Entrepreneur

Entrepreneurs Are Being Deported -- And They Might Be at the Center of America's Coming Immigration Fight

As if entrepreneurship weren't stressful enough.
Source: Diana Levine

On a recent Thursday morning in Cambridge, Mass., Alessandro Babini straps his company’s palm-size wearable device onto his arm. He’s the cofounder of a startup called Humon, which makes a next-generation fitness gadget. It monitors how well a user’s muscles are processing oxygen and then relays that information to an iPhone screen, which indicates whether the user can safely push a workout harder or should stop and recover. Although the product has been tested with Olympians, Babini sees the technology having applications beyond professional sports -- helping improve health for the masses, as well as fostering a deeper understanding of how the body works. 

Related: The Immigrant Entrepreneurs Behind Major American Companies (Infographic)

“It seems crazy,” he says, “that people know more about the car they drive than about the body they put behind the steering wheel.” That’s typical entrepreneur-speak, of course: outrage at a problem that simply must be solved. And Babini -- who is tall, with dark stubble and clad in the startup uniform of a plaid button-down and jeans -- is in many ways the model entrepreneur. He quit a safe, lucrative job at a venture capital firm and shelled out $100,000 of his own money to obtain an MBA at MIT. He also says that he didn’t take a salary for Humon’s first year. And now he has a staff of four, along with several part-timers. He regularly moderates panels in the startup community and volunteers his time to help and advise other entrepreneurs. 

But in addition to the usual stresses of launching a new company -- hiring, fund-raising, finding workspace, creating prototypes, dealing with investors -- Babini faces a graver concern: deportation. 

Babini is a French citizen, born in Paris to a French mother and an Italian-Lebanese father. That venture capital firm he quit was in London. Since coming to America, he has

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from Entrepreneur

Entrepreneur3 min read
Making the Midlife Leap
Sometimes, building the life you want requires a big risk. That’s what Keri Gardner realized when she cashed in $100,000 of her retirement savings to buy a franchise. It was November 2020, and she had just been laid off from her executive role at a h
Entrepreneur2 min read
‘I Won’t Make That Mistake Again!’
When Shizu Okusa decided to start a new business, she knew where to find the best guidance. “I wanted to reverse engineer everything I did wrong in my last company,” she says. Raised on a farm in Vancouver by Japanese immigrants, she’d founded a cold
Entrepreneur3 min read
THE Franchise 500® HALL OF FAME
This year, we at Entrepreneur published the 45th annual edition of our Franchise 500 ranking. As we celebrate that milestone, we also want to recognize the franchise brands that have been on this Franchise 500 journey right alongside us for the longe

Related