Extraordinary.com

The problem became personal

At 17, I left high school and flew to San Francisco because I wanted to build. I soon ran into a constraint that had nothing to do with my ability or ambition: without a degree, the standard TN and H-1B paths were closed to me.

The O-1 visa for extraordinary ability appeared to be my only path. I barely knew anyone who had one, and the official guidance made it sound as if I needed a Nobel Prize. I spent months assembling evidence, coordinating recommendation letters, and learning how the system actually worked.

Becoming an extraordinary alien

After nine difficult months in Toronto, my O-1 was approved in November 2023. The experience showed me that many extraordinary people are qualified to build in America but never try because the process is opaque, intimidating, and emotionally exhausting.

I began sharing everything I had learned. In January 2024, I published a free walkthrough of the process. The video reached hundreds of thousands of people and made clear how much unmet demand existed for honest, practical immigration guidance.

Paying it forward

What began as advice became a community. I met other O-1 recipients, introduced applicants to people who could help, hosted gatherings, and hand-delivered “Alien of Extraordinary Ability” hoodies to people who made it through the process.

The San Francisco Standard profiled this early community in June 2024. The article described the anxiety of my own visa process and the informal network of immigrants helping one another navigate a system that too often keeps exceptional people from doing their best work.

At 20, my EB-1A Extraordinary Ability green card petition was approved.

Building the community

I started talking publicly about skilled immigration whenever I could. Sometimes that meant explaining policy. Sometimes it meant making the O-1 part of technology culture.

The extraordinary-alien community also developed its own sense of humor.

Immigration can be isolating. I wanted extraordinary people to know one another, share what they had learned, and feel that they belonged in the American technology ecosystem. In December 2024, a16z and I brought together 30 O-1 visa holders.

By March 2025, the free educational work had made me the top result for O-1 visa information on X.

Founding Extraordinary.com

I turned those lessons into Extraordinary.com: a modern immigration service that combines top lawyers with software and an obsessive understanding of extraordinary talent.

The goal was simple: help far more people than I ever could through advice alone. One of the early people we helped was Yang Fan Yun, New Zealand’s smartest teenager, who graduated Stanford CS with the highest GPA and was running out of time on his OPT.

Then came more builders and creators whose age or unconventional path made traditional immigration categories a poor fit. Toby Brown became the youngest O-1A holder. Beluga, one of the world’s largest YouTubers, received an O-1B artist visa and could keep creating in America.

Extraordinary people build the future

The more people we helped, the clearer the pattern became. America’s advantage has always come from attracting unusually capable people and giving them a place to build. Andrej Karpathy’s journey from Slovakia and Toronto to Stanford, OpenAI, and Tesla is one example of what that compounding can look like.

The people in the Extraordinary network now span engineering, investing, industrial technology, research, and media. They include Deedy Das at Menlo Ventures and Hooman, the materials science prodigy building Solcoa to produce rare earth metals in North America.

In October 2025, a16z and I brought together 50 extraordinary aliens working across rare earth metals, space, disaster defense, energy, finance, biotechnology, and AI. Their potential contribution to America is difficult to overstate.

Celebrating extraordinary talent

Extraordinary is not only about paperwork. It is about recognizing people who learn, build, and contribute at an unusual rate, then helping them tell that story. Gabriel Petersson taught himself mathematics and machine learning with AI after dropping out of high school and became an AI researcher at OpenAI. His path captures the kind of agency I want the company to champion.

By the end of 2025, Extraordinary had become part of the technology community that inspired it. Stripe gave us a storefront inside its miniature city, a small but meaningful marker of how far the project had come.

Today, Extraordinary helps power companies and funds including Ramp, Cognition, Lovable, Zapier, Founders Fund, a16z, Khosla Ventures, Etched, and Y Combinator. We help founders and technical talent move quickly through O-1, EB-1A, and other immigration pathways so they can spend more time building.

I believe one of the highest-leverage things America can do is attract power-law talent. Immigrant founders and engineers have built many of the country’s most important companies. Bringing more of the world’s best people here pushes the frontier of technology and creates prosperity for everyone.

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