How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain • Hacker News Board

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#741

Post by pavel_lishin » Mon, Apr 08, 2024, 1:10 PM UTC

SeanLuke wrote: post #735

For those of you griping about German bureaucracy I urge you to come to Italy to learn just how good you have it. My wife is Italian and wanted to get married in her small home town. In order for her to get married to an American in her home town required paperwork that bordered on the Kafkaesque. We had to show up at the Italian embassy in Washington DC (fortunately we live there!) with proof and witnesses that I wa…

> then even though I wrote the vows myself in Italian, just because I am American we had to have it translated by someone else back into English, by hand, just so I understood the vows I had myself written. We then had to contract someone to read the vows out loud in English at the ceremony so I understood my own words.

I badly want to learn the historical reason for this insistence that non-Italian-speaking foreigners must understand the contract they're entering into. They wouldn't put up these hoops to jump through unless someone's gotten badly burned in the past, right?

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#742

Post by foepys » Mon, Apr 08, 2024, 1:11 PM UTC

SeanLuke wrote: post #735

For those of you griping about German bureaucracy I urge you to come to Italy to learn just how good you have it. My wife is Italian and wanted to get married in her small home town. In order for her to get married to an American in her home town required paperwork that bordered on the Kafkaesque. We had to show up at the Italian embassy in Washington DC (fortunately we live there!) with proof and witnesses that I wa…

Quite a few EU citizens travel to Denmark nowadays to get married to foreign nationals. Much less complicated and since Denmark is in the EU they won't have any problems to get it recognized in their home country.

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#743

Post by zettabomb » Mon, Apr 08, 2024, 1:11 PM UTC

ImPleadThe5th wrote: post #621

nickpp wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for your reply. Care to be more specific? I guess I am more curious about how you were personally affected than generic sweeping statements. I live in the EU and I used to live in USA for a while so I am always looking for similar experiences and comparisons. Thanks again!

Hey! I am a different American living in Germany. For me (and I didn't fully appreciate this until I moved here) there is an incredible amount of mental overhead in the US. Questions you don't have to ask yourself in Germany: - What happens if I get very sick? Do I have enough savings for cancer? - What happens if I lose my job? Do I have enough savings to get by if my job fires me? - What happens if something happen…

All fantastic examples. A semi-joking game we used to play at my high school was "Firework or gunshot?". A few more to add:

- If I call the police, will they help? Will they help me? Many people I know are SCARED by the police when they're just minding their business, which I'd say indicates something wrong. We nearly had a civil war in 2020 over police killings. - Very little walking or biking infrastructure. Very long distances between commercial and residential areas too. Even trying to be environmentally friendly feels pointless sometimes when you have to drive 10 or 20 minutes just to go to a recycling center. - Workers' rights are a joke in the US. OSHA regulations are only followed after someone gets a bad enough injury. Good luck getting any compensation for that too, the phrase "worker's comp" is a joke all by itself. - The cost of secondary education is ridiculous. I have loans from college, as do most of my friends, and we've been paying those of and will be paying for years to come.

You're very much correct that some or all of these can be resolved with enough money. But even for someone with the cash and connections to make such a drastic and expensive move, it's a lot. I'm sure as time goes on I will find more examples.

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#744

Post by mtmail » Mon, Apr 08, 2024, 1:12 PM UTC

data_maan wrote: post #462

Propelloni wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not doubting your experience but mine is different. I'm doing business in the Köln/Düsseldorf area and while the experience could be nicer, it is far from terrible. I have been involved in founding five companies (four GmbH and one GmbH & Co. KG) and closing one down in the last 10 years and I would have no qualms to go for another one. Each founding took about 6-8 weeks from first filing to entry into the regist…

Can you recommend any company in that area that offers these services to buy a "ready to run" shell company?

We got ours from https://www.foris.com/en/shelf-companies/ and can recommend them.

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#745

Post by chironjit » Mon, Apr 08, 2024, 1:12 PM UTC

mhitza wrote: post #715

chironjit wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing the point here. It's bad, and it affects people's lives. It also fuels populist sentiment because people blame immigrants for problems not entirely related to them. Worse still, if a german says fuck it and wants to run his business in Estonia, the org still has to pay taxes in germany The only silver lining to all this are Spaniards, Greeks, etc say the system here is better than in their country, but…

> Worse still, if a german says fuck it and wants to run his business in Estonia, the org still has to pay taxes in germany Why? Doesn't Germany have treaties with Estonia to avoid double taxation?

There are CFC tax rules in Germany (like in some other countries). So though corporate taxes in Estonia are zero*, you will likely be subject to the German corporate tax system if the majority of the beneficial owners are based in Germany.

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#746

Post by jamil7 » Mon, Apr 08, 2024, 1:13 PM UTC

Semaphor wrote: post #429

jamil7 wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you gone through the process? The system wasn’t “designed” at all, it’s completely broken and chaotic. It is 100% the fault of this system and not that of the immigrants going through it. Some of the people involved can also be extremely unpleasant to deal with, even if you speak German.

Not myself, but I accompanied my wife every time, and she’s now a permanent resident. The last time we just wanted to extend her temporary residence permit, they even advised us that we have no reason to do that and could just apply for permanent residence (which we then did). Waiting times are annoying, but that is because of an overloaded system, everything else was pretty painless.

I'm glad it was straightforward for you. I've gone for a number of temporary visas and had mixed experiences. I was in a very similar situation on my last visit and was, like your wife recommended to go straight for permanent residency, which ended up being a 6 month process with multiple visits and dealing with about 4-5 different people. This was all happening during the immigration reforms so that might have been a large part of the problem (requirements changed mid-way through).

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#747

Post by askonomm » Mon, Apr 08, 2024, 1:17 PM UTC

GrumpySloth wrote: post #594

treprinum wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect the degradation came from Eastern Europe, what you wrote is what I was told EE looked like in the 80-90s.

What do you mean by that? Did Finland change location over time? Also, two Eastern European countries that I have first-hand knowledge of: Poland and Estonia are much more digitised and efficient at those things than Germany (and, from what GP wrote, it seems Finland as well?).

I don't know why does everyone on HN think that Estonia is Eastern Europe when it is actually Northern Europe (https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Europe). All of the Baltic countries are Northern.

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#748

Post by askonomm » Mon, Apr 08, 2024, 1:19 PM UTC

throwaway2037 wrote: post #328

4ad wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As bad as Germany is, it is better than average. Eastern Europe is harder, and Asia borders on impossible. Africa is literally impossible.

> Eastern Europe is harder Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania? I doubt it.

Also, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania is Northern Europe, not Eastern: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Europe

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#749

Post by Tainnor » Mon, Apr 08, 2024, 1:20 PM UTC

lifestyleguru wrote: post #437

microtonal wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bureaucracy problem is compounded by not wanting to link databases between government organizations and a general resistance to anything digital that involves personal data (except Facebook et al. for some reason), which reduces efficiency a lot . However, this is understandable given German history.

Schufa, Rundfunkbeitrag, and copyright trolls have no problem cross linking personal data between government databases in Germany. > However, this is understandable given German history. So tired of this apologetics, modern German bureaucracy has been built exactly by former Nazis and Stasi agents.

> So tired of this apologetics, modern German bureaucracy has been built exactly by former Nazis and Stasi agents.

The modern US was founded by slave owners, Spain was a dictatorship for longer than most of Germany, Poland was sliding into illiberal democracy until very recently, most of Latin America seems one recession away from a coup or revolution, ... there is a lot of continuity between liberal democracies and authoritarian governments. The roots of German bureaucracy also go much further back than the Nazi era (at least to Prussia).

I'm not really sure what using loaded language like this accomplished, though.

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#750

Post by rsp1984 » Mon, Apr 08, 2024, 1:21 PM UTC

The worst part of being a founder in Germany is not even the bureaucracy (even though it is just as bad as described), it's that everybody wants money from you all the time:

- For services that you never signed up for (there are certain institutions in Germany that can bill you for stuff you neither want nor need but they have the full force of the government behind them): IHK, GEZ (Rundfunk), Verwaltungsberufsgenossenschaft (in case white collar workers hurt themselves by typing on the keyboard...). If you refuse to pay, they can literally put you in jail.

- For services whose necessity is entirely generated by the government: 1k EUR for the Notary to read you some boilerplate text. 500 EUR per month for bookkeeping services (govt creates all these arcane rules to make sure you never want to do it yourself). Plus many legal bills because German business and employment law is a minefield and you don't want to blow yourself up.

- For tax on imagined revenue that you didn't even realise yet. Yes, the govt. literally makes things up and says "that's probably going to be your revenue this year and you owe us tax on that".

If you're a big company with large predictable revenue and departments of people to deal with this, I guess it's tolerable, but there is no doubt in my mind whatsoever why the vast majority of successful startups exist outside of Germany.