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Comment by corford | Hacker News Reader

I'd say the UK certainly has the lead in Europe in terms of talent pool size, legal services, tax regime and government support.

I'll shortly be moving back to there and incorporating a company for my bootstrapped startup. I live in France at the moment and the decision to move and kick it off from the UK was a no brainer.

One of the major attractions is the SEIS scheme and the potential this gives me to attract funding via a crowd funding platform like http://www.crowdcube.com This sort of startup friendly business environment just doesn't exist anywhere else in Europe (at least that I'm aware of).

Edit: in connection to the above, would love to know if any UK HNers have had any experience with http://www.vwv.co.uk/ ? I need some legal advice before I incorporate and I've heard they're good and very startup friendly.

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Interested in the reasons behind the 'no brainer' move. We're in France, and the regime for startups, with innovation tax cuts and other security nets is pretty favorable. The engineers are pretty good too!

YMMV but for my specific setup, it was just easier on all fronts. My French isn't terrible (my partner is French) but English is my mother tongue and what I'm most comfortable in (especially for business stuff). It's also much easier to get quick, good access to startup focussed legal advice. Then there's the SEIS scheme which is very attractive if I run out of runway after launching and need to look at additional seed funding. Company incorporation is easy and inexpensive. Rent is cheap if you aren't in the South East (and I'm not locked in to a long contract as is standard in France). If my startup turns out to be successful and I need to employ people it's much easier and more cost effective to do this in the UK than in France. And the list goes on.

I'm currently under the Auto-Entrepreneur scheme here and frankly it's a bordel :) I'd like to kill URSAFF sometimes...

Edit: I should also say that I'm out in the sticks in the Limousin region. I imagine things are a bit better in Paris. Where are you guys based?

haha, everyone would like to kill URSAFF, but they are your life after your biological CPU has turned into a good old Pentium :)

And yes Limousin, may not be your startup hub of choice, but after all, it is probably cheaper than everywhere else. Probably good enough while you are in the coding phase, not that good afterwards for sure.

The language problem is real though, and I understand your move much better now.

We're in Toulouse, some other startups I know are in Paris. Ping me if you ever come down South (everything above Bordeaux is Great far 'beyond the Wall' North for us :) ).

Haha je connais bien "la ligne de Bordeaux"... My partner is Catalan and we lived near Perpignan for 3 years before moving here - she thinks of the Limousin as another country!

Would be great to meet up for a beer/wine/ricard and talk startups the next time I'm in the South. I can't see your email but mine is in my profile.

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