[oellegaard]

I have seen promotion of this idea multiple times but every time I read about it I fail to understand the gains.

I’m based in Denmark and have incorporated multiple companies. It is very easy and digital and costs very little, even if you get a lawyer to do it for you.

Maybe the issue is a few member states that are behind on digitalization?

In my experience EU is better at setting the guidelines and then the member states can implement the details themselves. When they try to push things it becomes bureaucratic - just look at the cookie law and GDPR. Both great ideas but overly complicated.

[tietjens]

Have you started a company that took investment from funds located in other countries within the EU? That is the main focus of this idea. Lowering the barrier to investing in startups across EU nation states.

Austrian company and you want to take investment from a venture fund in X country? It'll get complicated very fast. That's part of what this trying to fix and make simple.

[whizzter]

I think starting and investing per-se really isn't the major issue for some time (at least in Sweden and probably Denmark), we've gotten many small business friendly laws over the past 15-20 years.

At the same time there are many discrepancies that makes it hard for companies from one country to mesh with companies from another country.

Law tradition (Napoleonic, German or Nordic), tax rules (German rules were (are?) notorious for their complexity,etc. , then there's certain laws such as the Finnish money gathering law that can be a problem for very early stage development ( https://solhsa.com/wishlist.html ).

All the above creates friction, and if EU-inc would follow German rules, I'd rather just stay with a Swedish company because..

Luckily the EU has harmonized things so a startup in one country can mostly work within local rules as long as we make sure to distribute earnings from different countries correctly.

The trickier part is forming bonds, such as for investor and/or startup protection for across-border investments when one wants to grow, various scams over the years has played out differently in various countries so those kinds of laws could be quite an issue outside of the stock market.

[whizzter]

Yep, same feeling as a Swede with so much being streamlined online, but at the same time I can see how it'd be a nightmare for someone without a BankID (or in Denmark MitID).