President Donald Trump’s new $100,000 H-1B visa fee has been a story in Silicon Valley since it was announced in an executive order a week ago.
Business Insider spoke to AI executives other than Big Tech. He said he was worried that fees could hinder progress and limit the potential of the startup. It could also help the US develop its own talent, one of them said.
The H-1B visa allows employers to hire highly skilled foreign workers for professional work. These visas have become the mainstay of the tech industry, with tech giants and startups employing thousands of H-1B workers each year.
News of the executive order has caused many Silicon Valley to panic as executives, tech workers and corporate lawyers work on fine printing of orders.
Some AI executives show how they believe changes could impact businesses, employees and the wider tech industry.
Arvind Jain, CEO of Glean
Arvind Jain, CEO and founder of Glean, says limiting access to foreign talent undermines progress. collection
Jain, 49, was born in Jaipur, India. He moved to the Seattle area in 1996 after earning his bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi. His first job in the US was as a software engineer at Microsoft. He founded Glean in 2019 and is now CEO.
First launched as an enterprise search tool, the company currently manufactures chatbots and AI agents for businesses. It reached a $7.2 billion valuation in June.
Jain shared his thoughts on the visa change in an email to Business Insider.
“The strength of American companies has always come from accessing the best global talent, a talent that brings a diverse perspective that drives innovation,” he said. “Restricting access to global talent will undermine progress not only in individual companies but across the technology industry. We will continue to support our employees and defend our policies that allow the best ideas and talent to flourish.”
Glean refused to share the number of employees using the H-1B visa with Business Insider. However, a company spokesman said the policy changes had not changed employment plans.
Related Stories
Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know
Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know
“Our focus remains unchanged. We will continue to hire the best talent for our job. We are closely watching these policy changes, as access to global talent is important for innovation, as we are in the rest of the industry.”
Writer CEO Mayhabib
May Habib, CEO and co-founder of AI platform Writer, says the new visa fees will benefit Big Tech. Habib in May
Habib, 40, was born in the countryside of Lebanon as one of eight children. She moved to Canada and then to the United States.
She attended Harvard University for her undergraduate students and spent many years in the financial industry before establishing AI writing assistant Qordoba in 2015.
In 2020, she and Waseem Alshikh founded Writer, an AI platform that develops their own large language models and builds their applications. The company reached a valuation of nearly $2 billion in November.
Habib writes:
“We’ve been hiring H1B since we were 20 people. Both me and Wasiem came to the US as non-Americans on visas. And the early people we hired helped us build the world’s largest tech companies and competitive LLM companies,” she said. “The addition of this $100K fee will create yet another benefit of Big Tech, which threatens to overwhelm the startup ecosystem that has been driving America’s innovation for 75 years, without the 20 startups being able to hire people who need H1BS.”
She added, “I think it’s essential to build a global, diverse team, especially when it comes to building AI models and systems.”
Habib told Business Insider that the writer has 10 workers on the H-1B visa, and the new policy will not change employment plans this year.
Suzanne Rabikov, founder of Pie Grower
Rabikov is the founder of Pie Growers. Suzanne Rabikov
Rabicoff, 39, is the founder of Pie Grower, a think tank that advises businesses on how to manage teams in the AI era.
In a text message to Business Insider Rabicoff, “My sense is that this is an overcorrection of performance by putting pressure on American companies to adopt AI (which is now a marketplace!) to prevent serious disasters in Employment Z.”
She pointed to a LinkedIn post entitled “Don’t waste $100,000 on Still,” written by Phil Fersht, the founder of a research and advisory company that Rabikov described as “a positive take from one of my favourite research companies.”
Under the subsection entitled “American Alumni Are Your New Talent Engine, Not Your Cost Center,” Fersht instructs employers to rethink their employment practices.
“We will redirect a portion of our $10,000 fees to the academy of athletic alumni. We will pay, train in a live customer backlog and move to billable roles within six months. We will focus on cloud OPS, data engineering, test automation, cybersecurity and applied genyai,” he writes.
Rabikov said she believes she supports immigration and is “the foundation of American culture and success.” But she said the new policies could be an opportunity to nurture young American workers.
“Reinvestment and reinvestment of what we produce and how we produce is important for our national happiness and economic security. That is, can we at least try to cook something great with the ingredients in our fridge?!” she told Business Insider.
Unless that talent develops, she said the new visa fees will ultimately benefit American tech companies: Facebook (now meta), Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google.
“I can’t help but wonder who’s going to win on the Enterprise side in the short term, and this is what’s important in AI racing,” she said. “Fans are one of the few employment agencies that can give them the best talent, and therefore they continue to compete with each other.”
