Former Apartments.com president Dick Burke is the new president and CEO of Chicago-based online immigration service provider VisaNow, the company announced Monday.
Founder Bob Meltzer, a former immigration lawyer, has stepped down from the CEO position to be the company’s chief immigration strategist.
“I wanted to find an opportunity here in Chicago,” Burke said. “I wanted to find a space I personally cared about. I’ve seen as an employer the impact immigration can have.”
Burke, who earned his law degree from Georgetown University in 1990, left private practice to join Apartments.com parent Classified Ventures in 1998 as general counsel. During his 16 years with the company, Burke oversaw business units including sales, marketing, finance, human resources and legal. He left Classified Ventures at the end of July, after the company’s sale to Washington-based CoStar Group.
In his roles at Classified Ventures and Apartments.com, Burke said he saw the way immigration affects attaining and retaining talented workers. He said that’s a challenge often weathered by small and medium-sized businesses that lack in-house counsel.
Burke said he’d been looking for a job with a company “that had a massive addressable market that I felt could be improved using technology.” He found that in VisaNow, which helps workers and individuals apply for visas.
Burke said the experience of helping grow Classified Ventures from a startup to a company with 1,500 employees exposed him to a plethora of challenges. He thinks the process might be easier this time.
“There we had to invent the product in the early days,” Burke said. “Here we know we’ve got the award-winning mousetrap.”
In November, VisaNow announced it had raised $16.1 million from General Catalyst Partners, a venture capital firm based in Cambridge, Mass., that has backed companies such as Airbnb and Kayak.
Burke said his top goals for the foreseeable future are increasing awareness, growing revenue and hiring.
He said Meltzer, in his new role, will devote more attention to connecting with employers and community-based organizations to get the word out about the company. Burke will look at ways to build on VisaNow’s double-digit growth in 2014. He expects to double the company’s 75-person team in the next 12 to 18 months.
Burke said VisaNow doesn’t take sides in the immigration-reform debate.
“The opportunity in front of us is so big that it doesn’t particularly matter,” Burke said. “The business plan doesn’t hinge on whether Obama’s executive action is implemented or not.”