Ask HN: Being part of a US based company as a foreigner

8 pointsby ashurov7 lat temu1 comments

Hi,

I started an US based company together with a former colleague. He is an US citizen while i'm an European citizen. We have several contracts, with our main focus on US government work. I lived in the US for about 5 years but moved back to Europe, with no plans on moving back to the US for now. We are struggling with a few questions/things that probably the people at HN experienced as well and resolved due to the link with the "start-up" world.

Currently the US based company is registered completely under the name of the other partner within the business. We are trying to figure out a good structure where the company will still be 50% US owned but were we both get an even "share". We need to keep the company 50% US owned to target certain US Government bids. Any ideas on possible solutions?

Certain bids also demand that persons working on the contract have a US VISA and/or US working permit. I, as an European citizen, would like to assist as well, so we have looked into either an E or L VISA, but both seems to have some issues and we haven't found a proper company that could assist/advise us with this. Is there anyway that I could assist on these type of projects as well?

I would be also interested to learn about companies within Massachusetts that could help us with both these questions. We contacted a few, but they didn't have the expertise we were looking for.

Any advise on this would be really appreciate!

Thank you!

1 comments

injb7 lat temu

Any immigration attorney should be able to help you with this - it shouldn't matter if they're in Massachusetts or not. Just try to find one that has some experience of tech start ups. I've had a few conversations with https://startupimmigrationattorney.com/ and I was pretty happy with them, although we didn't actually make any applications for anything.

I believe that with E visas, the company has to be mainly owned by citizens of the treaty country (not US, iow) so with the 50% ownership I'm not sure if that will work.

Are you sure that your bids require everyone to have US work authorization? For comparison, my organization has people working from Europe and people on US visas all working on the same contracts - only the people who live in or travel to the US need visas. And these are often public sector contracts. I've never heard anything about European based staff not being able to contribute.