81–90 of 244 posts
How can they compete with well capitalized start ups?
A simple EU regulation that requires offering real-time distribution of user data to third parties would massively level the playing field.
1. Salary Grants => SEED / EXIST stipends
2. Simplify Bureaucracy and Regulations => Who doesn't want that?
3. Expand VAT Exemptions => Council Directive (EU) 2020/285 will bring this law: "For SMEs conducting cross-border transactions, a cumulative turnover cap of €100,000 across all 27 EU member states applies"
4. English Language Support => I'd say most of the EU is already pretty good at this.
I think the more interesting aspect is funding: if you tell a VC that you're aiming to become market leader in a small niche, they hear "no outsized returns" and go looking for riskier ventures.
But there is an existing funding ecosystem for small businesses that don't expect to get big, I guess mostly bank loans or bigger companies financing new suppliers. I wonder how open those are to software companies.
We must stop associating the European economy with the German economy.
Better still, stop thinking about it as "the European economy" and start thinking in terms of regional and national economies. There is not that much overlap between e.g. the Finnish or Swedish economy and the Portuguese or Greek economy and it does not make much sense to try to push these disparate countries into the same box even if bureaucrats in Brussels would like you to believe so.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did, it was super easy.
How long did it take you from start to finish? In Australia, Canada and the US I can open a company in about 30 minutes from picking the name to opening a bank account I can get money into. In Germany the last time I tried it was about 7 weeks.
If you want to found a limited liability company (i.e. GmbH) you also can start with picking a name and opening a bank. Add "i.G." to your company's name (i.e. GmbH i.G.) and start doing business.
Both approaches require you to register your business somewhere down the line, foremost for tax reasons. And yes, this can take quite some time, I had one occasion where we waited for 16 weeks after filing, but did business all the time. Note that some services are unavailable to you as long as your company is not formally registered, e.g. insurance.
If you are in a real hurry and need a running limited liability company, just buy one. Better tax advisors usually have a few "empty" GmbH in their files they sell you for the price of capital stock plus some handling fees. This gives you all required IDs immediately and you just have to transfer the bank account and, if you want to, change the name. Depending on the availability of a notary, this can be done in a few hours but usually takes a few days. One additional advantage of buying a shell is that you get history, which makes a lot of things easier.
We must stop associating the European economy with the German economy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did, it was super easy.
How long did it take you from start to finish? In Australia, Canada and the US I can open a company in about 30 minutes from picking the name to opening a bank account I can get money into. In Germany the last time I tried it was about 7 weeks.
IMHO, the British approach is more pragmatic: Why would you not make it as simple as possible to incorporate and run a company?
I really like the idea, but I'm not sure how the traditional "Made in Germany" success stories would translate into a digital world. For example Würth is the world leading producer of screws. I think it's a good example of how a lot of these companies make parts. But what are the parts in the digital world? It's libraries and frameworks, and nobody is paying for those. Also the values you mentioned: excellence and st…
In essence, all software is a service; often legally even. But for this we'd need to look at software that's "shipped" to all customers in more or less the same form. But is also not a full blown end-user product. Taking that, we can look at "parts" or even "partial products" as:
* B2B SAAS services. From microservices to large services. From API-only to full blown UI based. That reservation system for nail-studios or the extract-PDF-to-our-bookeeping-API.
* B2B Mobile apps. E.g. a scanner-app to help with packaging or finding in a warehouse. Or a PoS for restaurants or shops.
* Hosted versions of FLOSS software. e.g. nexcloud, mastodon, matomo, a ci-pipeline, SIP, LMS, CMS, etc.
* Managed common PAAS parts. Managed Postgres, managed LDAP, managed CI, managed firewall etc. Not on-prem (that would be services) but more like AWS, but then from local "Vendors".
* Plugins and micro-saas. Just look at the amount of paid-for plugins in shopify, salesforce, google docs, github-marketplace etc. etc.
Almost all of these could be startups. But have a very restricted TAM. So they'll remain small. They also don't deliver a full-blown end-user-product, but something that's built on top of other common IT components. They often have very localized focus (a common restaurant reservation in France is very different from a reservation in the Netherlands, for example), often have a benefit from being trusted on a human level (I'd either backup my companies data to some FAANG, or to that one guy that I know and has been servicing my company for the last decades very well already).
But most of all, they are too small to become scale-ups in the "silicon valley" sense. Because in doing so, they'd loose all that makes them valuable today.
(Source: I've worked at or on many such "startups" that would forever remain small but big enough for the founders to get a solid income from)
I do disagree with the work-life balance part, I struggle to see how you can build something (and maintain it at such a high level) without intense focus and commitment.