Common Sense

And my thoughts on the H1-B kerfuffle.

Tyler Denk
January 14, 2025

Alright, I’ll admit it. I used to be a DocuSign guy until I realized I was paying hundreds of dollars per month simply to send and receive signed documents. Then I found Agree.com.

Agree made e-signature free for everyone… and then loaded the platform with killer features like automated invoicing, integrated payments, and revenue recovery.

Now I can send, sign, and get paid—all in one place. No more waiting around for checks or jumping between apps. Agree.com doesn’t just save me hundreds of dollars every month; it gets me to the good part faster: seeing money hit my account.

As a founder myself, I gotta say my favorite part about Agree.com is that their founders are accessible and dialed in to making the product 10x better than the alternative.

I already know you’re smart because you read Big Desk Energy. Now you can show others that you’re smart because you send contracts with Agree.

Using Agree.com is an IQ test.

What do all of the following companies have in common: Google, Tesla, eBay, NVIDIA, Zoom, Stripe, Robinhood, Cloudflare, Instacart, SpaceX, Palantir, Slack, Duolingo, Roblox.

Toad buying you some time to think before seeing the answer

They were all founded, or co-founded, by immigrants.

Now imagine these immigrants were never allowed to enter and work in the US. The ~375,000 people employed by these companies wouldn’t have the same well paying jobs they do today, and the $7T in aggregate market cap would be contributing to other economies and countries around the world.

This is also a drastic over-simplification. It doesn’t account for the taxes generated for federal and state governments (yes, I’m aware there are loopholes), the substantial income taxes paid by their highly compensated employees, or the contributions these 375,000 employees make within their local communities. Not to mention that these companies are home to some of the world's most innovative technologies.

The overwhelmingly obvious point I’m trying to make here: the U.S. as a whole is considerably better off because these companies exist, and were built here in America. Note that it only took about 10 companies to illustrate that; but there are thousands to choose from.

I know the whole kerfuffle (always wanted to use that word) over H1-B visas happened a few weeks ago, but I was in Costa Rica enjoying my time off during the holidays. I’ve got a few thoughts and a newsletter, so here we are.

Some may consider the debate political; it’s not — it’s common sense. Believe it or not, not everything worthy of debate needs to be reduced to two opposing political sides.

If you too were busy actually enjoying the holidays, I’ll give a quick recap:

The H-1B visa program allows U.S. companies to hire highly skilled foreign workers, requiring a bachelor’s degree or higher. There are 85,000 visas issued each year.

It’s common for tech companies to leverage H-1B to hire talent from across the world. SpaceX and Tesla obtained 724 H-1B visas last year. Yeah, that last sentence had a citation (put a capital “J” Journalist next to my name).

Over the holidays, Trump appointed Sriram Krishnan to be an advisor on AI policy. Krishnan is an Indian American VC who was most recently a General Partner at A16Z.

Far-right activists like Laura Loomer criticized the appointment claiming it would oppose “Trump’s America First agenda.” This set off a firestorm of tweets and debate between the far-right MAGA crowd who are mostly anti-immigrant, and those who have recently gained influence in Trump’s inner circle and have leveraged the government’s H-1B program for their own businesses (Elon, Vivek Ramaswamy, etc.)

You have permission to feel however you’d like about Elon. What you can’t argue is his contribution to the world (and the U.S.).

He has built Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, xAI, The Boring Company, and also runs X (formerly Twitter). Collectively they employ over 150,000 people (in the U.S.), and are pushing the boundaries of transportation, energy storage, aerospace, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, biomedical engineering, artificial intelligence, and free speech.

A recent criticism is that he yields far too much power, wealth, and influence as a private citizen. And to be honest, I agree. I don’t think an unelected official should be able to unilaterally deploy internet and communication infrastructure in an active European warzone.

That said — I’m at least grateful that the person who does have those capabilities is an American citizen rather than one of an adversary. That was only made possible because Elon previously immigrated to the U.S. on an H-1B visa. It’s a vehicle to bring the best and brightest to contribute to the American economy.

Hard pivot from geopolitical power, but imagine the NBA without Embiid, Luka, Giannis, Jokić, Kyrie, SGA, Jamal Murray, Andrew Wiggins and the dozens of other international superstars. The NBA would be a shell of itself without them.

Fortunately Adam Silver, the NBA commissioner, allows these “foreigners” to participate because they are some of the most talented players in the world. His job is to put the best product out on the court to the benefit of the fans, the owners, the shareholders, the networks, the advertisers, and the local communities.

The utmost American thing you could possibly want is for the most talented people from around the world to willingly choose to upend their lives and move to the U.S. These are skilled workers who are contributing to American innovation, building their own companies, paying their taxes, and employing many thousands of American citizens.

The same way the NBA is a better product because it openly accepts the best players on merit — Silicon Valley and the companies shaping the future are far superior when they are built by the world’s most talented engineers.

There are over 8 billion people on the planet today. Contrary to what some believe, the U.S. doesn’t have a monopoly of talent — it has a monopoly of arrogance.

At beehiiv we currently have an open role for a Data Engineer. As CEO, my only priority is to hire someone who can best excel in the role and help us succeed. I couldn’t care less where that employee lives, where they were born, their gender, religion, ethnicity, or favorite movie. I just need the best data engineer (if this is you, you should apply).

What Laura and the protectionist MAGA wing would argue is that I actually should only hire the best American worker, even if that candidate is far inferior to the others in our pipeline.

The result: we end up with a mediocre data engineer, which makes us just a bit less competitive and less likely to succeed.

Granted, a single subpar hire likely wouldn’t be the downfall of beehiiv. But when we are now forced to hire inferior candidates across all of our open engineering roles, it has a negative compounding effect on our ability to compete in a global market.

While building the best newsletter platform may not be one of America’s top national interests (it’s my top national interest fwiw) — being home to the dominant companies in industries like aerospace, defense, AI, crypto, and energy likely are. The asinine government overreach to enforce only hiring American workers would put these companies at risk of falling behind their international competitors.

Unless it were true that the absolute most talented and qualified person for every single open role just so happened to be born in the U.S., the only thing that protectionism does is diminish the quality and output of American companies.

Rather than forcing companies to hire American workers, shouldn’t politicians instead prioritize and invest in programs that would improve the education and training of American youth so that Americans are the most talented and qualified?

The problem with that solution is that it would take decades, and instead the American political complex is built on short-term incentives. When politicians' top priority is to remain in power via election cycles that range from 2 to 6 years, where’s the incentive to invest in long-term solutions?

Look, I’m not a policy expert, nor am I interested in politics. It’s just that politicians who intentionally promote xenophobic and protectionist policies in the name of “America first” actually undermine the competitive nature of America.

It impacts Silicon Valley, it impacts our national defense, and it impacts every American citizen and consumer. It’s not political; it’s common sense.

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Credit: Pedro Goncalves

As a new plant dad, I dig all the greenery we got going here. The only thing it’s missing is a view (or windows you can actually see out of).

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