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๐ŸŽง๐ŸŒ The Secret 4-Week Visa Powering Silicon Valley with Lisa Wehden

Why talent is the bottleneck to AI development, the secret O-1A Visa, living in a sawmill building her first startup, giving VCs their money back, raising grant funding, and how to fix US immigration

is the Founder and CEO of Plymouth Street, building fast and simple immigration for technologists. We talk through the broken US immigration system, how its holding back US innovation, and the secret 0-1A Visa you can get in as fast as four weeks.

Lisa lived in a sawmill while building her first climate tech startup, and we go inside that journey, why she gave the money she raised back to VCs in order to start Plymouth, raising grants to fund it, and how she initially broke into Silicon Valley as an outsider.

Iโ€™m trying something new with this episode - you can stream it here within the Substack post / app! Let me know if I should keep doing this and if you run into any issues.

๐Ÿ‘‰ Stream on Apple and Spotify


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Timestamps to jump in:

  • 04:51 The state of US immigration

  • 09:26 Why immigrants are good founders

  • 11:43 The secret O-1A Visa

  • 12:18 Why the O-1A is easier to get

  • 16:54 Founders sheโ€™s gotten their O-1A

  • 20:00 How to get a Visa in four weeks

  • 22:01 The 500-page, physical paper Visa application

  • 25:57 Lisaโ€™s US immigration COVID hobby

  • 27:58 Living in a Sawmill building a climate tech startup

  • 30:59 Giving VCs their money back

  • 32:19 Joining Interact in SF

  • 33:51 Raising grant money instead of VC

  • 34:40 Becoming a paralegal to learn the industry

  • 37:24 The Plymouth 100 community

  • 39:20 How Lisa raised grant funding from Eric Schmidt and Tyler Cowen

  • 43:55 Talent is the bottleneck to AI development

  • 46:04 How to break into Silicon Valley as an outsider

  • 52:43 Hiring on hopes and fears

  • 55:31 "Write it down, make it happen"

  • 56:45 Benefits of doing a calendar audit

  • 1:01:54 Anyone can be an entrepreneur

  • 1:04:53 Why Lisa doesnโ€™t work from her phone

  • 1:06:38 How she would fix US immigration

Referenced:

Follow Lisa on Twitter and LinkedIn.


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Transcript

Find transcripts of all prior episodes here.

Turner Novak:

Lisa, how's it going? Welcome to the show.

Lisa Wehden:

Hi, Turner, thanks so much for having me.

Turner Novak:

Thank you so much for coming on.

To kick things off, can you give us a super high-level crash course on the state of US immigration?

Lisa Wehden:

Yeah, it's a big question, but I'll try my best.

So there is two different routes for immigration, it's employment-based immigration and non-employment-based immigration. So you have marriage, green cards, asylum, all that sort of stuff.

We focus on employment-based immigration at Plymouth Street. And the most common route that people will know about is called the H-1B, and the H-1B is this visa category that was designed in the 1990s to bring specialist immigrant talent over to the US.

When it was designed, they set a cap of 65,000 people. And one of the most interesting things is that visa category has been so heavily oversubscribed ever since it was created. Last year, we had 780,000 people apply for the H-1B for 65,000 slots. And so, there's this enormous demand for talent to move to the United States, but the visa category that most people come in on is just not fit for purpose.

And so, there are all these other specialist or unique visa categories that are available that people are unaware of, underexplored, sometimes complicated. There are visa categories for specific countries. So you have the TN for people coming over from Canada and Mexico. You have a visa category for a Australian nationals. Not all countries have a special relationship with the United States so you can get a visa.

There are visa categories where if you've been working for a company internationally for a year, you could come over. And then there's this visa category called the J-1, which is this amazing visa category which is called the cultural exchange visa, where you could come to the US for between 12 to 18 months and spend time here learning American best practices and then return to your home country and share those best practices.

And then, there's the O-1 visa, which I'm super excited to talk a bit more about today, which I think is the most, one of the best secrets for people who are looking to build in the United States.

Turner Novak:

Why do you think it's so hard to figure out this whole process?

Lisa Wehden:

I think when systems are designed, they make a lot of sense, but very quickly, bureaucracy and understanding of those systems can get very confusing. Like I said with the H-1B, it's like when it was designed, it was like, okay, there's this cap limit.

Turner Novak:

Yeah, 65,000 and the H-1B is a lottery, right? It's kind of random. Is that true?

Lisa Wehden:

Yeah. You put your name in and you either get it or you don't.

And it's crazy to think that hundreds of thousands of people's lives depend on a lottery ticket system, and the future of America depends on a lottery ticket system. So some of the world's best talent is applying for the H-1B, and they don't get it because of a lottery.

You can imagine a pioneer in AI, a leader in quantum. They apply and if they don't get it, they have to leave the United States or they can't get into the United States.

Turner Novak:

You just think of, I don't know, Elon Musk, if he didn't get his visa, he maybe wouldn't have built SpaceX, pretty important company, Tesla, pretty important company.

I think there's a stat too, something like 55% of unicorn startup founders are immigrants. Thatโ€™s insane. And it's just a random process that then they might not even get to build their company.

Lisa Wehden:

Yeah, I mean Elon's a great story because he actually went from South Africa to Canada first, and then came to the United States.

Turner Novak:

Is that a common hack, because Canada has a little bit more convenient immigration set up?

Lisa Wehden:

Yeah. So I hear a lot about immigrants stepping to the UK or Canada before coming to America because America is so hard. And just in terms of economic innovation, if you can get the most talented people to the locations where they could be the most productive, you can unlock enormous economic progress. And so, what if Elon Musk actually didn't have to go via Canada but could come straight to the United States, how much further along-

Turner Novak:

He might have a fourth or a fifth unicorn startup that solved a different problem.

Lisa Wehden:

Exactly.

And so, I think a lot about that's like what's the fastest path to talented people being able to access the resources that they need to access to build.

Turner Novak:

Do you have any thoughts on why are immigrants such good founders? 55% of like we talked about, the unicorn startups are built by immigrants. That seems very large compared to the percentage of people in the country in the US. Do you know why they're so good?

Lisa Wehden:

I think the very nature of being an immigrant, you are a risk-taker. You are willing to take risks. You are moving from your home country, people moving from India, Europe, Asia coming all the way over to the United States to build, you've taken a huge amount of risk.

Starting a company is a risky, it's a risky enterprise. The odds are not in your favor. And I think immigrants can withstand a lot of pain. And if there's one thing I've learned about building a company, it's like you have to have-

Turner Novak:

It's painful.

Lisa Wehden:

Exactly. I think there's something around they come to America, you don't have any other option to fall back on so you build and you build and you build. So it's a very, I think, optimistic lens of creating things and innovating. And I think it's something about the psyche.

Turner Novak:

And it's fascinating because if you just think about the US in general, go back 300, 400 years, it was built by immigrants. We're a melting pot. I think that's what I remember they said in elementary school, and we learned all those songs and stuff. We are the home of immigration really, at the end of the day.

Lisa Wehden:

I think that's what has made America such an incredible place for innovation. I think immigration is America's superpower. In moments of great crisis, America has used immigration as a very successful lever to enable greater innovation.

If you look at World War II and the Manhattan Project. I think, even if you look at this moment right now, I'm based in San Francisco - in the AI communities, you see just some of the most talented immigrant builders coming here to build the future of the technology industry.

And so, I do think America has that superpower. And I would love to see the government use that to really effectively to drive progress.

Turner Novak:

So you mentioned this really interesting acronym, I think it was O-1A and or B. Can you go a little bit deeper on what that visa is and how to get it?

Lisa Wehden:

Yeah, this is my bread and butter. So I spend all my time talking about the O-1A visa. I think the O-1A is so special compared to the H-1B because it's an uncapped visa category.

You can apply any time in the year. You can get premium processing, which means you can get an answer within 15 business days. There's no minimum wage requirement and no minimum degree requirement.

And so, compared to the H-1B, it's this amazing category that you can apply for. The O-1A is for people who have extraordinary ability in science, business, technology, and those fields.

Turner Novak:

I think art, education, athletics also, or you're a celebrity basically is what it said.

Lisa Wehden:

So the O-1B is for individuals in the arts and the entertainment industry.

Turner Novak:

Oh, got it.

Lisa Wehden:

So O-1A, for people, you can think about it like people in STEM, O-1A. O-1B is for people in the entertainment industry.

Turner Novak:

Okay, yeah, that's a good framework.

Lisa Wehden:

And the O-1B actually is the more popular visa. More people in the entertainment industry apply for that visa than the people in the O-1A.

And so, the core insight at Plymouth is that we should get many more people to apply for the O-1A visa because it's uncapped. So the people who are missing out on the H-1B lottery, the people who don't want to take a lottery ticket with their lives, that they can actually prepare an application and put forward a case relatively quickly is what we focus on.

And the insight as well is that many more people could be qualified or already qualified for an O-1A than they know. So you can imagine that the PhD students who are graduating from top American schools, they are likely to already be qualified for an O-1A, or very soon to be qualified for an O-1A.

Turner Novak:

And it's just, you need to have extraordinary ability. That's how they define it. Pretty open-ended.

Lisa Wehden:

Yeah. So I think it's better to see it as expert ability. I feel like extraordinary ability, people were like, when I was looking at the visa category, I was tensing off. I was like, "I don't think I'm extraordinary."

Turner Novak:

Yeah, there's no way.

Lisa Wehden:

But there's eight criteria and you have to meet three out of the eight criteria to be considered someone of extraordinary ability. And some of the criteria I think are quite accessible to people. So judging hackathons, so there's one called judging, and if you judge hackathons, you could meet the criteria.

Turner Novak:

That seems very realistic for someone to do.

Lisa Wehden:

Exactly. If you've been a software engineer at a company where you've contributed critical code, you could meet the critical role criteria.

There's a membership criteria. So if you have joined a top accelerator like YC, Entrepreneur First, South Park Commons, you could meet the membership criteria too.

And there are five others, and I won't go one by one in each of the criteria, but they're much more accessible than you think.

And you could actually, if you're looking at the criteria and you say like, "Oh, I've got one, I've judged a hackathon," you could work on improving your eligibility for the other criteria. So it's possible for lots of people to take a six-month lens on their career and improve their eligibility for an O-1 visa.

Turner Novak:

It's pretty crazy then when you think about the difference between the capped and uncapped. Like, that 700,000 applicant difference between the H-1B and the people that want to get it. It's just, okay, well if they're all qualified or most of them, we can just shift them over. Do you think it's realistic for that to happen?

Lisa Wehden:

There's no reason why not. I think it won't happen today. It's not going to happen today. It's not going to happen this year. But I do see a future where the US really takes immigration and talent scouting incredibly seriously to bring over the best and brightest to build here.

I think it's not unrealistic to 10x the number of people coming in on the O-1A visa. To give you a statistic, there's less than 5,000 STEM individuals using the O-1A visa today. Less than 5,000!

Turner Novak:

And you have a whole magnitude, multiple magnitudes doing the other version.

Lisa Wehden:

Exactly. And so, I think you could see a future, not too distant future, where you 10x the number of people applying for this visa category. And that is very strategic for the United States. You could imagine the economic growth that will be driven by those individuals.

Turner Novak:

It's really interesting when you just think, generally the people that are getting these visas that are coming in, they have extraordinary abilities, they're top whatever percent of humans. We probably want them in the country, hopefully contributing to society and making the world a better place, right?

Lisa Wehden:

Yeah. I mean, just some of the customers we've worked with recently, and I'm allowed to share because they posted publicly on Twitter about their approvals. So JC Btaiche is the founder of Fuse Energy. They are accelerating energy abundance through nuclear fusion, and they're building these small reactors. They have relationships with the government. They hired top CIA former officials. JC is 24, and he's raised millions of dollars in venture capital funding to fulfill this vision. And he is the type of innovator, I think, that's really leading one of the most critical fields in America today. And he's just one example of an innovator coming to build in America.

The other individual that we worked with is called Gabriel Petersson. He's this incredible programmer from Sweden, 22-year-old dropout. And now working at Midjourney, which is one of the most prominent AI companies in Silicon Valley. And I wish I could take a bet on his career right now, invest in his career, because I think he is one of the most talented individuals I've been lucky to work with. There dozens of other examples of people that we've worked with who are just really pioneers in their field.

Another example is there's a company called Living Carbon that's doing bioengineered trees.

Turner Novak:

Oh, yep. Heard of that one.

Lisa Wehden:

And we've worked with them on multiple visas for top scientists who are basically bioengineering trees to do more carbon capture to help solve carbon removal, which is one of the largest problems in tackling climate change today.

We've got dozens more examples, like an AI engineer from Replit, Madhav, is just moving from Canada to transform coding accessibility to more people. And I feel like I could talk about our customers all day because they are just very inspiring individuals.

Turner Novak:

So it sounds like some of them are founders. Some of them are employees or early hires at companies that are significantly impacting, making the world a better place, solving pretty urgent problems, contributing to the economy. Again, it's probably people we want living here in the US.

Lisa Wehden:

I think not only do we want them, want them to move quicker and faster and be here because they are contributing to one of the most successful industries America has, which is the technology industry.

And I think the other side of it is that immigration is driving the US economy right now. Immigrants who come over, they also spend. And so they are, there's this really incredible relationship where not only are they building, but they're also spending. The US has an aging population and we need immigrants to come in and fulfill critical jobs.

And so, my work at Plymouth is really all about how do we get them to move faster and more productive so that we can drive economic growth.

Turner Novak:

Okay. So question on that then. Just generally, this whole process of getting a visa, it sounds scary. So if I'm sitting here, I'm like, "I got to do this," but you've thrown out all these acronyms. You talked about showing I'm an extraordinary person. It takes a long time, there's a cap, uncap, whatever. It just sounds a little daunting.

Can you take us through what this process looks like, and what all goes into it? And then, I mean, I guess this is an interesting place to pitch Plymouth also, but if you can talk us through all this.

Lisa Wehden:

Yeah, totally. So the whole product experience is driven around fast and simple immigration, and why we focus heavily on the O-1A Visa is that we can prepare an application within four weeks.

Turner Novak:

How long does it usually take?

Lisa Wehden:

Compared to other attorneys, four months. So we're doing it significantly faster. So taking a four-month process that's been complicated, you spend a lot of time going back and forth with attorneys. We've built a tech-enabled service, which streamlines the petition production process that you can get a visa delivered within four weeks, and then if you opt for premium processing, you get an answer within 15 business days.

So all in your immigration experience could take less than two months and you could be in the United States working.

Turner Novak:

And you do it for me instead of me figuring this out by myself.

Lisa Wehden:

Exactly. You can think of Plymouth as your guide. Our goal is to make it as straightforward as possible. We're not exactly the same as TurboTax. I think it's a false analogy, but-

Turner Novak:

Yeah, that's a little bit of a derogatory analogy almost.

Lisa Wehden:

I don't want to use it the same, but we make it as streamlined as possible. We bake into your systems, we pull all the information about you online. And so, one of our customers, they compared it to having a research report about you. It's like, "Has the FBI done a research report about me?" Because the end product is like a 500-hundred page document that we physically ship to USCIS.

Turner Novak:

Yeah, I saw that. That's insane.

Lisa Wehden:

Yeah. It is funny, in the early days of building Plymouth, I think a lot of founders talk about shipping product. I mean, we're in the tech industry. I stood by a printer and printed out this copy of someone's application and I carried it across the streets of San Francisco, and I was terrified that one of the papers would be lost.

Turner Novak:

You'd lose page 315 out of the 400.

Lisa Wehden:

I know. I was so stressed. I'm like, I carried it, shipped it. The woman looked at me at FedEx, and she was like, "What are you shipping?" I was like, "Oh, something to the US immigration." And now, we have a whole system that does that, but that was the first shipping of the product, basically.

Turner Novak:

So you can't submit this electronically at all?

Lisa Wehden:

No.

Turner Novak:

So let's say get to the immigration office, someone just flips through the pages and reads it?

Lisa Wehden:

Yeah.

Turner Novak:

That's insane.

Lisa Wehden:

This is, I think, Plymouth's secret sauce. We really focus on conciseness and precision to the criteria. We try and make it as straightforward, no jargon, this is how this individual meets the criteria.

And we've created this very specific methodology in partnership with our VP of legal who's been in the field for 10 years. She has, I think, more experience than any other attorney working with founders and technologists over the course of her career. And essentially, we've created this playbook for getting technologists approved at a much higher rate. I mean, our approval rating is 99%.

Turner Novak:

Wow. What's the average if I was just to go do this by myself working with an attorney?

Lisa Wehden:

So national average is between 90 to 93%. And so, it is a very good odd if you're applying for it, but I think typically attorneys will take a long time in getting these cases approved.

Turner Novak:

So really, your value prop is speed, really.

Lisa Wehden:

Yeah, exactly.

Turner Novak:

Correctness, I guess, accuracy.

Lisa Wehden:

Speed and customer experience. You don't have time as a busy founder to spend hours on your immigration paperwork. We are going to remove that problem and get you your approval as quickly as possible.

Turner Novak:

Makes sense. If I'm doing this without Plymouth, I'm paying attorney and I'm paying an application fee that are decent amount, how much do I usually pay?

Lisa Wehden:

It varies within the industry. If you go for a smaller provider, you're looking at paying $9,000. If you're going for a large law firm, you could be paying somewhere between $9,000 to $15,000.

Turner Novak:

And then, how do you guys do all the pricing at Plymouth?

Lisa Wehden:

Yeah, so we have pricing for working on whether you want to do premium processing or not, and then essentially if you are a small company, we have pricing fit that provider. And then, if you're a larger company, there was also pricing on that.

Turner Novak:

Okay. And then, even when you apply, they do this thing called a request for evidence. So you might get a response and you have to give them even more information. Am I understanding that right?

Lisa Wehden:

Yeah. So there's three outcomes basically. Either you get your visa approved, or for some reason clerical error gets denied. If the government wants to see more evidence, so maybe they say, "Look, I know that you judged a hackathon, but prove to be why that hackathon is the best hackathon for AI engineers." And so, they want more evidence to substantiate your extraordinary ability.

Turner Novak:

Doesn't sound that bad, but just takes longer, right?

Lisa Wehden:

Exactly. Like there's slowdowns, there's delays, and if you are a company that really cares about your talent, you want this done very, very quickly.

Turner Novak:

Makes sense.

So a little bit different topic, but why do you care so much about immigration?

Lisa Wehden:

This is a great question. The real reason is that I went through this problem and I spent two years of my life not seeing my family, stuck inside the United States, not being sure around whether my application was in the best hands. I actually got rejected for my first visa.

Turner Novak:

Which one did you do?

Lisa Wehden:

I did the O-1, and I got rejected.

Turner Novak:

Wow. So you were in the 7 to 10% that gets rejected?

Lisa Wehden:

Yeah.

Turner Novak:

Wow. Do you know what happened?

Lisa Wehden:

My attorney, this is what I think, didn't do a good job at explaining my story. And at that point, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I think everyone has a COVID hobby. Mine was US Immigration.

Turner Novak:

I've never heard that one before for a COVID hobby.

Lisa Wehden:

Yeah. I was just obsessed with figuring this out. I was like, I'm not going to let someone control my ability to build in America because they don't understand my story. I'm going to write my own story.

So I spent six months writing my story, my narrative, understanding the criteria, and that pain of going through that. I felt so lonely and it was just such a hard experience. I was like, no one should have to go through this. It felt like the system was against me.

And I actually think it's because I had bad immigration advice. I don't think it was the USCIS, I think it was actually, it wasn't clear immigration advice. They didn't tell my story really effectively. And going through that pain, I was like, I have to help people now. I have to go out and help people who I think are very competent in their lives and talented to solve this problem.

And so, I didn't actually think when I started to think about company building, I would build a company in this space. I actually was really passionate about a carbon removal climate technology.

And so, when I got my green card, I was like, I'm going to take a year, spend all my savings that I've earned in America and build a company, and I started building a climate company and I followed all the VC advice. It's big market, find a really ambitious problem. Investors are really excited about this space.

I actually went and lived a sawmill in Northern California to understand my customers I really like.

Turner Novak:

Lived in a sawmill that takes logs and chops them up?

Lisa Wehden:

Yeah. I went to go live at a sawmill in Northern California.

Turner Novak:

There's a room in the mill that you slept in or?

Lisa Wehden:

I became friends with the sawmill owners. It was like the second-largest lumber company in California.

And I was building this company, and in the back of my head, I was just casually talking to people about immigration. I'd written this essay that lots of people found very helpful around my own immigration experience.

And every conversation I had, I had conversations about climate, but I was also like, "Hey, do you know there's this problem about immigration?"

Turner Novak:

It was like this side hustle that just kept persisting.

Lisa Wehden:

Yeah, I just kept on coming back. And six months into building the climate company, I'd raised a pre-seed round. I'd written quite a big essay on this topic. I'm an essay writer, and I had a product for the climate tech company.

But every day I woke up, I was just like, I don't think I can build this business. I don't think I'm the best person to build this company. Because ultimately, it was a manufacturing company that I was building.

Turner Novak:

What were you trying to do?

Lisa Wehden:

I was trying to create a better version of biochar. As in, build a better pyrolyzer to create biochar, which is this form of carbon removal. And you basically take woody biomass and you put it within a pyrolyzer and you convert it into biochar, which ultimately you store in the ground, which removes carbon from the atmosphere.

Turner Novak:

What is biochar? Should I know what that is? I've never heard that word before.

Lisa Wehden:

Yeah, you could think about it as a form of charcoal. It's basically black material that you store in the ground and it takes carbon from the atmosphere.

Turner Novak:

Interesting, okay.

So you spent all this time working on it. Then you're like, "I can't do this. I'm not the right person to build this kind of company."

Lisa Wehden:

Yeah. I looked at myself. I think for me, at the very least, company building is the amount of time, dedication, and commitment to building something. I want to build something that is an institution, and I think that I just looked at myself in the mirror every day and I was like, "I can't build this."

And so, I gave all the VC funding back.

Turner Novak:

Yeah. How do you do that, by the way? People don't talk about that very often, but how do you raise VC funding and then give it back to them?

Lisa Wehden:

I had amazing investors. I was so lucky. And I just had honest conversations. I was like, "Look, I really care about the commitment that I've made to you to see this through, and I don't believe that I can return your capital, which was the commitment I set out to do." That was the endeavor I set.

I felt very obliged. I thought of it as a serious job, and so I had honest conversations with my investors and I said, "Look, I want to give you all this money back because I don't think this is the best allocation of your capital."

And so, just wired it back and back to spending my savings. I was back to being unemployed. It was not very glamorous, honestly, and I felt like a massive failure. I remember feeling like, what am I doing? Time is your most precious resource, and I don't have a company to show for it. I have this idea that I'm obsessed with, but I don't think anyone's going to give me any money for this idea because VCs didn't really like immigration at that time. And so, at that point it was really actually a community of people who stepped in and supported me through that period.

Turner Novak:

What happened?

Lisa Wehden:

So there's this community in San Francisco called Interact run by Maran Nelson. And it's a really special group of technologists who join. Not necessarily because they are trying to build companies, but because they want to impact the technology industry with ideas and projects that might not necessarily become venture-backed. Some do, some amazing companies like JC is part of the community, Keisha from Lumini.

But the real focus of the community is what problem do you want to solve? And Maran was running this fellowship with Devon Zuegel for mid-career technologists to go and spend a summer in New York. And during that summer, they were like, "You can work on any problem you want." It felt like being at school again, it was like being at university again. You were like, "Oh my gosh, no one tells me that I'm a mid-career professional and I can do whatever I want."

Turner Novak:

Like you said, you're kind of seen as a failure if you don't know what you want to do and you have this clear direction.

Lisa Wehden:

Yeah, exactly. You have to tell this narrative of I'm super clear.

Turner Novak:

Yeah, I'm crushing it, and everything is up and to the right. And it's rocket ships all the time.

Lisa Wehden:

And I was like, I do not have a job. I don't know if this project's going to work out. And I'm going to run out of my savings in six months time.

So I started working on this problem. I was like, okay, I want to solve US immigration. It is crazy. Not sure what shape it will take. But let me see if I can get the outline of how I would build a product around this.

And I met Alec Stapp and Caleb Watney from the Institute for Progress, and they initially reached out to talk about climate work,. But then we spent the whole lunch together talking about immigration, and they said to me, "Look, go work on this. This is what you care about."

And basically after that lunch, I wrote up a one pager around what I thought Plymouth could be, and they said like, "Hey, you could probably raise some philanthropic grants for this." And that's what I did and started building Plymouth.

Turner Novak:

Amazing. So then, I think you told me you were a paralegal for a couple months to just learn how this all works. That's what happened next, right?

Lisa Wehden:

Yeah. So basically, the first version of this is I would just go and tell people my own immigration journey. And I would say, "Hey, you can do it too." And so, one of the things I did for my visa application is I ended up writing an essay, which was published in TechCrunch, and I also looked at different hackathons that I could judge.

And so, I would go out and help people. We'd have 20-minute chats where I'd say, "Look, this is what is possible and this is how I prepared the application." And that became really, really popular. I think I must have had over 150 calls within three months of just talking to people constantly.

Turner Novak:

Thatโ€™s a packed calendar.

Lisa Wehden:

It was back to back. I would post on Slack channels. I would post online. I'd be like, "Hey, just have a chat." And during that time, basically, we built a lot of customer relationships and they said to me like, "Hey, can you actually just do the petition?" And I was like, "I'm not an immigration attorney. I cannot write your petition."

But then, I met an amazing immigration attorney who's Plymouth's VP of legal today. And we basically partnered up, where I would go back and forth on emails with people to collect their information. And then she would create a much more streamlined version of it to actually prepare the application. And together, we were able to move through cases much faster.

So I basically became a legal assistant. And it was funny. I remember thinking a year and a half ago, I used to be in VC. I think VC is quite a high status thing. I think it's outsized high status.

Turner Novak:

Yeah, people think a lot higher of it than it actually is, but-

Lisa Wehden:

Yeah, exactly. And it's seen as cool, maybe not cool, but-

Turner Novak:

It's sexy. If someone's like, what do you do? "I'm a venture capitalist." Like, "Oh, that's badass."

Lisa Wehden:

Exactly, really sexy. And it's like, okay, I've gone from being a VC to a legal assistant, and I was like, "Okay, this is..."

Turner Novak:

The lowest or the biggest change you could possibly have.

Lisa Wehden:

Exactly. But I knew I was solving a problem. I could really feel it. I was like, wow.

And then we got this approval for this guy called Alexey Guzey who spends a lot of time on Twitter writing about meta science, sometimes AI.

And he posted, he was like, "Hey, I just got my approval through this method." And it was at that moment, I knew it was pretty special, just doing it very quickly and enabling more people to understand that they were eligible.

Turner Novak:

And I think at this point, you've built a pretty big community just in terms of, I think it's three digits of customers that you've helped at this point. Can you just talk about how it's all evolved over time?

Lisa Wehden:

Yeah, it's been unbelievable, the demand for what we've been building is.

So from that initial approval, we now had over 115 cases approved. And I didn't realize it when I started building Plymouth. I started and I was like, "Okay, I just want to solve this problem." And now, with over 100 individuals who've gone through this process, we've been doing more community events.

And now, we do dinners. We've done fireside chats with Patrick Collison, Amjad Masad, icons in the tech industry who are also immigrants. And our community comes to these events, comes to these private dinners, conversations. And they're all sharing advice and insights and helping each other out.

And this community I think is very, very special in nature. I've been in a lot of tech communities during my venture career, and I think, again, people coming here, they're big risk-takers. They're very ambitious, they're going through similar problems like how do I figure out my taxes? And they all want to give back to each other. So we're trying to nurture that community as much as possible.

I think long-term, Plymouth wants to be the on-ramp to the American dream. So you come here, we support you with immigration, but we can also help with community, other services that can really help you build your life here. And ultimately, those individuals, I hope, give back to the ecosystem of builders who arrive and ultimately create a generation of people who are contributing, growing, and innovating in America.

Turner Novak:

Yeah. Sounds awesome.

You mentioned getting some grant funding. How exactly does that work if somebody's never gotten a grant before?

Lisa Wehden:

Yeah, I didn't know anything about the grant funding process. So you're in San Francisco and you just think VC is the default way to raise capital.

Turner Novak:

Exactly, yeah.

Lisa Wehden:

But I'd done that and I had given that money back, so I was like -

Turner Novak:

Yeah, what's next? What are my other options?

Lisa Wehden:

Yeah, how do I raise this? Because I couldn't afford to do it long-term without having a salary. And I was really fortunate, Alec and Caleb from IFP, they had raised capital from philanthropists. And one of their core focuses was immigration. And so, they were able to back this project and they said, "Look, this is a focus area for us."

Eric Schmidt's, philanthropic Foundation, Schmidt Futures, which is now Renaissance Collective. So it's slightly different now, but they also backed us because STEM talent in particular is a real focus for Eric Schmidt. I think, because he's been a titan of the technology industry for decades, and he knows how important talent is.

Tyler Cowen's Emergent Ventures. I think Tyler Cowen is the most unbelievable backer of early stage people that I have ever seen. He just believes in people, he supports them, he gives them capital, which is a huge unlock. And he gave some money to support Plymouth in the early days. And he also just has an amazing network of brilliant immigrants from India or the UK or Europe more generally, who are all working on incredible projects. And so, he invested in Plymouth.

And finally, the Talent Mobility Fund. So this is a fund that was set up by Amy Nice, who is the person from the Biden administration who wrote the clarifications for the O-1A visa for STEM individuals to apply for it.

So basically in 2022, the Biden administration came out and said, "We want more STEM individuals to apply for the O-1A visa. Here's how you can do it." And Amy Nice was the person who wrote those clarifications. And so, she invested in Plymouth because she really believes in increasing the number of talented STEM individuals to apply for the O-1A.

Turner Novak:

That's awesome. So with a grant, if somebody who doesn't know what a grant is, do they invest it? Do they own part of the entity? Do you have to pay the money back? How does a grant work if somebody doesn't know?

Lisa Wehden:

Yeah, so it's non-dilutive capital. There's no equity exchanged. It's purely a grant. You do get taxed on it though, so that is a surprise that I didn't know.

Turner Novak:

Oh, geez. Okay. What happened?

Lisa Wehden:

Yeah, I was just likeโ€ฆ taxes were really tough this year. I was like, "Oh gosh, okay, I have to pay taxes on the grant." So it was a little bit shortened runway. But it was fine. It was just I didn't know that from grant funding and maybe other grant funders know that, but I didn't know that.

Turner Novak:

I did not know that either. So Iโ€™ll keep it in mind, if I ever get a grant from someone.

Lisa Wehden:

That's to say maybe you start a project where you need some grant funding.

Turner Novak:

Yeah, for the podcast, or maybe instead of raising money from investors, I'll just get a grant so that way I don't have to pay any of it back.

Lisa Wehden:

Yeah. Well, it's funny, Tyler has backed a ton of podcasts. Like Dwarkesh's podcast was backed by Tyler Cowen, and I think that's become a really important podcast in Silicon Valley, breaking down what's happening in AI.

So I just feel like Tyler Cowen, he doesn't get enough praise. Even, though he does get praise, but I think he should get more praise.

Turner Novak:

Really? Yeah, that's fair. There are definitely people who are very under-appreciated, if that's a fair way to put it. People know about them, but it's like, "Dude, this guy should be much more popular than this."

Lisa Wehden:

Yeah.

Turner Novak:

So youโ€™ve mentioned before something I thought was really interesting, that talent was this bottleneck to tech development. Can you expand on that. Because that's a pretty fascinating concept.

Lisa Wehden:

The most talented individuals are resource that are not easily replicable. You can't actually find the best minds easily. And I think that finding, especially in America's key industries, the best and brightest and bringing them to America, is absolutely mission-critical.

I think at least in the AI industry right now, what I see speaking with our customers is that the biggest bottleneck for them to move faster to get to a future which ensures America is the leader in AI, is finding the right talent. And so, I think about it as even more important than compute, having the right people to innovate.

And so, I think I spend my days talking to some of the best AI companies in Silicon Valley, trying to help them understand how do they bring their best people over faster and how do they find even more of those incredible individuals to build in America?

Turner Novak:

Yeah. You said you think AI will actually benefit the best engineers the most. Can you expand on that?

Lisa Wehden:

My mental model of this is that AI is a huge accelerant of human productivity. And if you are incredibly skilled at utilizing tools to augment your own intelligence, AI is this unbelievable technology to enable you to become faster, better, quicker at getting to your insights. And so, from what I'm seeing is that the best engineers are utilizing it.

Turner Novak:

And they're becoming even better.

Lisa Wehden:

Exactly. They're getting through their manual tasks so much faster. They can be much more specific about the prompts they're generating because they have the right ability to, or they have the ability to craft prompts that really get them to the answers quickly

ย And so, that's what I'm seeing right now. I'm not an AI engineer, but I get to work with a lot of really incredible ones. And so, that's what I've seen.

Turner Novak:

So talking about getting more talent into Silicon Valley, working on tech, working on AI, you have a pretty cool story about how you got into Silicon Valley. Can you hit on that and then maybe give us a crash course on you're a complete outsider, how do you get in?

Lisa Wehden:

Yeah, so I was totally obsessed with the idea of coming to San Francisco and building here. I'd met a bunch of technologists when I was a student, and these technologists were pioneers in their fields like Jack Dorsey, Eric Schmidt, and Brian Chesky. And I was like, I have to get to San Francisco because that's where the builders are.

So I was actually living in Berlin for two years before I moved to San Francisco. And I took a plane, I took a flight. I was actually going to see some friends in Utah.

And what I did is I cold emailed a ton of different people. So I cold emailed VCs, founders, people working at tech companies. I also asked all my friends, I was like, "Does anyone know anyone in San Francisco? Can you connect me with people that I can meet and just have coffee with and ask them, how do I get a job here?"

And it was actually through one of my friends who had connected me to a partner at Bloomberg Beta, which is the VC fund I ended up joining. He did the introduction, I was in Soma and I had I think five back-to-back meetings, and I was running late for this meeting and I had to run across town because I couldn't get an Uber.

Turner Novak:

You were just trying to cram as much as you could in, right?

Lisa Wehden:

Yeah, exactly. I was just trying as hard as possible. And I was running late for this meeting, which ended up being the meeting where I got a job offer. And basically, I think my strategy was reach out to as many people as I could. Contact them on Twitter, LinkedIn, maybe there are some people in your network that you can ask for intros and conversations with and be genuinely interested. I was really interested in being in the technology industry, and so I was asking a lot for advice around how do I break in, which ultimately led to a job offer.

Turner Novak:

So what do you think really stuck out to people like the Lisa back a couple of years ago? Why do you think they hired you? Was there anything specific that maybe other people could learn from?

Lisa Wehden:

I think, at the time a lot of my friends in England were going into consulting, banking, law. And I decided to go into the technology industry and working at Entrepreneur First. And it was an unusual career path. Lots of people in my cohort of very talented people didn't see it as a viable career option.

And so, I think having done the work for two years in Europe, building up entrepreneurial ecosystems, spending time with entrepreneurs, it was genuine that my interest in working with this group of people was clear.

My job at EF was actually just to run around Germany and recruit top engineers and scientists and convince them to build companies because it wasn't culturally common for people to consider startups as a natural career path.

In San Francisco, it's very common for people to start companies. In Europe, it's less so. And so, I was talking to PhD students with backgrounds in biochemistry and nuclear physics and all these things and convincing them to start companies. And so, I think that showed a level of hustle and I think grit, which I think resonated with people.

Turner Novak:

And you were not just showing up in San Francisco with no relevant experience. You were doing some similar things just in Europe, in Berlin and the UK.

Lisa Wehden:

Exactly. There was a clear arc from what I was doing in Europe to what I wanted to do in America. And I think you can do that. Maybe you have a specific interest, you can start working on it wherever you are and then come to San Francisco and continue building there. I think showing authentic interest in something does resonate with people who are also interested in it.

Turner Novak:

So it's kind of have some relevant experience or track record that is clearly related to what you're trying to do and then just be super passionate about it, work really hard.

I mean, it sounds like there's not a ton of shortcuts. You mentioned cold emailing and reaching out to people. How did you do that?

Lisa Wehden:

Yeah, I found people's emails online. It was a shameless strategy. I would just look people's emails up online.

Turner Novak:

Do you just Google Turner Novakโ€™s email or is it that easy?

Lisa Wehden:

You could find people's emails in the weirdest places. I remember finding an email for a CEO of a very prominent company. He said it in a talk. At the end of his, I think lecture, he said, "Hey, here's my email if you want to reach out." And I was like, "Okay, I'll use that."

Turner Novak:

Nice.

Lisa Wehden:

And then, just writing a really concise email. So it's like an introduction about you, why you're reaching out, why you want to talk to them, and some evidence of what you've been working on. And if you can get those key points over in an email, you start a conversation already around, this is why I want your time. That was my strategy.

I actually work with a lot of developers who are relatively early in their career, and one thing that I've seen actually from someone that I worked with is he started posting demos online on things that he's built. The other thing that he did was he found bugs on their website, in their product, and he would say, "Here's how I'd fix your bug." And I thought that was really clever, actually solving an immediate problem for the company.

And so, I think it depends on what your skill set is. My skill set, a lot of it is writing and sharing stories, whereas if you are an engineering background, maybe you actually do work that more resonates with people in your field.

Turner Novak:

Yeah, I've heard some people say if you're emailing a founder, you almost build a product or figure out a problem for them and solve the problem when you reach out, "Found a bug, or I heard you're launching this new product in the future, I built this and here's a demo of it," or it's something like that. It's hard to just ignore. You solved a problem that they had.

Lisa Wehden:

Exactly. It just shows that you really care. You've gone out of your way, you've done something creative, and shows you've got some hustle. And so, I think it's actually just like can you show not tell someone why they should be speaking to you?

Turner Novak:

So you have this interesting framework around hiring. You just think about it as โ€œhopes and fearsโ€. Can you expand on that a little bit?

Lisa Wehden:

I like to keep things super simple. Maybe I'm just not able to handle super sophisticated frameworks. But with hiring, I really want to get to the crux of what is the conversation we're having around your hope for the future.

You're taking a job, so you have to think through what is the best case scenario here? What does this help you fulfill? What are your personal goals here? Is it money? Is it status? Is it ideas? Is it people? Is it the product? There's lots of different things, but what is your biggest hope for the future and how can we help you build that, fulfill that at the company?

And then, fears is what's your biggest fear? Is it that this crashes and burns? Is it that you don't have enough autonomy here? Is it that you-

Turner Novak:

Won't be entertained or won't be fun or something?

Lisa Wehden:

Yeah, exactly. And I think that everyone has them. It's just human to have a hope and a fear. It's very easy language that you can talk to someone. And I try and be as transparent as possible. I'm like, "What is your hope? And what is your fear here?"

And I found that leads to much deeper conversations. Yes, money and equity and all these things about hiring is important, but actually what do you really care about? And especially with an early stage company, the people that you end up hiring initially shape the course of the organization. And so, I really want to get to know that person on an individual level and see if this is their home.

Turner Novak:

I think it's a good perspective to have. I feel like there's a lot of people skills-based, it's a lot of these hard interview questions or insane case study take homes, especially recently with the recent hiring market. Everyone I hear is I do these full projects and I don't even hear back because the market's so intense right now.

Lisa Wehden:

Yeah, and I think it's different. Obviously, if you were going for a larger company at the early stage, one of the best things that we've done is contract to hire, spend three months with someone, get to know them super well. And that means that we can access way better talent than a company at our stage. And that has actually been really successful for three of our key hires are just spending a lot of time. And then, they have all actually ended up joining because they've really enjoyed the mission and the company and our growth.

Turner Novak:

Yeah, I mean, it's an awesome mission, I think is really interesting.

So this other kind of framework, write it down, make it happen. What does that mean? I think I maybe have an idea, but can you expand on that?

Lisa Wehden:

Yeah. I actually took this from one of our partners called Tom Kalil. He was the chief innovation officer at Schmidt Futures, and now he has started his own philanthropic organization called Renaissance Collective.

And basically, if it's in your head, it's not necessarily going to get done. And so, every plan needs to be written down and actioned. And in doing that, you can have an objective document that says, "Has it happened? Yes or no?" And so, pulling ideas out of your head, making them into plans, giving them a timeline, ensuring that those timelines are hit has just been transformative. When I'm thinking about an idea, I'm like, "Just it down and try it. And if it doesn't work, that's fine, but at least you've done it."

Turner Novak:

So it's like a to-do list, but maybe a little bit more in depth.

Lisa Wehden:

I'm a huge fan of to-do lists. Every day, I've got a to-do list.

Turner Novak:

Hey, I've got one, I won't open it, but I've got my to-do list right there.

And then, you do these things, these calendar audits, I've heard of people doing those before. Can you explain that and then just practically walk us through how you do that and what the benefits are?

Lisa Wehden:

Yeah, I think it was Elad Gil's High Growth Handbook where I got this idea from. And I think your most precious resource is your time. And one week I just felt super energy drained. I was like, "Oh, I'm so tired. What did I do this week?"

And as a best practice, I would sit down, actually did it on a Saturday morning. I try and do it on Fridays now because I think it's important to do it in the flow of the week. And I would just look back on how I broke down my time. Was it in a meeting? Was it in deep work? Was it outbound conversations? Was it with the team? Where was I spending my time?

And in doing that, basically I could figure out, do I have to be doing this? Could I automate this? Do I need someone else on the team, an additional resource to take this off my plate? And it's just I think way more people should do a calendar audit because if you're not identifying where you could save time each week, that means you're doing the same thing again and you're not moving the business forward. And so, I think it's a great practice.

Turner Novak:

So you basically go through, look at where you're spending your time, figuring out if you're getting energy, if you're losing energy, figuring out ways to just optimize how you're spending your time and make changes hopefully going forward.

Lisa Wehden:

Yeah. Does this have to be me? Does this have to be done? Was this a useful meeting? Should I say no? When an opportunistic conversation happens, what am I not doing more of? And I also share this with a few people on my team as well, because I think it's important that they have visibility in where you are spending time to decide whether that actually is the most important thing for the business to move forward.

Turner Novak:

I've definitely gone through some similar exercises. And it basically came down to just eliminating worthless meetings, if that makes sense. I'm so much more strict now. As in, everyone gets these emails of like, "Hey, pick your brain, or whatever." As a VC, you could easily fill up your day with a lot of stuff.

I think I just had this realization, it's probably two years ago where it was a similar, where I was, I just feel like I'm wasting so much time on stuff that's just not really that important. And it had a huge impact. It was probably hard at first to eliminate so many things and then learning to say no probably more often than most people would. I don't know.

What have you learned just in terms of how to say no? Like limiting unproductive time on your calendar?

Lisa Wehden:

Yeah, I just feel like it's so lots of people asking for advice and sometimes I'm like, "I don't think I'm the best person to give this advice. There's so many great blog posts."

Sometimes I just share blog posts from other people. I'm like, "This is a great resource." My former partner at Bloomberg Beta wrote this amazing blog post on how to write introduction emails, and I share that blog post all the time. I'm like, this is a great resource. This is how you should do it.

And I think saying no is like saying, "What are you focused on?" My priority is I'm focusing on customers this quarter, or I'm focusing on, I'm always focusing on customers, but product or customers or-

Turner Novak:

Podcast interviews.

Lisa Wehden:

Podcast interviews. Celebrating Plymouth, advocating more, and yet also content. This is great because now, if someone asks me, how do you spend your day? I'm going to be like, "This is how I spend my day. Listen to this podcast episode."

Well, I do get a lot of people asking me, "How do you find a problem you really care about?" Because lots of people are very entrepreneurial but might not have a problem that they want to solve. And I don't know what you can apply for my own journey, but I tried to build a company that I thought was the right VC fit, and I decided actually it wasn't the right fit for me, and I decided to build this company because I really cared about the problem. And I think you don't have to build a company to solve a problem. You can solve it in many different ways.

And so, just find the problem you want to solve. I don't want to give general advice because everyone's different. But that's my big takeaway from my own journey.

Turner Novak:

Yeah, I'm trying to think of how to summarize or synthesize that. It's maybe less thing about what other people tell you you should be working on necessarily, or trying to fit it into a box or fit your peg, your square peg through a round hole or something. And it's more of just, what's something you actually get energy from and actually enjoy doing.

Tying it back to earlier, you just kept coming back to this immigration thing that no one else is really talking about. I've not met very many people that are as passionate about immigration.

Lisa Wehden:

It's super unsexy. It's just like uncool, unsexy, but I just wanted to solve it.

Turner Novak:

Yeah. Well, you also had this other hot take that I heard you say once that I thought was really interesting. You think anyone or everyone can be an entrepreneur? And you just alluded to a little bit right there. I feel like a lot of people would actually disagree with that. Can you just expand on that a little bit?

Lisa Wehden:

Yeah. Well, I don't want to start some Twitter wars.

Turner Novak:

Hey, that's good for the podcast when we got everybody referencing your hot take that they disagree with.

Lisa Wehden:

Yeah.

Turner Novak:

Let's try to start some beef here. (I'm just kidding.)

Lisa Wehden:

Oh, gosh. I guess I believe there are so many problems to solve in the world and people see problems every single day, and entrepreneurship is not a one size fits all startup lens of looking at things. You could apply the principles to your day-to-day. And so you could do social entrepreneurship. You can do policy entrepreneurship. You can solve a problem in your local community. Or you could solve a problem by writing a blog about a topic that you really care about like giving people more education. These are just examples of you can solve problems in so many shapes and forms, and VC and startups are just one way of solving a problem.

And so, my belief is everyone has entrepreneurial skills and can build something they care about, but it might not be the shape that right now people see as the most obvious shape for building a company.

Turner Novak:

Yeah, that's fair. I mean, I just see it too, just with people close to me, family members, they might be really, really good at video games and you think, "Oh, this person's not motivated or driven.โ€.

But then there's a job that's taking the exact same function that they're maybe really good at in video games, and then suddenly they're an amazing quality, QA engineer, so theyโ€™re good at testing things. Or they're so good at driving. My brother has a job where he's just drives all day and he loves it. And it's like, who would've thought? But everyone has something that they're really good at.

Lisa Wehden:

And taking that passion to maybe create content around it, maybe create guides, I don't know, helping others discover what you found. You didn't know that that was a real career path. You can do something, take that to the next level to inspire people to solve a problem that you really care about.

So that's how I think about taking your entrepreneurship to the next level.

Turner Novak:

Yeah. Well, on that point, it's like I don't think anyone went through high school saying like, "Oh, what are the possible career paths like a podcaster, a VC, or helping people immigrate to the US." None of those are things that we learned about growing up, but yet here we are.

Lisa Wehden:

Exactly. Yeah, no one told me about VC. No one told me about immigration, and now I think we both get to do what we love and it solves problems for people.

Turner Novak:

And you had this really interesting comment that you had too, that I've never really thought of this before. It's almost like counter to how I think about it, but it's an interesting way of thinking. You basically say you do work only from your laptop, you avoid work on your phone.

How did you come about that and how and why does it work?

Lisa Wehden:

So I try to. I can't say that I'm perfect because I do sometimes send messages on my phone. I just think what I've observed for myself is I'm so much more productive on my laptop. I can move way faster. And I also think that the phone can be extremely distracting for personal messages or notifications from platforms that don't have anything to do with when I'm thinking about work.

And so, I think a lot about productivity and being actually productive as opposed to being the illusion of being productive. And I think especially when your time is so like you're just doing so many things. And so, I've just found that if I can really zoom in on things on my laptop, I get through work way faster. So that's how I think about it. So when I'm thinking about just sending messages on my phone, I try and come back to my laptop because I am just way faster.

Turner Novak:

Do you go on airplane mode during the day or do you flip your phone over so you can't see the screen, or are you not that extreme?

Lisa Wehden:

Sometimes I do for serious deep work. I'll go on airplane mode, but I do have calls to work. I try to do, if there's a real problem, I'll just have a call. And so, sometimes I do have to take it off airplane mode.

Turner Novak:

Fair.

So I have one last question for you. About the immigration system, obviously we've talked about it a bunch, you know a bunch about how it works. If you could pick one thing to change or a fix, if you were given a soap box to give some policy changes, what would you change to fix US immigration as a whole?

Lisa Wehden:

Yeah, so I think there's some tactical things where a lot of visa categories are not dual intent. So the O-1A is not a dual intent visa, but you can apply for a green card. But what this causes is that when you apply for a green card, you have to stay in the country whilst you're waiting. And so, that means that people can stay in the country for a year, sometimes a bit longer.

And so, I would just make these visa categories dual intent. It's a super low lift thing and would enable people who have the O-1A classification of extraordinary ability, the ability to travel whilst they're waiting for their green card. And that I think would unlock huge amounts of cross-border trade because of how special these individuals are.

I think making it much easier for graduates from US schools to apply for green cards. If you've been a graduate from a US university, you should have a fast track path to a green card. That feels like an obvious thing to do, and yet that's still not the case. You have people graduating from PhDs from Stanford University who don't have a fast track to a green card and have to figure out that path, which is I think pretty crazy for me.

And then, I think electronic filing. It would make everyone's lives so much faster. You could move much quicker if you could just file electronically.

Turner Novak:

That still blows my mind that it's 2024 and we're sending 500-page, literal paper pages of applications. That's nuts. It's like with taxes, it's like, why do we spend all this time doing our taxes? The government already knows what we owe. It's like a tax on people who can't afford to do all the optimization, I guess. Totally different topic.

Lisa Wehden:

No, but I think that one of the real reasons for building Plymouth is gatekeepers for information. Like immigration, there was gatekeepers on this information. And our goal is to make it as accessible as possible so people can navigate this journey much faster, much easier, and come build in America.

Turner Novak:

So what's the best way to learn more about this?

Lisa Wehden:

So please reach out to this. If you're a talented immigrant builder, you want to come build in America, you're working in the technology industry, please reach out to us. We want to help you. You can contact us at www.plymouthstreet.com, @plymouthstreet on Twitter. My handle is @lisawehden, so find us online and we'll get back to you as soon as we can on your application.

Turner Novak:

Amazing. Well, this is a super cool conversation. Thank you so much for taking the time and hopefully people learned a lot.

Lisa Wehden:

Great chatting. Thanks so much for having me.


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