> a year to fire people even when they don’t show up
In what country? I just checked, in France it's 15 days. The employer can ask to be paid the notice period, and the employee won't get unemployment benefits.
> As an employer/employee takes a year to fire people even when they don’t show up, ergo the incentive is to coast.
That is not true in the UK. In the first two years of service you can fire someone without a reason so long as you were not being deliberately discriminatory. Burden of proof on the employee for this
After that you just have to go through a fair process. Your decision is not in question, just whether you followed a fair process. I have worked in a place that routinely fired people for being 1 minute late on three occasions. Late once, verbal warning, late twice, written warning, late three times fired.
> As a founder you’re buried in bureaucracy and taxes, so the incentive is to stay an employee.
As a sole trader in the UK you can set up instantly. You have 3 months to let the tax authority know what you did, but no real threat if you leave it a bit longer. Setting up a corporate entity takes 10 minutes online. You can have that done by your accountant and the annual accounts done for maybe £300. No need for an audit until you have cross 2 out of three of these thresholds
Annual turnover of no more than £15 million
Gross assets of no more than £7.5 million
Average number of employees of no more than 50
Immediately you get a significant tax advantage over employees.
Easy access to capital is harder, unless you went to high-end private school that is. Development capital is not that hard to get, but seed funding is harder.
“Tech alternatives” yet a good portion of the companies I randomly clicked on are software services/outsourcing, especially on the eastern side.
Show me a European iPhone, European Microsoft, European Nvidia, etc. Hell, I’ll take a European one man company that can reach all 27 markets.
Europe needs a single market for capital and the removal of legal barriers to extend across the continent, foremost for the little guy. Von der Failen can only add _more_ regulation. Someone wake me when they actually make something easier.
Feels like you're addressing two different topics in one comment.
Legally speaking, a one person company can address the whole EEA market. From a marketing/sales standpoint yeah, sure, it's probably hard to address culturally different markets like Portugal, Poland and Sweden.
But it does not have much to do with regulations, especially not ones decided at the EU level.
I'm all for better integration but diverse cultures are here to stay....
Sample size of one, but done business in Italy, Spain, Belgium, France, Switzerland and Germany: main issues were not regulation related...
> Europe needs a single market for capital and the removal of legal barriers to extend across the continent, foremost for the little guy.
?!?
You can trivially sell your software inside the EU. As for software that I use almost daily: OsmAnd. LanguageTool, which is spell-checking this message, is made in Germany. IntelliJ products are made in Czechia, and I'm using them right now.
You can sell products anywhere but you’re battling 27 different sets of rules and legislations. Look at how a burger shop becomes a continent wide franchise overnight and you’ll see how that’s impossible in the EU.
We just lack the regulatory freedom and deep financial markets, access to credit, etc.
A burger shop is a hard example. Software is trivial. Distribution of goods is no harder than the US and its sales tax regime, that is different in all 50 states and can be different in each county inside that state. In EU you can use the One Stop Shop.
In the US you're battling 51 different rules and legislations, plus the countless county and city legislations if you're shipping or doing anything physical. The EU is better.
I don't know why this is held up as some insurmountable challenge: every US state has different laws, if you sell any software to solve business problems you'll be dealing with 50 different legal codes and regulations you have to support too.
>Show me a European iPhone, European Microsoft, European Nvidia, etc.
The "avoid dependence on the US" movement only really started picking up steam with Trump's accelerating dementia in his second term.
The iPhone, Microsoft, and nVidia all took multiple decades to develop into the behemoths they are today. Famously, the first iPhone was actually expensive trash: no apps, no 3G, couldn't even cut and paste text. It wasn't until the 3G model and the App Store that it became a true success.
> Famously, the first iPhone was actually expensive trash: no apps, no 3G, couldn't even cut and paste text.
Also famously, while the tech elitists complained about all of its shortcomings, the broader consumer market fully embraced it and it single-handedly drove an entirely new generation of consumer electronics.
For the record, it let you read the same web pages as a desktop computer over WiFi. It had a usable mapping app and good music app.
The rest of the experience, stuff like alarms, calculator, address book, etc. also worked nicely.
Those turned out to be things no one else was offering. I had a Nokia N95 at the time and the original iPhone was a big improvement on everything except the camera.
Yes, as I wrote initially: the iPhone is a behemoth today, but its first version was underwhelming to say the least.
My point, which you seem to have overlooked, is that parent poster complaining that a "european iphone" doesn't exist is not realistic, considering how it went for Apple.
The consumer market embraced it despite its shortcomings because it looked nice and was easy to use; the alternatives were not. Yeah, it didn't do that much, but it did more than a flip phone. The alternatives wanted you to use a stylus just to use your phone, and tried to basically recreate the MS Windows UI on a tiny screen; their UI was terrible.
That is false. You can absolutely found a company by just getting an entry as a merchant here with neither of the things you listed. If you want to found a limited liability company though, then yes, you need some monetary backing to cover for fuckups (likely the 25k are not fully covering it anyway) and a notary to make it official.
No, you CANNOT found a company like that. It’s an absolute fabrication.
You also seem to somehow justify spending 25k on an endeavor you don’t know will succeed upfront, when every other country on the planet allows you to open one with orders of magnitude smaller amounts of capital.
You can open a UK LTD in a few days with 12GBP. Similar in DK/NL/CZ… the list goes on.
I’ve learned firsthand that germans will bend over backwards to justify this insanity.
Needing to put in >1000 EUR in starting capital is not uncommon. The "cheapest Danish limited liability company, the Aps needs 20k DKK up front, i.e. ~3000 EUR. In Sweden an AB needs 25k SEK, ~2300 EUR.
And you can always dissolve the company and take the capital out again tax free, so what's the big deal?
> No, you CANNOT found a company like that. It’s an absolute fabrication.
I'm a German. I have done this myself. I assure you it's true.
> You also seem to somehow justify spending 25k on an endeavor you don’t know will succeed upfront, when every other country on the planet allows you to open one with orders of magnitude smaller amounts of capital.
If you are planning a serious endeavour where you intend to limit your liability, you'll have a business plan. And that allows multiple options, from a bank loan of a local bank that will very likely be granted on good conditions, to one of the various municipal, regional, or federal programs that offer grants for newly founded companies. My current company secured 200k Euro at the beginning from a federal program that we did not have to pay back, for example.
You are clearly misinformed. According to German law, you can start a UG (limited) with only 1€ + notary cost. Starting a business with personal liability doesn't cost anything.
It's beyond me why anyone would downvote that. An UG is uninvestable, and a GmbH would also scare most investors. Anything but an AG is not going to work.
What are you talking about..? A GmbH is the German equivalent of an Ltd. An AG is a publicly traded company and thus not something investors are looking for. Also, the majority of companies in Germany are just ordinary eigetragene Kaufmänner (so normal businesspeople like your average plumber), or GmbH (literally any other company that isn’t a stock market traded enterprise).
We're talking about VC investing here, not your local currywurst kiosk.
> An AG is a publicly traded company
Falsch. An Aktiengesellschaft is a corporate form that protects the investors and mandates a certain formal governance and management structure. It has nothing to do with being publicly traded.
For the same reasons, VCs will be very wary of investing in a Delaware S Corp (similar to a GmbH) instead of the preferred C corp (similar to an AG), even if the company is fully private and has no revenue.
> Also, the majority of companies in Germany are just ordinary eigetragene Kaufmänner (so normal businesspeople like your average plumber), or GmbH (literally any other company that isn’t a stock market traded enterprise).
> It has nothing to do with being publicly traded.
It is, in most cases. Tell me about a startup that started off as an Aktiengesellschaft as opposed to a GmbH? Why would you even want to put 50k in instead of 25k, deal with all the governance overhead and reporting duties? It makes no sense at all, and during all the VC conversations I had, never once was a GmbH mentioned as problematic.
> Irrelevant.
It's not to the claim that you cannot found a company in Germany without putting down a significant amount of money and a notary. You just moved the goalposts.
AG is required for going public, however it's not a legal requirement that only public companies do so. You're mistaking cause and effect.
> Tell me about a startup that started off as an Aktiengesellschaft as opposed to a GmbH? Why would you even want to put 50k in instead of 25k, deal with all the governance overhead and reporting duties?
This is one of the big problems with German companies, and the reason why even German founders will start directly as a Delaware company instead. The capital requirements are $100 and reporting very minimal.
> It's not to the claim that you cannot found a company in Germany without putting down a significant amount of money and a notary.
I claimed that a non-AG makes it uninvestable, not what you're saying here (which is the product of your imagination). A GbmH has strict requirements that adding a new owner (an investor) must be done in front of a notary, and if your angel investors are all over Europe or the world, you'll have to tell them that they either they have to fly to Germany or find a German lawyer and give the lawyer a PoA. That's way too much hassle for most people, and the result is you'll hear a polite "no thanks, I might reconsider if you move your company to US/UK/Singapore". At least investing in an AG can be done without notarization.
A non-AG in Germany will inherently chase away almost all international investors. If you're lucky enough to find an international investor that's really interested, the most likely thing you'll be told is to either switch to AG or, preferably, re-incorporate in US/UK/Singapore and only then will your company be investable.
> You just moved the goalposts.
No, that's your misunderstanding. I mentioned a non-AG being unviable for international investors because they're the only ones worth mentioning. Local ones in Germany are mostly irrelevant for various reasons: they're either too ignorant of a specific market segment, too stingy, want too much control, only invest in later stages but not pre-seed, etc... You have to be really desperate to look for German investors, and that's true in most EU countries. The good VCs tend to be based in UK, Sweden or Estonia, with few exceptions. Angels are everywhere, but mostly outside Germany and they just won't bother with notarization for 20k EUR.
Realistically, what you're asking for won't happen unless there's a strong push for Federalisation.
Unfortunately, most Eastern Bloc countries are led into the false belief that the EU is encroaching on their ways of life and "making them eat ze bugs", and the Brussels elite is more concerned with using their slim remaining political capital to push restrictions on internet freedoms rather than federalisation.
Agreed. In a post-CC world anyone can build this for themselves so easily. Especially since their entire supposed customer base already uses these tools to begin with.
This allows the agent to make any changes in a production clone vs agents running on a production VM. For example, you wouldn't want claude editing crucial config on the chance it brings everything down vs letting it do in a cloned environment where it can test whatever.
You can’t foster excellence if you don’t reward it monetarily (enough).
No unified capital markets, no high reward as an investor.
As an employer/employee takes a year to fire people even when they don’t show up, ergo the incentive is to coast.
As a founder you’re buried in bureaucracy and taxes, so the incentive is to stay an employee.
It’s a trifecta of shit.
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