How I moved to the US at the age of 25

you guys asked me how did we move to the united states did i get my green card as a creator or as an entrepreneur what kind of green card did i get and what our journey look like here in the u.s i'm gonna tell you everything in this video [Music] the utah inn is an iconic hotel in san francisco because almost every beginner startup founder who comes to san francisco and silicon valley to raise their first round knows this hotel because it's one of the cheapest hotels in san francisco right now i just checked it's 46 dollars a night you can walk to financial districts so you can take all the meetings without using public transportation and you can also walk to caltrain to go to silicon valley and this is where we stayed for the first three days and i remember i was looking out the window and i saw the palm trees and the sunshine i was like oh here are my shores my t-shirt because i thought it's gonna be really warm and we walked outside it was freezing it was windy so we went back to the hotel room and i put the clothes that i wore in russia and it was snowing in russia so basically yeah this is where it all started this is the first place where we stayed in san francisco dima yes what did you feel when you realized that from now on we're gonna live in the united states i felt like pretty good at the moment because uh i was excited that we get accepted to top accelerator we got a funding from silicon valley it was my dream for a couple of years and was a goal and finally i achieved the goal so i was super excited i was super pumped about it but when covet happened uh so like two years ago i just started reflecting on my journey here so i just like started reassessing all the way like all these five years in the states and i understood that damn actually i was like pretty uh scared and i wasn't integrated to the real world first of all because it's like new country new environment new culture but also because i was super scared to talk to anyone because my language skill was like super low and thanks to lingua chip and this immersion and like i became became like better with language and the criteria for me that when somebody invited me to give a speech or something like that here i feel comfortable so i don't feel any like problems with that and in 2015 i was not like i was scared even when talked to people on the streets i was like for me it was super challenging so i just realized that i was living in my dreams in my head it was like my escape it was easier for me to live in my dreams in my head instead of integrate to real life the real world so and i just started like two years ago i just started to integrate like go out from my inside world to the real world so now every day it feels better and better to be here it's funny how i've never had a dream about moving to the us as a kid my dream was to live and work in an english-speaking environment but i always thought it's going to be great britain i was such a huge fan of the uk the problem was i really wanted to go and study there but education in the uk is just crazy expensive so i started researching other countries and in 2014 i learned that you could actually go to the us and get a full-ride scholarship if you're talented enough i was like maybe i should try and so i started taking my toefl in gmat and this is also the time when i started my first youtube channel which was in russian because i felt really lonely at the same time my husband and i and he was my boyfriend back then we were building a company in russia to help people study abroad and we had a dream of building an international company which was kind of hard because we wanted to you know build an i.t solution and wanted to build a platform we needed to raise some money and we tried to raise money in russia which was almost impossible back then we also tried europe but my husband always said you know we have to be in the top place for entrepreneurs and the top place for entrepreneurs in silicon valley and my reaction to that was like who even needs us there like we're not even you know from europe or from the us we're russian founders with a really young startup but we kept applying we kept talking to other founders we kept pitching our startup and we applied to all us accelerators and back then it was tech stars y combinator and 500 startups and funny enough in march 2015 i got offers from two universities in the us johns hopkins university of florida with a full-ride scholarship and around april 1st we got an invitation from y combinator to come to silicon valley for the interview and back then the interviews were in person and y combinator would actually pay for your flights and hotel uh for you to come here and we got an offer from 500 startups and i remember getting an offer from 500 and it was like april 1st or something and imagine like waking up in st petersburg opening your email and it says offer from 500 startups we want to invest one hundred thousand dollars in your startup and i'm pinching demos like next time like we just got accepted to prevent new startups and we call our third co-founder and he's like oh guys it's april 1st it's probably april fool's drug i'm like no no no we actually got in and it was just so exciting and so game changing so y combinator paid for our flights here they ended up not accepting us to their accelerator because they i think they didn't like our market but 500 startups accepted us as they promised and this is where our journey started here in the us and then we started running out of money then my visa got denied we couldn't rent our initial apartment let me talk about this step by step behind me is 444 caster street the tallest building in mountain view this is where we spend most of the time in our first months here in the us this is where our 500 startups office used to be they're only in san francisco location these days but this building symbolizes the start of the dream for me this is where we're right we're like oh my god this is the place that we still have to explore this is a place where we don't understand anything people are so amazing here and this also feels like home it's just i don't know amazing if you're an immigrant in the u.s it's really hard for you to rent an apartment if you come without any credit history if you come without a job offer and without a social security number so initially i was like oh it's going to be easy so i went on zillow i found a lot of apartments here in mountain view and i started calling them and when i started explaining our situation that no we don't have an employer no we don't have a social security number and yes we want a month by month lease the answer from everyone was no and after spending two weeks in a hotel where a demon my husband was bitten by a bed bug and where a shooting happened in the night when we were staying there we were like okay let's step up our game and start looking for an apartment in a different way so the plan was to just 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