Global EIR

Helping struggling Middle America cities make the innovation economy work for their communities through partnering with immigrant startup entrepreneurs

In the 21st Century to date, the best and brightest from Middle America leave for the coasts and growing cities as soon as they can, whether that's for college or after graduation. Meaningful jobs are there, opportunity, and communities built around growth. 

What remains? Leaders in love with the city where they put down roots looking for a reason to hope for a better future. A future where their children don't have to leave to find meaningful work.

The Kauffman Foundation notes that almost all net job creation happens because of new business formation. Increasingly, new businesses are unequally forming along the coasts. American cities in the middle are struggling to reinvent themselves in the post-industrial world, and they're being starved of well-paid, interesting, and innovative jobs by coastal cities.

At the same time, the American Congress has failed to pass a startup visa over the past decade, despite a lack of opposition and plenty of support. These immigrant entrepreneurs who lack an official visa pathway are forced to return home to start a company or put aside their entrepreneurial dreams for a 9-5 until securing a green card in a decade or more. They know that being in America is always better than being outside to pursue these dreams, even if they're not in Silicon Valley. They attend and graduate from schools throughout America and would be willing to invest their time and passion into their communities given the chance to do so.

Our solution is to combine the two problems. Global EIR leverages the ability of these cities' local colleges and universities to provide access to visas for the entrepreneurs, who in turn will build the next generation of anchor businesses for the towns that took a bet on them. These new businesses will create jobs and reinvigorate towns and cities that launch and run Global EIR programs. Ultimately, a brighter future of work will emerge for the new generation of residents and the region who can find good pay and purpose by staying near where they grew up.

Global EIR's success will mean a successful pushback of geographic inequality; nationally—finding meaningful work shouldn't have to mean leaving your home and community—and internationally—entrepreneurial success should be available to as many people as possible, regardless of where they're born. Since the Great Recession, a mere 20 counties created half of the new jobs, mostly clustered on the coasts. We look to a brighter future where growth is shared more evenly across the US, that more people in places like Tulsa and Detroit can access and benefit from the innovation economy.

Global EIR's founders found a visa pathway within existing immigration law that enables colleges and universities to provide access to the pathway to immigrant entrepreneurs. Others have used it, but no one has successfully scaled it before. 

We work with local community leaders across America to build the operations and assemble the support that makes scaling possible. We tune each program to the economic development needs of our local partners, whether that's working with Latinx entrepreneurs or building a watertech community.

Where groups like Rise of the Rest put capital into communities, we help them attract and retain talented entrepreneurs.

Mostly, we support tech-driven, high-growth startups, which are valuable drivers of job creation and innovation. What's unique about our solution is the process driving it, which was a little-known legal pathway that we've scaled up, using best practices from the startup community, specifically Techstars. As we scale, we plan to use technology more directly to maintain a small, nimble team that supports a large number of partners.

Ensure that our Tulsa and Detroit programs take root with sufficient local funding to achieve our goals—or in the specific case of Detroit, which has a $1.5m grant for three years, begin putting that funding to use—attract a sizeable pool of applicants, and successfully secure visas for a number of selected applicants.

Achieve self-sufficiency with revenues/grants related to these programs, and turn towards accelerating our growth rate based on the success of our flagship Boston program (47 visas and growing) and extant network of partner programs.

Our vision in the next three to five years is to have dozens of cities across America using Global EIR to grow their local innovation economies and creating hundreds and thousands of new jobs for their residents. As each program launches and gains confidence, it can run autonomously and ultimately reach self-sustainability after an initial seed grant from local sources.

We'll ensure a steady stream of applicants as we completely solve the immigration problem for the existing pool of international entrepreneurs and begin seeing the surge of graduating international students using the Global EIR pathway to pursue their entrepreneurial dreams.

We reach our customers primarily through word of mouth and introductions right now. They are business and civic leaders who bring foundations, local political leaders, and colleges and universities to the table. We deploy locally to work alongside these communities to launch and run Global EIR programs.

By building relationships with startup communities around the world over the past decade, we are overwhelmed with demand by immigrant entrepreneurs, currently on the order of hundreds of applications each year.

Beyond that, we expect thousands out of the 1.1m international student population will pursue entrepreneurial initiatives given the chance.

Right now, 55 entrepreneurs gained visas through Global EIR, and many have moved on to their next visa or have secured permanent residency. They don't have to worry about being forced to leave their company behind in the US when their visitor or student visa expires, thanks to Global EIR.

They employ 580 people, roughly, and are putting over $312m in capital to work. Few, if any, would have jobs without Global EIR.

Their companies interact with the communities of six cities through our partnerships with 13 colleges and universities across America.

In 12 months: our partners will have secured our 100th visa approval, with over 1000 people employed by these companies and around $500m in capital. We 15-20 partner programs in operation by then, all based on past growth trends and our current pipeline, with 3-5 actively scaling to 10+ entrepreneurs served/year. 

Growth is driven by launching more programs and serving more entrepreneurs per program. The Kauffman Foundation estimates that 10,000 immigrant entrepreneurs can be served each year, ultimately leading to between 500,000 and 1,400,000 new jobs created each decade for our partner communities. Serving 500-1000/year is our target for 2021.

Our two operational leads both have a background in Silicon Valley and politics. We were able to deliver solutions to advance the startup visa cause as lobbyists and community organizers during the 2011-2014 period. 

Our repeated demonstration of passion for and service to our communities meant that when previous efforts stalled out, our supporters and backers turned to us and empowered us to make our impact outside of the traditional political arena. We proved our ability to bring a program to launch, which brought in further resources and supporters, which we hope will snowball and drive future growth.

Our current revenue model is to serve as subject matter experts in a consulting role to regional programs as they launch and scale. Customers are business and civic leaders who secure foundation or donor support and pay us for our operational expertise.

Individual programs are able to meet about a third of their operational costs with resource usage fees paid by participating companies, while remaining costs are covered by seed funding and partnership support by local businesses, especially banks and corporate law firms.

Over time and as the network of individual Global EIR programs achieve general self-sustainability, we'll transition to a model of services provided to our network, e.g. generating recruiting opportunities internationally or training sessions to spread best practices.

Finally, around the 10 year mark, we expect to see an increasing amount of Global EIR alumni who have achieved success with their businesses choosing to donate to pay it forward to the next generation of Global EIR entrepreneurs and the communities that supported them. We're using the Pledge 1% model to set up these future donations.

Solve seems like it's grappling with the same big problems we're hearing from our community partners in Middle America. How do their communities survive and thrive? What provides meaning to their friends and family? What reasons can they offer their kids' generation to stay or come and make their future in town where they put down roots?

I believe the Solve knowledge base and community can help us find the next generation of partners and solutions to bring Global EIR to the next level, perhaps entree to a new town where a Solve community member is currently working.

The biggest barrier is defining who are supporters are and what community we belong to. We've been significantly growth-limited by available resources. Partially, we need assistance telling our story more concisely and attractively. Partially, we need a better sense of how to deploy tech to support our scaling efforts.

We initially began solely as an immigration solution for international entrepreneurs. These people were considered too elite by immigration impact funders, while we saw increasing interest from economic development interests. 

Solve can help us better understand the Future of Work space and to tell our story from this perspective.