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The typical immigration policy conference assembles lawyers, academics, and government officials. JP Conte had a different gathering in mind when he built the program for the January 22, 2026 Immigration Policy and the Economics of Innovation conference at Stanford’s Hoover Institution — one that deliberately placed people who allocate capital alongside people who study labor flows and people who process visas.
Alex Rampell, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, was among the panelists at the afternoon session. His presence alongside economist Giovanni Peri of UC Davis, Nova Credit CEO Misha Esipov, Hoover senior fellow Paola Sapienza, and immigration counsel Amy Nice of the Institute for Progress was a deliberate signal about what JP Conte intends for the initiative he funds: that research on immigration’s economic effects should reach the people who are making real-time decisions about where to invest, whom to hire, and which companies to back.
Why Investors Have Skin in the Game
Venture capital has a particular relationship with immigration that is underappreciated in most policy discussions. A large share of the founding teams that receive venture funding include at least one person who came to the United States on a student visa or a work authorization. Those founders built companies that created jobs, generated returns, and in many cases became anchors of regional innovation ecosystems. A change in the probability or predictability of visa approvals has direct effects on the quality and composition of the founding teams that venture investors see.
For a firm like Andreessen Horowitz, which operates at the scale and prominence that it does, those effects are not marginal. They shape portfolio construction, recruitment strategy, and the broader health of the market from which the firm draws its deal flow. Rampell’s participation in the conference brought those stakes into direct conversation with the academic findings about how immigration restrictions redirect talent to other countries.
JP Conte’s Argument for Cross-Sector Conversation
JP Conte has consistently argued that the people who understand most clearly what immigration means for innovation are business leaders — people who have built organizations, made hiring decisions, and watched firsthand what happens when the talent pipeline narrows. Hoover Institution Director Condoleezza Rice made a similar point at the conference, observing that “perhaps business leaders understand” most acutely the need to remain the destination of choice for the world’s most capable workers.
The panel that JP Conte assembled was designed to generate precisely that cross-sector conversation — to put investors and founders in the same room with economists and lawyers, so that the findings coming out of academic research are immediately tested against the experience of people who operate inside the system. The result was a more textured discussion than any single discipline could have produced on its own.
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