Already being discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46703877
I too tried to submit eu-inc.org yesterday I think, but was then redirected to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46696097
Seems someone else might have the same workflow, and the de-dup detector let it through for whatever reason.
How would this organization address that fundamental psychological block?
I haven't seen that personally, most of the VCs I've worked with here in Europe who live here in Europe, invest in European companies. Most of them invest in companies in the same country they live in, because it's a bit of a hassle to invest in companies from other countries currently (hoping that EU-INC makes that easier), but none of them regularly invest in US companies.
If the EU really wants to light the fire, they should invest all those suddenly available defense euros in European companies only. Keep that going for a decade and there'll be a whole new generation of angel investors and small funds run by recently exited entrepreneurs with a soft spot for proper innovation. The SV VC culture didn't pop into being magically. It happened because a sufficiently large % of VCs had been entrepreneurs in a previous life (and not bankers), and their attitudes rubbed off on the rest.
"Today, if a company wants to scale up, it is confronted with different requirements in each Member State - that leads to an overwhelming 27 different rulebooks."
One of the biggest investors in Europe are pension funds. And this is one of the reasons why they did not invest in EU startups. And they did not expect this move until 2028. So it's moving faster than expected for whatever that is worth.
https://ioplus.nl/en/posts/pension-funds-set-to-drive-europe...
https://ioplus.nl/en/posts/pension-funds-are-open-to-investi...
The EU Inc. makes pan-EU operations simpler for businesses. This decreases internal barriers for trade, so it will lead to growth!
I feel like the mentality problem will follow the market realities. If startup founders become rich, they turn into investors and the startup snowball keeps growing.
It'll make it easier for investors in one country to invest in businesses in another (assuming both are in EU of course). Larger pool of available investors == larger pool of investors who are fine with higher risks.
Currently, when you raise money, you usually end up with just local investors, because others can't be bothered to having to understand your local laws and regulations, and with everything that comes with that.
Personally, that's what's stopping me too. In one case I still went through and invested in a company in another country, but in most cases I don't even bother reading deeper about the company unless it's in the same country, would have to be an exceptional idea and team for it to be worth it.
For my third venture, I cold emailed a US VC (from their about us page) that specializes in cyber. Within a month I had a term sheet. I didn’t take it because it was contingent on relocating to the US or adding a US based cofounder/senior person ... but they were super proactive, introduced me to senior cyber operators, getting design partners and were clearly willing to underwrite founder risk early.
In contrast, simply changing my LinkedIn status to “stealth” triggered 15+ inbound messages from EU focused investors .. mostly low effort outreach, deal scouts .. It got to the point where I had a template reply along the lines of: “I’m not looking for VC coaching or therapy sessions — I just need fire and forget capital. If that works, happy to talk.” Every single one either went silent or declined.
In my experience, many European investors index heavily on hierarchy, control, validation, and internal consensus and tend to operate from a very rigid playbook of what a “proper” startup is supposed to look like .. whatever "proper" means.
I agree it is Eu-wide or pan-EU rather than pan European.
Its probably not going to solve the problems it sets out to given all the differences between EU countries legal systems, tax, regulation etc.
And by "it" we mean both "free choice to be part of the union or not" and "legal jurisdictions".
Much like "an American firm" doesn't mean Canadian or Brazilian.
See comment above:
> Its obviously EU
I know how continents work. I don't think you know when contextual usages of language work.
The only way would be to copy it individually so it is the same in each member state which breaks the purpose of it.
Which.. would be a good idea, but I am not holding my breath for it to happen in the next 10 years.
yes you company needs to be rooted in a specific country, and sure moving company roots between countries is still not always trivial (anti capital flight laws are a thing). But that isn't really in conflict with a EU INC per-se. I mean they do point out that it will have
> Local taxes & employment
and this isn't in conflict with
- the same business form being available in all EU members
- central EU registry
- Standardized investment documents ( * this is only investment documents, not e.g. tax documents)
- Standardized EU-wide stock options
- For every founder ( * with some limits)
Like there are already some "EU level" business models, e.g. you company can operate as a Societas Europaea (SE). Now a SE is for other use-cases so not really the same at all (it's more like the EU version of a German GmbH), but it shows that things "in that direction" are very much viable.
Hmm - any examples of this applying intra-EU? That feels like a violation of the free movement of banking services.
You have to select a state to incorporate in. You can't incorporate "federally". All states have different laws and regulations relating to business. Just like in Europe.
So they're chasing a false idea.
Having a EU based one will be great.
Now, that may not work in all jurisdictions for reasons of local taxation etc (and you'll have to work out payroll tax, benefits etc) but that's almost never anything to do with the legal entity type!
Neither of which is in EU, which is exactly the point. Should be an EU one which is usable...
Man, at least read the title of the submission, even if you're not gonna be bothered reading the contents. This is clearly about EU and Europe, incorporating in either of those two places would defeat the entire purpose :)
> the legal entity you choose is possibly the least consequential
I think this is a bit of the goal with EU-INC, so people don't have to think about it as much. Right now, if you're multinational, you really have to be careful what country you use as your base. Hopefully, with something like this, in the future, you can also include a "EU-INC" in there, and advice people to just go with the simplest way. I think that's the dream at least.
American startups and businesses get investor money from all over the world, including from Europe. Willingness to invest in startups depends on the downstream of willingness to invest in business in general. If venture capital investors know that there's a lot of money willing to invest after the startup phase, then they are willing to take more risks. And so on for every phase of investors, until you reach big institutional investors like retirement funds.
It looks like the proponents here have fallen into the classic European thinking: "Let's talk and make papers to make our wishes become true". Instead of trying to understand reality and why things are the way they are.
They should ask themselves why any European investor would want to invest in a European startup instead of in an American startup. They should ask themselves why European entrepreneurs should create their startup in Europe instead of in America. When they have the answers to those questions they know what solutions to propose.
My experience doing business in and with America has been nothing but fantastic. They have all the infrastructure and all the culture to help entrepreneurs and anybody who wants to do business. They want to do business as well. Need a credit card processor? Need an LLC? Need a bank account? Need a business loan? It's easy, the USA is fucking open for business.
In Europe it is hostility mostly all the way, from banks to regulators to governments, and so on. The easy part is registering a company, which is just as swift in Europe as it is in the USA. But apart from that you won't find any friends in the process. Even if you're European. Even in the country and the city you were born in.
Americans love new things and new ideas and see them as opportunities. Europeans see them as threats. And that is mirrored everywhere you turn. You might agree with the European perspective in a society-wide perspective, but for startup businesses the American mindset fits much better.
What if the founders can't get a visa?
The assumption that the world is flat, trade is free, and people can just be anywhere - globalization - may not hold true for much longer.
In practice ... there is always so much bureaucracy and inertia. I don't think the current EU model works well. I also don't think a copy/paste USA 2.0 works either, yet this seems to be the primary objective by the people in Brussels (that is, = politicians, not all folks in Brussels of course). There is such a huge disconnect between what people such as Leyen babble, and what people want or need or may want. And a lack of decision-making power too. So I think most of those projects will end in failure.
Personally I think an EU model will only work when the agendas are NOT unified, because unification leads to disagreements. You can already see this happening in regards to politics or war - some countries want to, oddly enough, serve Russia. That may be a fine decision for a state, but if other states push for another approach, you have a problem here. Now there are discussions to simply isolate the "non-compliant" states, but this is a bad approach since it will again lead to fragmentation and more people being angry at Brussels here. So this is a failing model. Splitting up things into separate aspects will also, of course, lead to more bureaucracy, but states would more easily form a specific opinion and align towards that, without being handicapped by other states that don't want to go that route. I don't see any other way for this to work. The EU in its present form is just setup for failure - the current model simply does not work, and the proposed new model is even worse in many ways e. g. 2/3 majority basically means that the big states will dominate the small ones. For instance, if Germany and France want to go to war against Russia (let's assume this were the case), then they'd have to send troops to the front - and they are unwilling to do so. So other states are more likely to be threatened. That model not only does not work but is also unfair.
Of course legal or taxation models are different to war, but the different countries have different wealth and opportunities, so a one-size-fits-all also can not possibly work. We saw this with the EURO where weaker countries struggle permanently. The whole EU needs to be completely re-designed - and this is not going to happen due to inertia alone.
Flat out these social differences and you'll have the social support you need to fight and/or collaborate as equal with everyone else. It's very simple.
ps. I'm not saying everybody should stay "put". But ppl shouldn't be migrating within the EU for these reasons. That was the initial goal anyway, then they started celebrating things that no one in the EU cares about as if it's something that matters (i.e. Apple vs EU dispute over the charger...)
Is it? I doubt it. There isn't a large country on earth where the salaries don't differ across regions.
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").
You'd be surprised at some of the weird things that can happen in the current systems in the EU if you try to do business across borders.
Like: your company suddenly automatically becoming deregistered, or you might get a sudden huge tax bill, or you might even inadvertently get charged with fraud.
Hasn't happened so far knock on wood, but it's a lot more work to stay on the light side than you'd really like.
This is all because the national systems still sort of assume that you'll live and work and stay inside one EU country. You end up constantly fitting square administrative pegs into regulatory round holes.
A lot of the EU's promise is actually theoretical without a proper pan european legal entity.
Yeah, I feel a bit the same way.
Just to make it clear to random passerby's, this is exactly what the proposed EU-INC is for, to create this "pan european legal entity", in case it wasn't clear from the context. I initially asked myself "But that's exactly what it is..." so maybe others end up thinking the same :)
TBH I doubt it's going to be possible with current status. Where will an EU-inc be based, Luxembourg? and how would that be different from any other Lux company.
But maybe we could at least have some business standards that will be enforced all over the EU
kvgr•48m ago
hanspagel•42m ago
mrtksn•41m ago
Its evident that labor cost and taxes are not excessive in EU by the reality of existence of plenty of businesses in a healthy society.
What doesn't exist in EU is the "tech" business, and the tech doesn't have margins too slim to employ people and pay taxes. On the contrary, the margins are fat. The reason that the tech sector isn't a large one in EU is that its easy to incorporate in USA and access the full EU market from there instead of incorporating in some small EU country and deal with their bureaucracy and internal border limitations. The 28th regime and the EU-INC is to address exactly that.
If the USA-EU relations deteriorate enough, it will also create instant trillion Euros market. Just look at the quarterly reports of US tech giants, they generate EU revenues that are not that behind the US revenues. For Apple thats %60 of the US revenue, or ~110B$ for the last quarter and that's happening despite Apple having a much smaller market share in EU.
A full blown conflict between US-EU will be a huge opportunity to replicate the US tech sector in EU and having an EU-INC will be the necessary facilitator that is currently missing when compared with the landscape in USA.
ExoticPearTree•20m ago
There is no such thing as slave labor in the tech sector. Some countries offer a lower barrier to entry than others. The EU has a very high barrier to entry when it comes to taxation.
You can believe what you want, but I think every country's goal is to reduce taxation as much as possible for companies and for people. Unfortunately, the current in the EU is to keep raising them and give state more and more monopoly on services.
mrtksn•9m ago
Most of the Europeans trust the government more that they trust the businesses and demand some services to be provided by the government and they all collect taxes accordingly. Some countries like Bulgaria have relatively small governments and do %10 flat tax for companies and individuals and other countries like France or Germany provide robust government services and safety net and do much higher taxation.
pjc50•7m ago
(see Apple Ireland)
traceroute66•40m ago
450 million and counting people would still prefer to live and work in the EU than anywhere else.
Even more so with present geopolitics, to put it politely !
PaywallBuster•29m ago
majority of population of any given country doesn't emigrate ever, even inside EU where it would be extremely easy
mrtksn•20m ago
Its also factual that there's a large scale migration intra-EU, with people from poorer countries moving to rich ones to seek jobs. Bulgaria, Romania and Poland are prime examples for that.
Its also well documented that those same people stop migrating and even coming back once their counties level up with the rest of the EU, again Poland and Bulgaria are good examples for this in the last years.
EU is trying to make sure that the poorer countries receive the help they need to catch up and it looks like its working.
ExoticPearTree•19m ago
Because unlike the US, we don't speak the same language. If there would have been a real push to have a common EU language since its inception, we would have been more mobile and more US like. But no...
lotsofpulp•33m ago
Besides a fractured market with lots of different bureaucracies to deal with, the lack of at-will employment is a big labor cost when you need to be able to quickly spin up or spin down operations.
Welfare should always be a responsibility of the government, not businesses. Let businesses business and let government redistribute wealth.
Cthulhu_•30m ago
carlosjobim•20m ago
ExoticPearTree•15m ago
In the US, this provides the companies with the levers they need to maintain a functioning business in pretty much an instant. In the EU you can't do that.
formerly_proven•4m ago
The US hire-and-fire approach is then the other extreme.
The optimal amount of worker protection is somewhere in-between.
atmosx•13m ago
Usually, high taxes go hand in hand with high quality welfare state. Contrary to popular belief, the vast majority of business ppl are educated and understand the added value of an accessible publicly funded healthcare, pension and education system.
Commonly listed (and perennial business problems) are: unstable political environment (in the sense that tax law changes every four years, complex legal system, so long term planning is impossible), corruption (meaning you have to know who to bribe to get the job done), crime rates and lack of infrastructure.