When Fred Stevens-Smith showed up at the hallowed Silicon Valley start-up hatchery Y Combinator in 2012, the British company founder faced immediate culture shock. “You’d have 18-year-olds say they were building a billion-dollar business in two years, and I’d laugh — and look around and everyone was nodding their heads,” he says.
Entrepreneurs don’t impress through modesty at Y Combinator and its ilk. So Stevens-Smith, chief executive of the quality assurance platform Rainforest QA, learnt to make a practice of taking his most ambitious goal — then blowing it up to be 10 times bigger.
American founders may lead the world in braggadocio, but the tech industry has long looked to talent from across the Atlantic for some of its most outsized successes. Its early history is peppered with icons such as the late Intel chief executive Andy Grove, a Hungarian émigré, and the venture capitalist and Welsh native Sir Michael Moritz.
More than half the American start-ups valued at $1bn or more today were launched by immigrants, according to a study by the National Foundation for American Policy earlier this year.
The reason for such a high concentration of expatriates in Silicon Valley is simple: to survive the challenges of a completely new environment tests the mettle quickly and separates the hobbyists from the best.
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“Coming here on day one, you feel like an outsider,” says Eoghan McCabe, who moved from Dublin to San Francisco to build the customer messaging software company Intercom in 2011. “Then you find out after a year or two that everyone is an outsider.”
The willingness to leave behind friends and family tends to bring out a grit and focus in foreign founders, McCabe says, if not an “obsession” with success. Those founders then tend to rub shoulders with and mentor like-minded start-up leaders, and the cycle continues.
“It’s easier to connect and understand the specific struggles we’ve gone through,” says Nicolas Dessaigne, the French chief executive of Algolia, which makes search tools for websites and apps.
Whereas many American entrepreneurs arrive on the scene with networks in place, often through their universities, expatriate founders have to build their own. The British bosses of the education start-up ClassDojo broke into the culture through an accelerator programme, but when it came to hiring talented employees they didn’t know where to turn.
“It took a lot of cold calls and some serendipity,” says co-founder and chief technology officer Liam Don. Without a large number of friends around to offer help, however, ClassDojo’s team were forced to spend more time with their customers — classroom teachers and parents — providing clarity for their product. This has proved invaluable in the years since then.
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Stevens-Smith’s start-up peers found it shocking when Rainforest took Sundays off work. The Americans, he discovered, believed that founders should work every hour of every day while starting out. “For a while I had anxiety about it and guilt, but we’ve built a great culture from it. It’s been an asset for us,” he says.
“More than half the American start-ups valued at $1bn or more today were launched by immigrantsAlex Konrad, Tech Bubble
Ed Zitron moved to San Francisco to set up a public relations agency servicing tech firms. His Britishness has been a selling point.
“A lot of people in the industry dance around the point, so the industry is considered one with a lot of deception,” Zitron says. “But it’s something I remember from home: if you’re blunt, then the worst thing that happens is what you said might happen.”
Some founders band together more formally. British entrepreneurs can mingle at regular consular events, while German founders convene a few times a year for a group dinner at a German restaurant, says Florian Leibert, chief executive of the enterprise software company Mesosphere. But others shun such formal events, preferring to find like-minded founders of any origin.
“You want to be successful on your own merits,” says Intercom’s McCabe, who had meetings with other Irish tech executives without either party ever acknowledging that common link.
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Foreign founders also benefit from the heightened interest they get back home, notes Mathilde Collin, chief executive of the email start-up Front. It’s no coincidence, she and others argue, that European-led start-ups tend to gain meaningful international sales faster than their typical American peer.
Then there’s the more cosmetic perk. “It sounds like a joke, but having an English accent is frankly very helpful,” says Stevens-Smith. “People do take you more seriously.”
Alex Konrad is a staff writer for Forbes magazine