Visas for Visionaries
Or, how to make Britain's immigration system actually work for startups
The following is an essay I wrote for the think tank Bright Blue, as part of their collection on improving Britain’s approach to immigration. In it, I focus on how the immigration system works – or more accurately doesn’t work – from the perspective of entrepreneurs building businesses in the United Kingdom.
For a TL;DR of the policies I recommend:
The minimum salary threshold is blind to the way many startups operate, in that they grant staff equity in the business to minimise headline salaries. This keeps operating costs lower, and gives staff a more direct stake in the future success of the business, incentivising growth. The Home Office needs to find a way of recognising this reality for the niche-yet-critical sliver of startup firms for whom traditional remuneration arrangements used by most businesses don’t make sense.
The High Potential Individual visa is a genuinely fantastic piece of legislation which is known among innovative circles around the world as a straightforward way to come to Britain to build. But it’s not perfect – its methodology excludes many universities and colleges (and, importantly, lots of business schools), nonetheless churn out talented graduates of the sort any sane person would be perfectly happy with entering the country. With some slight tweaks, we can ensure the HPI visa lives up to its own high potential.
We should piggyback off the bureaucracies of other nations to snap up talented individuals who they’ve gone through the trouble of certifying. Canada previously offered anyone with a valid H-1B Specialty Occupations visa living in the US to receive an open work permit for up to three years. We should identify similar visa routes from other countries and allow holders of them to come seamlessly to Britain to start contributing to our economy.
For especially gifted people, especially younger individuals who haven’t yet ‘proved’ themselves in the labour force, many visa routes will not recognise their potential. We should establish a government unit and give it discretionary powers to grant visas and fast-track bureaucratic processes to enable these individuals relocate to Britain.
If Britain going to succeed in tomorrow’s economy, where intangible capital takes on even greater importance than it does today, we need to ensure that we’re clustering the finest minds together. Our nation is already full of great people, but we’re not even 1% of the world’s population. Anyone serious about restoring growth and relevant to the industries of the future cannot ignore the untapped potential of the best of the remaining 99%.
Innovation has always been an indispensable factor of economic growth and this has become especially true of the modern economy. Whereas once we could increase the sum of our lot by simply exploiting ever more of the natural world around us, now the surest way to meaningfully and sustainably increase the size of the pie is to get better at getting richer. This invariably means devising, developing and deploying new technologies that enable us to work more efficiently and explore entirely new horizons. However, while virtually everyone involved in Britain’s blossoming innovation ecosystem agrees that immigration is a vital ingredient for keeping this particular flywheel of growth spinning, current visa policies are not always set up to enable startups to attract the skills they need.
Transformative ideas that reshape the economy can emerge from many places – from corporate behemoths that can sink resources into new products, to publicly-funded scientists who have the leeway to pursue curiosity-driven research in the hope of breaking new ground. Without doubt, these sorts of entities have been engines of innovation in the past, but they nevertheless have their limitations. Incumbent firms may have more of an interest in maintaining the status quo, while academics do not necessarily have to ensure the commercial applicability of their work and can face steep institutional barriers when they do try to spin out their research.
Filling this gap are modern-day startups. In various sectors, these plucky challengers are upending traditional business models and bringing novel goods and services to bear. A growing body of evidence shows how young firms disproportionately create new jobs, boost productivity and push forward innovation.1 To thoroughly seize the future, we must ensure they have the right conditions in which to thrive.
Many of the most iconic examples of successful startups have been able to conquer markets by being scalable and based on intangible capital.2 That is, their value typically stems not from raw materials or hardware, but ideas, techniques, processes and knowledge. Having the best shot at getting more of those abstract assets requires a concentration of talented and creative minds – entrepreneurial individuals with a knack for solving problems, building companies and organising people. Of course, as a relatively well-educated, high human capital country, the UK can tap much of its native-born population for these kinds of thinkers.3 Yet while doing so is necessary, it would be grossly conceited to believe that that is therefore sufficient. Less than 1% of the world’s population lives within our borders – and incredible potential lies in attracting the very brightest and the best of the remaining 99% to come here.4
In and of themselves, we know the disproportionate contribution immigrants make to the UK’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. For several years now, The Entrepreneurs Network has been tracking the founders of the UK’s fastest-growing companies by valuation and their countries of birth.5 In our latest analysis of the data, some 39% had a founder or cofounder born overseas, despite just 15% or so of the UK’s population at large being foreign-born.6 Among the founders who have featured in our analysis to date are those who helped set up enormously valuable and innovative companies such as Darktrace, Deliveroo, Monzo, Synthesia, Gousto and Oddbox. Many more will become household names in years to come.
It should hardly come as a surprise that immigrants find themselves disproportionately represented among the founding teams of our most trailblazing companies. If you are the sort of person who is willing to strike out and relocate your life to a new country to build a business, you are already displaying key traits shared by many top entrepreneurs such as openness to experience, ambition, adaptability, agency and so forth. You are probably also well-educated and may already have connections and networks in the country you are moving to. Indeed, when interviewing the founders we profile in our research, a common theme is that many of them first came to the UK to study at one of our elite universities.7
Other research has found that the very act of migrating can be a boon for innovation. A 2022 study by economist Marta Prato, for instance, looked at what happens when patent-holders move countries – either from the European Union to the United States, or vice versa. She found that migrating inventors’ patenting rates increase by around 40% per year when compared to a matched cohort of non-migrating inventors.8
Meanwhile, in a 2021 paper, economists Dario Diodato, Andrea Morrison and Sergio Petralia investigated the impact of migrant scientists and inventors to US cities between 1870 and 1940.9 First, they found that the arrival of foreign innovators increases the patenting rate of domestic innovators within the field in which the migrating innovators specialise. Second, they also found an increase in the rate of patenting in fields associated with the country the immigrant inventor came from, even if that field differed from the immigrant inventor’s specialism. As the authors put it, immigrant inventors “act as brokers of knowledge,” both directly and indirectly diffusing expertise between far-flung parts of the world.
Immigration, therefore, appears to be good for the innovative capacity of both immigrant and domestic innovators. Immigrants bring with them new perspectives, new wisdom and new networks – and when combined with the native workforce the sum truly is greater than its individual parts.
To enable the UK’s entrepreneurial ecosystem to continue to flourish, we need to ensure that immigration policies are sympathetic to the needs of fast-growing startups, while also making provisions for high-potential – or already successful – entrepreneurs to build within our borders. On this front, a few policy changes should be considered.
One measure introduced by the last Conservative Government to limit immigration into the UK was to massively hike the minimum annual salary threshold required for a Skilled Worker visa, from £26,200 to £38,700.10 While understandable – it was an eye-catching, easy to implement move – there is good reason to suspect this is hampering startups’ ability to recruit the scarce international talent they require. For most employees working at most businesses, their earnings will likely come in the form of a monthly pay cheque. Perhaps some might get a performance bonus now and then, but the headline salary is generally all they receive. For individuals working at a startup, however, a much more common arrangement is for them to receive part of their overall remuneration as equity in the business they are building. This is in the hope that those shares will become extremely valuable once the company matures and raises rounds of investment. At present, the minimum salary threshold approach is largely blind to this core reality of the startup world. We should rectify this before UK firms really begin losing out to their international competitors.
If that policy change was one of the less positive moves overseen in recent years, the creation of the High Potential Individual (HPI) visa stands out as quite the opposite. The HPI visa enables recent graduates of top foreign universities – as defined by featuring in the top 50 of at least two of three annual ranking lists – to move to the UK to live and work for two years, or three years in the case of PhD holders. With very little friction, engineers from Stanford or data scientists from MIT and the like can use this route to ply their skills and generate wealth in the UK.
Pioneering as the HPI is, however, the methodologies used to build the ranking lists it is based upon are far from perfect. They do not, for instance, pay much – if any, in some cases – attention to post-graduation outcomes, which in turn excludes graduates from many of the world’s top-performing universities in terms of the salaries they eventually go on to earn. An extremely straightforward, if imperfect, fix for this would be to simply cast the net that bit wider and expand the HPI visa’s eligibility criteria to allow graduates from universities that feature in the top 100 of at least two of the three rankings. For a more substantive reform, however, the Home Office could also look at ways to include leading business schools and other domain specialist colleges, which because they are not necessarily focused on academic research, can lose out in traditional ranking lists that weigh heavily towards this.
This is not the only place where proxies could be used to easily and inexpensively enable individuals with specialist skills to come to the UK. In 2023, Canada introduced a policy of offering anyone with a valid H-1B Specialty Occupations visa living in the US to receive an open work permit for up to three years.11 This enabled Canada to offer an entry route for skilled people who had effectively been pre-vetted by the US – in other words, piggybacking off the efforts of American bureaucracy to poach some of their top talent. The UK should investigate a similar scheme – identifying comparable visas from other countries that select for individuals with skills in short supply.
Policies like these would open up opportunities for people who have demonstrated their abilities. However, this approach would still leave open the possibility that our immigration architecture would freeze out other proven or potential geniuses who do not neatly fit into certain categories. For these edge cases, we should think creatively about how to fashion workarounds to enable them into the country without massively rewriting the overall framework. One idea would be for a specialist taskforce to be assembled and given discretionary powers to grant visas and fast-track bureaucratic processes to enable extraordinarily talented individuals to smoothly relocate to the UK. If it works in coaxing just one entrepreneur who founds a unicorn firm in the UK instead of somewhere else, it would positively obliterate any cost-benefit analysis.
We are reminded of the importance of individual founders on a daily basis. The characteristics of the modern economy mean that an ambitious entrepreneur with a small, committed team behind them can build a company that rivals entire countries for size and stature. Looking at the founders of some of the world’s most innovative and valuable firms, it is abundantly clear that no country has a monopoly on talent. But what governments can do is tilt the scales and make it easier for gifted individuals to flock to them by thinking creatively about their immigration systems.
While the UK is confronting thorny political challenges when it comes to immigration, our leaders would do well to remember that scant few voters want to actively pull up the drawbridge to the sort of innovators who build fantastically lucrative and beneficial firms. Responding to calls for lower overall numbers does not and should not, mean depriving the country of top international talent.
See: Jessica Looze and Thomas Goff, “Job creation by firm age: Recent trends in the United States”, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation https://indicators.kauffman.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/10/EntrepreneurialJobs-Indicators-National-Report-October-2022.pdf (2002); Julian Kolev et al. “Of academics and creative destruction: Startup advantage in the process of innovation”, National Bureau Of Economic Research, https://www.nber.org/ system/files/working_papers/w30362/w30362.pdf (2022); John Haltiwanger et al., “High Growth Young Firms: Contribution to Job, Output and Productivity Growth” “https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c13492/revisions/ c13492.rev4.pdf (2016).
Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake, Capitalism without capital: The rise of the intangible economy (Princeton, NK: Princeton University Press, 2018).
Department for Education, “England among highest performing western countries in education”, https://www.gov. uk/government/news/england-among-highest-performing-western-countries-in-education (2023).
International Monetary Fund, “Population”, https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/LP@WEO/OEMDC/ADVEC/ WEOWORLD (2025).
The Entrepreneurs Network, “Immigrant founders”, https://www.tenentrepreneurs.org/immigrant-foundersabout-1 (2025).
The Entrepreneurs Network, “Briefing paper: Job creators 2024”, https://static1.squarespace.com/ static/58ed40453a04116f46e8d99b/t/66cec4d404380c54c6e88ed4/1724826859152/Job+Creators+2024.pdf (2024).
The Entrepreneurs Network and Eamonn Ives, “The kids are alright: The case for increasing global youth mobility” https://entrepreneursnetwork.substack.com/p/the-kids-are-alright (2024).
Marta Prato, “The Global Race for Talent: Brain Drain, Knowledge Transfer, and Growth” https://papers.ssrn.com/ sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4287268 (2022).
Dario Diodato, Andrea Morrison and Sergio Petralia, “Migration and invention in the Age of Mass Migration”, Journal of Economic Geography (2022), 477-498.
House of Commons Library, “Changes to legal migration rules for family and work visas in 2024”, https:// commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9920/ (2024).
Government of Canada, “H-1B visa holder work permit” https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugeescitizenship/services/work-canada/permit/h1b.html (2024).