The “3 to 5 Year Rule” for Investing in Immigrant Founders

If you want to back first-generation immigrant entrepreneurs, you should start thinking in terms of a 3–5 year time span to cultivate relationships.

Why 3–5 years?

What do first-generation immigrant founders need in order to take the plunge? To me, it's mostly two things: clarity on immigration and some sort of financial safety net. Everything else, they can manage, as many have before them.

Immigration is more direct. You don’t want to be thrown out of the country due to a lack of proper work authorization. Every country has its own quirks. In the UK, the most common routes are:

Working your way to an ILR (3 years on the Global Talent Visa, or 5 years on the Tier 2 Work Visa)

Being the dependent of another visa holder (often a partner/spouse)

Being on the (often restrictive) Innovator Founder Visa

Being on a temporary visa for 2 years (like HPI or the Graduate Visa) and hoping to convert into one of the above

I believe its a similar timeline in the rest of the EU as well (especially with the EU Blue Card).

The safety net is more fluid and can take on various shapes. There are the fortunate ones, with well-off parents or a spouse/partner in a stable job.

However, for most people, it takes a few years of working to come up with a financial safety net that gives them at least 1–2 years of runway. This is all the more pertinent to those who come to the country as working professionals, often with their partners (and not as students).

The most common scenario, then, would be where you fit into 1. or 2. on the immigration front and need at least a year or two's worth of expenses. Combining both of these together means it typically takes at least 3–5 years from the day you step into the UK for the entrepreneurial bug to infect you.

There’s another reason why it takes that long.

Familiarity with the tech ecosystem takes time, especially if you’re from overseas. Getting to know the major companies/startups, events, and investors. And more importantly, building a support system of friends and colleagues who can become future co-founders, early hires, or early customers.

In my own orbit, there are examples like Sunil Pai. We had tried hiring him back in India while running my own startup. He then came to the UK and became a sensation in the tech ecosystem over the years (5 years, to be exact) and then decided to start Partykit (backed by Sequoia and later acquired by Cloudflare). I was a tiny investor. Or Rishabh Mehrotra, who overlapped with me during uni in India. He always had entrepreneurial dreams, but spent time doing ML at Spotify, ShareChat, and Sourcegraph before starting Pavo AI, where I am an advisor.

Caveat: Note that the clock starts ticking when someone arrives in the country, not when you meet them. If you meet an immigrant builder in their final year of university, they may only be a couple of years away from taking the plunge. If you meet someone who's already spent four years working in the UK and is months away from ILR, the wait could be much shorter. The key isn't how long you've known someone; it's understanding where they are in the process of accumulating the freedom, security, and network required to start a company.

Building the relationships

When you first meet an immigrant builder who is fresh off the boat, they might be raw. Or they might seem a little off. You might think they’re not risk-taking (you’ll often be wrong).

They might just have different priorities in life. The trick is to understand where they are in their journey. How long before you get ILR? Are you thinking about the Global Talent Visa? How much of your ESOPs have vested? Going to make any money from it? Parents back home okay?

While I have spent enough time in B2B/enterprise/devtools, marketing, and early-stage startups, what I really enjoy is community building and connecting with people. I also love underdogs.

And so, building on that, I started doing two things:

Community building: I did (and continue to do so) this for the Indian diaspora after realising that it's going to become the number one immigrant group in UK tech. And that's how Svagat was born, a banner under which I do a myriad of meetups and podcasts. It helps me keep a tab on the pulse of the diaspora, as well as identify folks who might be onto the next thing a few years down the line.

Immigration: Having secured the Global Talent Visa myself, I knew the peace of mind it gave me. I started helping smart and hungry people with their GTV applications. Some of them have since started up and have been backed by top-tier investors; some have gone on to take up leadership roles in European unicorns. Nothing is a higher signal for future entrepreneurial activity than applying for the Global Talent Visa.

Needless to say, this goodwill compounds.

Cultivate relationships early

The best immigrant founders are rarely "emerging" when you first meet them. More often, they're still accumulating optionality (possibly a topic for another full post). They're earning the visa that gives them freedom, building the savings that let them take risks, and finding the people they'll eventually build with.

If you only start paying attention once they have a deck and a company name, you've probably arrived too late.

The real opportunity is to meet them years earlier, long before they're fundraising, and to become part of the support system that helps them get there. In a world where everyone is competing for access to the best founders, patience itself becomes a competitive advantage.

The challenge is that this window doesn't stay open forever. Most immigrant founders need a few years to accumulate optionality, but some end up accumulating so much of it that they never exercise it. A high-paying job becomes a promotion. The promotion becomes golden handcuffs. The entrepreneurial dream gets pushed out another year, and then another. In many immigrant communities, these careers also carry significant status, making it even harder to walk away.

The sweet spot is often when someone has accumulated enough freedom to take a risk, but hasn't yet become too comfortable to want to.