Shahriar Tajbakhsh, the CTO and co-founder of Metaview AI, which sells software to help automate job interviews, joked about the $100,000 H-1B yearly visa fee and said ‘make it per day’. The company recently created a social media stir as they did their hiring in India, the hub of H-1B, fearing neither the fee nor the prevalent sentiment in the US against H-1B. When the fee was announced in September, he called it a ’rounding error’ compared to the value the H-1B staff members add to the team. “Make it per day,” he posted as the MetaView hiring posters in India went viral. “I’ll set up a recurring payment,” he added, making it clear that the fee does not matter to his company. “Yes, we still sponsor H-1Bs”; “No, AI won’t build itself,” Metaview AI’s recent hiring posters in India read.

Who is Shahriar Tajbakhsh?

Iranian-origin Shahriar Tajbakhsh is a technology entrepreneur and engineer. He did his BSc in Computer Science from University College London. He worked at Palatir Technologies before starting Metaview in 2018. Metaview is London-based but now expanded to the US. Tajbaksh told Business Insider earlier this year that his company plans to submit more H-1B petitions in the next lottery and Trump’s executive order will not change his belief that an organization’s success or failure is a function of its people. Tajbakhsh, however, is not an H-1B. He revealed that he was relocating to the US on an EB-1 visa which is an employment-based, first preference visa for an individual of extraordinary abilities, or an outstanding professor or researcher, or a multinational executive or manager. “When you sum up the value created by people’s hard work, $100,000 just doesn’t matter. The only way to build anything meaningful that changes people’s lives is to have a world-class team — there’s no shortcut around that. Trying to save money on talent is the most irresponsible thing a founder could possibly do,” Tajbakhsh said.