Immigrants are integral to the U.S. tech market.
More than half of the most valuable U.S. tech companies were founded by first- or second-generation immigrants
Mary Meeker updates her data on immigrant founders.
Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Rani Molla was a senior correspondent at Vox and has been focusing her reporting on the future of work. She has covered business and technology for more than a decade — often in charts — including at Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal.
Some 56 percent of the 25 most valuable tech companies in the U.S. had a founder who was a first- or second-generation immigrant, according to Mary Meeker’s annual presentation at the Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif.
The father of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos came from Cuba. Alphabet founder Sergey Brin is from Russia. One of Facebook’s founders, Eduardo Saverin, hails from Brazil.
In total, these companies are responsible for employing 1.7 million Americans, according to Kleiner Perkins partner Meeker.
Meeker also has a slide that looks only at private companies founded by first-generation immigrants, meaning people who moved to the U.S. and started their company.
First-generation founders include Uber’s Garrett Camp (Canada), Tesla and SpaceX’s Elon Musk (South Africa) and WeWork’s Adam Neumann (Israel).
Watch her full presentation below.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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