investment, investors, international, entrepreneurism-abroadI am running a software company in Europe and I want to get funding from Silicon Valley investors. Open a small office in Silicon Valley but keep most of the operations, development, etc.. and 1 cofounder in Europe. This way I believe we can get more stuff done with the funding we receive.
I know that they don’t directly invest in companies that are not present in US. But what if we had linked companies in 2 countries?
During a recent mission to the Silicon Valley, with an Angel Group, I had many meetings with SV angels, advisors, mentors, accelerators, lawyers and consultants.
One of the things that was highly mentioned by all of them is the lack of available talent in the Valley at this point. Economy is blooming and even a StartUp investment bubble is being considered. Finance-focused media has even written about that possible bubble recently.
One of the main reasons that seem to be well mentioned is precisely the difficulty in bringing in foreign talent to the US in general, and as a consequence, to SV. That is a collateral effect of the immigration policy adopted as a general rule in the US.
Being with a foreign mission, one of my main objectives was trying to understand how to get some of my invested StartUps in the US market, and in SV if possible. So that theme was pretty well addressed in my questions and remarks.
The general rule that was stated was: if you have a legally established US company and your Tech Founder and preferably the CEO (or some other high C-level team member) are located in the Silicon Valley and you have a huge market in the US for whatever it is that you do, than your company will be treated as a US company by local investors. Having a foreign team seems to be the rule these days, and cost-economy and visa issues is making that even desirable for some companies.
I have even met with consultants that deal specifically with “flip” (local name for bringing your StartUp to the US) issues.
You need to be realistic that it’s tougher to achieve what you want, and some investors won’t look at you. So do your homework, find people who have succeeded before you and reach out to build your network and your knowledge.
A number of SV firms have a meaningful presence in Europe, so you might want to start by making those connections. Here in the UK, London is a great place for all kinds of software businesses, and Cambridge for a narrower subset of typically more tech-rich startups. There’s no denying that SV offers scale, access to capital and a culture that Europe isn’t close to matching, but the complexity of a split operation is going at least to offset some of that differential.
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