私がシリコンバレーに関するプレゼンテーションや話を始めるときに、余興として観客に「シリコンバレーのエリアに今住んでいる人は手を挙げてください」と聞くと、会場の多くの人々が手を挙げます。それに続けて私は「その中で、シリコンバレーのエリアで生まれ育った人だけ、手を挙げたままにしてください」と聞きます。多くの場合、会場に1000人の観客がいたのなら、その内15人程度しか手を挙げ続ける人はいません。

このような状況が、シリコンバレーを特別な場所としているのです－シリコンバレーは、世界中から人々を迎え入れ、そして彼らの夢を実現させています。シリコンバレーは、私が行ったことのある土地の何処よりも、人種差別、階級差別、男女差別、そして偏見が少ない場所です。それらの理由としては、ベイエリアの変わった歴史的な事情（サンフランシスコ－やバークレーなど）や、強烈な競争社会の中では、偏見などはあっという間に取り除かれてしまうという事が関係しているでしょう。

おそらく、このシリコンバレーの生態系を破壊できるのは、アメリカ政府がこれを台無しにするときだけでしょう。とりわけ私は、大幅に合法的にこの国で働ける外国人数が制限される事になる、H1Bビザの発給数について心配しています。この問題に関して私は、各大統領候補に対してインタビューを行いました。ここのインタビューを聞いて下さい、そしてそれぞれの候補のH1Bビザに対する立場をここで見て下さい。さらに私は、連邦議会がH１B ビザの発給数の増量に関して行動を開始したことを嬉しく思っています。

これらの事情を考えると、このゲストライターの寄稿はとてもいいタイミングでした。Peter Nixey氏はY Combinatorが立ち上げたClickpassの創設者です。Clickpassのアイデアはイギリスで生まれ、Y Combinatorの出資によりアメリカに導入され、先月始動しました。

Peter氏の下記の寄稿は、合法的に彼の会社をシリコンバレーに移すための5ヶ月以上にわたる彼の取り組みの記録です。近い将来、企業家達が多くの面倒な行政手続を回避し、彼等の会社の成長のみに集中できる日が来ることを、私は真剣に願っています。

（下記英文記事）
　

While the Silicon-Valley v. Rest-of-The-World debate rages on and on there are still some companies for whom it’s essential to be in the heart of the industry. Getting a visa to come the valley is not easy though and with more first generation immigrants than almost anywhere else I’ve been, every San Franciscan foreign accent has a war story of how they battled their way into California.

This is the story of how we brought Clickpass to California and how a holiday turned into a pitch turned into a company and finally into a successful product.

Visiting San Francisco

Today Clickpass is a platform servicing websites with tens of millions of users, a team of developers and an E2 visa to trade in the US. Almost 12 months ago to the day though it was little more than a vision and a dash of technical insight.

After having turned the idea over and developed it for several months in London we happened to be on a trip to San Francisco visiting the Auctomatic founders who at the time were on Y-Combinator. As well as seeing the California hills I wanted to speak to as many people as possible and to understand what the receptiveness of the community was to the OpenID platform we were proposing.

The inevitability of immigration

We managed to get a lot of meetings. Both Keith Teare and one of his platform architects took time to go through our business proposition, Chris Messina and I spoke for hours about how to bring the usability we were planning to OpenID whilst still staying true to the core open-ness of the protocol. We spoke with engineers at Google, Ben Bangert who was implementing OpenID at O’Reilly and then finally were invited to apply for Y-Combinator by Jessica Livingston.

At this stage we’d still only been in California for five days and it was already obvious that San Francisco was the right place to do what we were planning. The energy, expertise and density of web-tech companies was alien to anything we’d ever experienced in London or Oxford. Knowing the move wouldn’t be easy we immediately approached an immigration lawyer to find out what options were available.

Choosing a visa category

There are a number of different visa categories, each of which is designed to service different requirements. As a company looking to set up shop in San Francisco there were only a few which were relevant to us.

H1B: Temporary workers and trainees

Since being rationed by congress H1B’s are like gold dust to get hold of and swamped by large corporations. There are so many issued each year and by the time we were investigating the previous year’s quota was already full.

L1: Intra-company transfer
The L1 allows for a company to make an internal transfer of an employee with specialist knowledge required to direct the American component of a company. Technically it’s possible for a startup to create a company in both their home country and the states and then to transfer across. However it is obviously a very flimsy premise for the visa and is also likely to be difficult to defend since the L1 requires the the company still do a significant part of its business in the country of origin.

O1: Alien of Extraordinary ability
Although we originally disregarded it, the superbly named “Alien of Extraordinary Ability” visa has proved to be one of the most popular choices amongst people I know. There is one particularly good lawyer called Chris Wright of the Wright Law Firm who has an excellent reputation for success in this field.

E2: Treaty investor
The visa which we applied for was the E2, foreign investor visa. If you’re from a qualifying country and you can invest money in your business then the E2 is the perfect visa to look at.

The key advantage of the E2 is that once the company has jumped through the necessary hoops to be granted E2 status, the transfer of its employees is far easier. Whereas most other visas need to be applied for on a person by person basis, the E2 applies to the company itself and not a particular individual. This means that even though the initial application process takes months and months, subsequent key-employee visas can in theory be arranged and issued in a matter of weeks.

E2: A world of catch 22

Getting the E2, however, is an arduous process. At the time we applied, the delay between submitting our application and actually being granted an interview was five months. Not only that but the visa also requires you to demonstrate that you are irreversibly committed to doing business in the US.

You need to show that the necessary funds have been invested and are already at work which means that should you fail to get the visa… you’re irrevocably committed. Not a great position to be in.

Showing that commitment requires evidence of expenditure on US employees, an office lease, bank accounts, tax returns and purchase receipts for equipment. Unfortunately those are exactly the type of things that the US border officials do not like to see.

Pack lightly and smile sweetly

The E2 requires demonstrating to the Visa officials that you are committed to and investing irreversibly in the states.

At the same time though you need demonstrate to the border officials that you’re leaving as soon as return flight is due and not intending to return. You certainly shouldn’t be bringing anything into the country that indicates you’re intending to stay for longer than 30 days (local bank cards, photo albums, US cellphone etc.)

We did three long (i.e. almost 90 day) trips before our visa interview and although we never overstepped any of the regulations, entry was hairy during entry on our second and third visits.

Fortunately for me the guard on my third visit hated the number of passwords he needed to do his job and when he found out what Clickpass was doing, wished me luck and waved me on through.

Acronym onslaught

The majority of the E2 requirements, business plans, rent, investment etc. are well defined and achievable. However two of the things you need are a bank account and also, ideally, payroll for any US employees.

In order to get these though you really need social security numbers. You can’t get an Social Security Number SSN without being a US resident which means instead getting either an EIN (Employer ID Number) or an ITIN (Individual Tax Payer Number) both of which are a PAIN.

To cut a long story short, despite our best bureaucratic wrangling we were unable to attain ITINs. As if from nowhere though, an EIN popped out of a random conversation we were having with an official who it seems we charmed / confused into co-operation. It seems out that EINs actually require almost no paperwork and that the main thing required is persistence.

Final interview

It took five months from submitting the application to being granted a visa but finally in April of this year it was time to plead our case.

The visa interview takes place in the individual’s country of origin and for us that meant the American embassy in London. The embassy is a little like being in a bank as all the interviews are done standing up and through thickened glass windows.

After arriving at 8AM and watching about a thousand Camp America teenagers collect their J1’s, I waited for four hours before I was finally called up and to the E2 window.

Over prepare

The documentation we had submitted ran to over a hundred pages but the officer dealing with us was was very familiar with all of it. Given the varied nature of the applications he sees I was impressed with how much time he’d taken to understand and study our application.

We had some excellent advice from the law firm we were using in London and as well as having already submitted one large file of information I also took another two files worth of supporting documentation. This included bank statements, press coverage of Clickpass and letters of support from Valley luminaries. I ended up needing almost every single document.

Granted

The interview lasted about three quarters of an hour and at the end at the end were granted a two year extendable visa to live and operate in the US. After twelve months of waiting, hundreds of hours of preparation and thousands of dollars worth of legal costs the relief of being granted the visa was almost overwhelming.

Not only would the consequences of denial have been catastrophic to the company they would have also meant that I as an individual could no longer travel under the visa waiver programme and despite being a British citizen, would have had to apply for a visa every time I visited.

When to go for it

The visa application process is expensive, very time consuming and very energy consuming. It saps time, attention and energy away from the core thing that any young business needs to do which is to grow.

There are many companies for whom that distraction simply doesn’t make sense. For us though I have no doubt that it was essential. Only weeks after launch, Clickpass is seeing thousands of registrations a week and the influence, support and partnerships that the company made in Silicon Valley were critical to that early success.

Although my first choice of base would always be London, I have no doubt that as a young technology team we would not have had the success we did had we stayed. Getting the visa was not a whole bundle of fun but if I had to go back and do it again I wouldn’t hesitate for a second.

[原文へ]

（翻訳：E.Kato）