Live data from Hacker News

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

eidel.io

991–1000 of 1001 posts

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

#991
post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Truly the worst thing about living in Germany is the apparent national hobby of complaining about things that perhaps aren't great, but really aren't as bad as you might think. In practice, German schools are pretty decent, but they obsess about PISA scores and so neglect to ever notice what the schools are doing well. The train networks are fairly extensive, can be quite cheap depending on how you travel, and consis…

I disagree heavily. Just because you have trains going everywhere (that's not a Germany-specific thing) doesn't mean they are allowed to be hours late. The transport system is broken, was destroyed by trying to cut costs in the past. Same with schools and educators. And don't get me started on healthcare. Your sentiment is part of the problem to be honest: Germans are always complaining, it's fine as it is bla bla. I…

My problem with Germany at the moment isn't that it's objectively so bad - although you can certainly find places where certain things run better, such as Switzerland - but that it's getting worse and that for the last two decades, very little has been done politically to modernise. People and politics are happy with the status quo, not realising that in a changing world, the status quo isn't just going to maintain itself.

So I think we need some of that outrage you're channeling in order to make our politicians (and society) accountable when they become too complacent. But I also think it's not effective when you overshoot and start painting in a much worse light than it actually is - because all those other countries have problems too. There's a lot that went wrong with Deutsche Bahn (and it's of course nowhere near the level of SBB in Switzerland), but most of the time the system is reliable, decent and high-frequency and -density enough, which is something that is just not true in many areas of the world, even in Europe (there are enough places even in Europe where you wouldn't want to live without a car).

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

#992
post #989
post #988

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Health data is a difficult topic. But for what do a drivers license database, social security numbers exist? And why should a country/state know your bank account number(s)? Etatism is cancer.

> But for what do a drivers license database, social security numbers exist? To keep bad drivers off the road? To suspend privileges when you kill someone with your car? Social security numbers were originally created for linking people to their social security accounts but has now become our national ID because there is an inherit need for one in the modern world. The problem with SSNs is that they were never design…

> To keep bad drivers off the road? To suspend privileges when you kill someone with your car?

A document is not sufficient for that? Doubt it.

> Social security numbers has now become our national ID because there is an inherit need for one in the modern world.

Why?

> A state will always have access to and the capability of seizing your account funds. This is a necessity for a multitude of reasons that I can list out, but I'll let you use your imagination.

But not one good reason. For law enforcement, there are other possibilities.

> Take a look around the world. Take a look at history. Autocrats don't need an efficient ID system to take control of their citizens.

But pseudo-democracies do.

> The only way to avoid tyranny is to fight for liberal values at the ballot box. Anything else is bullshit. Your guns won't do shit when your local militia is aligned with the autocrat in control.

No. The only way is to send politicians with their political idiocies to hell and establish direct democracies. When the people have to participate in the organisation of a country/state (or better in a cooperation of peoples; is there really a need for geographical limits?), and discuss the distribution of resources, instead of just balloting from time to time for one or another political idiocy, don't you think they could make that way better than the current systems?

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

#993
post #895

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am familiar with both German and Finnish bureaucracy. German bureaucracy is (in)famous for paperwork and using faxes. Citizens/residents have no unique identifier (more and more weakened recently) and need to present documentation for everything. If you have no paper birth certificate you are not born... Finland has had much higher digitalization for decades. You have a person number and authorities store everythin…

> Citizens/residents have no unique identifier actually that's not true: people in Germany have MANY unique IDs: they have not one but TWO tax identifiers ("Steuernummer" and "Steuer ID"), social security number ("Sozialversicherungsnummer"), national ID number ("Personalausweisnummer"), passport number ("Reisepaßnummer") and health insurance ID ("Krankenversicherungsnumer"), among others.

Several of these IDs change when you get a new Personalausweis, Reisepaß, or Health Insurance, respectively. They don't identify you, but the document or contract. Some of the tax identifiers might be specific to you and a tax authority, ie change when you move to a different Land.

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

#994
post #987
post #724

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like all automation, having a database of your population greatly increases your efficiency, without regard to whether this power is used to do good or to do evil. There are many still alive who remember the evils done by the Stasi, when I was a child, there were many who remembered the evils done by the Gestapo; when those are your core examples of a citizen database, such thing naturally seems "big brother". The ir…

> Like all automation, having a database of your population greatly increases your efficiency Really? For what purposes exactly?

All the things that surveys do but where surveys would be really slow, repetitive, and suffer sub-population sampling biases; and all the things that censuses do but with better temporal resolution.

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

#995
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…

Why govt is not doing anything about it? bureaucracy is well known problem in Germany.

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

#996
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…

Is there any good humane VCs in Germany, who like to play the long game?

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

#997

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree heavily. Just because you have trains going everywhere (that's not a Germany-specific thing) doesn't mean they are allowed to be hours late. The transport system is broken, was destroyed by trying to cut costs in the past. Same with schools and educators. And don't get me started on healthcare. Your sentiment is part of the problem to be honest: Germans are always complaining, it's fine as it is bla bla. I…

My problem with Germany at the moment isn't that it's objectively so bad - although you can certainly find places where certain things run better, such as Switzerland - but that it's getting worse and that for the last two decades, very little has been done politically to modernise. People and politics are happy with the status quo, not realising that in a changing world, the status quo isn't just going to maintain i…

Heavily agree with your first paragraph! I'm contemplating on leaving Germany, because I think that this is just the beginning. Idiotic politicians wasting money on bullshit and not seeing the problems we have. More bureaucracy, less motivation to move things (let's all reduce the time we work), less value for your money, less security and more resignation. I don't see a path forward except me leaving this dumpster fire to be. I cannot build the life I want here and have the opportunity to leave, so why not ... I don't see any way how this can change without a bigger reset.

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

#998
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…

Is there any good humane VCs in Germany, who like to play the long game?

There certainly are, but I’d recommend making the first priority to look for who is actually going to be your most valuable business partner, their location in my opinion doesn’t really play any role in it. And in my experience a VC with conviction in your business will find a way to invest.

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

#999
post #842

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…

Knowing both Italy and Germany, they are 2 different things: Italy is messy, Germany bureaucratic. Both are bad. But the fact that Italy is “known” to be messy, and Germany “known” to be “efficient” is what is perplexing. Germany is the hell if bureaucracy, and is getting messy.

Like Sparta abusing Thermopylae for creed, Germany seems to ride a sorta-nostalgic idea built by prussian state introducing more modern information systems in 19th century and other efficiency-improving things.

Personally I found all germanic-country centered companies to be very disorganized in practice...

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

#1000
post #994
post #987

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like all automation, having a database of your population greatly increases your efficiency Really? For what purposes exactly?

All the things that surveys do but where surveys would be really slow, repetitive, and suffer sub-population sampling biases; and all the things that censuses do but with better temporal resolution.

Sorry, saw your answer just now.

And you think that those fine granularities are really needed?

Post reply on HN