Heaven! (Photo: Blueseed)

Paging Peter Thiel! Blueseed, a sea-faring tech incubator that aims to skirt visa laws by hosting its programs in international waters, has raised $300,000 from Silicon Valley investor Mike Maples. The startup incubator and business center intends to provide a place for non-US citizens to have the same access to the ideas and capital in the Valley without having to go through the complicated visa process. Though it's just a fraction of the $10-30 million needed for the project to actually take off, no doubt Silicon Valley's principled libertarian population will be excited to hear the news.

Last we checked in with the Valley libertarians, Peter Thiel pal Patri Friedman was preparing a book on Seasteading, the practice of living at sea in order to avoid national laws. Blueseed, meanwhile, raised $500,000 in September 2011 and is planning to launch at the end of this year.

According to the venture's site, it will cost about $1,600 per month per person to live and work on the floating incubator, which will be anchored approximately 12 miles from Silicon Valley. "We’ll charge a combination of rent and equity to accommodate the stage of your startup," reads the site. "The price per person will include living and office space, and will range from $1200 for a shared cabin to $3000 for a top-tier single accommodation cabin."

This may be the closest to a libertarian paradise we'll get any time soon, as the Peter Thiel-funded Future Cities project, which sought to build its own autonomous utopia within Honduras, was shut down in October 2012.

Fear not: we're sure the high-rolling Mr. Thiel has plenty of soft $100 bills to wipe his tears away.

The utopian tech community of Blueseed. (Image: blueseed.co)

The libertarian contingent in Silicon Valley has long been fascinated by the possibilities of living independently in international waters, where taxes can be avoided and talented developers can be imported from around the world to work in a kind of floating sweatshop without the hindrance of securing an HB-1 visa. So it's no surprise that two entrepreneurs have gotten interest from more than 240 startups for a visa-free tech incubator on a boat 12 miles off the coast of Northern California, which hopes to foster startups until they're large enough that U.S. Citizen and Immigration services "takes them seriously," as cofounder Max Marty told InformationWeek. Followers on AngelList are already calling it the "Visa Boat" and "jurisdictional arbitrage."

The project is called Blueseed, and rents will range from $1,200 for a shared cabin to $3,000 for the best single-person room. Blueseed, still in the "concept vessels" stage, raised $50,000 in the fall. The founders hope to launch in the third quarter of 2013, if all goes well, and will provide Internet access, 24-hour dining and other modern conveniences as well as the expected startup perks such as a game room and gym.  "Silicon Valley's visa-free offshore startup community," says the website.

Of course, they'll need a whole lot more than that measly $50K. Paging Peter Thiel.

Image via Wired.

Mayor Bloomberg doesn't do a tech ribbon cutting with reminding us that immigration is critical to our tech sectors future. And prominent venture capitalist Fred Wilson has written time and again about the importance of foreign workers in tech and the Startup Visa Act.

But over on the West Coast, they are doing some balls-out crazy stuff to make this happen. Blueseed, for example, a company backed by billionaire Peter Thiel, is constructing a floating city that will drop anchor 12 miles off the California coast. Transient techies will work on the boat by day, then head back to San Francisco to live by night, meaning they can avoid laws preventing immigrants from working at U.S. companies. 

Ok, couple things startups are going to need to survive:

Caffeine, check.

Cute puppy, check.

Internet... hmmm.

"We’re testing out a few ideas," Blueseed CEO Max Marty told Wired. "We’ll need a stable and low-latency bandwidth connection to the Internet. Cruise ships have not done this well, relying on satellite which is slow, and the price is significantly higher than it is on land. A laser could be good, but is susceptible to fog, which is bad in the Bay Area. We’re considering running an undersea cable from ship to shore, but it may be be cost prohibitive."

A laser beam of internet access cutting through the Frisco fog would certainly make a great symbol. Like a bat signal for innovation.

Like most incubators, Blueseed will ask for equity in exchange for giving startups a share of this oceanic co-working space. They are still debating the merits of a barge versus a cruise ship, but luckily for the company, we're in a down market for cruise ships, with many tourist fleets docking some of their big boats, so they may be able to secure the vessel on the cheap. "No matter what we go with, we want to be the Googleplex of the sea," Blueseed president Dario Mutabdzija told Wired. Well, at least they've got the branding down.