[matt4077]

Do you feel that any of the bureaucracy creates an undue burden – or one that could possibly thwart a company which would otherwise achieve scale?

I'm asking because the article seems to buy into the narrative that these rules and regulation create an actual obstacle to ventures such as google ever being founded in Germany, and having gone through the process a few times, I can neither find any step of the process that I would consider completely unreasonable (except the chamber of commerce), nor could I imagine it being more than an irrelevant nuisance to any dedicated team.

I also think the 2000 Euro/year you're citing is true only for a company actually doing a fair amount of business and having employees. I'm sure it's less than half that if you're just maintaining the legal structure, or are a single founder before launch – VAT reporting, for example, has threshold below which reporting happens only quarterly or yearly.

[helge5]

The 2k/y (a little more) is what I pay for a one person GmbH serviced by an accountant. If you employ people or earn significant money, it'll cost you extra (employing people has its own filing/processing requirements, but the tax-account will do that for you, so it is not 'hard' per se). Note: you can reduce costs by doing a lot of stuff on your own, but well, do you want to? :-)

BTW: If you plan Google big and want to take on multiple investors pouring in 100k's or millions, you wouldn't usually found a 'GmbH' or UG but an 'AG' (Aktiengesellschaft, a share based construct). This involves more reporting/regulations but also makes it easier to deal with the ownership of the company.

Wrt your 'Google ever being founded in Germany'. The process of founding a company is not an obstacle, that part is easy enough. Other obstacles are manyfold: you don't have nearly as much VC money available, there are strong data protection laws, employing people is a significant liability in Germany (vs California where you can quit them any day), side-costs of employment are very high (state required insurances for medical, unemployment, disability, pension, ...) etc etc.

Summary: If you plan a small software/IT business it probably makes sense to just start with an UG and see where it goes.

[Loic]

In my case the turnover is around 100k€. The cost are based on turnover for most of them.

For the general question about rules etc. At my level, it is a non problem because everything is taken into account by my accountant. It means, it is very easy. Also, the GmbH structure is the same for everybody, it means, everybody must follow these strict rules and as a customer told me: "You have a GmbH, we can trust you that you do the things the right way".

So, for me, these relatively small requirements at the start are a way to keep the non serious people out of business. This is good for the trust when running your business on the long run. I like it this way.