351–360 of 405 posts
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Yes unless you have a very very very good reason it's always best to just file a basic LLC in the state you are a resident of. Only costs a few hundred dollars at most and doesn't really complicate taxes
This is totally false, sorry. Delaware entities are the standard. Delaware corporate law is better understood than any other by a long shot. Dealing with a random non-Delaware LLC is usually a hint that your counterparty is a rube.
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Any business can be run in a shady manner if the human decided. One fully automated business I think could exist and might be useful is apartment/condo rental. I'd pay a business $100 for a proper report on the rentals available in a city that meet a criteria and are amalgamated from all the the various platforms. Doing it yourself (at least in Canada) means creating accounts on a bunch of platforms, and the process…
> Any business can be run in a shady manner if the human decided. No kidding. > One fully automated business I think could exist and might be useful is apartment/condo rental. We're starting strong on the category of businesses that generate no actual value and just scrape an amount of value out of existing transactions that would've happened anyway, i.e., rent-seeking. But good for you, you can now artificially shri…
Rent-seeking is a very specific economic term where a party inserts themselves into a transaction and takes a cut without providing anything: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
Being a landlord comes with significant responsibilities and even principal investment risk.
The reason this blog post does not come with any concrete examples how to use this enablement for useful and constructive things tells you something very important - it is a toy and they do not know who and how they will use it. It is cool feature but to what end? Buying a domain is not something you have to do daily to require any kind of automation. I am also not sure who Stripe Atlas for. I am genuinely confused.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Any business can be run in a shady manner if the human decided. No kidding. > One fully automated business I think could exist and might be useful is apartment/condo rental. We're starting strong on the category of businesses that generate no actual value and just scrape an amount of value out of existing transactions that would've happened anyway, i.e., rent-seeking. But good for you, you can now artificially shri…
Despite paying rent for an apartment, it’s not rent-seeking. You get a place to live out of it that wouldn’t exist without the owner renting it to you. Rent-seeking is a very specific economic term where a party inserts themselves into a transaction and takes a cut without providing anything: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking Being a landlord comes with significant responsibilities and even principal investm…
> Rent-seeking is a very specific economic term where a party inserts themselves into a transaction and takes a cut without providing anything: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
> Being a landlord comes with significant responsibilities and even principal investment risk.
Economist here. Yes, this was a correct use of the term "rent-seeking behavior". It's actually quite funny to see someone try to argue otherwise, when the name was chosen because this is, literally, the textbook example.
The reason this blog post does not come with any concrete examples how to use this enablement for useful and constructive things tells you something very important - it is a toy and they do not know who and how they will use it. It is cool feature but to what end? Buying a domain is not something you have to do daily to require any kind of automation. I am also not sure who Stripe Atlas for. I am genuinely confused.…
I remember back in the day Heroku had a huge store of integrations that you could just turn on with a click and they worked like that. You'd get a New Relic account that was tailored to dyno performance and you accessed it via your Heroku dashboard. It became "the way" a lot of these PaaS systems operated and I'm sure the goal was to get some percentage once you increased your usage from the free tier, which makes se…
For sure, revshare is standard on those partnerships.
Fun(ny) fact: all the companies that started out on Heroku back then are still locked into those Heroku-captive tenant accounts on those partners, because contractually, the partner is not allowed to transition such an account to direct billing. One company I've worked with has had all their infra moved off Heroku for almost a decade, but their Sendgrid account, which has hundreds of subtenants that each have custom domains configured, still can only be logged into via Heroku. They'd have to rebuild that whole thing from scratch (including make all their customers redo DNS validation) to move to a real sendgrid account.
I'm sure Heroku earns Salesforce a really healthy revenue stream based on this.
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Perfect for spammers, scammers and domain squatters, who can now automate their activities even more. Can’t think of any other uses for this given the current state of LLM ‘agents’, though I can’t wait for the next report of something like ‘openclaw registered 1000 domains for me without asking and now cloudflare won’t refund me’.
LLM generation in general provides the most use to scammers and the like. Generate emails which people won't read, generate articles which are just honeypots or rip-offs, generate images to said articles, generate more and more spam. Every legit use case for LLM practically requires that human would verify the result manually, at least briefly. But spammers can enjoy skipping that step, since content was never a main…
The reason this blog post does not come with any concrete examples how to use this enablement for useful and constructive things tells you something very important - it is a toy and they do not know who and how they will use it. It is cool feature but to what end? Buying a domain is not something you have to do daily to require any kind of automation. I am also not sure who Stripe Atlas for. I am genuinely confused.…
> I am also not sure who Stripe Atlas for. It's for founders who don't have lawyers. My co-founder and I are both developers, we used Stripe Atlas to incorporate a C-Corp due to expecting to fundraise ------- I said we made a C-Corp but other founders should default to LLC, which Stripe Atlas can also streamline. An LLC is superior to C-Corp in pretty much every way for any pre-raise founders who don't have an extra…
> They're wrong about the Delaware franchise tax.
"The minimum tax is $175.00 for corporations using the Authorized Shares method and a minimum tax of $400.00 for corporations using the Assumed Par Value Capital Method." [0]
That is the "save a few hundred dollars" I was talking about. I did get the # of shares threshold wrong, it needs to be > They're wrong about the foreign registration -- in California (and I believe most other states), you also need to register foreign LLCs.
Yes, but I was referencing that it often costs more to register a C-Corp than an LLC (depending on the state).
> They're wrong about investments -- SAFEs are very easy for corporations (no lawyers required), but they can't even be used by LLCs. You'll need to convert to a C-Corp.
Yes. Totally agree on all points. This conversion will cost roughly the same as first year taxes, but leaves the option of not doing it if you never get enough revenue to hire employees and don't get funded. And if you do get enough revenue for that, or you get funded by SAFE's, you'll have no issue affording the lawyer+CPA who can do it for you.
As for it being a bad time to deal with that headache, I generally agree. You'd probably want to do that when you reach the point that you feel ready to start fundraising.
> They're wrong about investments -- SAFEs are very easy for corporations (no lawyers required), but they can't even be used by LLCs. LLCs don't have stock, and most boilerplate documents will not work for LLCs.
I miscommunicated on this point: I meant to say if you're not getting funded by SAFE's, you'll need a lawyer, and therefore the "saving money" thing probably isn't particularly relevant and there's no issue filing as a C-Corp.
Boilerplate documents work fine for LLC, and Stripe Atlas helps with this.
> Something about passing losses from an LLC to your personal taxes being a good way to get you audited.
I'm not sure you can do that? Haven't had to deal with it personally (my LLC's were profitable in their first year) but AFAIK capitalization is usually done with post-tax money so I don't see how first-year LLC losses can reduce your personal AGI.
> Something about tax paperwork burden being roughly equal for LLC vs. C-Corp.
I was mainly trying to say that CPA's charge more for C-Corps than for LLCs.
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A lot of what enabled Web 1.0 was how easy it was for an average web user to create his own website. An average web user got far less technical since, and making a website got harder instead. Now, if anyone could just ask an AI agent to set up a website, and get a personal page with an e-mail inbox and a domain - all reasonably secure, TLS set up, billing added as +$5 per year to the AI subscription bundle? Maybe tha…
Yes, this is exactly my hope too. Many hacker/cypherpunk ideas failed or never reached wide adoption because they were just too complicated for regular people: GPG/web of trust, self-hosting websites and email, having your own custom software for personal tasks… Instead, everybody ended up using Gmail, iMessage/WhatsApp, and Facebook, and things are as centralized as they can be. Agents could be a force in breaking t…
Interesting evolution:
1980s and before - Centralized computers, thin clients & terminals
1990s - Decentralized computing - rich clients running native code locally, data lives locally, making use of the network for necessary communication (e.g. email, IM)
Present day - Entirely centralized data, compute outsourced from companies to 'Public Clouds', bloated clients running JavaScript locally, but mostly without local storage besides cached copies of data.
I wonder what path the next phase will take.