Embarking on the TechNation Global Talent Visa Journey: A Seasoned Innovator's Perspective

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Hello TechNation Community!

I am excited to introduce myself to this vibrant and inspiring community. My name is Christopher Dailey, and am documenting a 28-year track record of pioneering digital innovation, particularly in the realms of digital health and government services. I’ve had the privilege of co-founding and selling three digital technology product and platform companies, leading venture capital investments of over $500M, serving as the CTO of a 200,000-person healthcare system, and spearheading the engineering of two massive digital health transformations valued at $4B and $16B in the most recent five years. In Digital Government I designed, architected, and delivered a budgeting portfolio management system, which has processed over $1.2 trillion in budget assignments since its go-live date.

Despite these accomplishments, I must confess that I am approaching the TechNation Endorsement application process with a sense of awe and a touch of what some might call “impostor syndrome.” The requirements are daunting! The level of talent and innovation that this community represents is truly humbling. But I believe that this sense of challenge is a testament to the high standards set by TechNation and the incredible opportunity that the Global Talent Visa represents.

I am drawn to the UK for its advanced healthcare culture, particularly the National Health Service (NHS), which I observe to be anywhere from 5 to 25 years ahead of other global healthcare markets (believe it or not, the US has built cultural debt like you wouldn’t believe pursuing revenue cycle optimization instead of patient outcomes). I am eager to contribute my expertise to the UK’s digital technology sector, particularly in the digital health and digital government areas.

I have worked with an immigration adviser to prepare my application for endorsement. I have gathered evidence, drafted a personal statement, and secured letters of support and testimonials. Now, I am looking for additional assistance of an immigration advisor to conduct a final review of my application materials. Does everyone use an adviser or have some of you succeeded running the process on your own?

I am looking forward to sharing my journey with all of you and learning from your experiences as well. I have absolutely no expectations and, to be candid, am far more terrified to be judged on my entire career’s gravitas than I ever was securing funding for my companies.

Thank you for welcoming me into this community. I am excited to learn, grow, and contribute alongside all of you.

Best regards,

Christopher Dailey

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Hi Christopher. I believe you are the type of talent tech nation is looking for. I am not sure you need an immigration advisor as stage one is not an immigration process but assessment of your achievements and proof of how you meet the criteria and having the right industry network to support your application.

You can start by listing the evidence you need to meet the criteria. Happy to respond to your question.

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Christopher, we all at some point got that “Impostor Syndrome” thing too, but like Francisca said, you don’t need an immigration consultant at this point. Many of us simply used the guidance and learnings from this platform to put our applications together. By the way, I think your profile is very impressive!

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Hi Francisca, and thank you for this positive energy!

Right now my documentation looks like this (I have no expectations, fully prepared to have to resubmit if I erred somewhere):

  • Personal Statement
    Focused on connecting global markets for digital health and digital Government, growing jobs, creating export opportunities for skills and products. Made sure to reference specific examples from my past and how this will extend into the future not just to create and grow markets but how I will grow as well and benefit from being in the UK.

  • Letters of Support
    I have several hundred digital product CEOs I could have tapped, but instead picked a much more difficult group and provided letters from consortium founders (e.g. SMART on FHIR, 10 year HIMSS President that created the interoperability showcase contest, News Investigative Reporter and former billion dollar system CIO who interviews C suite at market leaders including FAANG, folks like Mark Cuban, etc.) Each of these people personally knows me, has worked with me, and tells personal stories of my impact.

  • Evidence
    I provided seven documents using full 3 A4 pages to include redacted engineering and digital business works of my own authorship in addition to recognition for digital efforts.
    Public recognition - Congress & Government for digital engineering leadership, moderator of digital health panels for AI/ML
    1 - Innovation, Sr. Exec, Product Led - engineering lead for a digital product in strategy, architecture, and engineering delivery for a $16B programme (digital health)
    2 - Tech Contributions, Sr. Exec, Product Led - engineering lead for a digital product in strategy, architecture, and engineering delivery for a $4B programme (digital health)
    3 - Tech Contribution, Sr. Exec, Product Led - chief of strategy & marketing for human-like digital agent (specific product example - world’s first in 2017 for AI/ML) with over 5 million daily users and plenty of metrics and letters of reference speaking to personal impact
    4 - Tech Contribution, Sr. Exec, Product Led - chief of strategy & marketing for portfolio of digital products in Digital Government w/a joint venture that is the largest customer of AWS by an order of magnitude (excluding Amazon themselves, of course)
    5 - Tech Contribution, Sr. Exec, Product Led - chief of strategy for digital Government relating to Internet of Things and digital integration, wasn’t sure here figured it might help as one of my advisors indicated that having extremely technical and extremely business oriented experience is rare and worth talking about but my impact is well known there at least
    6 - Innovation, Founder, Product Led - co-founder, head of R&D for digital health, led and participated in raising over $500M in VC, very innovative idea that was largely ahead of its time
    7 - Exceptional Ability, Academic Contributions, AI/ML/HPC - narrative and excerpt from my AIAA publication on exascale computing. It’s more than 5 years ago but as we architected the relationship between languages like Python and heavy metal via HPC it was a formative work that a lot of ppl have leveraged to effectively find the ideal point of demarcation between massively parallel micro services and what are essentially web services of scripts

I submitted my application for endorsement back on July 21st, and am putting positive energy into the world! Thank you for any feedback, I’m looking forward to hearing back from the Home Office and will keep everyone up to date on the outcome.

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Thank you for this positive energy, @Gbemiga_Adelola!!! I have clicked the buttons and am awaiting news.

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Which evidence are you using for the mandatory criterion? What optional criteria are you cinsidering and what evidence do you have to proof you met the criteria?

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@Francisca_Chiedu - thank you for framing it up like that.

I heard back with a negative response on my initial application, it was not unkind!
For each “No” they said that while my evidence was respected they were looking for certain things that I did not include (very interesting!)

I met with three separate legal firms in the UK to assist in putting the information together over seven months.
Each one indicated that my greatest challenge was having too much evidence to select from (it can be overwhelming perhaps even distracting). A head of one legal firm indicated that my evidence was the most detailed he had ever seen in their career and that that is good. They also indicated that the Tech Nation assessment is subjective and that any concerns could matter more or less depending on the week. It’s intimidating, to be honest, when the alumni banner that I loved so much said something along the lines of not looking for reasons why you may not be endorsed, but think of reasons why you should be endorsed and your journey will begin. I will maintain a positive outlook!

  • What did I not know about the process to help those going next
    – The form to submit your letters of reference also includes a mandatory field for physical mailing address. For some reason I thought it was just email address and personal phone number, and this ended up adding a few days to my information gathering as the luminaries these letters come from don’t generally want to give out their home address.
    –The letters of reference should also include their CV as part of the same file (I think). I had these split out into different files thinking they would ask for each referee’s CV separately from the letter of recommendation (three page limit). As their CVs are likely more than three pages I wasn’t sure how to fit it all in. Given that the referee’s LinkedIn URLs were part of the submission I figured that perhaps that was enough, but it was definitely not one of the responses actually indicated that they weren’t sure the founder of SMART on FHIR was considered a leading industry expert (I don’t know how to interpret that conclusion, they continue to impact digital health globally).
    –The Mandatory Criteria is its own document upload. I had speaking engagements and publications prepared but not in its own document like I did the evidence, so when I put in the free text field that information and attached one of my pieces of evidence this was an error on my part.
    – I’m going to infer that as part of the evidence, letters from witnesses and colleagues are more important than actual evidence. I had included my own authored work for both optional criteria that clearly indicate leadership and ownership of the outcomes but in both cases they just replied that there’s “no proofs to demonstrate that this is solely related to their individual work”.

  • Evidence submitted (with what I will do better in the second submission in brackets - please comment!)
    –MC: speaking engagement examples and leadership recognition for several billion dollar USD programmes [second time: PDF of speaking engagements, publications, and cloud computing podcast with 2.5 million subscribers]
    –OC1: the assessors looks at numbers 1 and 2 above for electronic health record experience and innovation on vendor integration (over 300 digital product companies) [highlight innovation and new digital concepts more, we had plenty of world firsts as a result of my individual efforts and it didn’t seem to get across, I will also include letters from leadership explaining impact on numbers 3 and 4 above as they were not mentioned in the assessment]
    –OC3: the assessors indicated that number 6 above is relevant but indicated that the “evidence provided does not back the claims convincingly or relate to the applicant’s individual work.” [I will have to get additional letters of reference from former CEO / CFO to speak directly to my individual impact as the company would not have existed without my seminal work and wouldn’t have sold without my efforts both in digital architecture and enterprise valuation]

Please reply with advice, positive energy, anything that you think might help us find our way through this very challenging process and thank you in advance!!!

V/r,

Christopher

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Hey I have made friends here and wanted to follow-up that it took me weeks to get an Innovator Founder Visa last year after spending months pursuing Global Talent.

I do not have any faith in TechNation as an endorsing body as a result of my experience, I do feel that they need to be replaced immediately. The fact that they questioned my endorsers, who are world reknown, and that their scoring replies had nothing to do with my application basically indicates that they didn’t do their job.

That said - I’m happy to report that the family and I have relocated to Musselburgh, I have an office in Edinburgh, and am changing the world to be a better place from the UK by creating jobs!

Thanks for all the energy last year everyone, the more I learn the more I believe you should be telling folks to go Innovator Founder who have boatloads of experience and bona fides instead of Global Talent (unless they have loads of conferences and media mentions - which I had but it just wasn’t enough).

Christopher

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Sorry, you had a different experience with your application. I am not sure this is the overall experience of majority of applicants applying for tech nation experience. If you have specific feedback on your process, please share and alumni will pass it on. Tech nation may find it useful.