Sharing Scheduler App Buffer Raises $400,000, Gets Kicked Out Of US

As an American, our immigration policies make me so damn mad. I know both Leo and Joel quite well, having went through AngelPad together, and they were building a solid company that should have stayed in America.<p>The fact that wealth-builders, and innovative startup founders that seek to create new frontiers can't legally find a way of staying in this country is preposterous.

This is so unfortunate to happen to such a good group of founders. When Buffer first launched, I sent Joel an email pertaining to cron jobs. I was just learning to code generic hello world scripts, and he not only got back to me, but his response was helpful and encouraging. The US lost a good team in this gaffe, unfortunately.<p>I actually now use Buffer regularly at my startup (I should actually start using it more), and to be honest, I never cared where you guys were based -- the product worked well. Just keep up the good work wherever you settle :)

How were they in the US in the first place?

This is definitely <i>not</i> a failure of your immigration system.<p>They didn't even move to the US to start this, it started in the UK and then, let's be frank, they went off to the US for a jolly holiday. Now they're going to Hong Kong for a jolly holiday.<p>All props to starting a business, etc. but if you can't sell Buffer from the UK and you can't sell it from the US, you're not going to be able to sell it from Hong Kong.<p>To everyone saying the US lost a great team, they didn't need to be there. The company was setup in the UK already running, it started in 2010. Joel was standing in front of me practically a year to the day in the UK advocating bootstrapping and now he's suddenly raised $400,000 for a trivial twitter app. How on earth can you spend $400,000 on a tweet scheduler?<p>The guy's great, I think the apps great for what it is, yes they're having a great time travelling the world. I appreciate people can change their minds.<p>Also they're probably a UK company and pay UK corporation taxes, not US ones, but I'm not sure as their terms of service and their website don't explicitly say who the legal owner of the app is or their registration number or registration address (illegally I might add if they're from the UK). If he's running it as a sole trader he should explicitly say so in his terms of service.<p>EDIT: Joel's deck from Dec 2010 advocating bootstrapping:<p><a href="http://notttuesday.com/2010/12/17/joel-gascoignes-lean-startup-slide-deck/" rel="nofollow">http://notttuesday.com/2010/12/17/joel-gascoignes-lean-start...</a>

Congrats guys! Sorry to see you go :(

Could you move to the Chilli Startup. Seems interesting over there. I've been tempted to apply.

I for one am ashamed that my country has mistreated them.

Hold on. If the average person reads 10 articles in the morning and 10 articles at lunch, why is the optimal time to send your friends articles some <i>other</i> time during the day?