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

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

#851

Post by johnzim »

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…

I lived this as an Italian trying to do the same for an American wife.

I had already steeled myself for the experience but it was still mind-numbing, until the appearance of one glorious stroke of luck.

The official in our consulate had incurred some minor peccadillo in the filling out of a form - their stamp was in the wrong part of the document, and because of that, their counterpart in Roma had officiously refused the document.

Suddenly, what had been a grinding war of attrition between us and the establishment, turned into a civil war within the machine. A principal adversary had flipped to our side.

We had serious firepower and the rest of the process was made incredibly easy, as our slighted new friend slashed through the red-tape and bulldozed our application through.

It ended with the final document being stamped at least a dozen times out of spite. I wish I had that copy (it probably rests in an aging manila envelope in the comune somewhere.)

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

#852

Post by stevoski »

I lived in Germany for years. I listened to Germans gripe about how bureaucratic it was to do things there like open and run a business.

Then I moved to Spain and started a company there.

Germans, your country has NOTHING on Spain when it comes to pointless, confusing bureaucracy.

Your country, your laws and rules and the application of them are BLISS compared to Spain.

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

#853

Post by mNovak »

yau8edq12i wrote: post #4
bouncing wrote: post #2

Not to brag, but there are so few things to actually feel some civic pride for in America, and business registration is one of them, so I guess we have that. I can get an IRS EIN (tax ID), register an LLC, obtain a sales tax license (only required for selling stuff), and open a business checking account in about 2 hours in Colorado. Someone who knows what they’re doing and doesn’t spend time researching banking optio…

Unless you're opening companies on a daily basis to evade taxes or whatever, I fail to see why you would need the process to be that fast. Because with such short delays, nobody will have actually checked anything, so the only winners are fraudsters, in the end.

Just because something is important doesn't mean it has to be inconvenient. A lot of people conflate opening a business with a major life event and embarking on a career, where a few weeks of admin is some kind of minimum commitment. But the whole idea is that we should allow for small organic "side hustles" and growth.

Here in the US (at least in entrepreneurial circles) it's common advice to wrap an LLC around anything that involves money. Hobby website starting to get some traffic? LLC. Selling earrings at the craft fair? LLC. I own a small building with my brother--you bet there's an LLC there. I started a $0 capital consulting company while a post-doc, just to try.

It's not a daily occurrence, but often enough that I don't want to waste time.

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

#854

Post by brancz »

thiago_fm wrote: post #652
brancz wrote: post #558

Having gone through this a couple of times, I'll say that all of this is true, but in practice, I find the actual founding process not very complicated with neo-banks that understand the founding process well. I just founded a new GmbH last week, and it took 2 days in total. One more thing I'd recommend doing before going to a notary though is get a "Vorabstellungnahme" from IHK to ensure that they won't reject your…

BTW, congrats on the funding ;-)

Thank you!

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

#855

Post by jupp0r »

nicbou wrote: post #114

I document German bureaucracy for a living,[0] and everything is like that. Every life event - immigrating, getting a job, getting married, having a child, buying a car - is mired in slow, paper-based bureaucracy. It is a constant, significant impediment to life in the country. Just last week, I was telling people that the best way to get married in Germany is to get married in Denmark. I cannot overstate how terribl…

FWIW, I got married in Germany (as a German to another German) and it was surprisingly straightforward compared to other acts of bureaucracy that I've seen.

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

#856

Post by araes »

fransje26 wrote: post #529
anewhnaccount2 wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The degradation comes from waves of austerity politics by right wing governments. These services are expensive and require staff to keep things going. Austerity ideology dictates that there simply must be inefficiency in public services, and cuts are the cure to this disease since this will cause the public sector to "make do and mend" and end up running more efficiently, rather than having a knock on effect and decr…

> Austerity ideology dictates that there simply must be inefficiency in public services, and cuts are the cure to this disease Over time I developed a more cynical theory. As politicians have extremely short-term understandings and targets, they abuse the latent momentum of public services to surf on the inherent delayed response before service quality goes down and gets noticed. By then, they can blame the cause on…

Excellent description, and further additions for the cynicism.

(opinion) Human society large rewards narcissism. Diligence is usually rewarded with exploitation. There's actually academic supporting the 2nd. Therefore, most politicians are largely selfish and mostly interested in being on TV, being the center of attention, and holding sway over other citizens. (Not all, just the majority). The only metric is "what gets elected." However, like "green" anything, the optimization is usually "do nothing, and color the corporate logo green."

Causes further issues. The optimization becomes, "focus on highly incendiary minutia, while avoiding anything risky, and maximizing viewer attention and anxiety." Issues that will allow them to say they're valiant, while exposing nothing especially damaging for the next election.

The American fiscal funding fiasco this / last year is typical. 6 months, and America finally has a budget. All the while, it's mostly arguments about minutia like "Homeland Security impeachment", who the speaker is, where Military can get abortions, whether a base will get funding, migrants on buses, and weekly CR shutdown "thwarting". It literally became weekly federal budgets around Feb-Mar in America... Meanwhile, a lot of enlisted in those abortion / base (yes/no?) states are wondering whether they're going to get paychecks. People on boats complain about having no ammunition to shoot with...

London's sewers are another excellent example. Dithering and dithering about repairs, about maintenance, about public toilets. Except the Thames is bright yellow, people won't go swimming, and when somebody asks, they're response is "well, btw, we're actually £18,000,000,000 in debt. Make -£2,000,000,000 per year. Have for years. Nobody even noticed. lolz." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Water Obvious optimization, nationalize while decrying the evils of the private sector. Quietly also nationalize the debt to the public in a line item somewhere that nobody writes about. Squander resources for years. Sell back to industry claiming the salvation of capitalism.

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

#857

Post by CalRobert »

stoltzmann wrote: post #808
CalRobert wrote: post #709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tergooi MC in Hilversum has no one to talk to when you walk in, really. You get a ticket with your Dutch id, wait where it tells you, and someone calls your name. It's really efficient if you have Dutch id!

At least when I was there last year, if you head left from the entrance there's a couple booths there. Usually at least one is staffed. Also if I remember at Tergooi MC you needed to register in their system anyways before an appointment. In the past they issued a little plastic card at the very same booth.

Thanks! I called them last week and they told me I couldn't do anything without a specifically Dutch ID. ISTR seeing booths with no staff in the past, I will look again next time.

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

#858

Post by fullspectrumdev »

nicbou wrote: post #114

I document German bureaucracy for a living,[0] and everything is like that. Every life event - immigrating, getting a job, getting married, having a child, buying a car - is mired in slow, paper-based bureaucracy. It is a constant, significant impediment to life in the country. Just last week, I was telling people that the best way to get married in Germany is to get married in Denmark. I cannot overstate how terribl…

Your site was a complete godsend when I lived in Berlin, though eventually the excessive paperwork was a major contributor towards my decision to move elsewhere.

A few other people I know who left after a couple of years say the same - endless bureaucracy and extremely dysfunctional local governance (eg: the clusterfuck with rent control where some people had to pay backrent) made the decision to leave easy.

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

#859

Post by fullspectrumdev »

secondcoming wrote: post #811
beAbU wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For all it's many many faults, I have to say I'm sometimes surprised by how efficient some South African bureaucratic state organs function. To get a renewed passport is a 5 minute online form, electronic payment, and then a 30 minute appointment at a local bank branch to get biometrics taken. Then about 1-2 weeks later you can go and pick up your new passport. Driving license not much different. For most people, pay…

I didn’t have to leave my bedroom to renew my Irish passport!

Our passport office is phenomenal. Too bad about everything else!

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

#860

Post by rs999gti »

tonis2 wrote: post #698
Beijinger wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Biggest problem: Germans don't understand digitization. They often try to recreate the paper process with IT, instead of making a complete new setup. Example: Previously, you had to go to the City Hall or whatever in your pace of birth to get a birth certificate. Now you can email them, pay, and they mail you the certificate via snail mail. How it should be: Use an online token, log into your account, request a birth…

Yeah, I worked in a German startup for 2 years, managers were running it like we were manufacutring cars. Lots of decision's, made no sense in software development.

> Lots of decision's, made no sense in software development.

But we must have process and governance in place. Let us set a meeting to discuss.

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