Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Startup Founders

Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Startup Founders
By Farhad Manjoo

Andy Grove, Intel's former chairman and CEO, was born in Hungary in 1936 and immigrated to the United States in his 20s. Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo, was born in Taipei, Taiwan, and moved to San Jose, Calif., with his family as a child. Sergey Brin, who co-founded Google, came to the United States from his native Russia when he was 6. They aren't special cases: About one-quarter of American tech companies are founded in part or entirely by foreigners. The proportion in Silicon Valley is even higher—a recent survey (PDF) by Vivek Wadhwa, an engineering professor at Duke University, showed that more than 52 percent of Valley startups were founded or co-founded by people born outside of the United States. According to Wadhwa's research, immigrant-founded firms produced $52 billion in sales and employed 450,000 workers in 2005.

http://www.slate.com/id/2228258/pagenum/all/#p2



[Posted by Melissa Cuen]