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Comment by data_maan | Hacker News Reader

Reading a lot on Germany business culture, my takeaway is that Germany is not made for lean founders who start small but aim big, i.e. your typical startup.

It seems to be aimed either at well established business magnates who want to open yet another business (and 25k€ is nothing in that case) or small bakery-on-the-corner businesses who will go for GmbH anyways (and hence no reason to cough up 25k€).

There's no path that explicitly caters to the tech founder.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

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Start with a "Einzelunternehmung". Registering that takes 15 to 30 minutes at your local mayors office and costs 30 Euro. From there on you can make something like 20k Euro turnover per year, if you grow out of that, you can still "invest" in a GmbH or whatever suits your needs best.

On the other hand, if you are sure that you're building the next Facebook, getting the money for a GmbH together on day -1 should be no problem at all. It turns out that most companies don't make it that far, though...

That 22k limit is only for the small business rule, which allows the choice of not collecting VAT on sales (but on the flip side cannot deduct it on purchases). Up to a yearly revenue of 0.6M one can also use a simplified profit calculation method for taxes.

Ah yes, you're right. I'm still not that settled in on the rules... :-D

Still suboptimal to have to iterate between business types as I grow (compared to other jurisdictions).

This "slow grow" mindset is so typical German. No one know who the next Facebook/Meta will be - but I would guess for some VCs (not all though) it helps to show you're not some random sole trader

A lot of German law is based around the unstated assumption that business owners are 19th century industrial tycoons and all workers are employees. There are a lot of protections for employees (dependent workers) but practically zero for freelancers, for example. The concept of co-owning a business with your spouse is also alien to German law as in almost every situation it's more beneficial for one of both to either be an employee or primarily work elsewhere.

And don't get me started on being a business owner and wanting to become a mother. A lot of women business owners abandon their companies to get hired as regular employees when they want to have children.

There are 2M sole proprietorships in Germany and around 0.4M partnership type companies (Personengesellschaft; GbR, etc.) and aside from the aspect of trying to appear like a large corporation while actually being a small start-up, they are perfectly adequate for many businesses.

There is also no limit on how large a sole proprietorship can grow. While mostly held up as example for why one might not want to keep the company form a sole proprietorship forever, Schlecker scaled from a single shop to over 14000 stores near the end and a couple billion euro revenue per year.

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