J-P Conte’s Hoover Conference Drew Tech Investors and Policy Experts Into the Same Conversation

Academic conferences on immigration economics have not traditionally drawn general partners from top-tier venture capital firms. The January 22, 2026 Immigration Policy and the Economics of Innovation conference at Stanford’s Hoover Institution was different — a deliberate design choice by J-P Conte, the managing partner and Hoover overseer whose initiative organized the event, to ensure that research findings were immediately tested against the experience of practitioners who live with immigration policy’s consequences every day.

The afternoon panel brought together Paola Sapienza, J-P Conte Family Senior Fellow and co-director of the initiative; Misha Esipov, co-founder and CEO of Nova Credit; Alex Rampell, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz; Giovanni Peri, professor of economics at UC Davis; and Amy Nice, distinguished immigration counsel at the Institute for Progress. The combination of investors, founders, economists, and legal experts produced a cross-disciplinary conversation that the morning’s research papers could only set up.

What Investors and Lawyers See

Rampell’s presence at the conference underscored something J-P Conte has consistently emphasized: that business leaders have a particular stake in understanding immigration as an economic question. A general partner at one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent venture firms, Rampell operates in an ecosystem where a significant share of founding teams include people who came to the United States on student visas or work authorizations. Policy changes that affect visa availability and stability have direct effects on the quality and composition of the companies in which he invests.

Amy Nice, whose practice at the Institute for Progress focuses on high-skill immigration pathways, brought a different but equally concrete perspective. Immigration lawyers see the operational friction of the current system in detail — the paperwork, the delays, the appeal processes, the moments where prior approval gets reversed at a consular interview. Nice’s participation ensured that abstract policy discussions were grounded in the lived experience of the workers and companies the system is supposed to serve.

J-P Conte’s Design Philosophy for the Conference

J-P Conte has been deliberate about building the initiative’s conference series to bridge the gap between research and practice. The January 2026 event was the second in the series — the first was held in October and November 2024 — and the panel structure was designed to make the research directly legible to people making hiring, investment, and policy decisions.

J-P Conte told attendees at the conference that the country’s strength in innovation cannot be separated from its openness to people who come here to build things. “The beauty of America is immigration and innovation,” he said. “And immigration is key to that innovation.” The panel was designed to test that claim against real experience — and the resulting conversation offered more texture than any paper alone could have provided.