Looking at the listing you provided, the wide majority of the non-American unicorn startups are from China, with some scattered startups in other eastern countries. So I think the shift in startup-location speaks more about China's success in bringing back talent (especially compared to India) versus America's lack of a grip on talent.

The trend is more important. US has only 32% of the world's unicorns. Even if you remove all the Chinese companies, US is 58% of the total, far less than the number a few years back. India and Southeast Asia are especially doing well if you put the size of their economies into consideration. In five years, these unicorns could grow into nowadays Amazon and Facebook, and the same holds true for the shift in the job market.

Can't reply to 'highlyskilledimm's' comment below, hence adding here.

Not sure if level 4* h1b's fall under highly skilled, here are a few wondering why they get RFE for their visa extensions:

https://www.reddit.com/r/h1b/comments/bdt5o8

[*Level 4 is the highest wage category for h1b.]

The reason half of them are foreign owned is because all of them are Chinese whom are later in their tech development cycle. Almost all those companies in the US have already went public.

That's nonsense. Masters degree is not high skill. Or really, I've seen basically zero evidence that it indicates any more skill than a bachelor's.

Agreed on the master's degree bit. A lot of them are just for generating money for the uni. A bit anecdotal, but most east and south asians use it as a platform to get a job in the US.

Hm - do you have a master's degree yourself? I've seen lots of people (here and elsewhere) who suggest that a bachelor's degree also doesn't indicate skill and is also therefore useless. It seems as if everybody assumes that whatever level of education they themselves have attained is the cutoff for "usefulness" and any level beyond that is just a waste of time.

I'd agree that bachelor's are also basically useless - all it tells you is that the candidate can put up with four years of bullshit and still jump through hoops at the end.

A masters degree tells you they're willing to put up with six.

I might have just had a bad experience - at my uni the CS Masters program was a pretty blatant cash grab, taking advantage of the visa requirements to pull in Indian students. That would have been fine, but the standards were super low, the students couldn't code at all (by year 5, at least a bachelor's CS student should know how to write a for loop), and we had a major cheating scandal every year.

I'm not saying I don't want those Indian students here - I absolutely do - I just wish we weren't creating these nonsense processes and making people contort their lives to fit them.