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Comment by hooande | Hacker News Reader

YC has a lot of founders from outside of the US. There were four teams from outside of the US in our YC class, two from Canada, one from the UK and one team from Austria. I can think of at least four other teams from abroad from previous classes.

In fact there is a kind of UK YC inside YC. The UK guys really stick together and help each other out. If you can get a hold of any of them I'm sure they'll point you in the right direction.

Papers and immigration are always a difficult issue. In most cases you can get a work visa or whatever visa lets you attend conferences in the US and it will be enough for the 3 month YC session.

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It's Germany in my case. Can you point out the Austrian guys?

I should probably add that in my case all founders would be from outside US! So the problem is not only in getting visas for some of the founders but also incorporating in the US as I figure PG has no interest in 6% of a germany based company. The link I remember contained descriptions of both (visas and incorporating at the same time).

If you incorporate in the US you'll also need an EU based organization for legal purposes (since you'll have a "Betriebsstätte" in Germany) that can be a subsidiary of a Deleware C-Corp. That's why we decided to incorporate in UK since a Ltd. is a valid legal form EU-wide and leaves all of the incorporation documents in English, which is easier for investors to deal with.

I intentionally didn't name any names, sorry. A lot of startups haven't launched yet and I don't want to out anyone who is in stealth mode.

Thought so. But had to try ;) Thanks though. Founders from austria sounds really intersting. Maybe they will read this and can contact me..

Living in Austria (Innsbruck) myself, I'd be curious to hear about it as well. I miss being able to talk tech with real live people every now and then.

How's YEurope doing btw? If you're from Innsbruck you might have thought about goin there too..? From what I see on their site it seems rather dead.. :(

I sent in an application for the hell of it, got turned down, and now that you mention it, their site doesn't look all that active.

I didn't like that thing neither. Was a bit too copycat without any innovation. Still it would be good to have s.th. similar in Europe (London,Berlin,Zürich?)

There is technoport/luxinnovation/123-gonetworking in Luxembourg, but it's not focused on web startups (they accept startups from all fields). You won't get any money, but they will help you with your business plan, give you access to coaches (lawyers, sale guys, financial people, technical people...), help you create the company or to get european subsidaries, 4 months office location/servers offered for free (internet + work computers included), and much more help. (like funding, business angel connections, etc.) All startups have offices next to each other, allthough the industrial ones are located on another site.

The url is http://www.technoport.lu/. You can email me if you want more information. We started there like a month ago, and it has been great so far.

One startup that started here was jamendo (http://www.jamendo.com/en/).

Thanks. Didn't lnow about those.

Seedcamp, based in London, is similar in some ways. We were at the local event in Berlin and that was quite nice. The bad news is that the deadline for the current round was just a couple weeks back and it's only once a year.

Where in Germany are you based? We're going to probably start a small, regular hacker meetup here in Berlin in the next month. Send me a mail (in my profile) and we'll let you know when we start...

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