Immigrants, Patents and Silicon Valley

Patents by foreign-born employees play an important role in startup companies. Silver Peak, based in Santa Clara, California, is a great example. "All issued Silver Peak patents have foreign inventors," according to Tony Thompson, senior director, corporate communications at Silver Peak.

The company's founder

The company's founder and Chief Research Officer David Hughes, who was born in Auckland, New Zealand, holds 34 patents in his career, including six issued for Silver Peak.  Damon Ennis, vice president of product management, was born in Northern Ireland and holds 5 patents, including one for Silver Peak. British-born Carl Hubbard, vice president of engineering, moved to America with his family as a child. He holds three patents.

"David Hughes saw an possibility to architect wide area network optimization research in software and create 'virtualization' appliances, where other vendors are and were doing it with hardware," said Tony Thompson.  "This has allowed for 'virtual' WAN optimization to in effect take off." Thompson said virtualization allows the company to offer significantly better performance for wide area networks at one-third the cost of competing hardware products.

"You are unlikely to find a Silicon Valley company that doesn't have foreign-born employees in important positions," said Kevin Bocek, vice president of marketing at IronKey. "It's a meritocracy and incubator for talent. There is a global market for talent and all software and cloud computing companies are now required to be global if they want to compete."

Boku, based in San Francisco, was started in 2009 and already employs 100 people. The company's service that allows online purchases via mobile devices is now available in 66 countries. "The nature of the Internet is you can create a platform or service that can be headquartered within 20 miles of San Francisco however available anywhere on earth," said Ron Hirson. "And if you have clients from around the world you need a global workforce, people familiar with local cultures." He sees the company's best growth prospects in Western Europe and Turkey.

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