Watch the full conversation above.
There is a particular kind of frustration I see over and over in talented immigrants. You have a good job. You make good money. Your career is objectively going well. And yet you know you want to build something. Then immigration enters the decision tree
That is why I wanted Soundarya Balasubramani on H1B Founders Live. Soundarya took a wonderfully non-standard path.
She had what many people would consider a dream job as a PM at Salesforce. But the status and money wore off quickly. Writing kept pulling her back. She tried books that went nowhere. She kept writing anyway.
Eventually she wrote Admitted, then Unshackled. She crowdfunded and raised grant money. She left the U.S. and spent much of 2023 in India. She built a company around her work, went through the O-1 process, came back to the U.S., built a substantial audience, and kept writing.
Her latest project is her first novel, 1000 Days of Love.
O-1 vs. founder H-1B is a tool choice
Soundarya built her path at a different time.
For her, O-1 offered flexibility that mattered: she wasn’t raising venture capital, she didn’t know when her business would generate enough money to support a conventional founder salary, and she wanted the freedom to build around writing.
Her petition was hundreds of pages and took months of documentation, letters, money and persistence.
Today, founder H-1B is also materially more explicit than it was when she began. There isn’t one magical “founder visa.” There are paths.
The useful question is: Given the company I actually want to build, which path creates the right constraints?
And, as always, work through your specific case with competent immigration counsel. This conversation is founders sharing lived experience, not legal advice.
The playbook itself is leverage
Simple things are only simple after someone has done them before.
Soundarya once spent about a week trying to figure out how to make a relatively simple change to an operating agreement.
Eventually someone who knew the answer essentially told her: change this language here. Done. That’s the thing about these systems.
That is also a large part of why I run Launch Club: a five-person cohort designed to get aspiring immigrant founders from stuck to building in three weeks.
The book is not necessarily the business
Another part I loved was hearing the economics of being an author.
Soundarya was remarkably straightforward: if your primary objective is making money, book royalties are probably not the cleverest business model.
Her writing became possible because she built an ecosystem around it: events, sponsorships, communities, crowdfunding, partnerships and other work.
That is founder thinking.
The artifact people see - a book, an app, a newsletter - does not necessarily have to be the entire business model. Sometimes the artifact is the center of gravity. The business forms around it.
Distribution is a system
Then we got to one of my favorite founder words: Distribution.
Technical founders are getting absurdly good at building quickly. AI has compressed the distance between idea and product dramatically. That makes the other side more obvious. Can anybody find you?
Soundarya has built an audience of hundreds of thousands, so I asked her what engineers and technical founders misunderstand about social media.
Her answer wasn’t “post constantly.”
It was systems.
A team can research ideas, watch what is happening, organize the pipeline, edit and handle operations. The founder keeps the thing that cannot really be outsourced:
taste.
Once that system exists, she said LinkedIn can take surprisingly little founder time.
She also gave the opposite advice, which I appreciated even more: Don’t become a content creator simply because Twitter told you every founder must become one.
Try it as an experiment. If you hate it, find another distribution system.
My takeaway
We spent about 50 minutes talking about immigration, writing, publishing, AI, social media, founder systems, O-1, H-1B and everything in between.
But I ended the episode with the thing I keep telling H1B founders:
Immigration is the easy part.
Building a business is harder. Building a profitable business is much harder.
The immigration problem is real. Learn it. Architect around it. Get good counsel. Build the right structure.
Then stop giving it 80% of your brain. Put your brain into the thing that actually determines whether you’re a founder:
Build something. Find customers. Get distribution. Make it profitable.
The rest has a funny way of becoming a solvable problem once there is something real on the other side.
Soundarya Balasubramani is a writer, entrepreneur, founder of Unshackled, and author of Admitted, Unshackled, and 1000 Days of Love. Find her at curiousmaverick.com and her LinkedIn. Support her book launch on the Kickstarter campagn.
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