In late 2025, Fabian Fuchs, a German operations and strategy executive who had spent over a decade scaling some of Europe's largest technology-enabled marketplaces, came to Path Law Group with an unconventional profile for an O-1A case. He had never held a job title like "founder" or "scientist", rather his career was built inside large organizations at the executive level. Some of his positions included Director Global Operations and Chief of Staff to the COO of Just Eat Takeaway.com, interim Country Manager for Just Eat France, London Director for Just Eat UK&I, and Head of Local Operations Germany at Delivery Hero, with an earlier chapter as a Senior Consultant at Boston Consulting Group. Along the way he had led teams of 200+ people, held accountability for up to £700 million in Gross Transaction Value, and been named to the OUTstanding LGBT+ Role Model List of Top 100 Future Leaders. He had quit his full-time role, was building his own U.S. company, and needed a route into the United States that didn't hinge on a single employer's sponsorship.
The mission
Founder and attorney Ashkan Emami and the Path Law Group team took on Fuchs's case to classify him as an individual of extraordinary ability in technology-enabled marketplace operations and large-scale logistics execution. Because Fuchs intended to work for his own venture rather than an existing employer, the firm structured Sandfox Logic Inc., a Delaware C-corp Fuchs founded and would run as CEO, as the petitioning entity. We decided that an independent board member holding hiring-and-firing authority would act as the petitioner so Fuchs could serve as owner and manager without signing his own employment contract. His STEM background was operational rather than academic, so the case would need to translate over a decade of executive execution into USCIS's extraordinary ability framework. This presented itself as a challenge because normally, USCIS would require publications and patents for this framework.
The engagement moved quickly. When starting, Fuchs arrived having already mapped his own career against the regulatory criteria: he could see a clear case for high salary and for a critical, leading role, and he had "doubled down" on judging engagements. He saw experience as a BCG Platinion hackathon jury member, an Antler Investment Committee appointment, and a scholarship selection committee as evidence that could satisfy this criteria. From there, the team worked to build the case further rather than stop at the regulatory minimum.
The strategy
Rather than rely on the bare three criteria USCIS requires, we built Fuchs's O-1A petition around all eight available evidentiary categories:
- Nationally and internationally recognized awards: The team anchored this criterion in Fuchs's selection to the OUTstanding LGBT+ Role Model List (Executive Category, Top 100 Future Leaders), a ranked distinction administered by INvolve and supported by YouTube, judged by senior executives from companies including Salesforce and Dow.
- Membership in highly selective associations: The petition documented Fuchs's admission to GBx Global (a sponsorship-gated network of British tech leaders and investors in Silicon Valley), sdw Alumni e.V. (limited to former recipients of Germany's competitive Klaus Murmann Scholarship), and the Chief of Staff Association. The last of which roles Fuchs proactively pursued mid-case at the firm's suggestion to strengthen this exact criterion.
- Published material about his work: The record spanned technology and business outlets (Analytics Insight, MSN, The AI Journal), German financial media (Ad Hoc News, ARIVA.DE), professional podcasts reaching a combined audience in the millions, and major German general-interest and entertainment press covering his public-facing role on RTL+'s Prince Charming.
- Judging the work of others: This became one of the case's strongest pillars, built from Fuchs's due diligence work for an sdw-affiliated angel syndicate, his multi-year service on sdw's national scholarship selection committee, his Investment Committee role and structured founder-scoring at Antler, his jury seat at the BCG Platinion Hackathon, and his venture evaluation work at ESCP Business School.
- Original contributions of major significance: What began at kickoff as a tentative, "creative storytelling" idea stating that Fuchs's employed-courier hub model was different from freelance-heavy competitors, eventually grew into a documented body of original operational frameworks. Works like the "City Lab" hyperlocal scaling model that reversed a 10% order decline in London, the courier density-optimization model that lifted productivity 46% during Delivery Hero's pandemic-era surge, and the partner-led grocery vertical playbook that took Just Eat Takeaway's grocery business from under 1% of GTV to a €460 million EBITDA-positive global operation comprised this section.
- Critical or essential capacity at distinguished organizations: The petition traced Fuchs's leading roles across Just Eat Takeaway.com and Delivery Hero. These companies are publicly traded, multi-billion-euro marketplace enterprises. We supported this with reference letters from the company's COO, a Just Eat managing director, and investor Peter Thiel, a personal contact Fuchs proposed mid-case as a "wildcard" reference precisely because he had backed Fuchs's judgment without having worked alongside him directly.
- High salary: The team benchmarked Fuchs's prior Just Eat Takeaway.com compensation (€334,190 in total direct pay) and his contracted $150,000 CEO compensation at Sandfox Logic against U.S. and UK labor-market data, in each case placing him above 90th-percentile benchmarks for comparable roles.
- Authorship of professional articles: Fuchs's published commentary on Medium and LinkedIn addressing AI-driven marketplace transformation and executive operating systems rounded out the eighth criterion.
A central judgment call was how far back Fuchs's evidence should reach. Early in the case, the team agreed that his BCG consulting years, while prestigious, didn't independently support a "leading role" claim, and that reference letters carried more weight when they came from people, like Thiel, with no direct working relationship to vouch for, rather than solely from direct supervisors. That distinction shaped which of Fuchs's many professional relationships were asked to write on his behalf.
Outcome
The O-1A was approved without a Request for Evidence. With the O-1A secured, Fuchs and the firm turned to his long-term path to permanent residency: given the strength and consistency of his existing evidentiary record, attorney Ashkan Emami identified EB-1A as the clearest next step, requiring roughly another year of sustained achievement. Fuchs will work on securing additional press, speaking engagements, and thought leadership to meet the higher "top of the field" standard the category demands. Fuchs continues to build that record while operating his AI consulting practice in New York.
