Legally speaking, a one person company can address the whole EEA market. From a marketing/sales standpoint yeah, sure, it's probably hard to address culturally different markets like Portugal, Poland and Sweden.
But it does not have much to do with regulations, especially not ones decided at the EU level.
I'm all for better integration but diverse cultures are here to stay....
Sample size of one, but done business in Italy, Spain, Belgium, France, Switzerland and Germany: main issues were not regulation related...
It was a travesty that the UK government let it be sold, admittedly.
Norway, Iceland and Switzerland are also not in the EU. Are they also on a different continent?
You also seem to somehow justify spending 25k on an endeavor you don’t know will succeed upfront, when every other country on the planet allows you to open one with orders of magnitude smaller amounts of capital.
You can open a UK LTD in a few days with 12GBP. Similar in DK/NL/CZ… the list goes on.
I’ve learned firsthand that germans will bend over backwards to justify this insanity.
We're talking about VC investing here, not your local currywurst kiosk.
> An AG is a publicly traded company
Falsch. An Aktiengesellschaft is a corporate form that protects the investors and mandates a certain formal governance and management structure. It has nothing to do with being publicly traded.
For the same reasons, VCs will be very wary of investing in a Delaware S Corp (similar to a GmbH) instead of the preferred C corp (similar to an AG), even if the company is fully private and has no revenue.
> Also, the majority of companies in Germany are just ordinary eigetragene Kaufmänner (so normal businesspeople like your average plumber), or GmbH (literally any other company that isn’t a stock market traded enterprise).
Irrelevant.
It is, in most cases. Tell me about a startup that started off as an Aktiengesellschaft as opposed to a GmbH? Why would you even want to put 50k in instead of 25k, deal with all the governance overhead and reporting duties? It makes no sense at all, and during all the VC conversations I had, never once was a GmbH mentioned as problematic.
> Irrelevant.
It's not to the claim that you cannot found a company in Germany without putting down a significant amount of money and a notary. You just moved the goalposts.
AG is required for going public, however it's not a legal requirement that only public companies do so. You're mistaking cause and effect.
> Tell me about a startup that started off as an Aktiengesellschaft as opposed to a GmbH? Why would you even want to put 50k in instead of 25k, deal with all the governance overhead and reporting duties?
This is one of the big problems with German companies, and the reason why even German founders will start directly as a Delaware company instead. The capital requirements are $100 and reporting very minimal.
> It's not to the claim that you cannot found a company in Germany without putting down a significant amount of money and a notary.
I claimed that a non-AG makes it uninvestable, not what you're saying here (which is the product of your imagination). A GbmH has strict requirements that adding a new owner (an investor) must be done in front of a notary, and if your angel investors are all over Europe or the world, you'll have to tell them that they either they have to fly to Germany or find a German lawyer and give the lawyer a PoA. That's way too much hassle for most people, and the result is you'll hear a polite "no thanks, I might reconsider if you move your company to US/UK/Singapore". At least investing in an AG can be done without notarization.
A non-AG in Germany will inherently chase away almost all international investors. If you're lucky enough to find an international investor that's really interested, the most likely thing you'll be told is to either switch to AG or, preferably, re-incorporate in US/UK/Singapore and only then will your company be investable.
> You just moved the goalposts.
No, that's your misunderstanding. I mentioned a non-AG being unviable for international investors because they're the only ones worth mentioning. Local ones in Germany are mostly irrelevant for various reasons: they're either too ignorant of a specific market segment, too stingy, want too much control, only invest in later stages but not pre-seed, etc... You have to be really desperate to look for German investors, and that's true in most EU countries. The good VCs tend to be based in UK, Sweden or Estonia, with few exceptions. Angels are everywhere, but mostly outside Germany and they just won't bother with notarization for 20k EUR.
I'm a German. I have done this myself. I assure you it's true.
> You also seem to somehow justify spending 25k on an endeavor you don’t know will succeed upfront, when every other country on the planet allows you to open one with orders of magnitude smaller amounts of capital.
If you are planning a serious endeavour where you intend to limit your liability, you'll have a business plan. And that allows multiple options, from a bank loan of a local bank that will very likely be granted on good conditions, to one of the various municipal, regional, or federal programs that offer grants for newly founded companies. My current company secured 200k Euro at the beginning from a federal program that we did not have to pay back, for example.
And you can always dissolve the company and take the capital out again tax free, so what's the big deal?
As for leaders, von der Leyen might not be the best but still lightyears better than the orange pedo in the wh.
The "avoid dependence on the US" movement only really started picking up steam with Trump's accelerating dementia in his second term.
The iPhone, Microsoft, and nVidia all took multiple decades to develop into the behemoths they are today. Famously, the first iPhone was actually expensive trash: no apps, no 3G, couldn't even cut and paste text. It wasn't until the 3G model and the App Store that it became a true success.
Also famously, while the tech elitists complained about all of its shortcomings, the broader consumer market fully embraced it and it single-handedly drove an entirely new generation of consumer electronics.
For the record, it let you read the same web pages as a desktop computer over WiFi. It had a usable mapping app and good music app.
The rest of the experience, stuff like alarms, calculator, address book, etc. also worked nicely.
Those turned out to be things no one else was offering. I had a Nokia N95 at the time and the original iPhone was a big improvement on everything except the camera.
My point, which you seem to have overlooked, is that parent poster complaining that a "european iphone" doesn't exist is not realistic, considering how it went for Apple.
> Europe needs a single market for capital and the removal of legal barriers to extend across the continent, foremost for the little guy.
?!?
You can trivially sell your software inside the EU. As for software that I use almost daily: OsmAnd. LanguageTool, which is spell-checking this message, is made in Germany. IntelliJ products are made in Czechia, and I'm using them right now.
We just lack the regulatory freedom and deep financial markets, access to credit, etc.
Just ask Moderna
Unfortunately, most Eastern Bloc countries are led into the false belief that the EU is encroaching on their ways of life and "making them eat ze bugs", and the Brussels elite is more concerned with using their slim remaining political capital to push restrictions on internet freedoms rather than federalisation.
Show me a European iPhone, European Microsoft, European Nvidia, etc. Hell, I’ll take a European one man company that can reach all 27 markets.
Europe needs a single market for capital and the removal of legal barriers to extend across the continent, foremost for the little guy. Von der Failen can only add _more_ regulation. Someone wake me when they actually make something easier.