legally start a Bay Area startup without being American?
petercooper: Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.As a Canadian you have some visa categories open to you that others do not. I don't know anything about those so cannot comment on them further.However, the US has the E-2 Treaty Investor visa for situations like this - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-2_visa and  http://travel.state.gov/visa/temp/types/types_1273.html .. Canada is a treaty signatory. There's quite a lot to it, but essentially it allows you to enter and work within the US to control an investment. Investment must be "significant" with respect to the sort of business it is (so if you were opening a steel mill, $200k probably wouldn't cut it, but a software company? Theoretically it could be as little as $100k). There was a post linked from HN recently about a British group of guys who used the E-2 successfully to set up a company in the Bay Area.Alternatively, you could work on your company in Canada for a period of a couple of years then open a US branch/subsidary and transfer to it through an L visa.The short story, though, is that it's really, really hard and generally rather expensive, unless you have access to some Canadian focused visa class I'm not aware of. Going to work at an established American company is not particularly hard (assuming you have a degree) but anything beyond that involves a great deal of pain. I've been investigating moving to the US as a self employed person for about six years now and am still not close to discovering a good route (with "save $250k in cash" as my current, tricky to attain fallback position).