A religion to get foreign entrepreneurs into Silicon Valley?

Startups are a religion. Founders are zealots.<p>Let me explain. In 1967, my parents received a letter from a missionary who taught at a school in rural Honduras. She asked them to help her run the school.<p>9 months later, my parents packed up all their worldly belongings into a Chevy pickup truck, and drove south 5,000 miles. Their 3 children under 5 rode along side my parents in the front seat.<p>My parents worked for 20 years in Central America, running schools, starting at least 10 churches, rehabbing 3 youth camps, doing refugee work ( Nicaraguan revolution happened then ), started a seminary, did literacy work, etc...<p>Most of their time was spent building community, getting people together to talk about shared values and beliefs, and helping people work together to build organizations that could help others.<p>I've spent most of my life hanging around missionaries. I actually dropped out of Bible school 20 years ago. My original plan was to be a missionary in the middle of a jungle somewhere. (True story). Last thing in the world I wanted to do was to stay in the US and start a business. Oops. Point is. I know missionaries.<p>Five years ago, my wife and I moved to Silicon Valley with all our wordly possessions in a moving van. And, we started work on our startup. Hackers &#38; Founders is all about building community, helping other people connect and talk about shared values (building startups, and hacking cool stuff together), and enabling them to build startups that can help themselves, and their customers.<p>We're going to be building educational resources: Hackers &#38; Founders University, a physical coworking space (at some point), small groups ( Hackers &#38; Founders @ Lunch ), large events with a speaker (preacher?), and general community building at our networking events.<p>Missionaries and founders are zealots. They generally take huge risks for the sake of their quixotic beliefs and ideals. They are passionate and evangelistic about promoting what they believe in. They build communities of customers, and try their best to serve them.<p>Misionaries == Founders &#38;&#38; Startups == a religion.<p>Laura (my wife and H&#38;F cofounder) and I often joke around that we're building the Church of the Startup with Hackers &#38; Founders.

<i>Could there be some special religion related visa?</i><p>The Mormons generally use Religious Worker (R) visas in the United States (and often similar ones internationally).<p>Please do not actually attempt to convince a consular officer that you are the representative of an entrepreneurial religion. The time it takes to reject your application -- which is as-night-follows-day <i>inevitable</i> -- is time that the officer could have been using to examine and approve someone who has a legitimate case for a visa.

On a more realistic note, I've often thought that combining hacker/maker spaces, good digital libraries and some communal living would make an excellent, low-cost fellowship for people looking to experiment for a couple of years. Related as I characterize the arrangement as monastic.

How did the organizations which have amassed unimaginable wealth through not being taxed manage to get preferential treatment in the immigration law and its implementing system? Tough question...<p>Btw, remember the religious worker visa being officially excluded from GC petition Premium Processing (15 days fast track) implemented for various employment based categories in the 2007 for the exact reason of being the category with the highest fraud found by the official investigation? One can imagine how bad the situation have been for the government to start officially "discriminate" against religion :)<p><a href="http://www.murthy.com/news/n_prorev.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.murthy.com/news/n_prorev.html</a><p>Why it isn't surprising that self-righteous people who think that they are owners of highest and the only truth [ and thus entitled to not pay their fair share ] are also the most fraud perpetrating?

I've actually been joking about wanting to start the first YC-funded religion for a while. I think there are a lot of good idioms and paradigms from religion that one can use to tackle a variety of secular problems. I'm particularly inspired by the open source religion movement that's currently gaining momentum. That said, I'm not convinced that religion is the best approach for the particularly problem that you're trying to solve here. And even if it is, I think you're making the mistake of assuming that all religions have to basically look or feel like Christianity.<p>In any case, silicon valley already has its own set of highly evolved spiritual beliefs. And no matter how much research you did I think it would be very difficult to impose some sort of external religion on top of that without changing the sorts of relationships that people have with each other, which I'd be hesitant to mess with too much since that is sort of the secret sauce of the place.

Of interest: for legal and tax purposes, some Humanist groups declare themselves religions, and this has been upheld in various court proceedings.

Did I read this article wrong? Why would American Mormons need to go through American immigration to work in another country?<p>I live in Northeast Thailand, and there is a hive of Mormons not too far from here who always travel on bicycle in pairs, and always wearing black trousers, white shirts and little black name tags. Local people just think they are crazy and ignore them. I have know idea how they work out visas out here. But I do know they have a lot of under the table political clout in many countries mostly because of money paid over many decades. When I lived in Hong Kong, I remember someone telling me that in 50 years they had only converted a handful of people.

My view of this is that it is intended as humor and is kind of tossing out the idea of "surely, there must be some sort of hack available for the visa problem". I was hoping it would inspire serious discussion of that piece of it rather than having people focus on the part of it that looks to me like it is tongue-in-cheek. (I get that kind of reaction a lot myself, which is sometimes frustrating, so it's possible I am projecting rather than being insightful.) Serious discussion of immigration options would be an interesting discussion to me. Busting people on the idea of "you can't be really serious about this" is pretty meh.<p>Peace.

who's John Galt?

I don't understand why people in the Netherlands are so gung ho about emigrating to the US. All I hear from europeans is how the US is a warmongering nation that has health care only for the rich. I think that's largely true, but then why is there such a big rush to come here to work. Could it be that The Netherlands is not the paradise that it is commonly promoted as?<p>I'd also like to see a list of nations that Americans with some sort of programming background can emigrate to with no hassle. Nothing special, just the sort of ease of moving in that they expect the US to provide to their people.