Hemkesh Agrawal landed in America after a 35-hour, three-layover flight. He had two bags, $1,000, and no network. He took a bus two hours from the airport through what he expected to be skyscrapers and instead was nothing but cornfields. He knew no one.

Now, he’s our Head of Engineering at Redbud VC and helping build Roots (social platform for builders).

Hemkesh represents exactly the kind of builder America keeps almost losing and sometimes does.

Before he arrived in the US, Hemkesh was already building. At 16, he watched a blind person struggling to use their phone. He built a glove with touch points mapped to digits so visually impaired users could dial by pressing their fingers. He got a patent on it. Then he went to pitch competitions and got great user feedback: one tester told him the glove prevented them from reading braille, so he redesigned it with open fingertips. Not bad from a tenth grader in India.

The instinct to find a problem, build something, and iterate based on real users isn't something people teach in school. It's a disposition. America's ability to attract people with that disposition is one of the most underrated inputs to our innovation economy.

When Hemkesh joined us, it was the product of an intentional career built around one constraint: he was on a visa. Every decision he made, from which startup to join after graduation to which hackathons to judge, was partly shaped by building a credible case to stay. He ended up qualifying for an O-1A (the "extraordinary ability" visa) across five categories: media coverage, critical role as a VC-backed CTO, judging experience, his patent, and salary benchmarks. He submitted a 400-page application. Premium processing. Then spent three weeks stuck in his apartment with no job, no driver's license, waiting to find out if he had to leave the country.

Luckily, he didn't. But plenty of people with his profile do, which is part of why Redbud backed Migrate Mate. Immigration shouldn't come down to a costly attorney or weeks sourcing the right role.

Hemkesh knew from day one he had to build his profile. That meant being intentional about the work he took, the communities he joined, and the events he went to. The visa pressure made him more deliberate. That's one reason immigrant founders tend to build with urgency that's hard to manufacture.

Technical depth isn't evenly distributed, and pretending otherwise doesn't help anyone. Hemkesh grew up in a system where programming was required curriculum from fifth grade. By the time he sat in a Michigan State engineering class, he had nearly a decade of structured technical training behind him. That's an advantage, and it's the product of another country making different choices about what’s important. 

When we close doors to people like that, we don't make our own talent pool stronger. We just make our companies weaker.

We're building a platform at Redbud called Roots that's designed, in part, around this problem. When Hemkesh landed in Michigan, the hardest part for him was having no network. And yes, you have to earn your right to win, but access to network effects is arguably a right that should be open-sourced rather than earned. It’s the most impactful lever for accelerating a high achiever's success. Roots is leveling the playing field, so entrepreneurship is not pay-to-play or a birthright.

Hemkesh found his way in without it. But he'll tell you himself: the people who connected him to other people were the unlock. Every critical role he landed, every hackathon he judged, and every letter of recommendation he collected, everything traced back to someone who opened a door.

That's what we're building at Roots.