I personally would find it much harder to start a company in Germany than the US for example. How does one deal with the "social" laws / customs? IIRC, the Germany company (40,000+ employees) I used to work for had the following rules/laws: - 12 month maternity leave - 32 vacation days per year - 6 month paid after termination (so for example, if you fired someone you had to pay them for 6 months)

I'm not sure if these are government regulated or just were forced from the works council. Therefore I could foresee well-funded start-ups in Germany to be quite successful but I can't see bootstrapped-type organizations popping up as frequent as they do in the US.