YC-aligned immigration attorney opens AMA on the realities of startup visas

Peter Roberts, an immigration attorney who works with Y Combinator and startups, is hosting an AMA-useful signal amid a lot of noise around founder and talent mobility. What’s notable here isn’t another policy hot take, but practitioner-level context on how visas intersect with how startups actually operate: hiring plans, job architectures, compensation bands, and corporate events like pivots, funding rounds, or layoffs. Under the hood, categories like H‑1B, O‑1, STEM OPT, and International Entrepreneur Parole turn on evidence, titles, and worksites-not vibes-while LCAs, amended petitions, and “material change” rules can quietly gate product roadmaps.

Worth noting: immigration constraints aren’t just HR trivia. They shape whether a seed-stage team can onshore a key engineer, whether a founder can pay themselves below “market,” and how remote-first claims square with U.S. worksite and wage compliance. An AMA with a practitioner tends to surface the operational details developers care about-what documentation actually moves an O‑1 across the line, how to avoid tripping an amendment with a role change, and the real timelines that affect runway.

The bigger picture: as startups go global-from-day-one, immigration is part of the infrastructure stack. Getting accurate, ground-truth guidance helps teams plan hiring, avoid unforced errors, and ship without surprises from USCIS.