Background

A.H. holds a Master’s degree in Industrial Engineering from National Taiwan University and possesses a specialized background in Deep Learning and Large Language Models. 

Prior to founding his current venture, IP (alias), A.H. served for nearly six years at a globally recognized competitor, RA (alias), to CapCut. 

Uniquely, he transitioned from a Machine Learning Engineer to a Product Manager role before becoming a Founder. This means we need to tap deeply into our product expertise to establish industry benchmarks that enable product leaders to quantify their extraordinary achievements. 

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Initial Problems

Despite his strong educational background and tenure at a well-known tech company, A.H. faced specific hurdles in meeting the O-1A criteria: 

First, his transition to CEO was recent (within the past year), meaning his "Critical Role" evidence relied heavily on his past employment rather than on his current startup. 

Second, as a product leader at his previous company (not a founder), he lacked the external evidence of "Original Contributions of Major Significance" required by USCIS. 

His work was proprietary to his previous employer and had not resulted in any public patents or white papers. We had to draw on our understanding of product-related achievements (key product north star metrics, e.g., DAU/MAU; D1/D7/D30 retention rates, with industry benchmarks) to establish significance. 

Third, he had no history of serving as a judge of others' work, a criterion for which we need to work closely with him to establish external validation of his profile. 

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Our work 

1. Establishing the significance of work for product leaders 

Product leaders require special attention and evidence-building strategies to qualify for the O-1, since they typically don’t bring the same levels of external validation as commercial-facing roles

Co-Founders. This requires the product industry and our understanding of the network of external product leaders to validate his product-related achievements against industry benchmarks. 

Given our expertise in the technology space, we understood industry metrics and standards for product-related roles - including DAU / MAU, D30 retention rates, specifically for video editing apps. We were able to work with A.H. quickly to obtain internal data, then benchmark against similar categories data to establish the achievement needed to build a product at a 15m MAU level. 

For product leader validations, we secured independent opinion letters from our network of industry experts and expert opinion vendors attesting that his specific implementation of AI in mobile editing set a precedent in the field, elevating his work from "internal" to "industry-wide" significance. 

2. Strategic Judging Appointments 

To quickly satisfy the "Judging" criterion, we leveraged our whitelisted event database to pair him with the right events to feature in. 

We guided A.H. in securing invitations to judge these specific tracks, ensuring the competitions had a distinguished reputation to meet O-1 standards. Importantly, we vet the caliber of every event’s judge and cross-check against the USCIS blacklist to ensure A.H. ’s efforts align with petition success. 

3. High Remuneration and Critical Role Qualification For Product Leaders 

We structured the petition to highlight his "High Remuneration" and "Critical Role" by framing them against our proprietary salary data for Taiwan. 

A.H. held PM roles in Taiwan, which we understood to be rare for him to receive Silicon Valley-standard remuneration, given salary data and industry norms in Taiwan. 

We were able to effectively argue that 1) it is rare for Taiwanese PMs to build global-facing products with 15m+ MAU traction; 2) A.H. is conducting the role in Taiwan; 3) justifying his salary against rare salary data of PMs in Taiwan. 

Importantly, we secured reference letters from the founders of Guitar Hero and Kabam through our networks, attesting to A.H.’s critical role and contributions at his previous company. These powerful industry references made a difference to A.H’s O-1A qualification.