Jesar Shah

I remember scrolling through internship listings and hitting wall after wall of: “U.S. Citizens and Permanent Residents Only.” Meanwhile, it takes ~30 minutes (I timed it yesterday) to register for E-Verify — and unlock access to 1.1 million international students already studying in the U.S. Plenty of companies say they’re “hiring the best talent,” but won’t touch the simplest visa process. That’s not a strategy. That’s a contradiction. It needs to change. 👇 If you’re building a team, take a minute to read this primer on visa pathways — it might open a whole new hiring pool.

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Everyone's panicking about the proposed $100K H-1B visa fee, but here's how I think it will actually play out, especially for startups and tech jobs. If this fee really goes through, the first group to feel the pain will be early-stage startups in the US. These are the teams that rely on immigrant engineers to ship product fast, and suddenly they'd be staring at massive added costs just to keep talent in the country. Many of them won't pay. They'll simply stop sponsoring visas. What happens next? Two things. First, we'd see a lot more remote hiring. Instead of going through the headache of immigration, companies would just open dev offices in India, Eastern Europe, or Latin America and hire directly. Second, we'd likely see a shift in global talent flow, a kind of "brain drain reversal." Fewer people would dream to move to the US, and more would choose to build from home. In a way, this could accelerate the trend we're already seeing: Silicon Valley is no longer just in California. It's everywhere, especially Bengaluru. If this rule passes, that shift just gets 10x faster.

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This a seductive idea; that organization's context fragments, decision logic gets lost, and an organization is prone to tackle collective amnesia. BUT this comes with a lot of caveats!! - MONOCULTURE: When one system becomes the authoritative interpreter of "why things are the way they are", it will collapse pluralism. An organization actually benefits from various "contested memories". An engineer and sales guy remember different things from a discussion and that helps. Employees can stop arguing with the system not because its correct but its "coherent". - OBSERVER's EFFECT: When people know that the reasoning within systems is being captured, they will change what gets recorded. The negotiations will become "safer" and will contaminate raw signals. - CENTRALIZATION: Interpretation gets centralized upwards. It may appear leadership or executives are gaining synthesis and becoming closer to the ground. But there is no comparison to living through the frictions, not even eclectic summaries. LEADERSHIP MUSCLE NEEDS TO PRACTICE LIVING THROUGH FRICTION OTHERWISE IT WILL TURN SENILE. - BIAS AMPLIFICATION: Model's inbuilt biases can combine with company's cultural quirks resulting in misinterpretations and distortions, worse they get reinforced over time. System will learn how the company thinks and then will optimize for continuity. AMNESIA IS SOMETIME A FEATURE. - SEMANTIC TRUTHS: Unlike objective truths this system will play on subjectivity and will build "causal" relationships that are based on semantics. This over time can form mythical decision norms with no external validity. The real question isn't "CAN IT BE BUILT?". Of course it can be. But "HOW IT SHOULD BE POSITIONSED". #llms #leadership #ai

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Thrilled to announce that Together Fund is investing in Sentra, alongside a16z speedrun! You track results in Jira. Decisions in Notion. Conversations in Slack. But the reasoning, the debates, trade-offs, and context behind why you chose A over B, disappears into what we call "Dark Matter." A decision made in March looks insane by July because no one remembers the constraints that made it smart. I lived this firsthand at Twitter scaling from 800 to 8,000 employees, and at Google while launching AI Overviews to billions at planet scale. The problem isn't process. Process is compensation for something deeper: organizational amnesia. An organization’s "Systems of Record" doesn’t solve this, they encode it. They store what happened, never why. That's why we are investing in Sentra. Sentra is the always-on collective memory that eliminates organizational amnesia by maintaining accurate context for all members and agents, functioning as an operational nervous system. It connects to every channel where work happens, meetings, Slack, email, code commits, docs, calendars, and treats them not as artifacts to search, but as living signals to synthesize. The fleeting and the permanent, unified into a memory that understands. The founding team is built for this: - Jae Gwan Park (CEO): Product-first founder, memory systems research at UofT and MIT - Ashwin Gopinath (CSO): Former MIT professor, created "Reflexion" (NeurIPS 2023), agents that learn from mistakes, 2x founder - Andrey Starenky (CTO): Early Vapi engineer, ex-IBM, built to process enterprise-scale data firehose Together is an operator-led fund. We invest in problems we've lived. This is one of them. Many congrats Jae, Ashwin and Andrey, we are so excited to partner with you! Read the full thesis: https://lnkd.in/gixj9cE4 Book a demo: https://www.sentra.app/ #OrganizationalMemory #AI #Sentra #TogetherFund #a16z #ContextGraphs

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8 months ago I got a call on Sunday evening and drove 4 hours through a snowstorm to make it back from Tahoe in time for my final round interview at HockeyStack. Here are the first 13 questions I asked Emir Atli during my final interview just to be sure that HockeyStack was a rocket ship: (He said, “wow, you ask a lot of questions.”) 1. What is your ARR? $XX million 2. What was your revenue growth this year? 4.9X 3. What's on your product roadmap? 1) Improvements to the core product 2) Sales Intelligence product 3) ABM product 4) Odin (AI marketing analyst). All have since shipped. 4. What is your multi-product attach rate? Account Intelligence had just been released. It was 10% for SMB, no MM/ENT yet. 5. Signs of PMF? Very low churn, ACV more than doubled in 5 months, sales velocity improving month over month. 6. How do you measure success? As a company and as a GTM team. 1) Customer happiness 2) Revenue/pipeline 3) Product improvements. 7. Describe your technical moat? Built our data model in-house allowing for deep customization and rapid product development that would not be possible if we'd built it on top of a BI tool (like our main competitor). This also enabled us to build AI analysts like Odin and Nova using our proprietary data foundation to train the model. 8. How do you take feedback? We appreciate feedback in both directions, with a focus on taking accountability and succeeding as an entire team. Music to my ears. 9. What repeatable GTM motion/s have you found so far? Founder posts and DMs, paid ads, influencer partnerships, outbound. 10. Describe your outbound process today. 5 Senior SDRs with auto dialers in a dark room lead by Alex Choi. Their call volume is over 1,000 dials/day and conversation to meeting conversion rate was 15%+ 11. Where are the highest leverage areas I could help with on day 1? Automate 10-15% of the outbound motion. To date we've automated 60-70% of their workflow and tripled meetings booked per rep with the help of Vik Salnich. We built our second product, Nova AI around everything we learnt. 12. What is your NRR? 100%+ for MM/ENT. 13. What is the big launch? It was our $20M Series A announcement. Now, with the benefit of hindsight I can confidently say that it was the right company to join. If this sounds like the place for you, feel free to reach out to myself or Rajalakshmi Venkatesh! We're hiring across most functions for in-person roles in SF. Relocation support is available. Are there any other questions you ask when evaluating early-stage companies during interviews? Leave a comment, I’d love to trade notes!

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$100,000 per year. That’s the new price tag Trump wants to slap on every H-1B visa. You’d think that as someone building a Virtual HQ for distributed teams, I’d be celebrating. More barriers to U.S. visas? More companies “go remote,” right? But here’s the truth: I actually give a sh*t about people. This kind of policy doesn’t fix work...it breaks it further: 🚷 It punishes H-1B employees who built their lives here. 📉 It damages the U.S. economy in the long run. 🧠 It’s short-term thinking, the kind only bad leadership embraces. And let’s be clear about what’s really at stake: 71% of H-1B visas go to workers from India, fueling U.S. tech. Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta rely on thousands of these workers to stay competitive. Limiting access doesn’t just hurt people—it pushes high-value work overseas, while China races ahead in AI and innovation. Real people are involved here. - Families. - Careers. - Futures. This is what I mean when I say we need to redefine the rules of work. Because right now, they’re broken and America will feel this pain for years to come. The future of work isn’t about borders, fees, or fear. It’s about building systems that work for people. What do you think...policy protection, or one of the most expensive mistakes in U.S. history? #FutureOfWork #Leadership #Immigration #Tech #RedefiningWork #GlobalTalent

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Twitter is going crazy. Suhail D. blew the lid on #SohamParekh, who was caught being employed at 5+ companies at once, preying on remote YC startups. Garry Tan, the CEO and President of Y Combinator called for a need to verify remote applicant identities. This is why we launched our fraud product last year, and it's why we will continue to build the most robust applicant fraud detection system so companies can focus on having real conversations with genuine candidates.

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3,000+ visas. 50+ countries. Every visa type that matters for tech founders and talent. That's what we've processed between Crimson's internal immigration unit and now Concord. Here's what no one in immigration will tell you: volume matters. Not because it's impressive. Because patterns emerge. The breakdown: L1A & L1B, H-1B, O-1A & O-1B, E-2 & E-3, TN, EB-1A, F-1 and OPT/STEM extensions. Every. Single. Type. We've seen the founder who "just needs short trips" turn into a 3-year ban, the growth exec who said the wrong thing and lost visa waiver privilege forever, the YC founder who flew to SF on visitor visa and realized too late "doing sprints" isn't allowed. 3,000 cases means we know what works. We know which visa makes sense for bootstrapped founders vs. post-seed. How to time applications around Demo Day or fundraising. Which border crossings are higher risk and which language gets you flagged. How to build O-1 profiles for founders who think they're "not extraordinary enough", we've done it hundreds of times. But here's the stat that really matters: 35% of Crimson's students applying to Ivy League/Top 15 schools get accepted, compared to ~5% overall applicants. 7x more likely. Crimson students account for nearly 10% of incoming international Ivy League admits. One company helped 1 in 10 international students get into the world's most competitive schools. How? Helping ambitious and driven individuals build profiles, creatively. Knowing what decision-makers care about. Having infrastructure that opens doors most don't know exist. This is the same approach we take at Concord: We help build narrative and evidence USCIS needs to tick off their checklist. We have the network for expert references, panel and judging nominations, tech PR experts and more. We translate "founder grinding in living room" into "extraordinary ability recognized by industry leaders" The difference from traditional law firms? They've done volume in corporate transfers. L-1s for multinational employees with massive amounts of pre-existing documentation for trainings and proprietary systems and processes. We've done volume in tech and startups. We know your life. We know that you think visas are a pain the ass and just want someone to sort it so you can build. We know you're thinking about automating/cancelling the bs meetings that keep popping into your calendar. We get it because we've lived it. 3,000+ visas taught us: Immigration isn't about finding the "perfect" visa or waiting until you're "certain." It's about planning ahead. Building the right profile. Having options in place before you need it. Don't be the founder who realizes too late that waiting cost them their business.

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