Why I’m giving up on Europe and moving my startup to China

Bureaucracy: I've heard regularly bad things about the German bundes. I've heard good things about UK, Sweden, Romania, Hungary.

Labor: Whether you get it here or there the price of labor is only going up, but in China it's going up faster. Programmers are expensive. I'm expensive. If a better offer comes along that you can't match or even come close to I'll be out the door faster than the computer can shutdown. (Of course with my 2 weeks-1 month notice first). Don't expect anything less from the chinese. I don't know what you are working but have you ever hired anyone straight out of college? Experience costs money and mistakes costs money. Just make sure the latter costs less than the former.

Costs and Taxes: Depending on the European country you may not pay any taxes on revenue while in the startup phase (generally 2 years). After that it's country specific, the rules that apply in Germany don't apply in the UK.

Travel: Maybe as a German these things don't matter to you, but, as an American, I find Europe to be fascinating, so many different cultures, so much history, and its all packed in one half continent. When I speak to other french or english friends about SE Asia it's generally "which beach should I visit this week?". Little interest in the culture, history, or the language (I love ordering food in thai, but that's all the thai I know). I think a lot of people have a very romantic idea of what SE Asia is about but that's it. Plus it's huge region, you need a plane to do all that traveling and those flights aren't short.

It looks like you've traded one set of problems for another. I don't know what the startup will ultimately be about but I wish you luck. Also be careful, lots of people have startup ideas that fizzle out, can't get funding, or can't get any promotion because it's not from the right place. One thing I've learned about a company is that it's the people you know as well as the idea that make it a success. If you are doing it in China, then have a chinese focus because no one in San Francisco is going to care about it, until it's too big to ignore.

Do the proper paperwork and apply through the greencard lottery. There are plenty of empty spots for French and German greencard seekers. Since we share the same language the UK slots are perpetually full. Australians get a special immigration visa (R-1?) just for being awesome.

I am in favor of hiring outsourced Chinese programmers over Indian ones: it is possible to find ones with decent Japanese proficiency, which means that when Tokyo discovers the latest... curious engineering choice I don't have to spend a day doing the needful to communicate our displeasure about it.

We told our outsourced team to write four functions to be accessible via a REST service, using RestEasy. I anticipated this to be approximately a 20 ~ 30 line job. Two weeks later, we received a scratch-built HTTP client which supported precisely one verb and two handwritten serialization schemes, with half the code containing precisely one comment in English by way of Babelfish and the other half containing very literate English comments like you would expect from code developed at a multinational with a legal department better funded than the armed forces of of most NATO countries.

I pray your mileage varies.