!

I moved to the United States for graduate school in 2007. I deliberately chose the Bay Area, as I was enamored by the startup culture YC had begun to infuse, a sea-change that the iPhone heralded, and the bountiful creativity on display through world-changing products that came out of here. It was like Renaissance in Florence. It was where the best and the brightest eventually landed.

I got into the scene quite quickly, doing part-time work at startups while balancing school, meeting potential co-founders, and learning through failures at early-stage startups I was part of. I even remember meeting the Airbnb folks when it was less than five employees, and regretfully deciding not to follow up on an engineering opportunity. Anyway, that’s a story for another day.

At the time, many of my friends had an eerily similar plan: get a job at a top-tier tech company, get freedom and stability through an employment-based green card, then strike out on your own. It was a simple plan that was supposed to work. Except it didn’t, for so many of us.

In 2021, more than ten years after I’d started my green card process, I was still waiting. It was a mirage, always just a couple of years away, but never materializing. Every presidential campaign promised reform, but hardly anything changed — it just kept getting worse. Currently, there are more than 600K green card hopefuls from India and China alone, and the wait time for a new applicant of Indian origin under EB2 is estimated to be 195 years! Sounds like satire, but it is true.

After a decade of inactivity, my patience was wearing thin. I decided I wanted to pursue an idea I couldn’t get out of my head, and that I wasn’t going to let immigration law thwart my excitement. I reached out to immigrant founders in my network to understand how they had navigated this issue. I was introduced to Seth Leech, a leading immigration attorney, who was instrumental in crafting a strategy to let me pursue my startup.

Late last year, USCIS launched a new program called International Entrepreneur Parole (IEP) that supports startup founders to reside in the US while building their companies. The only problem was that the application count was so low that USCIS published no data at all, and no immigration lawyer had even heard of anyone successfully getting one. It would be a risky gamble, but still, there was some light at the end of the tunnel. It could be done!

I approached investors with my idea for a startup that I myself couldn’t be employed in. Instead of laughing me off, Bill Trenchard and First Round decided to take a chance on me by investing in Cache. Not just that, Bill and Gokul Rajaram wrote strong references for my IEP application. Through that support, I have been able to build Cache into a thriving startup that has an extremely talented and passionate team of ten folks that I’m lucky to work with every day. The last six months have undoubtedly been the most exciting and rewarding time of my career. (We are not yet ready to disclose what we are working on, follow me or Cache to get an update when we launch.)

Yesterday, as a foreshadow of Independence Day, I received a letter that my application for IEP had been approved, less than four months after it was filed. A stark contrast to the ten-plus years languished in the green card queue, waiting to one day get that same privilege.?

Friends, please take advantage of this option if you’ve been dreaming up a company, but have been unable to pursue it due to immigration hurdles. I’m happy to help you guide and navigate through the process and connect you with the right resources.

Happy 4th of July everyone!