Meet the 'Visa Whisperer' of Silicon Valley
Published in Forbes on August 29, 2017
Immigration lawyer Todd Heine shuttles back and forth between Seattle and San Francisco’s Silicon Valley. His area of expertise is the O-1 visa for “Individuals with Extraordinary Ability or Achievement.” All his clients are tech entrepreneurs, a grateful former client once called him the “Visa Whisperer.”
Heine, 36-years-old, has an O-1 visa success rate of 99% and averages processing 100 visas per year. He recently managed to zip an O-1 visa through in three days from the day it landed on USCIS’s desk, breaking his previous record of eight days.
Silicon Valley buzzes with immigrant entrepreneurial activity. Tesla, Instagram, WhatsApp (both acquired by Facebook), Ebay and Yahoo, were all founded or co-founded by immigrant entrepreneurs. According to a 2012 study “America’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs: Then and Now,” sponsored by the Kauffman Foundation, 43.9 % of Silicon Valley’s 335 engineering and tech startups were founded or co-founded by immigrants.
Heine just launched his legal software product VentureVisa, specifically for immigrant entrepreneurs seeking O-1 visas. The landing page has a clean, spare design, with straightforward directions, which is the portal that leads accepted clients to sophisticated legal software. Clients can upload documents, answer questions, input data, which Heine receives.
Despite the plentiful number of immigrant entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and Heine’s impressive stats, it’s common knowledge that obtaining a work visa for most immigrant entrepreneurs is extraordinarily tedious if not a daunting nail-biter. From Seattle, Heine explains his success, the evolution of VentureVisa and why lawyers should use technology to “delight” their clients.
Nina Roberts: Why have you focused on this niche area of immigration law, the O-1 visa for tech entrepreneurs?
Todd Heine: Most lawyers go a little bit wider with their practice, where as I’m just insanely focused. The beauty of the O-1 is that it’s not a very technical visa. Either you meet three of the eight criteria or you don’t. The O-1 visa is the best bet for someone who has been through an accelerator like Y Combinator or Techstars.
Roberts: Is there a cap on O-1 visas?
Heine: Nope. No cap.
Roberts: Who are your clients?
Heine: We work with one group of people, founders of technology companies who have raised venture capital. $100K is pretty much the minimum. Most of them are coming out of accelerators.
Roberts: Is your typical client physically in the U.S. or abroad?
Heine: Most are in San Francisco, others are elsewhere in the country. There are plenty outside the U.S. either because their status ended and they left or they’re sitting on the bench waiting to come in.
Roberts: How do your clients find you?
Heine: It’s all word of mouth between founders.
Roberts: When you were at Vermont Law School, were you planning to be an immigration lawyer?
Heine: I knew I wanted to do some law that dealt with people across borders. I specifically did not want to do immigration law until I fell into this crowd. They are interesting, really good for the country, very positive influences—just a cool crowd.
Also, I was interested in combining technology and law. Oliver Goodenough was my property law instructor at Vermont Law School—he’s a brilliant guy—he pushed law and technology in his spiel. Law is logic and technology is logic. Once I saw it, holy crap, this crowd is awesome for what I want to do.
Roberts: Combining law and technology must have been the motivation behind the VentureVisa?
Heine: Most lawyers run away from technology or pooh-pooh it and say, “Nope, you need a human being.” Law is really hard to provide good service to a client; technology can make it a lot better.
Roberts: You don’t really hear about "customer service" or "user experience" in law that often.
Heine: Clients hate filling out weird Word documents that a lawyer sends them or really ugly intake forms. And clients always have to chase down lawyers and say, “Where are we? When is this getting shipped?”
We should be making the process really efficient to—believe it or not—delight the customer!
Roberts: How did VentureVisa transition from concept to actual software?
Heine: I found myself doing the same use case over and over, so we just focused on automation bit by bit. Nights and weekends, building tools, taking off the lawyer hat and putting on more of a software hat. And wearing hats together.
I joined forces with Kevin May (who I’ve known since 7th grade science class) and his team at GenB, a digital product development company based in Washington DC.
Roberts: Can you give an example how VentureVisa’s technology could “delight” a client?
Heine: Scholarly articles. People used to print them out or Xerox their bound copy from their bookshelf and send it to their lawyer. If you have 20 articles, you’re sending hundreds and hundreds of pages that the government is never going to read.
So, one of the fields is, “Have you published any articles?” Then, “If yes, do you have a Google Scholar profile?” Then, “If yes, paste your Google Scholar file right here.” Bing, pulls it from Google Scholar, shows every article you’ve ever published, the number of citations, where it was published. We send the government two pages instead of 200 pages.
Roberts: How long has VentureVisa been up and running?
Heine: We just updated everything mid-August. We’re rolling out new iterations of the project over the next few months. 10 to 20 clients have used this most recent iteration; 200 people used our tools as we were building them.
Roberts: Did the Trump administration’s shelving of the proposed International Entrepreneur Rule in July impact your business?
Heine: No. Anecdotally, we saw increased scrutiny for about four weeks when that rule was getting torpedoed, but that’s leveled off. It was kind of scary—is this a big policy shift? Everything is going through again, so it’s fine.
Roberts: How will VentureVisa evolve in the future?
Heine: The goal is to open it up to a small group of lawyers, allow them to use the software. The longer-term goal is to expand to other visa categories.
Roberts: Like a business?
Heine: Definitely a business. It’s super valuable software because it reduces lawyers’ time and headaches, and increases their volume. It creates a much better experience for the client.
Roberts: Does anything like VentureVisa exist?
Heine: There are a few other tools out there but nothing this focused and this tried and true. We’re really in a “nichey” place.
This Q&A has been edited and condensed for clarity.