"The journey is already hard enough in building a company. The best we can do is to make that a little less painful when they juggle immigration as part of a necessary step for them to expand to the US. I think that empathy is what differentiated us." - Frederick Ng, Co-founder and CEO of Beyond Border
"In the first week, without a website, without anything, we had 10 meetings. Within the first month, we got on a call with a Swedish entrepreneur. He raised $50 million and he needed to move to the US to build a geothermal plant. Within 10 minutes, he wired us US dollars, and so my co-founder Arnold and I looked at each other and we're like, 'Oh, wow, there's something here.'" - Frederick Ng, Co-founder and CEO of Beyond Border
"We spoke to about 6,000 founders in the last year. 55% of them don't know what an O-1 visa is, let alone the different visa types. Most of the founders that come to us think that typical US work visa can be done as soon as ESTA, which is, typically if you're a Singaporean... you fill out a form, and then within 48 hours, you get a visa outcome. It does take at least three months to run a good process." - Frederick Ng, Co-founder and CEO of Beyond Border
Most founders who come to Beyond Border assume a US work visa works like an ESTA: fill in a form, get an answer in 48 hours. Frederick Ng, its co-founder, explains why a good O-1 process takes about three months and a 700- to 1,000-page petition. He joins Jeremy Au to cover the O-1 and L visas for founders and their launch teams, why a spouse's work rights often decide the visa, and how executives tied to an employer-sponsored green card can move to the EB-1A. He also walks through how Beyond Border separates human judgment from AI-assisted case work, how it found product-market fit with no website, why he went from VC to operator and back before founding, and the silent retreat and Everest base camp trek that tested him first.
Fred Ng is the Co-founder and CEO of Beyond Border, a tech-enabled U.S. immigration platform helping founders, companies and global talent navigate the U.S. immigration system.
An entrepreneur, operator and former venture capital investor, Fred previously served as Country Manager at Glints, where he helped build and scale the company’s business across Southeast Asia. He later joined Square Peg, a leading Asia-Pacific venture capital firm, where he invested in and worked with technology companies across the region.
Fred founded Beyond Border with a simple belief: where you come from should never limit where you can go. Today, Beyond Border is a trusted immigration partner to founders, highly skilled professionals and growing companies looking to build their futures in the U.S.
Drawing on his experience across entrepreneurship, operations and investing, Fred regularly speaks on entrepreneurship, venture capital, U.S. and Asian startup ecosystems, global talent and immigration, and what it takes for founders to build and expand across borders.
Fred’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/frederick-ng/
Beyond Border: https://www.beyondborderglobal.com/
00:00 Introduction
01:10 Fred's path: Glints, Square Peg and Beyond Border
02:23 Hong Kong, London and multiple passports
05:16 Starting venture on the wrong side of the table
07:49 Why operators make better investors
12:48 Too impatient for a 10-year feedback loop
15:19 Finding product-market fit with no website
17:46 Empathy over the CRM
19:29 Judgment vs intelligence in immigration work
24:04 Why a US work visa takes three months, not 48 hours
25:34 The O-1 and L visas for founders and launch teams
28:02 Spouses, dependents and the EB-1A
30:46 Ten days of silence, then Everest base camp
33:42 Three takeaways
Keywords: US Immigration, O-1 Visa, US Expansion, L Visa, Venture Capital, Tech Startups, Product-Market Fit, Founder Resilience, Southeast Asia Tech
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Meet Frederick Ng
Jeremy Au: Hello, Fred. Good to see you.
Frederick Ng: Great to be here, Jeremy.
Jeremy Au: I'm excited to have you on the show because you're talking about immigration to the US, which is a struggle that many founders have as part of their global expansion to the US market. I have referred many friends to my past immigration lawyer for help with the O-1 Extraordinary Alien Visa. I believe that's what it's called. They've had good outcomes with that, and I'm excited to hear that, Fred, you're offering a solution for founders to get this visa category, but also to explore the immigration opportunities and channels to the US. So Fred, could you introduce yourself?
Frederick Ng: My name is Fred. I'm a co-founder at Beyond Border. Prior to founding Beyond Border, I spent time on both sides of the table. For the last eight years, I've spent time operating twice and being a venture investor twice.
I think a common denominator of how I've spent my time professionally is being a facilitator of exceptional talent. At Glints, for example, that meant helping talent from the region to be discovered by companies that are not operating in the region, mostly from the developed side of the world, to work with them, and through that, providing a pathway for them to really realize their human potential.
As a venture investor, it's more about finding exceptional founders, sometimes begging them to take your capital, and helping them in a small way to achieve their ambition.
In all of that, I found a common denominator and a lot of joy in helping people get to where they need to be to achieve their dream. I'm very glad that immigration, and what we do at Beyond Border, became a very important vessel for helping them realize and accelerate their human ambitions. It also helps us create impact and help people not be confined by where they're born, limiting where they need to go or where they can go. So that's a brief summary of how I've spent my time in the last couple of years.
Hong Kong, London and Multiple Passports
Jeremy Au: Wow, fantastic. Let's get to it. You grew up in Hong Kong and then you studied at the London School of Economics. So that was your first experience with immigration. Was it easy? Was it hard? What was that experience like for you?
Frederick Ng: The immigration part was somewhat easier. I was very lucky that my parents did all the groundwork, and I think that was a very big plus in hindsight. Immigration is not something you can do at the flick of a switch. The immigration part was easy because my parents laid the groundwork and gave me multiple passports to allow me to make that move smoothly.
But living abroad taught me so much. It was the first time I realized that immigration, and being able to expand your horizon out of your home country or wherever you're from, really helps you realize what your potential can be. It was the hardship I went through living abroad for the first time that taught me how important this topic was.
A lot of it comes down to understanding a new way of doing things, and how people are funny in a different language and a different cultural context. Because you're immersed in such a different environment, it stretches you and helps you expand what you're capable of. It was a very impactful experience.
Chasing the Opportunity Home
Jeremy Au: I think that's a fair point, which is that your parents make such an important decision about your immigration status, either by blood, because of what nationality they are, or otherwise. So many parents are thinking about what is the best country for their kids to grow up in, to study in, to work in. So much of a kid's nationality is dependent on the parents, either by right, which is their blood or their nationality, or by location, which is the country they're born in. So a lot of decisions need to be made.
So I'm curious, when you think about those identities. You could have made a decision to keep staying in London. Your parents did all the legwork. You went to study at the London School of Economics. You did well in academics, and you could have stayed in the UK like so many Hong Kong friends of mine. What made you say you wanted to go back to Asia versus staying in the UK for longer?
Frederick Ng: It's about chasing the opportunity in front of me, and what I had the ambition to do back then. It was very difficult for me to find a role in venture capital. At that point in time, I was very dead set, for very different reasons from why I did my second stint in venture, on starting my career in venture capital. And it was very difficult for someone who was not born in the UK, and who naturally didn't have the right networks to tap into, to be effective as a venture investor. So I had to immigrate back.
This is one of the things I share with a lot of our clients: you have to chase opportunity and make decisions based on that, and hopefully immigration is not an issue. For me, it was moving back home to chase that opportunity. I was lucky it was home for me, and it was easy for me to go back, but it's sometimes very difficult for a lot of our clients. For me back then, it was about going back so that I could begin my journey in venture capital. That's why I made the move.
Starting on the Wrong Side of the Table
Jeremy Au: So there you are. You're doing venture capital, then you're an operator at Glints, and then you go back to being a VC again. Can you talk a little bit more about those career choices?
Frederick Ng: When I first started in venture, and I like to tell people this, I started on the wrong side of the table, because I went straight into an investor role, out of ego more than anything. I thought it was cool to do venture. It is quite cool in many ways, but I was going into it for the wrong reasons. When I became an investor for the first time, I had no idea how to operate. I'd never built a business before. I'd never run a business before.
It took me a good year to realize I was way out of my depth. If I had done my job right, I would have partnered up with best-in-class operators, and they don't need guidance. But ignorant me, back in the day, was trying to tell people that they should do this and that. It was very embarrassing. It took me a good part of a year to realize I was out of my depth.
What happened was, and kudos to Oswald at Glints, whom I worked with in my first operator stint, I picked up the phone and called Oswald, and I said, "Hey, sorry I was being very arrogant in the way I said things and communicated. I realize now that I need to earn some battle scars to do the venture job a lot more justice. So if you'd be so kind as to give me a shoestring budget and let me operate and learn through that, hopefully I'll build a business or two that's profitable and creating value for Glints." He was gracious enough to say yes to that.
So I made the switch and went to the dark side of operating. I did that for two years, and it was a phenomenal learning experience, because I learned everything. I'm still learning, but I learned the basics of operating, especially in a service-heavy industry, which is fundamentally what Glints is trying to disrupt. I learned a lot about operating a service business, and a lot about hiring A players: what an A player looks like, what B and C players look like, and what you can do to maximize your chance of getting lucky and partnering up with an A player.
So that was two years in. At that point, I decided that I had learned some skill sets. I had hit a milestone in building two profitable businesses for Glints, and it was easier for me to go back to the nicer side of the table, so to speak, and hopefully do it with a bit more justice this time, having operated a bit. So I decided to make the switch and got in touch with the team at Square Peg. They were very lucky to take me on, and I had a phenomenal two and a half years of learning and working together with some of the best founders in the region before I started building Beyond Border.
Why Operators Make Better Investors
Jeremy Au: Let's talk a little bit about that transition between venture capital, operating and venture capital again, because in some ways that's the dream job for many undergraduates.
Frederick Ng: Sure.
Jeremy Au: I've seen so many undergraduates who call me and say, "Hey, Jeremy, I'm an undergraduate. I would love to be a venture capitalist. Should I become a founder first to become a venture capitalist? Should I operate to become a venture capitalist? Or should I just go straight into a venture capital job?" I'm curious, because you said it was a mistake, that you felt out of your depth going into venture capital out of college. Could you share a little bit more about that reflection?
Frederick Ng: I want to start with a big caveat. There are great investors I've worked with and learned from who didn't come from an operating background per se, but they're still phenomenal. Tushar Roy from Square Peg, for example. I think he's hands down one of the best investors in the region, and he hasn't operated in a startup environment before.
A lot of it comes down to the way an individual learns. For me, it's always experiential. I had to go through things and experience them myself, as opposed to just intellectually understanding certain lessons, to apply my learning to doing a better job in venture capital. That's just the way I'm wired.
But personally, having gone through that operating experience became a superpower in some ways. One is, if you speak to 10 founders who are fundraising, 10 out of 10 will tell you they prefer to work with an operator investor, because they have gone through that journey and they know how tough it is. A very key part of having experience as an operator is that it gives you empathy. You also know that people work in spikes.
What I mean by empathy is that if you've gone through it, you understand that building a company has lots of ups and downs, and there are many things that are not within your control. So being a great investor, at least from my point of view, is sometimes about being empathetic about the situation. The founder already has a hard enough job to do. It's more than a job, it's their livelihood. Empowering them with empathy is sometimes the only thing they need to get through tough times. Because if you have done your job right and partnered up with best-in-class people, they're best placed to solve the problem they decided to put their life's work into solving. So just giving that emotional support is helpful, and being an operator in the past helped me realize that.
The second thing is that it helps you get into tactical conversations with founders if you've operated before. I'm a very big fan of founders, or generally brilliant individuals, who can think in levels. There are people who haven't operated before who have a natural knack for asking the right questions to get to what matters, even in an operating setup. But generally speaking, if you've operated before, you know from firsthand experience how to make better hiring decisions, and what's priority one versus priority zero. You know what is typically going to cost your business versus what's not. On the surface, if you haven't operated before, two fires that look similarly big might both look like P0 at the same time. So being an operator helped me massively as an investor, at least personally.
Empathy Means Knowing It's the People
Jeremy Au: I empathize with going through this set of experiences, because I was a founder and a management consultant, and then turned to venture capital. There was that dimension of conversation, which I think was helpful. One interesting part you mentioned was empathy. Could you share a little bit more about that? You had your first stint as a VC without any founder experience, and then you came back with some operating experience. What did that difference in empathy mean in terms of how you felt, or how you practiced venture capital?
Frederick Ng: The difference, having gone through both the operator and the investor route, is an understanding. Empathy is an understanding of emotion and also of the situation at hand. In a venture capital setup, it's understanding that people build businesses. Ultimately, what matters, at least what I chose to believe in having gone through that operator-investor journey, is that whatever your problem set or the idea you decide to embark on, it's the people that matter.
Without that operator experience, purely as an investor, I'd be very fixated on whether it's a good problem set, whether the economics are great, and whether the person is just smart. But what does smart really mean? That's where empathy comes in. Having operated, smart to me is whether you're a talent magnet, whether you're thinking from first principles, and in different contexts that would look different.
If you have operated before, you know that businesses come in different shapes and sizes. Some sectors require a lot of capital intensity. For example, if I'm building hardware, if I'm building, say, WHOOP, I would need to be a very good fundraiser to be a really good operator in that space, because you need to fund the J-curve with a lot of capital. That's different from someone like me, operating in a less capital-intensive industry. What exceptional looks like can differ in terms of the founder's background and DNA. So I think that's empathy, and the insight that having operated before unlocks.
Too Impatient for a 10-Year Feedback Loop
Jeremy Au: You've done both stints: operator, as a country market launcher and as a GM, as well as a VC. And then you decided to become a founder. You could have kept going in venture capital. It is hard times, but you have that experience and that perspective. Why decide to be a founder?
Frederick Ng: I decided to be a founder for two reasons. Number one is more personal, and I think it's also a function of time and learning more about myself: I'm a very impatient person. In venture, if you want to be very good, the number one trait you need is to be very patient. You need a 10-year learning cycle to know whether you're good or not. You make a decision, and then after 10 years you find out whether you're good. I'm too impatient for that. That was one big realization I had. I'd much rather be working on things where I can see almost immediate impact, either on the business or on the clients I serve. I like to be fixing the problem.
When I was an investor, one of the very big principles of how we decided to operate was that we wanted to stay out of the way of the founders we partnered up with. That means that even from a 20,000-foot view, you're sitting on boards and hearing how founders talk about their problems. There are certain problems where you think, I have experience with that, or I know the right person I can bring in to work together and solve this. But it's against the principle to do so, because you partnered up with the founder in the first place because you believe the founder is best placed to solve those problems. So there was always this itch that I could do more, and the impatience kicked in. I'd think, "I wish I were in the company, doing things for them and solving problems." That's part of the realization.
The second thing is that I had time to think back on what matters to me. Being in venture capital is great because you're partnering up with people wherever they're from, and they have very big ambitions they want to go after, but you can only play a small part in that journey. I think there's a lot more direct impact I could deliver if I'm hands-on, getting my hands dirty and solving impactful problems. Immigration became an extension of that understanding.
So without having anything lined up, I decided to make the switch and go find interesting problems to solve. It didn't take me and Arnold, Arnold being my co-founder, very long to decide that immigration was something impactful to solve. It comes down to two things. One is being able to roll my sleeves up and go solve problems, because I'm impatient. Number two, I'd rather be working on a problem than sitting 20,000 feet up and watching how others go solve it. I don't want to miss the fun.
Ten Meetings in a Week With No Website
Jeremy Au: How did you land on this product-market fit?
Frederick Ng: It was one of those where the dots connected, if you will. When I was in venture, part of my mission was to partner up with founders in the region who were primarily building AI SaaS startups. Typically, a lot of them would subsequently move to the US, because that's where the capital, the clients and the business development side of things are. I saw firsthand how my founders struggled with the immigration process while trying to build their companies, so I knew there was a big job to be done there.
The next thing was to see whether the problem was painful enough. Our journey to find product-market fit was to go to the market first, as opposed to building a product and hoping it sells itself. We decided it was easier to see whether we could reach out to third-degree connections. When Arnold and I embarked on the journey, we were very dead set on not finding friends to buy from us or be design partners, so to speak. Rather, we wanted to go out to almost complete randos and see, without a website and with nothing but a narrative, whether people were willing to pay, and pay a pretty high ticket, for the products and the visas we sell. If people are willing to pay despite all of that, it tells you pretty much that there's an impactful job to be done. There's a lot of value left on the table, and a lot of value left to be created.
Once we decided immigration was an impactful problem to solve, one aligned with our goal to accelerate human ambition and help talented people get to wherever innovation happens, we decided to go out and find venture-backed founders and see whether they would respond. When we first went to market, we didn't have a website. We were just learning on every call. In the first week, without a website, without anything, we had 10 meetings.
Within the first month, we got on a call with a Swedish entrepreneur. He had raised $50 million, and he needed to move to the US to build a geothermal plant. Mind you, we had no website. We were armed with a little bit more knowledge about the O-1 visa, which was the hero product at the time. And within 10 minutes, he wired us. Arnold and I looked at each other and we were like, "Oh, wow, there's something here."
So that was the quote-unquote product-market fit exploration: compressing that timeframe, getting to the market as quickly as possible, and not being afraid of embarrassment, almost welcoming it, because you learn the most from it. That's how I think we accelerated our journey to finding product-market fit.
Empathy Over the CRM
Jeremy Au: Visas are obviously a problem, especially when you're applying from a foreign country and getting to the US is attractive. If you Google this, there are many services available. There are law firms and so forth. So what's your approach?
Frederick Ng: We wanted to work with a lot of empathy, compared to how others might have experienced their journeys with a traditional immigration law firm. What I mean by that is, having operated in this space and solved this problem, and with a team that is primarily immigrants themselves who have gone through that journey, we know it's a very emotional one. Part of what makes a great case is someone who has spent time with whoever is going through the process. Through the inevitable ups and downs of getting the case done and getting your evidence together to help your visa process go through, you support them emotionally, so that whoever's going through it doesn't get affected too much by the process while juggling building their thing.
I think that's the big part where traditional professional services are lacking, specifically in immigration. A lot of the time, especially when a firm is operating at scale, you start to become a number in their CRM. We decided that's not what we want to do, because a lot of our team members have been through that journey. We have team members who have done green cards for their own families as well as themselves, and that really changed their whole family's livelihood. With the same empathy that we received, that's how we decided to operate: to help founders achieve their ambition wherever they are. The journey of building a company is already hard enough. The best we can do is make it a little less painful when they juggle immigration as a necessary step to expand to the US. I think that empathy is what differentiated us.
Judgment Versus Intelligence
Jeremy Au: Based on what you share on your website, you're tech-enabled, you do things faster, and there's a money-back guarantee. Could you share a little bit more about how that works?
Frederick Ng: Our process is designed from first principles, differently from a traditional lawyer's. The framing is AI-native services. It just so happens that we're building this business in immigration. You can think of the job to be done as judgment and intelligence. That's typically what a body of work encompasses in professional service settings.
We can use a different industry to see the parallels. Let's say an accountant. You hire an accountant to do the work of keeping your books, obviously, but the accountant also tells you how to keep the books, and how to allot certain line items in a way that makes sense within the auditing standard.
If you take the same analogy to what an immigration professional or immigration lawyer does, the body of work comprises judgment, which is what you do in a particular situation, and then how you do it, which is the actual work that an immigration attorney and an immigration paralegal would do. How we do it differently is that we're very consciously trying to unbundle the two, and give more time back to the immigration professionals and attorneys we work with, so that they spend more of their time on judgment, which is what a human can do and what LLMs cannot. Then there's the intelligence, which is how you do it: how you compile a case of a 700- to 1,000-page petition with as much LLM-enabled assistance as possible, so that you give more time back to intelligence.
Let me put this into an actual situation. Let's say two founders come in who look completely the same on paper. Both are Series A founders, both are very well credentialed, and they would probably qualify very well for the O-1A. So the intelligence on how you craft the case will be very similar. But as you dig in and spend time with the founder, you start to understand the unique situation each person is in. Even though both are Series A founders, one might have, hypothetically, overstayed in the US on a B-1/B-2 visa.
That's where judgment comes in, and where our model lets immigration professionals and attorneys do their best work: freeing up more of their time to decide whether this is the right time for case number one, a Series A founder with a visa overstay, to go through immigration. Versus case number two, also a Series A founder but without that overstay, who can go through the process. We're very intentional about unlocking more time for judgment, and that typically makes or breaks an immigration case, because on paper you might qualify, but there are often nitty-gritty details in a personal situation that make or break a case, so to speak.
So where our model is different is that we try to automate as much of the intelligence work as possible, and unlock more time for the attorneys, or our immigration paralegals, to work with the founders. One immediate byproduct is that our clients get a lot more face time with immigration professionals and attorneys, and they feel more supported along the way. That's how we're different.
Why the Details Matter More Now
Jeremy Au: Can you talk to me about why that matters, that differentiation between the two founders?
Frederick Ng: Now is a very challenging time to go through immigration. It matters that we're able to spend enough time on one company versus another, or one founder versus another, because every case is unique. When you pair that with a very challenging immigration environment, the details determine whether the immigration process is a success or not.
I'll give you an example. Say that in the past, under a different administration, a founder was going through the immigration process and taking a launch team over to the US alongside them, which is a very typical use case for what we do. In the past administration, we would have taken everyone on an O visa: the founder and the founder minus one. If you'd spent enough time with the team members, you'd understand whether they could be a good fit for an O-1 visa versus a typical pathway like the L visa or H-1B.
Fast-forward to today, in a more challenging immigration environment, being able to spend time to really understand the case makes all the difference, because it helps you determine the right visa type. That's judgment: how do you decide the right visa type for the person, and for the team members, to move to the US? If you've spent enough time, that empathy and understanding allows you to say, "Okay, except for the founder, these people shouldn't go through the O-1 visa. They should go for, let's say, an L visa to bring the team over." That makes all the difference, especially in an environment like this: being able to zoom in, with enough time, on client A versus client B, who might look the same on paper.
Three Months, Not 48 Hours
Jeremy Au: What's interesting is that you're mentioning all these different types of visas, and I'm familiar with them because I was in the US. But for a founder or technology executive in Southeast Asia who's interested in moving to America, what's the span of visa categories they should be aware of, and who is each one best for, based on persona?
Frederick Ng: Let me take a step back. This is something I wish founders knew when they came to us. In terms of awareness of visa types, most founders haven't heard of O visas or L visas. It's great, Jeremy, that you've gone through the exercise, and I'd say you're in the minority of founders or venture operators who come to us already knowing about the visa type.
I'll give you a stat. We spoke to about 6,000 founders in the last year, and 55% of them don't know what an O-1 visa is, let alone the different visa types. Most of the founders who come to us think a typical US work visa can be done as easily as ESTA, which is what you'd use if you're a Singaporean, or coming mostly from developed or European countries. You fill out a form, and within 48 hours you get a visa outcome. It's not like that, and most founders don't know that it's not that easy. It's a 700- to 1,000-page petition, because you're literally going after the most powerful work visa for operating in the US.
So number one, generally the awareness is not quite there yet. If there's one thing I hope founders take away, it's that this isn't something you can get done within 48 hours. A good process typically takes about three months.
The O-1 and the L Visa
Frederick Ng: Then it's about the different options they have. The O-1 is great for venture-backed founders. If you think about it from first principles, what does the O-1 visa do? It has a reputation for being called the Einstein visa, or the extraordinary ability alien visa. Why are venture-backed founders a great fit? Because in spirit, this visa type is trying to attract people who are the crème de la crème of their industry to go and contribute in the US in a work setting. Being a venture-backed founder typically means you are one of the very few who have been selected by a venture investor and received institutional investment. Through that, you're among the very top in what you do, which is entrepreneurship. So the O-1 is typically a very good pathway for them.
One thing most people don't realize is that the O-1 has consistently had a broad-based, very high approval rate across different administrations. Case in point: in the first Trump administration, the O-1 visa had a 90% approval rate. In the Biden administration that came after, 93%. And in the latest stats published by USCIS, the US immigration bureau, so to speak, the second Trump administration has a 91% approval rate. Founders are expanding to the US, and they need certainty that the visa is there so they can go expand. What they don't realize is that this is a category with a very high approval rate, and hence the certainty founders are seeking.
Another typical visa type that fits a venture operator or a founder is the L visa, which is an intra-company transfer visa. The typical use case is founders who have built their base in Asia, need to expand to the US, and want to bring their launch team over with them. The founder minus one might not have as well or publicly chronicled a profile as the founder, so a better way to go through it is to say, "I've spent one year in a local entity affiliated with my US entity." A startup typically has a Delaware C-Corp or an LLC. If you've been on the payroll of that local entity for 12 months, you can do an intra-company transfer and say, "I need to do in the US the same thing I did with the local entity."
So these two tend to be the most typical pathways startup operators go through. If there's one thing to take away from all of this and from understanding the different visa types, it's that this is not something that can be done in 48 hours. It takes at least three months to run a good process. So as founders think about their US expansion motions, it's one of the first things they should think about.
Family First: Spouses, Dependents and the EB-1A
Jeremy Au: For many founders, when they think about their visa move, they're also often thinking about their spouse and sometimes their children. If you're a very young founder and maybe you studied at a US university, it's pretty straightforward to go through the practical training afterwards. There's a window to stay in America. But people who are using visa services often have a spouse, a girlfriend or boyfriend, and children. So how do you talk to them about that process?
Frederick Ng: It's one of the first things we try to get clarity on with founders, or even tech executives for that matter, who come through our door seeking advice on visa or green card types. To bring this to life: a lot of the time, whether you decide on one visa type versus another, or one green card type over another, comes down to family considerations. Maybe not so much for founders, but for tech operators especially.
We have a lot of executives from across the Mag 7 today, be it Meta or Google. The first question we often ask them is what their spouse's visa status would be if they were to go through this visa versus that visa, because not all visas allow the spouse to work in the US. They can live and stay, but not work. That's a main reason why people need to switch visa types, and it's something people should bear in mind. It's not just about the utility and how quickly you get the visa for yourself, but also the dependent status.
We've literally seen a lot of tech executives who couldn't make decisions that were more favorable to them and their families because they were boxed into a particular green card type. Case in point, a lot of tech executives from, say, Amazon come to us. Amazon will sponsor a category called EB-1C for them, which is for multinational executives, and the wait time is super long. Because Amazon is sponsoring their process, they can't leave. If they leave, it's not only their professional career that's in jeopardy, but also their family's livelihood in the US.
So a lot of the time they come to us and say, "Okay, I want a different visa." We chat with them and understand the practical situation the family depends on. Then we say, "Okay, have you thought about the EB-1A?" Without going into too much terminology, it allows you to anchor your professional merit against the qualifying criteria and be approved for a different green card purely on that basis. Once you've gotten that status, your dependents can live and work in the US without any ties to Amazon. That unlocks their ambition, because now they're not tied to an employer. They can go work for whoever they want, or even start a company.
So the dependent situation, the family situation, is often the first thing we talk about, especially for those who are already based in the US and have built some sort of livelihood there.
Ten Days of Silence, Then Everest Base Camp
Jeremy Au: That's so great to hear. My last question for you: could you share a personal story about a time that you've been brave?
Frederick Ng: That would be the time before I started this company. When I was a venture investor, I took a sabbatical. I knew I was going to build something. I didn't know what it was, but whatever I'd learned in the years prior taught me it was going to be a rough journey, a really rough journey, that would test my limits in every facet. So I decided to go and seek some hardship. I took a sabbatical, and that was the month when I was the bravest I've been in my entire life so far.
I went to two places, India and Nepal. In India, I locked myself in an ashram about an hour's drive from Hyderabad. I was the only foreigner there, and it was a super rundown situation. You wake up at 4:00 AM, and you're not allowed to touch your phone. You're not allowed to do anything outside of meditating. You wake up at 4:00 AM, you go to bed at 9:00 PM, and you do it again. You're not allowed to talk throughout the entire experience.
It was brave because I care a lot about the people around me, and I didn't want them to think I'd died. And vice versa. During those 10 days, so many of these thoughts came to my mind: "Oh, my parents might have died in these 10 days. For whatever reason, my partner might have left me." All sorts of things. It absolutely tested my limits. I went through it, and I thought, "Okay, if I've gone through and survived that, I can probably do something and not be daunted by the challenge ahead of me."
So to put that to the test, I took a bus across the border to Nepal, and I decided to hike to Everest base camp. Armed with all the confidence I had from Vipassana, and from having lived in the ashram without any contact with anyone, I went up toward Everest base camp. It was a long hike. I got to about 4,800 meters above sea level, which is relatively high, and I started developing altitude sickness, but I was three days from base camp.
The outcome I'd set for myself, to really test whether I had the resilience, was to reach base camp no matter what. I think this would resonate with a lot of founders as they go through their own company-building journeys, and it certainly resonates with mine. I was three days out from base camp, and reaching it was something I'd be really proud of for the rest of my life. I had a cracking headache every day. I couldn't sleep for three hours, three days straight. You're operating at really high altitude, so you get sick really easily.
The Sherpa had explicitly told me, "When you experience a headache, you should let me know, and then we're going to send you back." At that point, I decided I was either going to get there or die trying. I didn't tell him about my headache, and I made it all the way to base camp. Right after I reached base camp, I collapsed, and I had to be sent back by helicopter to Kathmandu to recuperate.
That one month really tested my limits, and it has helped massively in the journey of building Beyond Border, because of the many inevitable ups and downs. In the tougher moments, I go back and tell myself, "If I've gone through all of that and survived, I can probably survive this as well."
Three Takeaways
Jeremy Au: Thank you so much for sharing your experience. Wow, what a crazy story. On that note, I'd love to wrap things up by summarizing three big takeaways.
First, thanks so much for sharing about your early career and your own immigration and movements across Hong Kong, the UK and Singapore, and also your career across founder, VC and operator roles. There's a lot to learn from those career choices.
Secondly, thanks for sharing your experience of being on all three sides of the table, as a VC, an operator and a founder, and what empathy means in that context. Also some of your self-realizations about the skill sets you needed, how you could be helpful to founders, and how to be a real thought partner to founders.
Lastly, thanks for sharing about the immigration solution your company is building. I thought it was fascinating to hear a little bit about what you're planning, and also your first-principles approach to making this a better experience across the different visa categories, whether it's for a solo founder, a technology executive, or somebody with a family who is thinking through their spousal decision. On that note, thank you so much for sharing.
Frederick Ng: Thanks, Jeremy. Thanks for having me. This was fun.
