Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice

paolino.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

621–630 of 789 posts

Re: Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice

#621

Post by kazinator »

Aurornis wrote: post #473
rayiner wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite. In the US this condition is handled at the back end. Running a corporation or LLC without sufficient capitalization can be grounds for piercing the liability shield in a lawsuit.

> Running a corporation or LLC without sufficient capitalization can be grounds for piercing the liability shield in a lawsuit. Which is exactly how it should be handled, IMO: Deal with the abuse situations directly. Forcing new companies to capitalize with an arbitrary amount of money at time of founding penalizes small players who want to start a company. It's also not a hurdle at all for large players who want to…

> penalizes small players who want to start a company

That's a barrier to entry; and who likes to perpetrate those? Why big, established companies who lobby the government.

Re: Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice

#622

Post by dgellow »

orthoxerox wrote: post #615
asyx wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like he said the GmbH is just the wrong legal form of his company. You can register a Kleingewerbe online over night and an UG within 2 weeks and that waiting period is only 2 weeks because it's such a simple and cheap process that notaries won't make time for you and they are busy people so you just take the next free slot they have in their calendar. So if you are lucky you can get an appointment the next day. My w…

> then fail to register a bank account on time Which you can do online in 20 minutes in more progressive countries.

you can create a bank account in Germany online in a few minutes

Re: Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice

#623

Post by t0mas88 »

GL26 wrote: post #52
VadimPR wrote: post #8

Before Europe gets lumped in as one country, founding a company in Netherlands and Sweden, speaking from personal experience, is a breeze. Although Sweden is a bit strange in the fact that banks have as much equal say as the government authority does in you starting a company, and if they don't want you as a customer, they can simply deny the right for your company to start!

Once had a call with a Netherlands founder (i am european too), and told me "Declare your company in Delaware, everything will be much easier"

Sounds like bad advice. Registering a local company in the Netherlands is super simple, tax is an online portal, everyone could do it. Setting op a foreign Delaware company means you're then dealing with international tax issues.

Unless you also personally relocate, then it probably makes sense.

Re: Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice

#624

Post by apelapan »

notpushkin wrote: post #317
gwd wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That won't get you a VAT ID, which is the key thing he says he needs to be able to bill people outside of Germany. It is significantly cheaper than 9k EUR and faster than 6 months to get in the UK, however.

Do you really need a VAT ID though? There is the “reverse charge” mechanism, which IIRC you can use until you sell a lot in any given country. (IANAL)

It is somewhat annoying dealing with accounting and reporting for reverse VAT as a customer.

Not a dealbreaker in itself, but the sort of little thing you don't want to build a stack of. Shady PO-box address, Yahoo contact email, expired ssl certificates etc.

Re: Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice

#625

Post by ghaff »

glad_duck wrote: post #607
WinstonSmith84 wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Delaware is expensive and you must have had a very specific reason to build your LLC there, rather than for example in Wyoming - such that to raise capital, build a corporation, etc. Now if you want to shut it down in a couple of years, it's not exactly clear what you had in mind.

If you register your company in WY but will be doing business in e.g. MA, you will have to pay registration fee in both jurisdictions. Doesn't sound like a saving to me. If you mean why not register in your state, then Delaware has some tax benefits I believe. Not sure they will apply in MA though, maybe somewhere else?

MA was going to be quite a bit more expensive. I did the transaction through Stripe and they use Delaware.

Re: Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice

#626

Post by jijijijij »

miroljub wrote: post #483
asyx wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have an UG for that. A GmbH is simply the wrong legal form for that sort of thing. You can create an UG with a single Euro on the bank account (and then immediately go bankrupt once you need to pay the notary).

No we don't. UG is still a GmbH bureaucratic monster which a bit less start capital. You still need to follow all taxation rules like GmbH, which costs you few more thousands per year (Bilanzeirung, Steuerberater, Abschluss, ...) just to be legaly compliant. American LLC taxation is as simple as or even simpler than Anlage EÜR. And you don't need a tax advisor to do it.

> which a bit less start capital.

You may consider a capital stock of "at least 1€" even significantly less than 25k€. Not sure you are arguing in good faith.

Re: Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice

#627

Post by glad_duck »

WarmWash wrote: post #224
Lariscus wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The authors inability to understand this really makes wonder how much of the rest of their story is essentially self-inflicted.

They are jealous of the US system where you can create an LLC in one hour for $200, and by the next day be doing business with all your personal assets isolated.

Whoa, not that fast. It will take a few days at least, depending on your state. Surely not 152 though.

Re: Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice

#628

Post by bell-cot »

PowerElectronix wrote: post #283
rob74 wrote: post #165

> Which leaves the only real question. Why 25,000 at all? It is my company and my risk. If I want to start with nothing, that is my call, not a toll the state collects before it will let me try. And the cheap door has a price of its own: to some clients, “UG” reads as “not serious,” and they would rather deal with a GmbH. The structure built to let me in quietly marks me for using it. The 25,000 is there to make sure…

The trust in a company should still be left to the criteria of suppliers, customer, etc. Not the random number that a bureaucrat pulled out of his arse.

Not saying the bureaucrats are great at this - but your "left to the criteria of" sounds like a massive duplication of effort.

Re: Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice

#629

Post by onli »

NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #347
onli wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you can't. It's not like you can bribe the bureaucrat working on your form, and there is no regular fast pass.

> It's not like you can bribe the bureaucrat working on your form are you trying to say "bureaucrat can't speed up" or are you doubting someone physically can't give someone else some cash?

It literally can't be done, in Germany.

There is corruption in Germany, but it simply does not exist at this level. It also wouldn't work in practice: You would have to find out who is the office worker working on your documents (you usually don't know that, and never in advance). Then that person has safeguards: He is part of a team, someone will check his work, usually at least a colleague and his boss. Assume you'd try anyway, you meet the person somehow alone - how would you find out whether he is corruptible? If you try to ask you will face severe consequences.

Plus, it's never worth it for him: If they were caught they would be facing jail time, lose their job, all the benefits already earned (the special pension state servants get, their health insurance, ...). You'd have to offer that much money that all of that is worth it. Not even twenty times the money we are talking about here would be enough.

Re: Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice

#630

Post by glad_duck »

bloppe wrote: post #390
_fat_santa wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US system is built to support entrepreneurship while the EU system broadly is to support the consumer and employee. The US will never be able to match the EU's consumer and employee protections and the EU will never be able to match the US's ease of doing business, because to have one you have to fundamentally give in on the other. Depending on who you ask, one system is wildly better than the other, but at the e…

In a healthy market economy, entrepreneurs are meant to support the consumer, and they do so partly by competing with one another for talent, which requires supporting the employee. We could argue ad nauseam about the health of the US's market economy, but ultimately is has resulted in unignorably higher wages than in Europe, even at the lower end of the economic ladder. This probably also has a lot to do with it's m…

It depends on the means of production (Marx had the point). One thing is if you want to open a factory, then those regulations and limitations may protect the market, consumers and reduce fraud. If you want to start a software company and sell a smartphone app, that's a very different story. I assume Germany is still in 19th century in this regard, favoring big businesses who don't mind to wait 152 days or more and pay 10K. Modern economy, or at least a big part of it, is more about agility though, for good or for bad.
Post reply on HN