As we finish up the year, I’m really pleased with the progress the Startup Visa gang is making.  I started thinking about, writing, and working on this on 9/10/09 when I wrote the post The Founders Visa Movement.  One quarter later, we’ve:

• Put together a core group of entrepreneurs, angels, and VCs who are working on this.
• Received a tremendous amount of positive feedback from entrepreneurs and investors who have struggled with this issue.
• Verified that this is a real issue, there is no current solution under the existing visa system, and even though there are plenty of immigration lawyers who say “no problem, I can get around this”, there aren’t clean solutions.
• Engaged with a number of Congressmen in both the house and the senate.
• Found a member of the house who is sponsoring a bill addressing the issue.
• Talking to several folks on the senate side to find a sponsor.
• Codified a first clean draft of language around this.
• Build lots of grassroots support and enthusiasm.
• Gotten plenty of discussion going in the blogosphere and mainstream media.

Getting a working visa for the US is a hit or miss proposition. If you are the founder of a bootstrapped company that happens to be based in the US, but you are not holding a US passport, this could be a difficult situation at best. I just came across this post by someone that is working on getting a visa class set up for those intelligent, enthusiastic people that want to set up a venture in the states.