| March 5th - We signed up to the waitlist the instant we heard about it April 8th - Received an invite. They gave up a form to fill out online where we had to upload some IDs and other details. April 10th - The docusign (digital signature) email documents came along with a legal/tax guide. We filled that out on Apr 19th. We ended up delaying for a while discussing the tax implications since we're moving from a low tax (Hong Kong) to much higher tax (Delaware C-Corp) area. Unlike Hong Kong, taxes in the US appear much much more complicated and intimidating. Ultimately for our startup, we weighed the benefits and decided to go ahead. May 16th - Decided to go ahead with the incorporation and signed all the forms (via docusign) May 17th - Get 15k AWS credits emails (super cool) May 19th - Our Stripe payments account was opened "You can now accept payments via Stripe" Email May 19th - "Welcome to SVB Bank" email with login details May 25th - "Your Company is now incorporated" w Certificate of Incorp attached June 4th - "Your Company now has an EIN", which a number ID to file taxes June 21st - SVB Bank asked us to print out a few docs to sign. Basically to confirm we received the EIN. And that's it. In most cases, it only takes a few days once you've signed the forms to be able to start taking payments via Stripe US (so you get the cheaper Stripe US fees rather than the more expensive international fees). As an international, we ended taking a while to decide if a US incorporation was the way to go. There's 2 reasons we hesitated: 1) Stripe released a beta in Asia where you can accept payments in many Asian countries. No more Braintree/Paypal crap so you don't need to have US bank account to use Stripe and the Stripe API. 2) American taxes are pretty high (compared to HK), and there seems to a lot more rules and paperwork required. For us, what pushed us to go ahead despite our reservations was that we spent 1 week in SF (for our YC interview). We didn't get in, but we scheduled a lot of meetings while we were there and we realised if we were to raise any sort of significant funding, a Delaware C-corp is a prerequisite. |
Can I ask what the game plan is for the annual DE C Corp compliance? Specifically do you know how much your DE franchise tax will be (did you determine how many shares were created or did Atlas)? Do you file your own DE annual report or does Atlas? Do you know who your DE Registered Agent is and the annual cost moving forward?
I'm thinking I could easyily offer those services, but it is not clear if Atlas does/plans to.