The Immigrant Founder of Instagram

Getting an American work visa is not exactly easy, as anyone who has applied for an H1B visa knows. A qualification to operate in that field in the US (some are country-specific qualifications, like lawyers and doctors, whereas others are universal qualifications, like engineers), and/or specialized occupations (generally science, tech, or management jobs fill that bill). Then there’s the other side of the story – the company sponsoring the visa (after all, the US government doesn’t fake companies setup as a backdoor for immigration).

 

What happens then if a Silicon Valley startup founder is a foreigner? With a startup, the company-side criteria is a big problem – the company is barely started! That’s the situation Instagram faced when its founder, Kevin Systrom tried to enlist his Stanford-mate from Brazil, Mike Krieger, write Sarah Frier in her biography of Instagram.

 

Before we get to how that went, let’s take a detour of how Krieger told his parents in Brazil of his decision to join a startup. We send you to America/Stanford and this is what you do? Found a startup that may never succeed? Instead of getting a high-paying job at some MNC? Krieger knew those were the kinds of questions he’d get, so he told them the “idea in steps”. In the first call home, he said he was thinking of the possibility, if an opportunity arose. A few days later, he called to say he’d bumped into a college mate with an interesting idea. At the end of the week, he called and said he’d done his research and felt it was a good idea.

“His parents, under the impression that their son had taken his time to make the choice, were supportive.”

 

Now let’s go back to the original problem: getting a work visa for a startup. They needed to show a business plan. But of course, startups are totally unpredictable. Plus, they often change course when ideas don’t work. But what choice did they have? In the application, they said the company would make money via some local coupon system (whatever that meant). And drew a chart saying they planned to have a million users by their third year.

“They laughed about how improbable that was.”

Even worse, until the application was processed, it wasn’t legal to work for the startup. Krieger was just sitting there spinning his wheels. As things dragged on, he told Systrom to consider a different co-founder, an American citizen. Systrom refused – he’d seen enough startups that didn’t work out due to a lack of rapport among its founders. He said he’d rather wait for Krieger.

 

Eventually, the visa came through and the rest, as they say, is history. Instagram would go on become the go-to-place for viewing photographic and creative excellence, get acquired by Facebook for a then-gigantic sum of $1 billion, and under Facebook, grow and grow to have over a billion users today.

 

In 2012, President Obama’s wife would invite Krieger to show him as a poster-child of how much benefit America can get from its immigrants!