Comment by marginalia_nu
4 years ago
I can only speak for myself, but I find the amount of legal red tape you need to deal with incredibly discouraging.
I'll much rather build and run software for free in my spare time than start a business since the latter would mean having to spend dozens of hours every week dealing with all manner of bureaucracy.
I have the capacity and funds to start a business, but I just don't think it's worth the hassle.
I have a hard time to see how Europe would be any more bureaucratic then the US. Working for a European company that do business with American companies every now and then I can say that the contracts lengths and the legal staffing is a factor of ten higher every time we try to deal with an American customer. Heck involving lawyers just to sign standard contracts is not even something we have to do with European customers generally.
That's not a good example at all. You have to compare starting a company in the US (as a US citizen) vs starting a company in the EU (as an European).
Doing international business is always difficult and the additional hassle when you deal with American customers says absolutely nothing about the overhead of starting a domestic company.
In NL, a single example would be the urencriterium (hours criterion). Ill simplify it a bit but it involves 2 criteria: 1) You spend at least 1225 hours on your business. 2) If you've been an entrepreneur for the last 5 years you must spend more time on your business than your job. If you meet it you get various tax discounts that I wont attempt to describe here. (or pay extra if you don't, depends how you look at it)
Thus the reality is that you run from left to right with your attention chopped up over 1000 things simultaneously while in theory you have to write down all time spend on each business related activity. Almost everything counts as long as you document it. If the description is to generic it is rejected.
Of course there are exceptions too! In the [corona] period 1 January 2021 tot 1 Juli 2021, if you were unable to do work, you may count 24 hours per week. It might be attractive to write things down anyway as it might add up to more than 24.
Now [say] some former employer asks you to do some work for a few months. He wants to pay you a salary as usual but you prefer freelance while the work is unrelated to your company. Do you start an extra company for it???? Will you fail to make enough hours cleaning your office and organizing your desktop??? How much will it cost you if you don't reach the magic 1225 number???
Or say the business is a moderate success, some money comes in, you might be able to survive, the feature set is complete and you ran out of bugs to fix. How spend your time now? You want to get a job but if you spend more time doing that it costs money.
In the US, everyone is used to the legalism and you just fire over mostly standard units that get modified in known ways. i.e. you know where your levers are. Vendor contracts are easy to read because they're mostly standard.
In the EU, there's a lot of this "what the regulator currently will accept". By the letter of the law, in the worst case, our business in the EU could not have existed. But it did exist and thrive.
The standardization in the US makes it easy. But if I ever have to figure out something for Germany again, I'll slit my throat and feed lizards with my blood first.