Jean-Pierre Conte’s Immigration Conference Heard From a Founder Whose Startup Was Stalled by Visa Delays.

Building a company in its earliest months is a race against time, capital, and uncertainty. Add an unresolved visa situation for one of the founders into that equation, and the race gets considerably harder. That is the story Misha Esipov brought to the Immigration Policy and the Economics of Innovation conference on January 22, 2026 — an event held at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and organized through the J-P Conte Initiative on Immigration, the research program funded and established by Jean-Pierre Conte, a managing partner and Hoover overseer.

Esipov, who came to the United States from Russia at the age of three, is the co-founder and CEO of Nova Credit, a company that functions as a credit bureau and underwriter for immigrants, using international credit data to help new arrivals establish their financial standing in the US. His remarks at the conference put concrete numbers on what the loss of certainty in the startup ecosystem costs.

Five Months Without a Co-Founder

Esipov described an episode from Nova Credit’s founding period involving a co-founder who was a UK national and needed an O-1 visa — the category reserved for individuals who can demonstrate extraordinary talent that would benefit the United States. The co-founder received approval on paper, then traveled to the US embassy in London to finalize the visa. American immigration officials denied her there, despite the prior approval. For five months that followed, Esipov’s co-founder was unable to return to the country.

The delay did not kill the company, but it measurably slowed its early development. Esipov used the episode to make a broader point about how the immigration system’s unpredictability imposes real costs on startup formation — costs that do not show up in any official accounting but accumulate across thousands of similar situations. His account resonated with an audience that included researchers trying to quantify precisely those kinds of effects.

Jean-Pierre Conte’s Framework for Understanding These Costs

Jean-Pierre Conte established the Hoover initiative with the explicit goal of generating evidence that can bridge the distance between academic research and practical policy decisions. Esipov’s story put a human dimension on findings that research papers can only capture in aggregate. Jean-Pierre Conte, whose own family navigated the immigration process across two generations and two continents, has repeatedly emphasized that immigration to the United States is not an abstraction but a lived experience with consequences that compound over time.

At the conference, Jean-Pierre Conte pressed attendees to think about what American innovation actually looks like when immigrant founders are removed from the picture. “Just think of a scenario where none of those people were here,” he said. Esipov’s account of a five-month delay is a small-scale illustration of that larger argument: that visa uncertainty extracts a cost on ambition, and that cost is paid in slower companies, delayed hiring, and opportunities that never quite materialize.