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Dear Sophie: Can I work in the US on a dependent spouse visa?
Sophie Alcorn is the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley and 2019 Global Law Experts Awards’ “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneur Immigration Services.” She connects people with the businesses and opportunities that expand their lives.
Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.
“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”
“Dear Sophie” columns are accessible for Extra Crunch subscribers; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one- or two-year subscription for 50% off.
Dear Sophie:
My spouse’s startup is transferring her to the U.S. to help set up an office there. Will I be able to go with her and work in the U.S.? How long will it take for me to get a work permit? How long will we be able to stay?
— Hopeful in Hyderabad
Dear Hopeful:
Congratulations on starting an exciting new adventure with your family. U.S. immigration law allows visa holders to bring their spouse and dependent children with them to the U.S. and you can check out this podcast on the topic. Dependent children are defined as children who are under the age of 21 and unmarried. Whether or not the spouse can get a work permit, which is called an Employment Authorization Document (EAD), depends on which dependent visa the spouse receives.
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6 CISOs share their game plans for a post-pandemic world
Oren Yunger
Contributor
Contributor
Oren Yunger is an investor at GGV Capital, focused on enterprise IT infrastructure, development tools and cybersecurity. He was previously chief information security officer at a SaaS company and a public financial institution.
More posts by this contributor
Like all business leaders, chief information security officers (CISOs) have shifted their roles quickly and dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic, but many have had to fight fires they never expected.
Most importantly, they’ve had to ensure corporate networks remain secure even with 100% of employees suddenly working from home. Controllers are moving millions between corporate accounts from their living rooms, HR managers are sharing employees’ personal information from their kitchen tables and tens of millions of workers are accessing company data using personal laptops and phones.
This unprecedented situation reveals once and for all that security is not only about preventing breaches, but also about ensuring fundamental business continuity.
While it might take time, everyone agrees the pandemic will end. But how will the cybersecurity sector look in a post-COVID-19 world? What type of software will CISOs want to buy in the near future, and two years down the road?
To find out, I asked six of the world’s leading CISOs to share their experiences during the pandemic and their plans for the future, providing insights on how cybersecurity companies should develop and market their solutions to emerge stronger:
- Ian Amit, Cimpress
- Colin Anderson, Levi Strauss & Co.
- Al Ghous, ServiceMax
- Adrian Ludwig, Atlassian
- Rinki Sethi, Rubrik
- Elwin Wong, Ross Stores
The security sector will experience challenges, but also opportunities
The good news is, many CISOs believe that cybersecurity will weather the economic storm better than other enterprise software sectors. That’s because security has become even more top of mind during the pandemic; with the vast majority of corporate employees now working remotely, a secure network has never been more paramount, said Rinki Sethi, CISO at Rubrik. “Many security teams are now focused on ensuring they have controls in place for a completely remote workforce, so endpoint and network security, as well as identity and access management, are more important than ever,” said Sethi. “Additionally, business continuity and disaster recovery planning are critical right now — the ability to respond to a security incident and have a robust plan to recover from it is top priority for most security teams, and will continue to be for a long time.”
That’s not to say all security companies will necessarily thrive during this current economic crisis. Adrian Ludwig, CISO at Atlassian, notes that an overall decline in IT budgets will impact security spending. But the silver lining is that some companies will be acquired. “I expect we will see consolidation in the cybersecurity markets, and that most new investments by IT departments will be in basic infrastructure to facilitate work-from-home,” said Ludwig. “Less well-capitalized cybersecurity companies may want to begin thinking about potential exit opportunities sooner rather than later.”
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What people tend to get wrong about remote work
What do people tend to get wrong about remote work? And how can companies make it work better for them?
While just about every tech company on the planet has become remote over the last few weeks, GitLab has been at this a while — since pretty much day one of its existence back in 2014, in fact. Since then they’ve grown to more than 1,200 employees across 65 countries, with a staggering valuation of nearly $3 billion. They’ve figured out some stuff along the way, sharing it all in an ever-evolving handbook.
I recently hopped on a call with GitLab’s head of Remote, Darren Murph, to get some insight on how they make it all work. This is the second part of my interview with Murph; he and I chatted for quite a while, so I’ve split it into two parts for easier reading. You can find Part I here.
TechCrunch: There’s this ongoing conversation about how people are coming away from this remote experience. Are they walking away saying, “yeah, that was great, we can do this day-to-day, I wouldn’t have seen that before,” or is the fact that they’re being thrust into this, and on not the best terms, going to have a negative impact?
Do you think this [sudden shift] is going to have a positive impact on remote work?
Darren Murph: I do. I’m a long-term optimist on this.
There’s a Gartner survey that just came out. They surveyed over 300 CFOs globally; 74% of them said that they’re going to shift some of their workforce permanently remote after this… even though this is the worst possible way to be thrust into remote.
This is the worst of circumstances, and people are still like, “You know, I love not having to commute.” And businesses are like, “You know, I love saving $10,000 per desk by not having that real estate.”
If it’s working in the worst of times… six to 12 months from now, when the crisis is abated and people have had time to lay the remote structure, build their handbooks, get the right remote hygiene integrated into the DNA of their company… it’s going to be like, warp-speed accelerator.
If you can make it work now, you can make it work any time.
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GitLab’s head of Remote on hiring, onboarding and why Slack is a no-work zone
With more than 1,200 employees distributed across over 65 countries and a valuation of nearly $3 billion, GitLab is one of the world’s most successful fully remote startups.
Describing it as a textbook example of a remote company would be redundant, because the company actually wrote a textbook about it.
I recently had a chance to talk to GitLab’s head of Remote, Darren Murph, who filled me in on how they get stuff done, his advice for all the companies that had to suddenly shift to remote work and why GitLab gets rid of all its Slack messages after 90 days. (Fun fact: Darren wrote for TechCrunch’s corporate cousin Engadget in a past life, where he earned a Guinness World Record for writing an absolutely ridiculous number of posts.)
Darren and I chatted for quite a while, so I’ve split the transcript into two parts for easier reading. Part two coming tomorrow!
TechCrunch: So your official title is “Head of Remote.” What does that entail?
Darren Murph: It’s three things.
It’s telling our remote story to the world, it’s making sure that people who join the company acclimate to working in an all-remote setting and it’s building out the educational piece. The “all-remote” section of our handbook has dozens of guides on how we do everything remotely, from async, to meetings, to hiring and compensation, and I’m the author of all of that.
We do that to better the world; we put it all out there, it’s open source. We want other companies to read it, implement it and use it. We never saw COVID coming, but I kind of knew that down the road [this handbook] would be necessary. Thankfully, I started working on it in advance. Now that the world needs it… it’s been crazy. We packaged up our best thinking in that remote playbook, and it’s just been off the charts with companies downloading it. It’s been wild.
Why did GitLab go remote in the first place?
It was remote by default. The first three people to join the company were in three different countries… so the only way to do it was through the internet.
The one brief moment in time where there was a co-located wrinkle to the company… they’d moved to California for Y Combinator. I think there was like nine or 10 people at the time. Of course, coming out of Y Combinator, at the time, you just get an office — it’s just what you did.
I think that lasted about three days. Then people just stopped showing up.
[Laughs]
But work kept getting done! Because even in the office they were just communicating on… whatever it was at the time. It probably wasn’t Slack, I don’t think Slack existed.
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Dear Sophie: What is required of employers laying off foreign workers?
Sophie Alcorn is the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley and 2019 Global Law Experts Awards’ “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneur Immigration Services.” She connects people with the businesses and opportunities that expand their lives.
Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.
“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”
“Dear Sophie” columns are accessible for Extra Crunch subscribers; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one or two-year subscription for 50% off.
Dear Sophie:
Fallout from COVID-19 is forcing our startup to downsize. What legal requirements do we need to consider if we’re laying off foreign-born employees or scaling back their hours?
— HR Manager in San Mateo
Dear HR Manager:
Thank you for your question; a lot of people are going through the same thing. Keep in mind that terminating an employee that your company sponsored for a visa or green card can have ramifications for future hiring.
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Dear Sophie: What’s the best option for international founders to expand in the US?
Sophie Alcorn is the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley and 2019 Global Law Experts Awards’ “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneur Immigration Services.” She connects people with the businesses and opportunities that expand their lives.
Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.
“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”
“Dear Sophie” columns are accessible for Extra Crunch subscribers; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one or two-year subscription for 50% off.
Dear Sophie:
I’m a startup founder in Israel looking to expand into the U.S. market. What is the best visa option for me and a key member of my executive team to come to the U.S. to establish a sales and marketing office there? I would like my spouse and children to join me if my spouse can also work in the U.S. Is that possible?
— Tenacious in Tel Aviv
Dear Tenacious:
Thanks for reaching out. Based on your situation, the E-2 visa for treaty investors and employees may offer the best option.
An underutilized option, the E-2 visa is ideal for startup founders and employees whose home country has a treaty of commerce and navigation with the U.S. Israelis became eligible for E-2 visas just last year, joining the citizens of 80 other treaty countries. For more details on E-2 visas for founders and employees, check out Episode 16 of my “Immigration Law for Tech Startups” podcast.
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How this startup built and exited to Twitter in 1,219 days
By the summer of 2016, Marie Outtier had spent eight years as a consultant advising media agencies and martech companies on marketing growth strategy.
Pierre-Jean “PJ” Camillieri started as a music software engineer before joining one of Apple’s consumer electronics divisions. Inspired by Siri, he left to start Timista, a smart lifestyle assistant.
When the two joined forces to co-found Aiden.ai, the combination was potent — one was a consummate marketer, the other, a specialist in machine learning. Their goal: create an AI-driven marketing analyst that offered actionable advice in real time.
Humans who manage ad campaigns must analyze vast amounts of numbers, but Outtier and Camillieri envisioned a tool that could make optimization recommendations in real time. Analytics are vast and unwieldy, so theirs was a no-brainer proposition with a market crying out for solutions.
The company’s first office was at Bloom Space in Gower Street, London. It was just a handful of hot desks and a nearby sofa shared with four other startups. That summer, they began in earnest to build the company. A few months later, they had a huge opportunity when the still 100% bootstrapped company was selected for Techcrunch Disrupt’s Startup Battlefield competition.
Interviewed by TechCrunch, they explained their proposition: Marketers wanted to know where a digital marketing campaign was getting the most traction: Twitter or Facebook. You might need to check several dashboards across multiple accounts, plus Google analytics to compile the data — and even if you conclude that one platform is outperforming the other, that might change next week as users shift attention to Instagram, potentially wasting 60% of ad spend.
Aiden was intended to feel like just another co-worker, relying on natural language processing to make the exchange feel chatty and comfortable. It queried data from multiple dashboards and quickly compiled it into flash charts, making it easy to find and digest.
Eventually, instead of managing 10 clients, marketing analysts would be able to manage 50 using dynamic predictions as well as visualizations. Aiden incorporated Outtier’s expertise into its algorithms so it could suggest how to tweak a Facebook campaign and anticipate what was going to happen.
Was appearing at Disrupt a significant moment? “It was a big deal for us,” says Outtier. “The exposure gave us ammunition to raise our first round. And being part of the Disrupt Battlefield alumni gave us many meaningful networking and PR opportunities.”
A few weeks later the company had raised a seed round of $750,000. But not without difficulty. By this time Outtier was in the latter stages of pregnancy. Raising money under these circumstances was difficult, but, she says, “it can be done. It’s tougher than ‘normal circumstances.’ It’s a bit like running a marathon, but with a fridge on your back.”
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The changing face of employment law during a global pandemic
Prompted by Jeff Bezos’s plans to test all Amazon employees for the virus that causes COVID-19, we wondered whether employers can mandate employee testing, regardless of symptoms. The issue pits public safety against personal privacy, but limited testing availability has rendered the question somewhat moot.
But as the World Health Organization and U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have noted, asymptomatic COVID-19 carriers can spread the virus without realizing they’re infected. To learn more about workers’ rights in this arena, we spoke to Tricia Bozyk Sherno, counsel at Debevoise & Plimpton, who focuses on employment and general commercial litigation.
The answer, for now, is not entirely straightforward, though updates from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission could make the situation clearer going forward as more tests are made available and state governments begin pushing to reopen businesses.
Sherno offered a fair amount of insight into the EEOC’s updated guidance and made some predictions about how things may look for both employers and workers going forward.
TechCrunch: Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, what sorts of laws governed an employer’s ability to test employees for infectious diseases?
Tricia Bozyk Sherno: Covered employers (employers with 15 or more employees) must comply with the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which limits an employer’s ability to make disability-related inquiries or require medical examinations. (Note that certain states may also have similar statutes in place.) Generally, disability-related inquiries and medical examinations are prohibited by the ADA except in limited circumstances. A “medical examination” is a procedure or test that seeks information about an individual’s physical or mental impairments or health — so infectious disease testing would fall into this category.
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CrowdStrike’s new CTO says the coronavirus era is ‘business as usual’
Two months ago, seemingly out of nowhere, CrowdStrike’s co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch decided it was time to depart.
Alperovitch, who served as the cybersecurity giant’s chief technology office since its 2011 debut, said he was leaving to launch a non-profit policy accelerator. CrowdStrike named Michael Sentonas, who managed the firm’s tech strategy for three years, as his replacement.
The news came at a critical time for the maker and seller of subscription-based endpoint security software that protects against breaches and cyberattacks. The company’s stock was in recovery after it fell below its IPO price, just months after popping 90% on its first day on the public market. It was one of the biggest offerings of the year, reaching more than $11 billion in value by the end, a far cry from a decade earlier when the security giant started out as a few notes scribbled on a napkin in a hotel lobby.
And then the pandemic happened.
By the time of his appointment, Sentonas was preparing to move to the U.S. from his native Australia, but “that hasn’t been the easiest thing to work through,” he told TechCrunch in a recent call. Despite having to balance the time difference and often swapping days with nights, the newly-appointed chief technology officer says it’s largely been “business as usual” for CrowdStrike.
Here’s why.
This interview was edited for clarity and length.
TechCrunch: Two months ago, you were appointed chief technology officer at CrowdStrike. Prior to that you were vice president of tech strategy. How have things been since the promotion?
Michael Sentonas: In some respects, things have been business as usual. A lot of the work I was doing around tech strategy and longer-term vision about [what] we should be working on hasn’t changed for me. Obviously, when one of the co-founders moves on, they have big shoes to fill. So, I’ve inherited a larger team. It’s working with the team around what can I assist them with to help us continue to focus. Probably the biggest change is just being stuck here because of what’s going on around the world and just adjusting to largely covering a U.S. timezone from Australia, which isn’t easy.
That can’t be easy?
We’re a globally-spread and globally-diverse organization. The last statistic that I looked at a few weeks ago was that 70% of our staff logins are remote. I’m dealing with Europe and the U.S., that’s just the way we’re spread. It’s all around the world.
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Dear Sophie: Is unemployment considered a public benefit?
Sophie Alcorn is the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley and 2019 Global Law Experts Awards’ “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneur Immigration Services.” She connects people with the businesses and opportunities that expand their lives.
Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.
“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”
“Dear Sophie” columns are accessible for Extra Crunch subscribers; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one or two-year subscription for 50% off.
Dear Sophie: I have an H-4 visa and work authorization. I currently have a job that’s considered nonessential during the coronavirus emergency. If I get laid off, I would need unemployment assistance while I look for another job.
Would getting unemployment benefits hurt my or my spouse’s green card petition under the new public charge rule?
— Nonessential in NorCal
Dear Nonessential:
Thanks for your timely question. The short answer is no, getting unemployment benefits alone right now won’t jeopardize your or your spouse’s green card. This is because receiving unemployment benefits, getting tested for coronavirus and seeking emergency medical treatment (even if it’s covered by Medicaid) are all exempt from consideration as government benefits under the new public charge rule.
Immigration officials have long had the authority to deny individuals a visa or green card if they are likely to be dependent on public benefits. The new public charge rule, which went into effect on February 24, expands the factors immigration officials will consider. An additional form seeking health and financial information must now be submitted with most visa and green card applications. Immigration officials will use that information to determine whether applicants are or are likely to become dependent on government benefits.
If you have received a public benefit in the past, your application won’t necessarily be denied, but given what’s at stake, it’s important to consult an experienced immigration attorney.
Individuals who will be subjected to the increased scrutiny of the expanded public charge rule are:
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