You might have heard about the campaign to Let PJ Stay. Well, PJ — a Belgian entrepreneur whose student visa was set to expire soon and who had recently become the face of tech s push for immigration reform — gets to stay. But he and his company may have to leave the U.S. anyway.
Pierre-Jean PJ Cobut, co-founder of Silicon Valley health-wearables startup Echo Labs, received an H-1B visa a couple of weeks ago. But co-founder Elad Ferber, who s from Israel, is facing a June 30 expiration date of his student-visa extension. Cobut won t go on without Ferber, a former head of engineering at an Israeli space startup that Cobut calls one of the most talented technologists I have ever met. So the two Stanford MBAs may be forced to pack up their 2-year-old company and leave the country.
They would be leaving an employee behind. And the five jobs they had planned to fill in the next several months would go elsewhere — perhaps Canada, Cobut told me this week. (I also was among his interviewers last week on the TV show Press:Here. See video below.)
We are looking mostly for PhDs with 5 to 10 years of experience in research, mostly in math, physics, or engineering, Cobut told me by email. These are people that are hard to come by, even in Silicon Valley… so I get nervous thinking about hiring people with the same level outside of the valley.
Silicon Valley has pushed hard for immigration reform, including for raising the cap on H-1B visas — this year, there was a record 233,000 applications for 85,000 slots — because companies say they need more qualified workers. It s a controversial issue: Not everyone agrees there is a tech-skills shortage in the United States; companies are being criticized for bringing foreign workers in so they can pay them less than American workers; the program has been called a gateway to offshoring jobs.
Cobut has his own company but secured an H-1B visa because technically, the board could ve fired him. There is no visa specifically for entrepreneurs, but not for lack of trying. The Startup Act, which among other things would create a visa for foreign-born entrepreneurs, was introduced in January by Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kansas, and Sen. Mark Warner, D-Virginia — for the fourth time. In the House, Rep. Robert Dold, R-Illinois, introduced in February a similarly named bill that would grant permanent residential status to foreign-born students who earn advanced degrees in STEM (science, technology, engineering or mathematics) and keep working in the field.
For now, though, the fate of Echo Labs — which is building a health wearable that measures blood composition as opposed to just counting steps — is unknown.
This technology opens up a whole new field of medicine – continuous monitoring, Cobut says.
Cobut s passion for his company seems matched by his love of Silicon Valley: We know it s the best place in the world to build our company. We have established a great network of entrepreneurs, investors and business partners. We know we wouldn t have the same chances of success elsewhere.
Photo at top courtesy of PJ Cobut
