Extraordinary is streamlining the O-1 visa process to bring the world's top talent to American tech companies

[ __ ] these people are based uh, these people are incredibly ambitious. I have to stay here. " And if you don't go to college, um, at the time, I originally got into the M& program at the University of Pennsylvania. I decided to opt out because I was pretty stubborn. I I really just wanted to be in Silicon Valley.

And the only visa options was the 01 for extraordinary ability. And this is what the US government calls it. And at the time, this was probably 3 years ago, uh it wasn't as proliferated. The one person I knew was Patrick Collison who had that. Um I couldn't get a TN visa or the H1B because you needed a degree.

So I had to go for the 01. and I hunted down every single person in Silicon Valley that uh that had the O1 visa, tried to understood what could qualify and after eight months with an immigration lawyer. I filed it. It was sponsored by Nepal.

I built this company with him and uh I was approved at 20 and I was like, "Holy [ __ ] this is it's so hard for the world's best talent to to come here. It's so unintuitive. " And uh I made a YouTube video uh about the about the process that has since has been seen by hundreds of thousands of people.

And um I I made this this hoodie during uh as merch for that YouTube video. So, and that kind of took off. What are the overall trends in the 01 visas? It feels like I mean like immigration is obviously complicated, but it feels like all the stars align for like everyone being like 01's are great.

Uh Elon has come out and said he, you know, loves 01's and like it feels like it's aligned with American values and freedom and like brain drain and even strategic stuff. like there's a lot of there's a lot of pro um are the number of ones 01's increasing? Is this a new program?

Can you give us like a little bit of like history and trajectory for the 01 program broadly? Yeah, I mean I I like to think that the 01 was created for the Manhattan project. I think the the it's it's that ethos.

Um I I don't know the exact origins but it's it's it's been around and it's it's been used to the premise of it is that you are the top you're an individual has risen to the top of your field. I like to say you're like the top. 1 percentile at at what you do and USCIS has these eight criterias to adhere towards.

Um, you can you can be a tattoo artist, you could be a chip designer, you could be a uh, you know, the founder of the fastest growing AI company who I'm currently helping out. Um, as long as you can prove that you are extraordinary at what you do, you can get it.

And I think for the longest time, it was it's very unclear because when you go to the website, it's like examples, you uh, you have a Nobel Prize or like whichever. And the the the way this company came to be was I literally mapped down um 500 people who have 01's and EB1s for extraordinary ability.

I gave them these hoodies. I actually built the website and just compiled them in terms of like their stories and like how they came to America. And um yeah, the I think that because of that more and more people have been applying for it. There's no cap to it.

as long as you meet um their bar for and convince USCIS that you're extraordinary, you can get it. And so I think it's very positive sum of the visa. Yeah. So what what is the process actually like?

I imagine that there's a lot of paperwork and lawyers and cost stuff that's you know tailor made for LLM automation and just even just normal SAS apps and stuff and form filling. Um, what are the headaches that 01 uh recipients typically report as particularly painful? I mean, my process took eight months.

It cost me more than $10,000. I mean, you got to you got to keep in mind what what what is the end product? Um, I have a printer here.

You're literally printing 500 pages of paper like with a bunch of citations to all evidence that you might have heard like there's recommendation letters to which you got to go chase down people and be like, "Hey, can you please vouch for me being in America? I think I can contribute to to this economy.

" One-shotted by Oach GBT from now on. You can imagine so many M dashes. There's thousands of M dashes. Let's delve into why he should be a 01. I'm sure I'm sure that's happening. that got ships shipped off to like USCS access.

It's they still use like they still break code bin the box and then scan it which is like super archaic. Wow. They don't even accept like a PDF. No, they don't. I I have to ship it through FedEx and then it scan it. Yeah. And then some scan it. Wow. Very high school diploma just adjudicates whether you're extraordinary.

Okay. Well, we're big fans of paper, but even that Yeah. Yeah. Even that's my my strategy. What um ho how have you thought about the the business model for extraordinary? Uh it feels like you know there's some immediate probably upfront value that you can capture and just making this process less painless.

But when you think about taking somebody at the absolute top of their field and bringing them to the best economy in the world where they're going to attract other talent and capital and things like that, it feels like a lot of the value creation is on the things that they The obvious business model here is to sell the data to venture capital firms.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Which I I I feel like might already be happening judging by the involvement of NAL. No, I mean what's the actual business model? jokes aside. Yeah. So, I'm tempted to rename the company to the extraordinary talent company of America.

Um, our our flagship first product obviously just making this much more seamless and faster.

Like I think it should be standard deviation uh of speed up which already is we already power ramp uh cognition and we of top founders building that we know and we should see we should see a lot more of that on our X feeds coming along.

I mean look you can you can make a good amount from providing the the best product uh and and serving these great talent to relocate here on the visa basis but um where I want to take things like I I don't actually view this ultimately as a as a visa filing company I think it's an extraordinary talent company and um if you look at the life cycle of extraordinary talent like someone who's I don't know like a senior engineer creating who's shipped like 60% of Devon I just filed that 01 case right?

like the the whole life cycle of them uh one being like placed at their company all the way to um how they even relocate there like most of the value capture isn't actually that like visa filing and I think also AI is going to uh eat away at margins in terms of services across all technology companies and so then like what what can you build that has network effects that has innate distribution um that can just attract the world's best talent like I want to build something where if you're remotely ambitious and talented.

You have a means to be discovered and uh if you want to if you remotely want to come here like you're going to be on extraordinary. com. How do you how do you think about giving people an opportunity to get to America without having credentials yet, right?

Like like presumably there's somebody out in the world who's 16 years old. they're in some like high school type situation and they actually could be one of the world's best programmers or something like that, but maybe they haven't gotten a job.

Is there an op is there a world in the future where you would create sort of like open testing where people could kind of like uh prove their abilities? I'm sure somebody would figure out how to how to hack it pretty quickly.

But how do how do you think about kind of creating the ability for for people to to prove their capabilities prior to getting the ability to get traditional credentials? Yeah. First off, I I actually got a 16-year-old approved for an 01 visa a few weeks ago. What What are they extraordinary at?

um uh interaction design for Roblox. Amazing. The most elite Roblox player. And um on on on the on the talent discovery front, um I I think that uh the the way that the way that we value talent is evolving.

I mean right now like it's so funny like there's Meror but then the FL founder of Cluey is like building software that hacks the Meror interviews. The proxies for measuring talent are just like falling through completely. It's hilarious.

And so like how do you then measure talent in this new age where uh you know we value people who are able to leverage AI much more and I think the the way that companies hire will evolve. Um and we need to account for that.

We need ways to of assessing people but also discovering people to showcase just how like competent they are.

And I'm a big very big believer of being able to give those means to um people around the world um regardless of their traditional like you know accolades and just being able to uh empower people who have the merit and who have the ability and uh they should be discovered and sponsored to come to America. Awesome.

Amazing. Well, congratulations on getting into the Teal Fellowship. Yeah. And uh I'm sure there will be many Teal fellows in the future that are go through your your program. Yeah. Already helping them. I'm excited for the first 01 bodybuilder. We saw what happened with Arnold Schwarzenegger when he came to America.

Had a fantastic impact outside of bodybuilding. Went on to be the governor of California. Governor of California. Pretty good one. So don't count out the bodybuilders. Let's get all the elite bodybuilders from all over the world. bring them here all at once. That's my goal.

As long as you're the top at what you do, uh, we help you. That's fantastic. That's great. Well, thanks so much for stopping by. Thanks for coming on. We'll talk to you soon. Congrats. Cheers. Bye. Uh, next up, what?

Just Gold's Gym in Venice just has hundreds of new uh members that are all on America's already dominant in bodybuilding. We we hold more than 50% of the Mr. Olympians. But we could be doing even better if we always everyone from all over the world who's elite at bodybuilding to America, which is my dream.

Uh anyway, our next guest is here. We have Aiden Smith, founder of Interphases. Welcome to the stream. How you doing? Boom. Howdy. I'm doing real well. How are y'all? We're great. Great to have you on. Would you mind kicking us off with a little introduction on yourself and the company you're building? Yeah, absolutely.

I think the best way to understand my life is kind of framed at this realization I had when I was a little tiny kid in like fourth grade. I was sitting in this classroom and I was watching some guy doing real science and I saw him and I was like dang I like know how to do addition.

I know how to do basic algebra and like where the hell am I going with my life? And I realized that the world is a