I love Stripe. And I agree that Atlas makes incorporation process quite easy.
But when I hear about a SaaS startup being organized as an LLC, I wonder if the founders considered the potential benefits of "qualified small business stock" or QSBS, which is only available in a c-corp.
This is true, but starting as an LLC and converting to a C corp does have a potential QSBS benefit, if you are able to meet the 5-year holding period. The QSBS deduction is the greater of $10 million or 10 times your adjusted basis at the time of acquisition of the C corp stock. If you incorporate as a C corp initially, you get the $10 million deduction, at best. If you form as an LLC and only convert to a C corp (and get your C corp stock) at the time of your first financing, your adjusted basis may be significant. If the value of your equity share is, say, $3 million at the time of your first equity round (not unheard of), when you convert to a C corp, you potentially get a QSBS deduction of 10 times that (i.e. $30 million).
Please note that in a conversion from LLC to C corp, you only get the QSBS on the gain over the initial basis. So, in my example above, if you end up selling the shares for $2 million in an exit (when the basis when you received the shares was $3 million), you will get no QSBS deduction.
Most startups on the venture track aren't profitable or reinvest any profits into growing the business. No profits = no tax. So double taxation usually isn't a problem.
I know these situations can be painful, (and there may be concerns re: confidentiality), but I really wish more founders would share a bit more detail describing what went wrong.
This kind of candor would be hugely valuable to other founders who are still in the trenches.
We've held off on adopting Slack because Hangouts Chat seemed promising. But here we are almost 3 years since it was introduced and there's still no integration with Gmail. Argh!
To add insult to injury, while we're stuck using crusty old Google Chat, (due to its integration with Gmail), Microsoft Teams is adding features regularly and has blown by Slack in terms of DAU.
Google Sites is even worse. "New" Google Sites was introduced in June of 2016. Since then, it's received very little attention in terms of ongoing development.
Meanwhile, companies like https://www.notion.so/ are completely eating their lunch (Notion has only 27 employees last time I checked). It's hard for me to believe that Google employees use Google Sites internally in its current state when there are so many better options out there.
I've lost all hope on Sites. I'm still hopeful that Google will make Hangouts Chat competitive with Slack and M$ Teams.
All that said, Gmail, Gcal, and Google Drive are still really really good. Even Hangouts Meet has improved significantly over the past year.
Since we already use MS Office (and paying for Office 365 subscription), moving to MS "ecosystem" looks like more and more likely option.
The only problem there is video conferencing (Skype is awful), but we use some other solutions for that, anyways (as enterprise customers we are dealing with are really not accustomed to meet.
Can't believe that MS looks agile compared to Google when it comes to these things. It seems that Ad business is eating up all the talent over there...
I've used https://simplenote.com/ for ~5 years because it's clean, fast, cross-platform, supports Markdown, has decent search and tagging features, and it's free & open source.
Every day I open a new note named #[YYMMDD] Scratch, and use it as my daily scratchpad. That makes it easy to search for notes by year, month, and day.
Section 2872 of the California Labor Code prohibits your employer from taking ownership of anything that you develop entirely on your own time without using your employer's equipment, supplies, facilities or trade secret information, EXCEPT for those things that either:
(a) Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice to your employer's business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development; or
(b) Result from any work performed by you for your employer.
Almost nothing is covered by a. Just do b and you'll be fine. Quote from a book:
"Keep Calm and Carry On"
Don't tell Google about it (but do declare it on any future employment agreements), make sure your team is happy with your performance, don't use company resources and your job/insurance will be fine. Let that settle in, afterwards thinking more is a waste of time.
There's many examples of Google employees building side projects that turn into companies. [1] Let that precedent keep you calm.
Note that sandstorm.io (and Cap'n Proto) was written 100% after I left Google, so I'm not sure if that's a great example.
I would not recommend working on a future startup while still at Google, unless the work is 100% open source and approved. If it's open source, you'll have an easier time getting it approved if you let Google keep copyright. This should be fine because they cannot retroactively revoke the license, so your startup will be able to use it under the terms of the open source license.
If you're writing proprietary code, you are putting your future startup at risk. It's not just that Google might come after you (this is actually unlikely, since it's bad PR for Google), but you may have a hard time getting investors if your IP rights aren't in order. Investors do care about this stuff.
California law does not work well as a defense since Google essentially claims that all code relates to its business in some way.
Each has its strengths and weaknesses. Notion is the most flexible and fun to use. Outline and Gitbook are open source, which is nice. Slab is probably the furthest along in development and in terms of being purpose-built for knowledge management.
Unfortunately, Google Sites seems to be super low priority at Google.
But when I hear about a SaaS startup being organized as an LLC, I wonder if the founders considered the potential benefits of "qualified small business stock" or QSBS, which is only available in a c-corp.
With QSBS, each founder and investor can supersize their exit proceeds by wiping out at least $10 million in U.S. taxes. (See https://www.businessinsider.com/qsbs-qualified-small-busines...).