279 | A Book for Aspiring Immigrant Entrepreneurs with Soundarya Balasubramani
Our guest this week on the pod is Soundarya Balasubramani. Soundarya is a 26 year old social entrepreneur and author. Her first social enterprise expanded to 7 countries and her first book, Admitted, is a best seller. Her forthcoming book, Unshackled, helps skilled immigrants learn how to a) start a company, b) get a green card faster and c) feel more unshackled.
And a special thanks to members of the Awarepreneurs Community for sponsoring this episode!
Resources mentioned in this episode include:
Tips for Immigrant Entrepreneurs: Interview with Soundarya Balasubramani
NOTE: While it’s not perfect, we offer this transcription by Otter.ai for those who are hearing impaired or who don’t find listening to a podcast enjoyable or possible.
SPEAKERS
Paul Zelizer, Soundarya Balasubramani
Paul Zelizer 00:01
Hi, this is Paul Zelizer, and welcome to the Awarepreneurs podcast. On this show, we dive deep into wisdom from some of the world's leading social entrepreneurs. Our goal is to help increase your positive impact your profitability, and your quality of life. Before we get into today's topic, I have one request. You could hit subscribe and do a review on your favorite podcast app that helps more people learn how to have positive impact through values based business. Thank you so much. Today I'm really thrilled to introduce you to Soundarya Balasubramani. Our topic is A Book for Aspiring Immigrant Entrepreneurs. Sondroundarya is a 26 year old social entrepreneur and author. Her first social enterprise expanded to seven countries and her first book, Admitted, is a best seller. Her forthcoming book,Unshackled, helps a) skilled immigrants learn how to a start acompany, b) get a green card faster and c) feel more unshackled. Soundarya, Welcome to the show.
Soundarya Balasubramani 01:03
Hey, Bo, thank you so much for that very generous introduction. And thrilled to be here. Well, you're doing awesome things. And we're gonna tell our audience about some awesome stuff that just happened today. Some exciting news in your world. Yeah.
Paul Zelizer 01:20
Yeah, I mean, do you want to share it? I can add more? No, it's your news. I just want to help you celebrate it. Okay, thank you so much. I,
Soundarya Balasubramani 01:30
I got the emergent ventures grant, a $50,000 grant, which is sponsored by the teal Foundation. And it's given out through the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. I know that's a really long way of saying it. But anyways, I got a $50,000 grant, to work on my project. And it just, I can't explain the amount of peace of mind I have. After getting this grant. I am so happy. And we're going to tell people about your work. And you know how this grant fits in but you literally just found out today, right? Oh, yeah, a few hours ago. So I think this is great timing. I don't know when this podcast would be, you know, listened to by audience the audience. But yeah, this happened sometime in November. So pretty happy. Often this will go out sometime like mid December 3 week, maybe a December. So it'll be okay. still fresh, but not as fresh. But audience you've heard it here.
Paul Zelizer 02:29
That's so cool. So thank you. This whole topics under a of like, with immigrants and impact and entrepreneurship, like give us a little bit of your backstory? How did you get interested in this topic? And like what kind of life experiences have you had that you have such a passion for this, like what's contributed to that?
Soundarya Balasubramani 02:52
I think it 100% comes from personal experience that I've had since I moved to America, I grew up in a very small suburban India, that I'm pretty sure nobody who's not from there would have heard of, but I was, you know, I had the privilege of being able to move to a new country for my masters five years ago. And it really is a privilege because we think about it. I do think that I'm one of the most privileged humans on Earth, to get to spend my days actually doing the things that I want to do. If you look at the Maslow's hierarchy, I feel like I'm probably at the top rung of trying to self actualize every single day. So I had this privilege of moving here five years ago. And I came here from my master's in management, Science and Engineering at Columbia University in New York. So post graduation, I joined a company called Salesforce, I, it's a pretty big tech company, CRM company. And I joined there as a product manager, which back then was certainly my dream role. Because something worth mentioning is my background in Bachelor's in chemical engineering. So I was a researcher for the entire four years that I was in my undergrad. And I just didn't feel right. That's a long story. But I'll just say that I knew that this was not an area where I would be extraordinary. So I wanted to move to business and management. And so I moved here, got into product management. And within the first six months, I realized that this is not, it doesn't feel like I'm actually contributing what I want to be doing every single day. It was a wonderful company, and a great role. Honestly, I think hundreds of 1000s of people would want to have the role that I had, and the kind of perks that I had at this pretty great company, but it just wasn't for me. So that's when immigration came into my mind because For the viewer, for people who are listening, who are, who are not familiar with how immigration works. Number one, you as an immigrant cannot stay in this country without employer sponsorship if you're on a visa. So I was on something called the h one B visa, which is a speciality occupation visa that is given out to people who have a bachelor's or advanced degree. So I knew that if the moment I quit my job, I would have exactly 10 days, 10 days to move back to India, or wherever I want to go. So you can imagine just how precarious that situation is, for someone who has an entire life in this new country, he has spent a better part of their 20s here, and then they're asked to go back in 10 days. So that's number one, I think fact people should know. And secondly, if you wanted to, say start a company, when you were working at one place, there is no easy way to do that. Meaning, I cannot just start a company when I'm working at Salesforce, and start making money through this new company, because that would just be illegal. That's that's out of status, because I don't have the work authorization that I need from this new company that I've set up to keep working on that and make money from that. So yeah, it was kind of stuck in this hard place of I really want to quit and start something of my own. But I cannot quit because of all these rules. But I also don't want to go back to India, because this feels like home for me. And I want to be here for a few more years.
Paul Zelizer 06:40
So one standard pieces of advice. And a common pathway to entrepreneurship is to use your job as your startup buttons. Right. So you're at Salesforce, and what many people might do that, uh, you know, Salesforce, certainly a very well known company, a relatively good paying job. You use that as your to fund your life while you're starting something up. But what I hear you saying is, if you're an immigrant in the US, that's not a pathway that's available to us is that what I'm understanding?
Soundarya Balasubramani 07:12
It could be and this is where I think the nuance really matters. Because people have done that before. Meaning you can certainly do research on the side, you can talk to customers, you can talk to investors, even you can partner with someone who's a citizen, and then build a company with them together and share responsibilities such that you let them work on things that you can be working on legally. And then eventually, when the company is stable enough, you transfer your h1 B from your existing employer to this company that you set up. So I know this is unnecessary detail. But my point is that it's nuanced, Betty.
Paul Zelizer 07:57
Very different pathway then sample like as a citizen, I was a social worker and burning out in mental health. So I got a contract job in mental health. And I did both and I got income from both and that yeah, not as easy to do. If you're there's some real strong laws, shall we say? Is that fair to say?
Soundarya Balasubramani 08:18
Yes. And these laws were implemented, for a good reason when they were implemented. So the whole problem with immigration can be described in this nutshell of it's not keeping up with the pace of how the world has changed in the last few decades. So the last immigration reform was in 1990, that's 32 years ago. So you can imagine how like the fastest, the most dynamic changes have happened in the last 30 years, except the policies have not kept up with the changes as they should have. And we can talk more about, you know, the issue here. But I do think that right now, the system is not set up to serve skilled immigrants the way that it should. Yeah.
Paul Zelizer 09:08
And just for our listeners who are on the younger end of the spectrum, 30 years ago, you were lucky. I mean, lucky, if you had a very, very, very slow dial up connection could get on something called the Internet, which a lot of people couldn't get on, right. So basically, the Internet as we know, it today, didn't even exist, there was there was there was a very like static version of the internet versus a very small portion of the population. So when you say the world has changed, the world has really
Soundarya Balasubramani 09:41
that's a great example that I might actually use in the book. Yeah, we haven't had it reform since before we had something called the internet. Yeah, exactly.
Paul Zelizer 09:51
If you think the internet changed the world a little bit, you get a sense of what we're pointing to in this conversation. So so if I'm an immigrant I'm a skilled immigrant. I'm like, okay, I get it. Like, you know, maybe I don't love my job, or I see an opportunity. And I really want to go this way. But starting a business. It's complicated. And one of the things that you said that I wrote down Sunday before we hit record, as you said, Now, the reason I'm really one of the reasons I'm really passionate about this book is because it's not like it's nuanced. It's complicated. And somebody can't just like Google. Now we have Google, because we have the internet. We didn't have there years ago, right? You can't just google this because it's complicated. There's legalese. And some of it is just hard to get the nuanced information that applies to your situation. Did I hear you right? And if so, tell us a little bit about that nuance?
Soundarya Balasubramani 10:47
Yeah, that's a great question. And there is a lot of information out there. And there is a lot of very good information on recommended sites on immigration. So I don't want to be arrogant in saying that, you know, my book is the best resource on this topic, it will be a fantastic resource. But this is where I feel that there is a second and third component of my project, which comes in. So somebody who is my co author, and an immigration lawyer. He and I are working on writing this book called unshackled together. But we're not just stopping with the book, which is what, as you can imagine, most authors do. Most authors want to write their book, share what they want to say, and then move on to another project. But with my first book, admitted, which was focused on helping students who wanted to study abroad, like I did, I also built a private Slack community online where inside the book, I put a link that would lead the student to the community. And they could just join for free and talk to other students and talk to me. So it just, it took learning to the next level where instead of passively reading a book, now they were actively talking to other people who were reading and going through the same thing, and getting exchanging knowledge that way. So that was a very trivial decision that I made back then I did not put much thought I just thought, hey, why not just create a Slack community because it'd be nice to talk to these people. But it turned out to be a great decision that I thought was unshackled, we have to take this to the next level where we don't, we don't just create a Slack community and leave it big. But from the get go, let's build a community that will act as the support system that immigrants need in this country. And when I say immigrants, I should be careful because immigrants mean many things. It could mean farm laborers from Latin America, or it can also mean tech workers from Asia. So I'm talking about the lighter, the skilled immigrants who come here for education and jobs. So yeah, just building this community that gives these people the support system they need. And this would look like, for example, weekly office hours that we'll have with lawyers who can answer any questions that people have a crowdsourced resource hub. So think of, there's something called the EB one, green card, extraordinary ability green card. So once again, for those who don't know much about this, don't really no need to know about this. There are many ways you can get a green card in this country. And one of those ways is called the EB one, which is entirely based on merit, you have to satisfy three or three, four categories out of nine categories. And these are things such as getting awards, getting pressed on your work, getting published in major journals, and so on, then you get this EB one green card, but it's a pretty involved process that extends to many years sometimes, and you need help through this process. So the crowdsource resource hub will have the very nuanced information you need as you navigate this process. And I really want to have in person events that bring these people in the same location together, webinars. And finally, the third pillar, aside from the book, and the community, would be a matching tool that connects these immigrants with their best fit attorneys. Because unlike other countries, in America, you cannot really do anything on your own. You need a lawyer to file a case for you. So I also think that finding a good lawyer is easier said than done. And we want to simplify that process by like actually getting you to the finish line. Let's say that a typical reader who reads this might be someone who wants to start a company He is currently on an HP and does not know what to do. So first we educate them through the book. And then we help them meet other potential founders, past founders who have done this before through the community, and then help them file a case that's suited to their profile through the matching. Do
Paul Zelizer 15:21
you know what one of our core values that were printers is? Community. And one of the things I would say, you know, we published episode 273. This week. So we've been around for a while. And we've heard stories on so many different impact areas, whether it's climate, immigration, today, regenerative agriculture, women's empowerment, diversity, equity, inclusion, so many different areas. But one of the common through lines I've heard over and over and over again, when we're dealing with complex problems that have many times existed for generations, or there's aspects of them that have gone on for a long time. Community, like Complex problems need a whole ecosystem, because no one person can have enough information and a complex problem, especially one that's changing through time to really navigate it as skillfully as a community. So I love that you're celebrating and baking that into what you're doing. I'm so glad to hear that.
Soundarya Balasubramani 16:18
Thank you. Yeah, I, I should say that I'm one of the faces of this project, but it's an iceberg. The number of people who are behind the scenes who have been helping me and the beautiful people who are working with me on this is it's it's astounding, and I can yeah, there's so many people that I want to thank. I don't want to go into all the names right now. But I when I got the grant a few hours ago. Yeah, I just I messaged, I think 15 Different people just letting them know that, hey, I got this. And really your support means the world to me on this project.
Paul Zelizer 17:00
That's beautiful. Now, what are the people that's been really important? Is your co author Samir, tell me a little bit like how did you to me and like, how do you talk about your different, like the strengths that you're each bringing the voices that you bring to this project?
Soundarya Balasubramani 17:16
Yes. So obviously, Samir is the expert on immigration. He's the lawyer. So I think clearly some yen brings that, you know, right off the bat, somewhere character is an immigration lawyer and has been practicing for the last 20 plus years. And he's worked in both big tech, where he was filing h1 B's and search for corporate employees. And he also started his own law firm about five years ago called Diandra. So right now, he just helps skilled immigrants with oh, one visas, which is also an extraordinary ability visa, EB one, building a startup on h1, B, and so on. So I, yeah, it makes me last year through a mutual connection through someone called Rajesh Sadie, who, you know, to me, he is my dearest mentor, someone who is akin to family, and the biggest supporter on his project. So he introduced me to Samir. And so me and I work together on a filing that I had to do last year. And I also worked with him. I mean, I just love the chemistry that we had when we were together. So he was willing to think creatively, which I felt like a few are lawyers were not. I met with at least four or five different lawyers before I finalized on submit. And I just felt the sense of, you know, it's, he's not just well learned and knowledgeable. He's also creative. And he's also just very human. I don't know the perception that people have of lawyers and labored. I'd think lawyers were pretty good people. And he kind of distribution me on all of that. And so I approached him, maybe at this point four ish months ago and asked him, so I want to work on this project, this book. What do you think? There's a long story there. But I'll just say that the first time around, Samir said, No, because it wasn't the right time for him. And then I approached him again, a month after. And then he said, Yes. So yeah, I'm just so so so glad that I approached him a second time. And right now, I think even he is kind of surprised at how fast the momentum has built up in the last few months.
Paul Zelizer 19:39
We'll put a link in the show notes to severes law firm and other things that we mentioned. So there's the book, there's the community, there's a, like a matchmaker service for lawyers like, like, help us understand like, how does this work as an enterprise As you're putting most of your time and attention into this project right now, is that fair to say? All of my time? All of your time? Yeah. So how does it work? Because you just got a grant. Congratulations. There was a Kickstarter, if I understand correctly.
Soundarya Balasubramani 20:16
Oh, yeah, we raised $50,000 through the Kickstarter. And now this grant essentially makes it a very nice, you know, 100,000, which is great.
Paul Zelizer 20:25
Oh, yeah, this little $50,000 thing that we Oh, yeah. Yeah, if you are about that, I was
Soundarya Balasubramani 20:33
talking to my mentor, Rajesh. And we were just thinking about how it took four weeks of incredibly, incredibly hard work to raise that 50,000 Through the Kickstarter, and then in one call, I get another 50. That's
Paul Zelizer 20:46
it. Tell us about the Kickstarter, like, what what, what did you learn? Like what contributed to it going? You know, yes, you worked really hard. But $50,000 for this project. There's a lot of people who, you know, would like to figure out how to do that for crowdfunding, but we're unable to raise that much like, what contributed to that really successful crowdfunding?
Soundarya Balasubramani 21:10
Yeah, actually, I've been thinking of writing an article on this topic for a while since the campaign ended. But we tried at least 10 different experiments, marketing experiments to see what works. And I'll just tell you a few of them that we tried. And interestingly, most of them did not work. Only a very few things work, which I will also share. So things we tried, like quickly briefing, email marketing, we had an audience of 5000 subscribers, mostly immigrants. So we tried marketing about this project, at least a month before it started through email. We tried running ads on Facebook and Instagram, we have always this. We are right, we posted a bunch of Facebook and Reddit groups that were centered around immigration, MSN us people coming here for studying and so on. We reached out to a ton of immigration blogs asked me if they would share about this project on their blog. We tried reaching out to immigrant investors, people who came here from other countries and founded, founded companies and then made their wealth and invested in other companies, we thought they would resonate with this cause. So a long list of ideas. But in the end, we made zero conversions from social marketing, like running ads on Facebook and Instagram, we made very few conversions from email subscribers as well, which was very, very surprising for me. So I feel like in the end, what worked out well was immigrant investors. So after $50,000, I would say 14,000 came from 14 people who all cared about this issue in different ways. Not all of them are actually immigrants. Some of them were citizens from America. So when I realized that was working, I thought, You know what, I think we should just do more of this, which is reach out to as many warm contacts that we have, and try to get introduced to these people who would care about this. And I think like getting a few gave more momentum, because I could then share about this on social media, and say that, hey, by the way, Brad Feld, who's a very famous VC has just invested $1,000 in this project. So I think that gave momentum on social media. And social media was also a channel that through which I got a ton of sales. And I would say the third biggest sales channel was Kickstarter itself. So Kickstarter recommends your projects to people who are just searching for things on Kickstarter. So I didn't expect that 10 to 15% of copii raise would come from just people searching for something related to this topic, I didn't think anything would come from Kickstarter itself. So my advice to people who are running crowdfunding campaigns would just be try everything in the beginning. So you know, obviously, work on setting up lead channels well before the campaign begins, at least at least a month before, preferably three months before and when you start running these different experiments within the first week or so you will start to understand what's working. Make sure to use custom links everywhere. tag every single source so you know that this is where the traffic is coming in from. And, and once you see what's working, just put more fuel on that and try to you know, let that help you make more money. And we made $50,000 Which is wonderful. And if you look at how we made 15,000 30,000 The first day we made $10,000 The very First 24 hours of the campaign. So the first 24 hours is really the most important day, or 24 hours of your campaign ever. In my case, that's where I made 20% of the total amount. And once you reach your initial goal, which in my case was 15,000, that's the goal I set for Kickstarter, because I wanted to set a low enough goal that I knew I would definitely reach it in the first few days. So we hit 15,000 on the third day, and then it just stalled. I think we made until 25,000 In the next week. But that's it. Like it just stole that 25,000 For three days. And I was so demotivated, those three days, because I was like I was trying all these things, but nothing worked. And then it slowly came back up. And in the last week, I believe we made another $14,000. So the first and last week is very important as that's when you can create a sense of urgency in the last week and a sense of novelty in the first week. And in between, I would say don't expect much. But you can always one thing that I didn't do was try to get press on my project, I knew that press would be very hard because I did reach out to a few journalists, but only a few responded. And one person said, I mean, unless I read the actual book, I cannot be talking about it, which makes a lot of sense. But for a product that's actually made already, it makes sense to get press and use press to add more traffic in the second and third week where it kind of dies down completely.
Paul Zelizer 26:40
But good advice. And what I really love overall, at the top level, Sunday is the 10 strategies, you tried a number of things you didn't like have this story, like we're gonna do x and y. And that's it. And they're gonna work even though you've never done this before you tried you said 10 different things. Thank you for giving us so much granular information about what worked and what didn't. So great advice there.
Soundarya Balasubramani 27:06
So let's do that. Yeah. And can I mention one more thing that I just thought of sorry, for interrupting? No, I, the thing that we thought would work the most was getting students from across universities in the US as campus ambassadors for this project, and asking them to share about this book at this community inside their WhatsApp groups. So we got 35 to 40 people, 40 students across all these universities to share this message on the day one of the campaign. And they did they did a fantastic job. We got at least 1000 people visiting the page through these just WhatsApp shares. And we got zero conversions. So that was a Yeah, once again, it's just so many things didn't work out. And I'm just happy that we made for BKV. And
Paul Zelizer 27:58
that's awesome. Let's do this in a moment, I want to come back and hear where the project is going and some of the things you're building. But before we do that, I just want to take a quick break and hear a word from our sponsor. Do you have a business that's about making the world a better place, and you want it to grow both in terms of your impact, helping more people and your income, so you could live a good quality life. If you do, I'd like to talk to you about some research for a second. When scientists look at what actually contributes to humans reaching their goals, the single biggest predictor, whether it's a wellness goal, or it's a business school, is what they call social support. In other words, a group of people who are on a similar journey, who can help you with specific strategies that work on that journey at the time and point of development that you're on, as well as emotional support for the ups and downs of that journey. Being a social entrepreneur has highs and lows, right? If you like that kind of support, where printers has a community called the AWARE printers community, over 270 really generous and really skillful social entrepreneurs. And that's what we do with each other. We share concrete strategies, as well as emotional support for the ups and downs of the journey. If you'd like to find out more, you can take a look at aware printers.com forward slash community. And thank you to everybody in the world printers community who helped sponsor this podcast. So welcome back, everybody. In the second part of the show Sunday, we'd like to joke about putting on our social entrepreneur glasses. And you've already done that getting really granular about the book. And so talk to us one of the questions I have, it's not common. I'm on LinkedIn listeners, you know, I love LinkedIn. And, you know, that's how we connected you reached out to me and I was like, This sounds cool. Let's do an interview right? But it's not common to be a 26 year old and have a link Then profile with over 17,000 connections, obviously, you've put some time and attention into LinkedIn, and we literally wouldn't be here. That's at least how I heard about it. So talk to us a little bit about LinkedIn, and how has that factored into your goals and how you've chosen to invest your energy as a social entrepreneur.
Soundarya Balasubramani 30:22
Without LinkedIn, I don't think this project will be happening right now. I can say this, because when I quit my Salesforce job, I don't know if I mentioned this in my background, but I quit my job role as a product manager at Salesforce on October 31, last year 2021. When I quit, I made a post on LinkedIn, and said, you know, Hey, today is the day I quit my job as a pm at Salesforce. I'm really excited to enter this new phase in life where I have full control of my time as an immigrant. And I'm excited to write books, create courses and content and so on. So for whatever reason, that was reached 1.5 million people. I didn't.
Paul Zelizer 31:06
Five Oh, my gosh,
Soundarya Balasubramani 31:09
yeah, I, I hit, I hit post. And then I thought, Okay, well, you know, I just wanted to let people know that I'm leaving, and I'm trying this new entering this new phase. And the likes and comments are coming in. And with LinkedIn, what people should know is the first two hours matter a lot. So more than likely, even Commons really matter as well. And of course, reports really help. So I don't think this post event had a lot of reports, it was just comments from people who, I guess resonated. And now I understand why it read so many people. Because back then I didn't know that immigration was such a big problem here. I didn't know so many people were also wanting to quit, and they just felt shackled, I guess. So whenever they saw that post, I think it gave them a glimmer of hope that I can do it. If I'm, you know, I don't have to be stuck here forever. I'd like to thank. And so that reached 1.5 million people. And I did a genius thing, which I mean, I'm openly saying that it's a genius thing, because this is what helped kickstart the book project. But so in that post, I added a link that said, Hey, by the way, I'm planning to write a, you know, a guide on immigration in the next few months. And if you're interested, if you'd like to say quit your job or start something of your own, just put your email in here, that's all. So it took them to a Google form with just name and email. That's literally it. So and then, yeah, over the next few days, I was pretty overwhelmed with responses from this post, I kept responding to people. And finally, there were about 2500 people who put their name and email in that form. So I was like, Okay, wow, that's a lot of people who put their email. But then I forgot about it completely. Because I was teaching a course at this point, I was running a course on how do you plan your days and weeks with notion, totally different topic than immigration, totally a topic of productivity, that I forgot about this email, and I just moved on with my life. And then immigration resurfaced again sometime in May of this year. And at that point, my mentor, Rajesh, who I mentioned before, he suggested, hey, why don't you just send an email to those people? And ask them, like, email them and ask them? What questions do they want answered on this topic? So I email after seven months, all these people just being like, Hey, by the way, this is the girl whose post you commented on seven months ago. Not sure if this is relevant for you, but I'm writing a book thinking of writing a book on immigration. What are your top three questions? And yeah, and then the responses came pouring in. I think I got 300 responses in the next week or so. I was very overwhelmed with how many people are looking for some solution. And yeah, my point is that LinkedIn, that post on Wednesday, I quit. If I hadn't done that, I would not have gotten this response 2500 emails in one pose. And if that hadn't happened, I would not have emailed and without the responses, I just know that I would not be working on this project.
Paul Zelizer 34:33
I would agree, I think you were dealing with whatever it's worth. So talk to us a little bit about, like, without going into all the details of the book, if you were going to give some tips for somebody, like go buy the book listener, Italian, anybody you know, who's an immigrant and wants to start a company to go buy the book, join the community. We'll put links to everything that's live when the But so goes in the shownotes. But if you're gonna give people something they could be thinking about now a tip or a couple strategies that would help an immigrant who isn't inspiring entrepreneur but has some concerns about him about things like green cards and citizenship like what what would you suggest?
Soundarya Balasubramani 35:20
Yeah, let's take firstly, archetype of someone who's been waiting in line for a green card for 10 years. This is most definitely an Indian because of the population of the country. India is a country that has the highest number of backlogs. And the reason is because the United States has a quarter, a country cap limit on every country are the number of green cards that's given out. I mean, they're trying to be fair, and you know, like, say that every country gets 7%. So because India is so popular is it just it's not enough. And so for people who are waiting in line for a green card, I would say, explore the way of Owen and EB one. If you have been here for 10 plus years, it means you have experienced working in corporate for 10 plus years, which means you have done great things in the meantime, by publishing papers, by attending conferences, winning awards, and so on. So instead of waiting in line for another 10 years, I would just recommend that go talk to a lawyer who can evaluate your profile on the O one visa, or the EB one, a green card. I know these are technical terms, but I think for immigrants, listening, just go and google them, and you will find all the information you need. And see, yeah, just see what the lawyer says, look at the kind of requirements it has. I myself published a 12,000 word guide on both Owen and EB one a recently. So everyone who pre orders my book immediately gets the guide right now. So you know, when you go and talk to a lawyer, and if if they think you might have a shot, then awesome, I would actually recommend spend the next six months to a year of preparing your profile for applying for this instead of waiting in line, because the Oh 181 is not just a visa or green card, it's really a catalyst for you to do things fast in your career. I mean, you will be for example, trying to attend conferences that you would not have otherwise thought of. So that's my session first to them. The second archetype, I would say are people who are currently on a temporary visa and want to start a company. I mean, they're not looking to just get a green card, but they want to actually build their own adventure. So for such people, I would say, once again, there are options out there, I'm going to just mention a few options that I would recommend you go and google yourself later on this topic. First is called the International entrepreneur parole IEP. This was introduced just last year, and it has certain requirements, if you have a company with which is raised to $3,000, and you have a 10% ownership stake, then you will be eligible for this parole program. Second option could be the O one visa, once again, the O one extraordinary ability visa, you can try to file for an O one through a company that you set up right now. And once you get that you can do whatever you want in that company. So the O one is also a temporary visa. But it has a lot of advantages over the h1 which if you Google, you understand how
Paul Zelizer 38:40
awesome you just came out with a guide that has some information about that right?
Soundarya Balasubramani 38:46
Yes, exactly. I just came up with a guide with some information. And I would say a few more options for potential entrepreneurs to look at would be looking at venture capital firms that specifically help immigrant founders and there's a few like this such as unshackled ventures. The name unshackled is not related to my I mean, it's the same name, but they're not related to my book. They're just calling choco ventures. They specifically invest in immigrant founders and help you with your visa support. There's a bold, global bond global VC, there is one way ventures so I just made a LinkedIn post of some seven different VC funds that people could look at who are immigrants. So I would say try and look for these VC funds that could help you with if you have a bold idea that you want to work towards. And finally, one more option worth looking at is called the global entrepreneur in residence program. G IR. This is a very interesting program that is probably most suited for someone who is on an OPD right now someone who's a student who just graduated in the in the first three years after graduation. If you haven't Good idea, check out global detroit.org or global e ir.org. And they will essentially hire you on an h1 B, pair you with a university where you can teach about entrepreneurship. And in the meantime, keep building your company on the side. So those are four options.
Paul Zelizer 40:22
Awesome. So go consider pre ordering the book listeners, and you will get that document. Andrea, there's so much we could talk about. But one of the things I would love to hear a little bit more just like specifically, like, when does the book come out? When does the community go live? Like, just give us a little bit of the details of how you're building this out?
Soundarya Balasubramani 40:45
Yes. Right now I think, you know, with the grant and all this, it just depends on how fast can me and my team work towards this. So my goal is to publish the book, get the book in the hands of people who pre ordered it in April 2023. So I guess about five months from now. And I want to start building the community sometime late February, early March. So as you can imagine, for the community, what is even what does that even mean? Right? It just means finding a tech stack online, using some community platform, getting a license and just inviting people over. But that's not a community. That's, that's just getting people to as you know, the same digital spot. But I feel like the community is a perpetual project where I will probably start with certain important things at first, and then slowly start adding more and more as we get feedback from people in the community. So but it will be launched in March of next year, for sure.
Paul Zelizer 41:51
Great, super excited about it. And please do circle back around when you actually have firm date, so I can help spread the word. So thunder area, we can hang out and talk all day. I love what you're doing. But you're a busy human. And our listeners are really busy too. If there was something you were hoping we were going to get to and we haven't gotten to it yet on this topic, or there's something you want to leave our listeners with about what you've learned about social entrepreneurship, you've gotten a lot done in your not huge amount of time on this planet as an adult. What would that be?
Soundarya Balasubramani 42:32
I just want to say that when the media talks about immigration, there is a lot of conflation that happens where they conflate people who are, for example, coming from Latin America, not coming for a master's degree. They conflate these farm laborers and traders with people who come here for a master's, and they're working in these highly skilled positions and want to contribute back to this country and pay a lot of taxes do. So I think that politicians use that rhetoric to try to gain more voters by talking about by saying things like, these people are stealing our jobs. But I just want to make that point that there is a reason why media loves this, because it's such a sensational, controversial topic. To kind of focus on, I would just say that. If you look at any academic research conducted on skilled immigrants, who are entrepreneurs, especially, it's a net positive to the country, it's a net positive to the world. So don't just try to dig deeper when you hear this because really, immigrants contribute to this nation so much more than what people think they do.
Paul Zelizer 43:45
I didn't say this earlier, not because of any reason other than just I wanted to hear your story and got super excited about the ground. But I'll end with a personal story of a dear friend is an immigrant who has a graduate degree and was not able to stay in the US, I think partially could have really benefited from the information you've shared today. And is now one of those scenarios, right? You got 10 days to go home after quite some time in the US providing a lot of value under different circumstances could imagine this person have stayed in the US and done incredible things. So this is a topic. It's very close to home as soon as I heard about it, and we you reached out on LinkedIn. I was like, oh, yeah, we need to tell this story. Not my personal journey, but somebody I love dearly, who would rather be in the US just because of what would be available in terms of resources to have impact globally. And as an incredibly skillful human and I'm quite sure would have done amazing things and still will, but not have the same access to capital and resources as this person's home country. So I just want to say listeners if you Were in a situation of knowing somebody who could benefit from this community, knowing somebody who could benefit from this book. Please, both my friend and I, when we heard about this topic, I let this person known this person, and I both said, Boy, I wonder if this, if you would still be here in the US if you didn't have some of the opportunities to have global impact, with more quality information and more nuanced information, so I share that to just say, listeners, if you know somebody who could benefit, please share it. I would love it brings me great joy, when we can help entrepreneurs who really have the skills and the passion to move the needle, get the capital, both the financial capital, but also the social capital, to really move the needle on the impact areas that they're passionate about. And in this one case, a few more months of this person being in the US and said, Hey, go join this community, I can't help but wonder if this person would still be here. Now, it's not a horrible thing. They're fine, they're going to eat but it hurt both our hearts that this person couldn't follow their dreams with all the access to capital that would have been available. Had he stayed here. So I just share that to say, listeners, if you know somebody, please tell him about the book. Tell him about the community. Let's get the word out there. Sunday, I so appreciate you being on the show today. Just thank you so much for being here sharing your story and for this incredible work that you do.
Soundarya Balasubramani 46:38
Thank you for sharing about these books, not just mine, but so many other entrepreneurs works with all of your audience, because I think you're doing something that's such a noble God's work in terms of making this information available, which is you know, what I'm also doing with this book, and you're doing is every single week with your podcast. So I think what you're doing is incredibly important.
Paul Zelizer 47:06
Thank you for your very kind. So before we go, listeners, just a reminder, we love I mean, we love listeners suggested topics and guest you're here you invest your time you listen, not many have listened to 273 episodes, but a lot of you have listened to a bunch and I so appreciate that. And I want to find the stories and the information about the topics that you care about. So if you have an idea, please go to the AWARE partners website. And right on our contact page, we have three simple guidelines, we try to be super transparent about what we're looking for and how we make decisions. It's right there for everybody to see. So if you have an idea, take a look at those guidelines. And if it fits, please send your ideas right on. So for now, I just want to say thank you so much for listening. Please take really good care. And thank you for all the