Forbes published "Why The U.S. Should Put Out The Welcome Mat For Foreign Entrepreneurs" by Council for Entrepreneurial Development (CED) President Joan Siefert-Rose, as part of our campaign's ongoing series. Siefert-Rose highlights the importance for attracting and retaining foreign entrepreneurs, and specifically cites the Triangle's role:
Only later did I realize that the two company founders we honored - Bob Young of the open source software company Red Hat, and Dennis Gillings of Quintiles, the world's biggest contract research organization - were immigrants. Young grew up in an entrepreneurial family in Canada, and saw opportunity in Raleigh in the early days of the Internet. Dr. Gillings was a mathematical genius who comes from a fishing community in England, and turned his research at the University of North Carolina into a predictive analytics powerhouse.
Today, the Research Triangle region is home to hundreds of tech and life science startups, many with diverse founding teams. At the tech community HQ Raleigh, founder and CEO of the photo sharing app FotoSwipe, Sylvain DuFour, is French. Other teams in the incubator include founders from Nicaragua and Venezuela. A Russian-born researcher at the University of North Carolina, Alex Ermoshkin, helped develop the technology for the 3D printing company Carbon, which is funded by Sequoia Capital. About one-third of Duke University's students in the prestigious Fuqua School of Business MBA program are non-U.S. citizens. How many might be capable of building the next Proctor & Gamble, Pfizer, Ebay, Google or PayPal - all of which had immigrant co-founders?
Sample Tweet: The Research Triangle is home to hundreds of startups, many with diverse founding teams - @CEDNC's latest in @Forbes http://ow.ly/HY8E3052dQY
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