It's inordinately difficult and expensive to start an LLC or SA in some EU countries. It's even difficult and expensive to _stop_ an LLC and dissolve it. Huge amount of risk and cost on founders and a huge distraction from running a business.

I think that EU-Inc _could_ be an improvement, but it needs to avoid the committee laundry list of ideas/requirements/form fields that plagues the EU startup ecosystem. My worry is that the end result will require notarized declarations of honour, financial plans stretching decades into the future, 30 page business plan documents, reams of corporate governance documents, and tons of other nonsense to protect against the perceived risk that someone who failed at starting a business once fails a second time.

There needs to be UX requirements on the process from day one against which the end result is judged. (E.g. "a company should be able to register in x days", "a complete application should be no longer than y pages", "application costs should be less than z euros").

> It's even difficult and expensive to _stop_ an LLC and dissolve it.

In my experience this is at least as important. Everyone focuses on the process of creating companies, which is now relatively streamlined in many European countries.

The real, massive difference between the US and EU is how hard it is to shutdown a company and the legal implications of that. I was shocked at how unreasonably slow and painful it can be to shutdown a company in Europe the first time I did it. Many countries effectively treat it as a criminal proceeding. Sometimes startups just fail, that is the nature of startups.

In the US shutting down a company is almost as easy as creating one.

> a company should be able to register in x days

Which EU bureaucrats will fully pass by treating this as "a company should be able to register in x days once the full set of documents has been collected".

I think what's even more important is that the costs for founding and maintaining such an LLC should scale with revenue, including scaling to 0.

In many EU countries, you still have to pay social security and/or health insurance, even if your company brings in no revenue. This isn't supposed to be a problem, as you're not really supposed to officially start a business unless you cross specific revenue thresholds. However, that doesn't work in practice if you're offering your services online, as many payment gateways in Europe will not deal with non-business accounts.

In the USA California, Texas, Delaware etc all have different company registration and compliance processes. This has not damaged the business environment.

It should be left to each EU country to decide how to manage their company compliance processes. Those companies can then easily trade all over the EU.

You can easily set up a company in Ireland.

The EU does not to over reach with one-size-fits-all regulations. That will eventually lead to it's dissolution. It needs to concentrate on maintaining a free trade area.

> My worry is that the end result will require

Yes it will.

The vast army of bureaucrats in any country does whatever is in their power to make sure their specific requirements are included into the process. What do you mean they would like to open a 3D printing workshop with no Environmental Impact Study done?!

Having a startup in the US is a huge mess due to all the states and taxes, if Europe can make everything digital AND easier, it's a no brainer for us to move our company there.

They won't be able to solve the problem. The only reason all those roadblocks exist is to control/regulate everything in a way to ensure the maximum possible taxation. At the same time, bureaucrats get to justify their existence, pretending to do meaningful work while they only take from productive people.

You can't even say they manage to regulate actual problems; they only reinforce the big players. The cookie consent banner nonsense and ongoing legal fight with Apple (and GAFAM in general) didn't bring anything of value to end consumers.

Cookies haven't disappeared; they have just become a major annoyance that you have to spend a lot of time clicking on and tracking hasn't been reduced, quite the contrary. The iPhone is still a locked-down device, with Apple maintaining a monopoly on software access as well as repairability (their repair program is such a joke that they should be tried for contempt if the EU actually had any power).

Bureaucracy is just cancer, and the EU is fully metastasized; there is not much that can improve until a major failure happens.

If you want to create a business, you have to pay the bureaucracy before you even make a single cent. Business has become more profitable to the government than the actual business owners; those thriving are the big ones who can afford to play the lobbying game and engage in regulatory capture and offload most of the cost on the taxpayers while profiting overseas.

Is this a true problem in EU (or indeed anywhere)? I don't think starting a company is the bottleneck, it's mostly the inordinate amount of regulations one has to comply with, as well as the strenuous laws around letting workers go, while making people work as contractors being also frowned upon.

I'm not sure how any one these is going to change.

In my experience it is very easy and pretty cheap to start a LLC in Poland.

I am a European living in the US and my god I am tired of hearing this over and over again. If your biggest hurdle to start a company is the paperwork you’ll have to do for one week, you better think of something else.

And yes, there are other way bigger issues in my opinion, such as financing and even social support.

> a complete application should be no longer than y pages

The monkey’s finger curls. All contract text is now sized at 2 points.

I agree on application costs to be less but I believe a company needs to bring some capital. In Switzerland you need to pony up 20k in startup capital for a GmbH or 100k for an AG (ignoring the 50k work around), it belongs to the company but guarantees some security for customers and vendors that you aren't just going to take their money and run.

In Switzerland you don't even need to collect VAT until you make at least 100k a year so I find requiring some capital ok.

You don't need business plans and all that stuff. The problem in Germany for instance is that a GmbH needs 25k of capital + expensive notarization. These are the only two things that need improvement.

Yeah, since there's lots of countries and some are very dynamic and modern, maybe they could act as early adopters. But don't stop there: if it works for the early adopters, others could also apply their lessons. For example Estonia is often mentioned in electronic government etc.

> There needs to be UX requirements on the process from day one against which the end result is judged. (E.g. "a company should be able to register in x days", "a complete application should be no longer than y pages", "application costs should be less than z euros").

It was announced you will be able to create company fully online and will have it ready in max 48h.

Didn't Estonia solve this problem?

Truly, this is one of the greatest losses of the UK leaving. For both parties. Advising EU startups on where to incorporate that isn’t London could be so much simpler.

There really is no reason for it to be longer, more expensive, and more complicated than what exists today in, say, the UK where you can do it all online for about £20 (or is it £50 now?) and complete in a matter of hours.

This is really down to individual countries' red tape and suspicion.

The risk element is also not at all attached to forming a company (hence why it can be so simple and quick), it is with funding and finance. So banks will want to see a business plan but the company registration office does not, or should not, care.

>My worry is that the end result will require notarized declarations of honour, financial plans stretching decades into the future, 30 page business plan documents, reams of corporate governance documents, and tons of other nonsense to protect against the perceived risk that someone who failed at starting a business once fails a second time.

That sounds like a really good use for AI.

> It's inordinately difficult and expensive to start an LLC or SA in some EU countries.

Totally.

One of the biggest and most horrific aspect of it is the KYC/AML. We regularly read articles explaining that drugs are so out of hand that several EU countries, like Belgium, are becoming narco-states: these are front page, major newspaper, stories. We also read articles explaining that cash bills from petty drug dealing are "necessary for the underground economy of the poor oppressed people".

Official numbers say 2% to 5% of the world's global GDP is tied to criminal activities.

So major drug trafficking is ongoing and that money is definitely being laundered.

Yet when regular people like myself want to open a company, the gates of the KYC/AML hell do open.

Bureaucrats and many people at various institutions like banks, notary, etc. do believe that the KYC/AML meant to catch actual criminals is actually a greenlight to go full stasi-mode on everyone.

Things go, literally, a bit like this:

stasi agent: "Source of funds: where do the 50 K EUR of capital come from?"

honest person: "I sold at 600 EUR shares of Meta I bought at 60 EUR in 2015 (making that up), here's a printed copy of both the buy order at the bank in 2015 and the copy of the sell order, at the same bank, 10 years later."

stasi agent: "Nice try! Where did the 5 K EUR you bought those Meta shares with in 2015 come from?".

The above is, literally, happening. It happened to me. It happened to people I know.

At one point I had no trace because I had to go so much back in time that the bank wouldn't give the proofs anymore: and it cost something insane like 25 EUR / month per account to get old infos. So for say four accounts we're talking 1 200 EUR per year to ask for old bank statements.

I'll remind everyone that a principle in many EU countries is that if there is no suspicion of fraud there's a delay after which the IRSes cannot legally go back. They have to prove that there's potential fraud to be able to go back more than, e.g., 7 years.

But the stasi-agents working in KYC/AML at banks, notary, etc.? They believe they have a mission to make regular's people life hell.

Oh and a good one: you think it's bad that legitimate citizens to denounce illegals? You wanna me to tell you about the phone numbers the governments put in place in many EU countries so that citizens can denounce other fellow citizens "because they believe they're frauding the IRS"? How's that one? Where's the outrage?

In my native country of Belgium I heard that at least one in every four solo-preneur ("independant") / entrepreneur has been the subject of at least one such denunciation.

Stasi.

Also totally counter-productive: when everybody is a suspect, nobody is.

I see on LinkedIn people whoring their profiles to would be employers by boasting about how many SARs denunciations they made (Suspicious Activity Reports).

Stasi agents.

And then don't get me started on people who are just bitter and sour because, in the EU, they may be net 3 K to 5 K EUR a month, and yet are authorized to KYC / AML on people owning Porsche and Ferrari, hundreds of thousands or millions of EUR worth of equities/investements, expensive real estate, etc.

These people cannot comprehend, in their own little minds, surrounded by people limited the same way they are, that there are people out there who are just legitimately more succesful than they'll ever be in life.

Their bitterness and jealousy turns them into little stati agents.

Bank menaced to not only not open my company's account but to close not just my account but also my wife's account. I had then to spend three weeks, full time, while my wife was on vacation (I sent her on vacation and stayed to produce the papers for the stasi), to produce a 49 pages (49 fucking pages) document full of proofs going back more than 10 years. Only to create a company and bring 50 K EUR in capital.

Just fuck this entire system.

You simply cannot hate bureaucracy enough.

> It's even difficult and expensive to _stop_ an LLC and dissolve it.

It's some countries it's near mission impossible. A friend of mine who had the equivalent of a LLC in Belgium who was then acquired by an US company spent 10 years to close the belgian entity. And it's much worse than that: while they refuse to do what's necessary to close it, many taxes are due and keep on coming each year. But of course those did manage to close a company or who know someone who closed a company are going to say: "I had no issue, so there's no issue".

All of this really does feel like a dystopian bureaucratic nightmare, in the style of the Brazil movie. It'd be nice if more movies were produced in that genre for it's badly needed to at least be able to vent off with some well-deserved satire.

> Huge amount of risk and cost on founders

Better than potentially putting risk and costs on other companies, the country and/or it's citizens.

> nonsense to protect against the perceived risk

It's not a perceived risk. No rule is made without cases.