Dear Sophie: How do we handle being fully remote when it comes to immigration?

Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.

“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”

TechCrunch+ members receive access to weekly “Dear Sophie” columns; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one- or two-year subscription for 50% off.


Dear Sophie,

Our fully remote startup is looking to fill several new engineering positions. 

We have not gone through the immigration process with employees before, and a couple of prospective hires will require visas. One is currently on an H-1B and living in Dallas. Another candidate is currently living in Germany and wants to work from Miami.

What should we consider before hiring these engineers? How do we handle being fully remote when it comes to immigration?

— Distributed and Determined

Dear Distributed,

The pandemic rapidly changed the way we work. Many companies like yours now have a distributed or a hybrid workforce.

I recently had a great talk with Hannah Genton, a founding partner of CGL, a corporate law firm that has had a fully distributed team since it launched in 2017. We chatted about her work with startup clients and she described several issues that startups should keep in mind, particularly if they have distributed or hybrid teams.

Protecting your company

A composite image of immigration law attorney Sophie Alcorn in front of a background with a TechCrunch logo.

Image Credits: Joanna Buniak / Sophie Alcorn (opens in a new window)

Genton says consulting a corporate attorney before extending a job offer, taking on equity or debt, or signing major contracts will help you make informed decisions and protect your company from penalties and lawsuits. Corporate, employment and privacy laws differ in each state, so you should know what you can and can’t do. A corporate attorney can also guide you in creating a distributed work policy for your company.

I also recommend consulting an immigration attorney before moving forward with the two prospective new hires you mentioned. An immigration attorney can guide you through the H-1B transfer process, next steps to retain that person after the H-1B visa is set to expire and assess the most promising visa options available at the time.

I list some of the most common work visas that startups use to sponsor talent in this TechCrunch article, but an attorney can also assist you in devising a solid immigration strategy based on your company’s goals and timing.

Now, let’s dive into your other questions.

What should I know about H-1B transfers?

You should know that the maximum stay allowed under an H-1B is six years — unless the employer or the H-1B visa holder has already started the green card process. Given that, you should find out:

Dear Sophie: How do I successfully expand my company to the US?

​​Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.

“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”

TechCrunch+ members receive access to weekly “Dear Sophie” columns; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one- or two-year subscription for 50% off.


Dear Sophie,

I’m an entrepreneur in Guatemala and would like to come to the United States to expand my tech company.

What is the best way to do that?

— Groundbreaking Guatemalan

Dear Groundbreaking,

What fantastic news that you’re looking to tackle the U.S. market. In a recent podcast (which is actually trending in your country the last several weeks!), I discussed my take on how to best establish a startup for immigration success. Whether a founder wants to make their way to the United States – or if they’re already here and want to start a venture of their own – we discussed the details. There are even options for companies that are newly formed with limited funding.

It’s important to know your options when setting up your company in the United States. This knowledge enables your company to successfully sponsor you, your founding team, and other prospective hires for visas and green cards if needed – prospective investors will also feel more comfortable investing in your company. Super important, right?! Before you get too deep into your plans, I recommend you consult both a corporate attorney and an immigration attorney to assist you in your efforts.

A composite image of immigration law attorney Sophie Alcorn in front of a background with a TechCrunch logo.

Image Credits: Joanna Buniak / Sophie Alcorn (opens in a new window)

LLC versus Delaware C-corp

One of the first decisions you’ll need to make is how to structure your company in the U.S. A business or corporate attorney will be able to help you make this decision. In general, both corporations and LLCs are able to sponsor individuals for a U.S. visa or green card.

What I typically see in the startup ecosystem are that most VCs prefer investing in a C corporation created in Delaware (Delaware C-corp). That’s primarily because Delaware laws protect investors, and Delaware C-corps can distribute two or more classes of stock and stock options to employees, investors, and board members.

There is no U.S. residency or citizenship requirement to set up a Delaware C-corp, and it can be done within a day. For more info on this topic, listen to my chat about startup law with my good friend and trusted colleague Lindsey Mignano, founding partner of Smith Shapourian Mignano, a corporate law firm based in San Francisco that focuses on startups.

Also, talk to your business attorney about the ownership structure of these entities as well. For example, one possibility is that your Guatemalan company could own your U.S.-based company. However, most investors prefer to invest in a parent company based in the United States, so you could consider setting up your U.S. company to own your company in Guatemala. However, if you’ve already distributed shares in your company in Guatemala, this could be a cumbersome process that might best wait until you’re ready for a funding round. Then, you could do what’s called a Delaware flip — and you should definitely have your corporate attorney advise you on doing that.

Google’s Gradient Ventures leads $8.2M Series A for Vault Platform’s misconduct reporting SaaS

Fixing workplace misconduct reporting is a mission that’s snagged London-based Vault Platform backing from Google’s AI focused fund, Gradient Ventures, which is the lead investor in an $8.2 million Series A that’s being announced today.

Other investors joining the round are Illuminate Financial, along with existing investors including Kindred Capital and Angular Ventures. Its $4.2M seed round was closed back in 2019.

Vault sells a suite of SaaS tools to enterprise-sized or large/scale-up companies to support them to pro-actively manage internal ethics and integrity issues. As well as tools for staff to report issues, data and analytics is baked into the platform — so it can support with customers’ wider audit and compliance requirements.

In an interview with TechCrunch, co-founder and CEO Neta Meidav said that as well as being wholly on board with the overarching mission to upgrade legacy reporting tools like hotlines provided to staff to try to surface conduct-related workplace risks (be that bullying and harassment; racism and sexism; or bribery, corruption and fraud), as you might expect Gradient Ventures was interested in the potential for applying AI to further enhance Vault’s SaaS-based reporting tool.

A feature of its current platform, called ‘GoTogether’, consists of an escrow system that allows users to submit misconduct reports to the relevant internal bodies but only if they are not the first or only person to have made a report about the same person — the idea being that can help encourage staff (or outsiders, where open reporting is enabled) to report concerns they may otherwise hesitate to, for various reasons.

Vault now wants to expand the feature’s capabilities so it can be used to proactively surface problematic conduct that may not just relate to a particular individual but may even affect a whole team or division — by using natural language processing to help spot patterns and potential linkages in the kind of activity being reported.

“Our algorithms today match on an alleged perpetrator’s identity. However many events that people might report on are not related to a specific person — they can be more descriptive,” explains Meidav. “For example if you are experiencing some irregularities in accounting in your department, for example, and you’re suspecting that there is some sort of corruption or fraudulent activity happening.”

“If you think about the greatest [workplace misconduct] disasters and crises that happened in recent years — the Dieselgate story at Volkswagen, what happened in Boeing — the common denominator in all these cases is that there’s been some sort of a serious ethical breach or failure which was observed by several people within the organization in remote parts of the organization. And the dots weren’t connected,” she goes on. “So the capacity we’re currently building and increasing — building upon what we already have with GoTogether — is the ability to connect on these repeated events and be able to connect and understand and read the human input. And connect the dots when repeated events are happening — alerting companies’ boards that there is a certain ‘hot pocket’ that they need to go and investigate.

“That would save companies from great risk, great cost, and essentially could prevent huge loss. Not only financial but reputational, sometimes it’s even loss to human lives… That’s where we’re getting to and what we’re aiming to achieve.”

There is the question of how defensible Vault’s GoTogether feature is — how easily it could be copied — given you can’t patent an idea. So baking in AI smarts may be a way to layer added sophistication to try to maintain a competitive edge.

“There’s some very sophisticated, unique technology there in the backend so we are continuing to invest in this side of our technology. And Gradient’s investment and the specific we’re receiving from Google now will only increase that element and that side of our business,” says Meidav when we ask about defensibility.

Commenting on the funding in a statement, Gradient Ventures founder and managing partner, Anna Patterson, added: “Vault tackles an important space with an innovative and timely solution. Vault’s application provides organizations with a data-driven approach to tackling challenges like occupational fraud, bribery or corruption incidents, safety failures and misconduct. Given their impressive team, technology, and customer traction, they are poised to improve the modern workplace.”

The London-based startup was only founded in 2018 — and while it’s most keen to talk about disrupting legacy hotline systems, which offer only a linear and passive conduit for misconduct reporting, there are a number of other startups playing in the same space. Examples include the likes of LA-based AllVoices, YC-backed WhispliHootsworth and Spot to name a few.

Competition seems likely to continue to increase as regulatory requirements around workplace reporting keep stepping up.

The incoming EU Whistleblower Protection Directive is one piece of regulation Vault expects will increase demand for smarter compliance solutions — aka “TrustTech”, as it seeks to badge it — as it will require companies of more than 250 employees to have a reporting solution in place by the end of December 2021, encouraging European businesses to cast around for tools to help shrink their misconduct-related risk.

She also suggests a platform solution can help bridge gaps between different internal teams that may need to be involved in addressing complaints, as well as helping to speed up internal investigations by offering the ability to chat anonymously with the original reporter.

Meidav also flags the rising attention US regulators are giving to workplace misconduct reporting — noting some recent massive awards by the SEC to external whistleblowers, such as the $28M paid out to a single whistleblower earlier this year (in relation to the Panasonic Avionics consultant corruption case).

She also argues that growing numbers of companies going public (such as via the SPAC trend, where there will have been reduced regulatory scrutiny ahead of the ‘blank check’ IPO) raises reporting requirements generally — meaning, again, more companies will need to have in place a system operated by a third party which allows anonymous and non-anonymous reporting. (And, well, we can only speculate whether companies going public by SPAC may be in greater need of misconduct reporting services vs companies that choose to take a more traditional and scrutinized route to market… )

“Just a few years back I had to convince investors that this category it really is a category — and fast forward to 2021, congratulations! We have a market here. It’s a growing category and there is competition in this space,” says Meidav.

“What truly differentiates Vault is that we did not just focus on digitizing an old legacy process. We focused on leveraging technology to truly empower more misconduct to surface internally and for employees to speak up in ways that weren’t available for them before. GoTogether is truly unique as well as the things that we’re doing on the operational side for a company — such as collaboration.”

She gives an example of how a customer in the oil and gas sector configured the platform to make use of an anonymous chat feature in Vault’s app so they could provide employees with a secure direct-line to company leadership.

“They’ve utilizing the anonymous chat that the app enables for people to have a direct line to leadership,” she says. “That’s incredible. That is such a progress, forward looking way to be utilizing this tool.”

Vault Platform’s suite of tools include an employee app and a Resolution Hub for compliance, HR, risk and legal teams (Image credits: Vault Platform)

Meidav says Vault has around 30 customers at this stage, split between the US and EU — its core regions of focus.

And while its platform is geared towards enterprises, its early customer base includes a fair number of scale-ups — with familiar names like Lemonade, Airbnb, Kavak, G2 and OVO Energy on the list.

Scale ups may be natural customers for this sort of product given the huge pressures that can be brought to bear upon company culture as a startup switches to expanding headcount very rapidly, per Meidav.

“They are the early adopters and they are also very much sensitive to events such as these kind of [workplace] scandals as it can impact them greatly… as well as the fact that when a company goes through a hyper growth — and usually you see hyper growth happening in tech companies more than in any other type of sector — hyper growth is at time when you really, as management, as leadership, it’s really important to safeguard your culture,” she suggests.

“Because it changes very, very quickly and these changes can lead to all sorts of things — and it’s really important that leadership is on top of it. So when a company goes through hyper growth it’s an excellent time for them to incorporate a tool such as Vault. As well as the fact that every company that even thinks of an IPO in the coming months or years will do very well to put a tool like Vault in place.”

Expanding Vault’s own team is also on the cards after this Series A close, as it guns for the next phase of growth for its own business. Presumably, though, it’s not short of a misconduct reporting solution.

Dear Sophie: I came on a B-1 visa, then COVID-19 happened. How can I stay?

Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.

“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”

Extra Crunch members receive access to weekly “Dear Sophie” columns; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one- or two-year subscription for 50% off.


Dear Sophie:

I’m currently in the U.S. on a business visitor visa. I arrived here in early March just before the COVID-19 pandemic began here to scope out the U.S. market for expanding the startup I co-founded in Bolivia a few years ago.

I had only planned to stay a couple months, but got stuck. Now my company has some real opportunities to expand. How can I stay and start working?

— Satisfied in San Jose

Hey, Satisfied!

Appreciative for the jobs you’ll be creating in the U.S. since you desire to remain in the U.S. and expand your startup. The U.S. economy greatly benefits from entrepreneurs like you who come here to innovate. Since you’re already in the U.S., you may have options to change your status without departing.

If you were granted a stay of six months when you were admitted most recently with your B-1 visitor visa, you can seek an extension of status for another six months. There are additional alternatives we can explore that would allow you work authorization. For more details on some of the options I’ll discuss here and for additional visa and green card options for startup founders, check out my podcast on “What is U.S. Startup Founder Immigration? A Step-By-Step Guide for Beginners.”

Because most green cards (immigrant visas) take longer than nonimmigrant (temporary) visas, a conservative strategy to pursue would be to find another temporary nonimmigrant status (what is often nicknamed a “visa”) — rather than a green card, which takes longer — that will allow you to create and grow your startup in the U.S. without having to return to Bolivia.

How to establish a startup and draw up your first contract

Founders are encouraged, incentivized and pressured to begin transacting with customers as quickly as possible to drive growth and revenue. But making legal mistakes early in the game can create costly liabilities down the road.

That’s why we invited James Alonso from Magnolia Law and Adam Zagaris from Moonshot Legal to join us at TechCrunch Early Stage to give us a 360 overview of the legal side of running a startup. We’ve shared highlights from their presentations below, along with a video of the entire panel discussion.

Corporate law 101 for startup founders

James Alonso gave us a presentation on company formation and getting funding. Maybe you’ve already created your startup, but if you’re still working on your own and don’t have any clients or employees yet, these tips are essential before you get your startup off the ground.

When you’re setting up a new company, it forces you to have a discussion about capital structure — who owns shares, how many shares and what kind of shares. There isn’t a single way to design a company on this front and we’ll look at some options later in this article. And because you’re starting a startup, you want to structure your company in a way that makes future financing easy.

Setting up a company also lets you put your IP in a single entity that you’re sharing with other shareholders. “One of the key things you’re doing when you’re forming a company is assigning the IP related to that company into a single entity that holds it all,” Alonso said.