jlangenauer

Be aware that incorporating in another jurisdiction doesn't mean your operations aren't taxable according to the local laws of where you are.

For example, if a company is incorporated in the US, but all it's employees/owners are physically located in Germany, then under German law, the "place of ordinary business" is Germany, and the company gets taxed as though it's a German company.

I believe the same sort of principal applies in most jurisdictions.

As a counterpoint, the Medically Supervised Injecting Room in Kings Cross (Sydney) has quite radically transformed the area for the better - people who used to live there before it opened tell of sometimes walking over the bodies of addicts who'd OD'd on the streets, and of seeing used syringes everywhere. Now, you'd hardly ever see these things.

(I'd link to the Wikipedia article, but it seems to be the subject of an edit war between a couple of groups with agendas to push, so is best ignored.)

It's not at all clear though how compatible a Canada-style deal is with not having any sort of border between Ireland and Northern Ireland.

I'm reminded of George Orwell's quote:

“Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.”

SYD-SCL and SYD-PER-JNB are routes where Qantas needs a 4-engined plane because they are so far outside the ETOPS limits. But those are pretty extreme exceptions.

No, that's actually French border control. On the Eurostar, you clear the destination border when you check in, so that when you arrive you simply walk out.

One of the strange things about Australia's startup scene over the last decade or so is the sheer number of what I like to call "meta-entrepreneurs" - people who help other people become entrepreneurs, and present themselves as experts on technology, business, Silicon Valley etc, but have declined to actually do the hard work of setting up a business, let alone growing it to success.

So when Australians give advice about "how to start a tech company", the first question to ask is "How many have you personally started? And how did they go?".

One of the things that I've come to understand about Australia since leaving (I've live in Berlin now, before that I was in London) is that the average level of professional work is quite mediocre by global standards - this is not just in tech, but across all industries. Australians have had it very easy for about 2 decades now, getting rich through a property boom and a mining boom, but most have never had to really compete on a global level. An awful lot of people cruise in their jobs, doing something that's good enough for the Australian market, and they've had a comfortable career doing it. So why change?

The problem is, that if you do achieve PMF in an economy that operates primarily at this level, you're not going to have PMF in an economy that operates at a higher level of sophistication and competence. That's why I think the strategy of "start local, grow global" is a fool's errand, and risks turning into "start local, burn some cash trying to go global, stay local".

I also dispute that there is an advantage to keeping a tech team in Australia. The salaries are still quite high (particularly in Sydney) but the talent is again, not that good. This is both in tech and tech management, however there ARE exceptions[1], and the situation is improving - Atlassian have produced a lot of people who know what it takes to run a global, successful tech business, and now we are starting to see a second generation of top-notch people being developed in fast-growing Australian startups like Canva and SafetyCulture[2].

There are plenty of companies who have sold into the US market from day 1 from outside the US. HotJar from Malta. My current employer, ChartMogul. Travis CI, also from here in Berlin. There are hundreds more, but those are the ones that just jumped to mind.

If you want to be a global company, then think like a global company from day one. This is as true in Australia as anywhere else, but it's taken a long time to sink in there.

[1] Of course, the exceptional people generally know it, and command matching salaries. As an aside (to this aside), I'm currently reading Camille Fournier's excellent "The Manager's Path", which is like a museum of management practises that I've never seen in Australia.

[2] SafetyCulture is an exception to my "start global" thesis. They did start locally, then grow. I think this is because of two main things: In health and safety things, Australia does generally lead the world, or come close to it. I used to work in construction in Australia, and am continually shocked at the practises I see in the EU and the US when I visit. The other thing is that I've seen SafetyCulture hire a lot of very good people, which is never a bad thing for a business to do.

For those asking where these graphs are coming from, that's ChartMogul (https://chartmogul.com). We're free if you've got less than $10K MRR!

I'm kinda astonished that this even needs to be negotiated. It should be the default at any half-decent employer.

This is one of the things that makes me think software development, like most other professions, should really have a formal code of ethics. If a lawyer or a construction engineer tried to do something equally dodgy, they would very soon find themselves hauled before a professional authority.

It should be made clear to the employees, management and investors of Kite that this is the sort of thing that marks you as someone willing to engage in unethical and underhanded behaviour. I wouldn't hire any such person into any team I manage, and I suspect quite a few other people wouldn't either. Actions have consequences. Especially unethical actions.

I remember that time - there were even people trying to sell guides purporting to teach people how to set up their own million-dollar homepage!

"Here are our coding guidelines. If you don't like them, the door is over there."

Strangely enough, I was just talking to someone here in Berlin last night about Adioso, and was wondering what happened to it. Good to see you guys still going, albeit in a new form.

And maybe they will.

I suspect nothing will convince you, because you've decided that you don't care who suffers for your actions - people in poorer countries, or future generations. This is a rationalisation on your part, not a failure of the scientists.

Australians can get an E-3 visa - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-3_visa

But the rest of your point still holds.

Yes, as others have pointed out, I was referring to Brexit, which has created a lot of uncertainty for those wanting to start or grow a business (and others, too).

It most certainly has not: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jan/09/uk-eu-citize...

Because those of us in say, Berlin, are doing our damnedest to encourage them here, where we need them for our engineering teams?

Apropos of this, I was in Paris recently at a startup event, and was pleasantly shocked at the sheer number of startups and people I saw doing things.

This is a good move by the French, and will help attract entrepreneurs away from other countries (particularly like those just across the channel currently inflicting generational economic damage on themselves.)

Actually, you don't. Former Presidents are just addressed as "Mr Obama".

http://emilypost.com/advice/addressing-a-former-president-of...

The problem is, of course, that how "hard" Brexit is, is not really up to the UK, or its parliament.

It'll depend what sort of deal the rest of the EU is willing to strike, and unless either the UK is willing to compromise on allowing free movement of people, or the EU is willing to compromise on the indivisibility of the "four freedoms" - neither of which seems likely - then the Brexit is, in fact, going to be quite hard.

No, US citizens can enter Poland (or more correctly the Schengen area), and stay there for 90 days in any 180 day period. This does not give you the right to work there.

Ultimately, the UK economy is very dependent on the housing bubble that has built up over the last decade.

Governments will be forced to do everything they can to keep it inflated, as if it pops, then the damage to the UK economy will be immeasurable.

ChartMogul | Berlin, Germany | DevOps Engineer | Onsite preferred, remote considered, visas available.

ChartMogul (https://chartmogul.com) provides analytics to subscription businesses by analysing their transaction data from Stripe, Recurly, Braintree, Chargify, or with our new Import API, just about anything you can imagine. We're growing strongly, with ever more customers and revenue.

After a year of huge growth, the time has come to evolve our infrastructure from a monolithic Ruby on Rails app to a service-based architecture to handle the ever-increasing amounts of data our customers trust us with. So we’re looking for an experienced DevOps Engineer to play a key part in this.

I'd love to talk to you if you've got something like the following:

  - Several years professional experience building and managing service-oriented architectures for production web applications.
  - Strong knowledge of provisioning and orchestration tools. We presently use Salt, Terraform and Packer.
  - Strong knowledge of Linux system administration, preferably Ubuntu.
  - Strong knowledge of cloud environments, particularly AWS and DigitalOcean.
  - Good communication and planning skills
  - You speak fluent professional English
  - You also speak fluent Git.

I'm ChartMogul's Director of Engineering, so drop me a line at jason@chartmogul.com if you're interested.

Our hiring process: Informal interview, technical interview, team lunch/interview (including a visit to Berlin if you're not from here)

What's this? Conservatives complaining that a business wants to pick and choose who it does business with? I thought they were in favour of that.

ChartMogul (https://chartmogul.com) | Berlin, Germany | Full Time | ONSITE, VISA

ChartMogul provides analytics for subscription businesses, so they can make the decisions that will grow their business. We're a small team of 11 people in Berlin, Germany, have been running for a year, and we're growing at a nice rate.

I'm looking for a DevOps engineer(http://chartmogul.breezy.hr/p/05eff6842e0c-devops-engineer-w...) and a Senior Backend Engineer(Not online yet) to help us make the transition from a monolithic Rails app to microservices so we can handle our growing customer base.

Our tech stack is Ruby/Rails/Redis/PostgreSQL/Marionette/Backbone (though we'll be likely adding to this soon), and we use Salt/Terraform/Packer/Docker to managing our infrastructure.

It's an English-speaking office, we're all fun people, and visa assistance is available for good candidates.

Shoot me an email at jason@chartmogul.com if you'd like to know more, or want to send through a CV.

I wouldn't touch a Software Engineering job in Sydney at $80,000. That doesn't buy much of a lifestyle in one of the world's most expensive cities.

Visas are pretty easy to come by in Berlin - google "EU Blue Card".

I moved to Berlin recently from Sydney. My rent is 60% of what I was paying in Sydney, and for a nicer apartment. I can't believe more people aren't moving here.

(Maybe I shouldn't say so. Keep the secret to those who know.)

It takes time to recover from burnout - sometimes months. The best thing for you to do is just let that take its course, and not try to push yourself back to 100%. That will only bake in the burnout, and it'll take longer for your to recover.

So go on holidays, meet with friends, read fiction, find some new hobbies. Whatever gives you pleasure, and isn't work, or an attempt to push yourself.

And with time, you will find yourself returning to how you were.