| > You can literally incorporate your business in 15 minutes or less. Try doing that in your home state. According to https://corp.delaware.gov/faqs/, their expedited service offers 1 hour, 2 hour, same day, and next day service. I didn't see anything there about how long regular service takes, but according to lawyers who answered a question about this [1] on Quora, it is about a week. Is there some faster way to get service (I saw something about some third party incorporation services have direct update access to the database, so maybe they can do it faster than going through the government directly?) My state, Washington, offers expedited service, which is two business days. You can get same day (usually less than an hour) if you file in person before 3:30 PM. That said, I'm having a hard time thinking of a scenario where I'd be trying to form a corporation and want expedited service, let alone be willing to actually pay more for it [2]. What's the use case for this? As far as where to incorporate goes, there are some good points for Delaware if you are going to do a large public company that operates in multiple state. If your company is going to a small private company doing business only in your home state, on the other hand, incorporating in your home state is often going to make more sense, at least if your state has reasonable corporate law, such as in states that use the Model Business Corporation Act. Even big public companies sometimes find incorporating in their home state fine. Apple, for example, is a California corporation. Microsoft is a Washington corporation. Microsoft did change to Delaware in 1986, five years after initially incorporation in Washington, because Delaware was more liberal about allowing the company to indemnify officers, but Washington changed its laws on that point and Microsoft re-re-incorporated back to Washington in 1993. Overall, about 35% of the Fortune 500 are not incorporated in Delaware. [1] https://www.quora.com/How-long-does-it-take-to-incorporate-a... [2] OK...I can think of one situation. I used to work at a small Unix workstation maker called Callan Data Systems. Callan was founded and owned by three founders, who were all equal. I asked one of the others once how Callan's name ended up on the company if they all were equal. The answer was that they had everything done to start the company except actually filing the papers, which they could not do because they could not agree on a name. This impasse went on for quite a while. During that time, the two other founders went away for a few days on a hunting trip. When they got back Dave told them he had incorporated using a temporary name so that actually get things going, and they could change the name later once they thought of a name. That temporary name was "Callan Data Systems". They were never able to agree on a new name, and so it stayed Callan Data Systems until the end. Perhaps expedited filing would be useful in that situation, so Dave could make sure they were incorporated before the others got back because if the filing has not yet been processed they may have been able to withdraw it, and they'd be right back where they were. |