Blueseed: Visa-free startup platform on a ship 30 minutes from Silicon Valley

This is really sad.<p>No, no the whole idea about building a floating incubator. It's the fact that immigrant &#38; visa laws are so ridiculously outlandish that it's perfectly conceivable to devise an elaborate and expensive "hacks" to circumvent them. Along with IP, this is probably the most visible area where U.S. law is stiffing innovation rather than fostering it.

IANAL, but I probably have more experience than many regarding immigration issues.<p>If you sell everything you have to live on this ship just outside of the US to sort of get access to a part of the US that the current visa system says you can't have access to, you may find you have a hard time demonstrating you have non-immigrant intent when trying to go to shore for meetings or R&#38;R.<p><a href="http://www.visapro.com/Immigration-Articles/?a=1575&#38;z=31" rel="nofollow">http://www.visapro.com/Immigration-Articles/?a=1575&#38;z=31</a><p>Keep in mind that every entry to the US is at the discretion of whatever border agent you happen to get that day, and pre-approved visa in your passport is merely a guide and not a guarantee of entry.

I see big problems in taxes and bank accounts.<p>1. Taxes:<p>So you incorporate on the BVIs or a similar tax heaven, because you don't want to pay taxes. You are not even using the infrastructure of a country, so that doesn't even feel morally wrong. But crucial parts of your company lay within the USA (servers, some investors, consultants, bank accounts..). There have been tax cases before (at least in Europe) where it has been argued that a server equals a permanent business establishment and therefore is taxable (I can not find an English language article on the quick but I remember a case where a german hat incorporated in Cyprus and used german servers). So that would be a mess.<p>2. Bank accounts<p>Does the country of the boats registration or the country you choose to incorporate have a stable banking system and currency? Can you get a Paypal (or whatever payment provider) account for this bank account? Or will you go for a US bank, which again leads us to (1), also I dont know how hard it is to open a bank account in the US on the name of a foreign company with no entity in the US. What will potential costumers think about bank accounts in county x? What happens if the US tightens rules on money laundry, making your transfers a pain?<p>Many questions will have to be solved on the way. I really hope the project succeeds, especially if it pushes US law-makers to think about their visas.

I'm not sure i'd want to be on a boat full of programmers and entrepreneurs. Just imagine the sort of arguments one could get yourself into.<p>Also how will order be enforced? One cannot assume everyone will be nice and benevolent. What happens in a medical emergency, can you get to the nearest hospital in time (assuming the onboard facilities are insufficient)? The lead programmer just fell overboard during a storm, what happens?

Actually this idea sounds to good to be true. Almost like a geek "The Boat That Rocked", but at the end, immigration or customs could be the pain in the ass for the residents of this ship. Not so much on how feasible it is, but more on the "they will make life hell for the residents on some kind of blacklist".<p>It all depends on the mood of third parties.<p>But actually this is the greatest hack to the immigration laws available.

The demographic of startup founders is severely lacking in gender and racial diversity. I don't know if I would want to go for months only seeing 1000 similar people (mostly men) with very similar occupations. In the end, entrepreneurs are people too and this would be a very bizarre society.

This is a really interesting idea, but they will have to be very careful about the culture and laws they enforce, especially with regards to wages and working hours.<p>Who pays the rent? What if the team member wants a private cabin and not sweatshop style accommodation? (Maybe I am thinking about the wrong demographic?)<p>- What happens when you want to leave and your visa is expired/revoked ? This sound like a place where you could <i>really</i> get <i>stuck</i>, with all the associated potential for abuse.<p>- They can make a killing on the price of coffee, food and entertainment for all these people.<p>Minor quibble: the 1GBps link seems small distributed over all the companies/person they imagine.

I vote for buying an old house in Cabo San Lucas and setting up a kick ass startup hub in front of the beach with all the modern amenities like huge teleconferencing walls and all. People could just cross over for a weekend on a tourist visa just for the really important face to face meetings.

So, the big sale here is the 30 minutes to... the shore of Santa Cruz? From there to Palo Alto is another hour (or more)? Unless they mean the Ano Nuevo Bay, which you'd have to drive even longer to get into the valley.<p>The real cultural wins they talk about in this slide deck don't come from the formal interactions planned ahead, but the random ones. The other day I was having an americano while doing some research in a cafe I'd never been to, and I accidentally got into a conversation with someone I'd never met before about writing compilers, changing python syntax for domain specific VM performance, and our favorite keyboards. The conversation has sparked at least a week of creativity and thought.<p>Anyone who's worked in technology outside of Silicon Valley (RTP, what up!) knows just how amazingly drastic the difference is. You're not going to be able to co-opt it on a boat 1.5-2 hours away.<p>But maybe they will. I'm going to bet against this, but I hope I lose my money. Success being a function of birthplace and parental wealth/race is a tragedy.

Can someone elaborate on how this is better than working remotely from back home? It doesn't sound like there's going to be a lot of action on the silicon deck, with people always coming and going to the shore. Why don't they just setup a remote mini incubator in a lawless region of the world where people can join online?

This looks like a insanely juicy target for pirates and drug lords. Incredibly easy target to take hostage, with lots of cash, rich people, passwords, intel, hardware, and lots and lots of real state to grow coca or poppy. Static, big, protected by few and very stressed PMC, and no fear whatever of retaliation. If they resist, just threaten to sink it down with one torpedo, or a cheap SCUD.<p>Hell, this is looking like an elevator pitch for a "counter-startup". Anyone interested?

What is bad about this idea: the weather. As a kid, I used to sail about once a year from San Francisco Bay to San Diego. The weather off shore at the planned site is not always so great, based on my personal experience.<p>Otherwise, an interesting idea!<p>I have done some good and creative work at sea. On the last cruise my wife and I took which lasted 25 days, many days were spent at sea and I found the public areas like the library were great places to both write and do some work. On sea days, spending 3 or 4 hours a day "working" didn't detract at all from enjoying the trip - given my tastes, it made the trip better. Except for shore tours which can be very expensive, the costs of spending long periods of time on cruise ships is not as much as you might think: the trick is to make reservations at the last minute and get jaw-dropping good deals.<p>What I am saying is that some people would probably really enjoy living and working on Blueseed, perhaps even some US citizens who want to partner with others in startups.

You are trying to hard and you are doing it wrong. Instead of doing this why don't you contact your congress people or whatever you guys have in the US and try to change the immigration laws ?<p>I'd rather cut my wrists than to spent my time on a boat full of prima-donas that want to "change the world".<p>I would love to move to SF one day, but I want to have living quality as much that country as to offer ,which isn't that good if you come from Europe, let's be honest, but it's probably one of the best places to live in the US, and not some artificial thingy floating in sea,<p>Again, if the US doesn't want us there because of our potential/skills, well then, I suggest we stop putting it in this big pedestal and start creating our own startups on our own countries or countries that want us there.<p>Question: Does YC fund foreign startups, if not, why ?

First of all, this certainly sounds like an interesting idea, regardless of whether or not it comes to fruition.<p>However, I don't know him personally, but everything I've ever read that was written by Peter Thiel had a really obnoxious tone. Assuming he's like that in real life (and it's possible he isn't), I can't imagine people wanting to be stuck on a boat with him. I'm dead serious. If he's just backing the project financially, I could really see it working. But if he's making appearances, his writing really makes him sound like the most arrogant SOB you could ever meet. I really could see this project failing if one too many stressed out entrepreneurs living in close quarters got into a yelling match with him.

So they are going to buy/build a 1,000 passenger ship (and a ferry, and a helicopter), fit it out top to toe with custom designs (including gym, pool, sports facilities, and apparently enough to keep you from going crazy), staff the thing (including security), maintain it, ship food (and people) back and forth from the mainland, etc.<p>And where exactly do they make their money? A bed on this thing is going to be mighty expensive....

If this works out, can we expect thousands of equivalent boats offshore of every desirable country in 10 years? What are the (legal or otherwise) limits?

I should read Ballard's "High Rise" before boarding this ship. Or maybe Lord Of The Flies.<p>I can picture the marauding feral packs of founders roaming the halls of the ship, ducking for cover behind burning barricades fashioned from Aeron chairs, hurling broken macbooks at interlopers from unfriendly decks.<p>Murder will be done on this boat.

This is really like the movie Good Morning England: <a href="http://www.imdb.fr/title/tt1131729/" rel="nofollow">http://www.imdb.fr/title/tt1131729/</a> in theory as well as in execution.<p>It seems the timeframe is very optimistic (1 year to find a boat and adapt it??) but if it works it will change the world.

This seems another in a category of proposals so grand and outlandish and controversial that a small team can make a tidy living for years researching &#38; promoting something which will never happen. Conjure up a plan with a price tag having enough digits, and you'll attract enough interest to live on for a while.<p>Same category as the libertarian-utopia "Oceania" project, the billion-dollar indoor ski resort near Atlanta, the bridge spanning the Strait of Gibraltar, and a half-dozen mile-high skyscraper projects. 1% of 1% of $1,000,000,000 is nothing for someone who could move that kind of money, but it's enough to keep me happy for a while. So, we buy a used cruise ship, park it in international waters, and ... hey, for 1% of 1% of total cost I'll give you a workable plan.

Shades of Stephenson'ian dystopic vision pierce my subconscious. I hope nobody ends up "listening to Reason" out there on those woolly waves.<p>Seriously though, wouldn't this be considered "economic terrorism" by the US Gov't, eventually, if it does well?

Wow. It's been exactly one year (3/14) since an action was last taken on the bill: <a href="http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s112-565" rel="nofollow">http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s112-565</a>

This is really cool. It would be awesome if US citizens and residents can rent a room in the ship for 2-3 months and work from there. The rent is cheap and you get the amenities of a cruise ship. Plus US citizens and residents can travel to SF by ferry in anytime they want. Besides it would be difficult host so many entrepreneurs in the city in one place for a long time. Ship is a great idea. Similar idea can be applied to certain types of education too.

Well it certainly doesn't sound like it's going to be environmentally friendly.

It is a bold idea, it is "slightly" crazy, but it is worth giving a shot. Things like this push the status quo and capture mainstream media's attention to cover the issue.

I really hope this is going to work but am fearful that the system is just going to crush them in short order. I suppose that is a battle worth fighting.

Put the ship in movement, in a different country in every 3 months, and definitely it is a good idea.

That is what bioshock did.

I love the initiative. But man, what an amazing amount of effort to hack around america's broken visa situation. This should be embarrassing to every representative, senator and the president.<p>Worse, I'm half afraid if they build it, the US will just unilaterally declare that its borders extend out 20 or 50 miles into the sea. (they've done this with fishing rights in the past, I believe.) Or if they can't extend the borders, I don't expect the DHS to be very friendly to these people. ITs very obviously a hack around US's sovereignty and therefore will be perceived as a threat. Britain barely tolerates sealand mainly because of the genteel culture that appreciates eccentrics. IF Sealand was big enough to grow and be a real economy, it wouldn't be tolerated for very long. The US has less of a tradition of tolerance for these kinds of experiments.<p>I do think starting with a cruise ship is probably a good idea-- there are a lot of used cruise ships and they depreciate quite a bit over their working career. You could get a really nice ship really pretty cheap because there isn't much else of a market for them outside the cruise industry (and scrap doesn't pay that much.) I say this with some confidence because I've priced out cruise ships in the past for another idea (that was just an idea, not a project.) Eventually a lot of the ships become nearly free, and sell for the cost of a couple months moorage. Though of course on the older ships, renovations become expensive. TANSTAAFL. But old ships approach scrap value.<p>The sad thing is, if Peter Theil wanted to create a startup incubator City, and was willing to do it in Chile, the Chilean government would probably loan him all the money necessary to buy the land (say an hour or 2 out of santiago) and let him go to town. He could likely import as many startups as he wanted. A chilean residency visa for a year isn't that hard (costs about $1,000) and can be renewed each year and eventually you can just get a permanent residency visa if you want.<p>It just seems wrong to see people trying to bring startups to a country that clearly doesn't give a damn about them... when there are other countries that truly do give a damn.<p>Silicon Valley is a result of a historical confluence- the WWII industry, schools and all that. It won't be replicated and the government of California and the USA generally seems to take it for granted. (I read yesterday that tax receipts in california dropped %22 last year because of businesses leaving the state.)<p>I think the silicon valley of the next 50 years won't be in california... I think it would be better spending the effort building it somewhere that has a chance (notice how the tolerant regulatory environment of blue seed was one of its big attractions.) Whatever you build won't be just like silicon valley... but if it has a good visa policy, it will start attracting the best and the brightest from all over the world, because, frankly, most governments are hostile to business one way or another (even when they don't intend to be.)

It's a brilliantly cool idea... but I'm just <i>trying</i> to imagine the gender dynamic on that ship, and I can't come up with a way it could be very healthy.

Not everybody feels that way about immigration laws.<p>Outside SV, many regard H-1B Visas as a force that creates downward pressure on wages and working conditions for software developers.<p>One thing we do know is that immigrants form "networks" in SV and other places. There's no doubt that some of these networks are highly innovative but it's also clear that many immigrants are motivated to bring as many of their friends from the "old country" as they can -- and this consideration might affect their decision and hiring practices more than rational and economic considerations.<p>The truth is that the social fabric is strained to the breaking point in SF and SV. You can't walk 25 feet in SF without tripping over a homeless hippie. I don't know exactly how, but the overheated venture capital culture has got something to do with it.<p>Something I never hear about is that SV investors might consider starting a secondary center in, say, Kansas City or Mumbai.