I’m Joining Stripe to Work on Atlas
kalzumeus.com
kalzumeus.com
> I never thought I could build a Fog Creek, but I saw a bunch of other geeks building Poker Co-pilot and Perfect Table Plan and skeet-shooting scoring software, and I was pretty sure I could at least do something like that.
I'm the geek who built (and continues to run) Poker Copilot. Patrick got the order of events backwards.
What actually happened is that I started Poker Copilot in a large part because Patrick inspired me by managing to launch a software product (Bingo Card Creator) after just one week of development.
All the best working for a boss again, Patrick! I'm sure there will be plenty of interesting twists and turns in the years ahead in this remarkable life of yours .
/oldschool
Today, it is all different. We are all hyper-connected and the old barriers are much diminished. This means a founder in Silicon Valley, where the infrastructure is solid, can continue to do incredible things but, now, so too can founders everywhere. Yes, it can help to be geographically at the heart of it all but it is no longer an indispensable part of startup success.
I think Stripe's Atlas takes a huge additional step in helping to remove the accident of a founder's location from the list of barriers to entry in the world's startup club. I have explained my views in more detail here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11166417#11168750
And what a felicitous teaming between Patrick and Stripe to help further that goal. Great people all round, working to achieve great goals! I cannot imagine a better combination. Very exciting and congrats to all.
1. For taxes? If I live in the UK and start my business with Atlas does the US get the corporation tax revenue or the UK (or a split of the two)?
2. For data security/privacy? Is the data I store now subject to access by the US government through National Security letters and the like? I believe that if I was storing EU citizen data I'm subject to privacy shield but all data would be more susceptible to US government requests. Is this accurate?
Edit: Quite shocked at the number of downvotes a completely legitimate question is getting...
You better have these questions answered before heading to Atlas.
I don't think you are accusing them of anything.
Yes, they are honest questions, but unrelated to Atlas. If you have doubts about taxes or privacy in the US, Atlas is not going to help you in anyway.
From the FAQ[1]
While incorporating in the U.S. can make many things much easier, it also comes with long-term legal and tax implications. You should think carefully about whether it’s best for your business and consult advisors as necessary.
Pretty clear.
Your first question, about taxes, is particularly complicated. Here are the relevant tax treaties:
https://www.irs.gov/businesses/international-businesses/unit...
While they seek to prevent double taxation (and tax evasion), they are packed with dense legalese full of clauses and subclauses designed to make certain types of income taxable in different places. To navigate that question, you'd need a highly experienced tax accountant/attorney with specific experience in UK/US tax treaties. Moreover, that person would need a strong understanding of what you do, how/where you sell, and how/if/when you plan to pay yourself.
Your second question is even more complicated. First, if you incorporate in a country like the US, your corporation is considered a person in that country and is thus bound by that country's laws. I trust that you did enough research to know that.
Second, recent history has demonstrated that the UK (as a Five Eyes nation) shares intelligence data with the United States. Moreover, recent history has demonstrated that the UK will work at the behest of the US intelligence community. This is governed by years of treaties and high level agreements. Consequently, the first thing you need to wonder is whether your government would just hand everything over, regardless of whether you have a US corporation or not.
Third, if you do incorporate in the US, you would be subject to US law, but US law can generally be fought in a court. The question becomes whether or not you could afford to fight an NSL. Could your business afford a long, highly distracting process where it is you versus a government??
But then, you need to look at yourself. Do you have any secrets that could be used as leverage against you?? If you plan to fight a well funded intelligence agency, you'd need to be prepared for them to fight hard.
I tend to argue that if a well funded intelligence agency truly wants information, they'll get it.
So, while your questions were honest, they were anything but straightforward. And, they aren't actually relevant to Atlas.
Rather, you and a group of experts need to sit down and figure out the costs, potential costs and the benefits of incorporating in the US. If it still makes sense, Atlas is a tool. But Atlas can't help you navigate the complicated relationship between your company, international law, agreements like NATO/other intelligence sharing agreements, EU law and two (possibly three) tax authorities.
And, with all due respect, neither can Hacker News. Every situation is so different that anyone who is qualified to answer those questions wouldn't as they understand how deeply complicated they are.
I'm surprised at the downvotes too - I'd have thought anyone outside the US and not knowing the laws (probably of both countries) would have similar questions to avoid landing themselves with an expensive mess.
To which the answer may well be "No. Right now, Atlas is US-centric, but could potentially broaden its scope in the future to include other jurisdictions".
Personally, I'm not worried about Atlas, in the same way as I'm not worried about other US company startup facilities.
When I started my latest UK company, I used a UK accountancy service, who handled the initial set-up for me.
It's similar to their rollout of payment processing across the globe - they've done it slowly as they've had to incorporate each jurisdiction's regulations.
Solving the incorporation problem is only the first of many problems.
---
Please understand that none of the following is a criticism of Stripe. If we hadn't been accepted to the beta we'd be dead in the water right now and our customers would have been screwed. I also expect the solutions to become easier as more people in more countries face the same problems.
(Btw… one small suggestion for the Stripe Atlas team if anyone there is reading this… how about a forum where Atlas users in the same countries can swap information?)
---
So, the questions you asked are completely legitimate.
Trying to answer them ourselves has cost us an inordinate amount of money on legal & tax advice so far and we're still no closer to answers.
The problem is this:
The moment you're operating in two countries you are subject to the same legal, tax & accounting rules that multi-national corporations have to conform to.
There _are_ existing services that are geared towards tackling the insane levels of complexity involved but the pricing also assumes that you are a large multi-national corporation.
So, to give you an idea: Several reputable firms all quoted us the equivalent of an engineer's salary for a month just to _estimate_ the price of getting our ducks in a row.
For my company this is a LOT of money. We're bootstrapping and are barely ramen profitable.
Also, and I'm sure this happens to everyone at least once, at the time I did not understand that what they were quoting for was to prepare an estimate for what it would cost to answer our questions. I thought this was the quote to answer our questions!
When the estimate itself arrived it was for the equivalent to an engineer's salary for a year, with _no_ guarantee that further complexities (and costs) would not come up during or after the process.
An expensive lesson.
Currently we're trying to navigate the process ourselves by interacting directly with the .za & USA revenue services and the .za Reserve Bank.
Needless to say, this is hell on trying to get any actual work done in the meantime :-)
Why did you chose Atlas (ie US Incorporation), giving those micro-scale multinational issues, rather than incorporate in SA?
We were already incorporated in SA but we also needed to be incorporated in the USA if we wanted to keep serving our customers.
It's a SaaS and most customers don't even know or care that we are not in the US.
I guess it varies depending on the type of business you are in.
Was it necessary to set up a company in RSA? Why not just be employees or contractors of the US company you happen you own? That's what I was going to do when I looked into doing this (myself, not via Atlas).
1) Whether you are an individual or a company, you still need permission from the South African Reserve bank to "just happen to own" a US company.
2) Whether the offshore company is owned by an individual or another .za company, you are still liable for tax to both the .za government and the offshore country. If you don't want to be double-taxed you need to set up a structure that allows for transfer-pricing and that conforms with the international tax treaties in effect between the two countries.
tl;dr whether you or your company owns the offshore entity makes no difference to your legal & tax obligations. :-P
edit: word salad
Well, there happens to be this guy Patrick, who sometimes hangs out here under the nickname patio11 :-) And he even left a comment on this story:
2. Yes because you'd be a US company.
Because a lot of countries have provisions for taxing income of foreign corporations locally if they deem that the corporation is controlled and operated from their country.
My UK accountant did specifically warn me about tax risks around this years ago - I don't remember the specific conditions where it might arise, but you should not take this lightly.
They would tax the individuals when they repatriated income.
In terms of taxing it, they would try to recover taxes from the entity itself first, but if the entity itself is non-responsive, they would go after its assets and directors and cash flows in or moving through the UK (and for now also the EU).
Since the issue here is specifically companies that are foreign entities operating out of the UK, there will be generally be something they can go after - if there isn't, then the company couldn't realistically be considered to be operating out of the UK for tax purposes anyway.
It's absolutely possible for UK owners to operate a foreign entity in ways that HMRC will agree does not imply taxes are due in the UK (been there, done that), but the point is that you need to be careful, because a few wrong moves and you may worst case have two jurisdictions both expecting you to pay taxes of the same money.
[0] http://www.menzies.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/INTERNAT...
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/usa-tax-treaties
People in the US have no idea how easy they have it with creating a company, something I helped to fix a little tiny bit in Italy: https://blog.therealitaly.com/2015/04/16/fixing-italy-a-litt...
One of the key points:
> All told, the price of creating a company in Italy was several months worth of salary for the average Italian worker, whereas even at minimum wage, someone in Oregon could open that LLC after a few days worth of work.
Both a feature and a bug, is that there is no federal incorporation statute for private persons in the United States.
That sounded really high, so I looked it up here:
http://www.sos.ca.gov/business-programs/business-entities/fo...
It looks like CA is $70, unless I'm missing something. I've never started an LLC in CA though. (EDIT: keep reading down the thread for more clarification.)
(But: there's another thread here that says IL is $500, which does appear to be correct.)
From the LLC-1 form:
"Filing Form LLC-1 will obligate most LLCs to pay an annual minimum $800 tax to the California Franchise Tax Board. For more information about taxes, go to https://www.ftb.ca.gov."
The process takes a few minutes in the simplest case:
https://indberet.virk.dk/myndigheder/stat/ERST/Start_virksom...
http://www.doingbusiness.org/rankings
But their reported procedures/costs differ from what you wrote:
http://www.doingbusiness.org/data/exploreeconomies/denmark/#...
Something that's nice in the US as compared to most continental European countries is that no 'initial capital' is required.
Unless you're doing something super simple, you don't want to mess around with a "single proprietorship" or the like.
But the whole point of a company is limited liability, an entity which can own property, sue and be sued, etc. separately from its collection of owners.
You can do that in any country. Austria sucks donkeyballs for staring an actual company however. You need 35.000 in capital and you need to involve a notary. The additional cost for actually getting the company in place is a few thousand euro, you need to listen to the notary read down the contract you made yourself and then you are subject to all sorts of utterly bizarre rules and regulations such as publishing your yearly report in a specific newspaper which charges you an arm and a leg for this privilege.
Can we please fix this?
German administration feels exactly the same. I have heard that situation being called "Prussian administration": slow and cumbersome to operate like a Prussian tank, efficient in its task like a Prussian tank.
BTW, here is a Prussian tank: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A7V#/media/File:A7v-wotan-dior...
Santander's mobile app is awful though. It kind of works but it's a chunky pre-iOS 7 hybrid monstrosity. Web access is pretty smooth however.
Co-op who I was previously are a crap beast on all counts.
Over the past few decades we got our rules "synced" to the rest of the EU (or the rest of the world). We now have several forms of limited liability companies. The capital requirement ranges from approx. 0.20 USD (IVS) to 100.000 USD (A/S) (or more ... if you want to make a bank).
It used to be that to do a Danish LLC you had to put up at least 20.000 USD in capital but because of the EU you could just go to the UK and start a LLC with no/very little capital there and then operate in DK with the same creditor protection.
Anyways; the point was that in many places creating a company is of very little trouble.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120831053519/http://www.govern...
It makes me very happy that it's working out for you!
But I am going to ask all of you to tread carefully when taking advice from well-intentioned experts. Over a period of 9 or so years, Patrick went from expressing opinions about a) why desktop software is still viable b) why web based is a better option than desktop because desktop causes too many pains c) why doing a SaaS model is better than the one time web based software (web version of BCC) d) why it may not be worth the stress of (some stressful event associated with clients in medical industry) for a SaaS which is generating less than $2000 MRR e) why a business like StarFighter is better because you feel like waking up and doing it for 5+ years in a row and f) eventually there will be a good reason for the decision to leave/stop Starfighter. Amongst these opinions, there would be two kinds of takeaway messages - the ones which are true independent of the specific time period (don't piss off your customer) vs the ones which are more subjective and epoch specific - e.g. Patrick's own admission of benefiting from AdSense (via the Content Network or some such thing) for BCC, which was probably not true by the time it was expressed publicly and is almost certainly not true today.
There is almost positively going to be a fair amount of time lag before these ideas germinate in the experts' head and they slowly turn into action in their lives, and by the time they are ready to write about it, sometimes they are close to the winding down phase of said idea. For the people who are keen to "follow suit", as they say, it is very hard to know if it is a good idea to invest the next 3-5 years of your lives trying to adopt the same idea.
This is all fine and obvious, you say. My concern has to do with the "other side" of the picture. When people were lavishing praise on the SaaS model about 3-4 years ago, I suppose I wasn't the only one who wondered "Wait a minute. What about the fact that a SaaS business takes up your mind space 24 x 7 x 365? Isn't that a cost most of us don't wish to pay?" And after a while, Patrick mentions in a MicroConf talk about doing an eBook or WP plugin first before embarking on a SaaS - all great advice. Just wish more people consider the balancing forces and always ask themselves whether they are getting the full picture.
I guess the takeaway is that no option is without its disadvantages.
At GDS (GOV.UK etc) we’re working on a programme called GaaP: Government as a Platform. This aims to provide components to radically simplify the difficulty of building services focused on user needs for the rest of government.
Tom Loosemoore (now ex-GDS but hey) gave this talk at Code For America last year: https://youtube.com/watch?v=VjE_zj-7A7A . It’s obviously quite long (and in my opinion worth watching the lot) but the topic relevant part comes at ~28 minutes in. Here Tom demonstrates how pulling together the pieces of GaaP could potentially lead to registering s company in 3.5 minutes.
That a private sector company could do the same thing is great, but sometimes you need to refactor the root inefficiency rather than patch the symptom.
This is also my view on a lot of fintech.
However... if the incumbents aren't doing something, then eating away at the edges may eventually either overcome the incumbents or force them into change.
I don't think Stripe could replace what govts do, but I can certainly see that Stripe being successful will put them at the table to influence or direct the which the way govts do things.
Because barriers to emigration are so high, countries don't have to compete with each other for quality of governance, and so it turns out that only the private sector can do it.
Your implication is that competition has to be with external agents. It’s perfectly possible to compete with the status quo.
The private sector has a profit motive at its core: make more money for shareholders. The public sector also has a profit motive: save more money and be more effective for tax-payers. They’re both examples of efficiency, two sides of the same coin.
Taxpayers don't want efficient use of funds either. From the point of view of a taxpayer, the most effective use of funds is to have them all benefit yourself. Everyone wants to maximize the piece of the pie that is assigned to them. Politicians use this as an excuse to grow the scope of government, regardless of what side you vote for. As a result, the voting apparatus does not serve to optimize government efficiency.
To argue your second point, tax payers want an easy life. If we can cut minutes or hours off your interactions with government year on year then you’ll be happier, regardless of whether your overall burden goes up or down.
Believe me, I don't sleep well at night, knowing you've got to motivate people to generate huge profit, so they can create great companies like Stripe. But it appears to be an ongoing trend.
Even the recents efforts made by GDS or USDS will be overshadowed by new, hip, fintech (and govtech?) startups.
Edit: added last sentence.
To which patio11 perfectly replied that note had gotten stuck in his spam folder :)
Patrick replied (very accurately, as it turned out) back in 2011 to my attempt to do a micropayments startup:
"I would strongly advise rethinking starting a payment processor as a student. It is relationship-, credibility-, and capital-intensive. It also requires truly massive scale before being worth any money. (Incredibly massive scale in micropayments. If you make $0.01 off each transaction you have to facilitate hundreds of thousands a month just to pay for the founding team's ramen. If you somehow possess the magic that you need to find 100,000 paying customers you shouldn't end up eating ramen!)"
As someone who started down the payments path and desisted pretty quickly ("fail fast", they call it :) ) I'm extremely impressed by Stripe, and they've definitely gotten a great talent and great guy in Patrick.
This. I had Starfighter bookmarked to dive into this Christmas during my holiday break. No time before then.
Very cool idea, but realistically I can only spend so much time on dev stuff and it wasn't going to beat out my other priorities.
Fuck that. It's a job that is possible to do and possible to do well and my life is too short (takes bite of ham sandwich) to spend it getting good at that.
So: I am still in love with the concept and still pursuing it, but I have fallen totally out of love with that particular business model and am happy to blowtorch it out of my life.
More writeup to come! Patrick's at Stripe now; Erin & I have more news coming. Ironically: expect more challenges from us, not less. :P
I stopped referring people to a former employer because I saw how much they jerked around people during the pipeline.
Good luck on the new news, and thanks for getting Starfighter as far as you did. :)
I imagine it's like the HomeBrew situation every day except 10 times worse because you recommended the candidate and the interviewer is your client. And unfortunately it's hard to make a business of telling your client they're doing it wrong.
This is all compounded by the fact that the devs who benefited most from their service were not Christopher Hemsworth looking Phd, ex-googlers who could get an interview with a phone call. Then come in with so much positive bias that as long as they didn't poo themselves during the interview they'd get hired. It was for people who were extremely skilled, but lacked the right pedigree or interviewing skills to be able to get the jobs they were very qualified for.
Curious to see what the real answer is.
THIS
But the answer about will there be challenges we maintain is "very yes".
I also really enjoyed stockfighter challenges. Between those six and my university's copy of Harris' Trading and Exchanges, I learned quite a bit. I bailed out on the AVR challenges though.
From a purely selfish viewpoint, I also want to work at places where the hiring process isn't really just whiteboard or gotcha questions, but instead actually has some consideration that, you know, demonstrating the ability to produce working useful code matters. Maybe I'm just nuts. The last interview I was in (for what people here would say is data science/engineering) involved a couple of big-O questions and two ill-specified SQL queries . . . sigh.
In other words, maybe it turned out to be a better filter for self-starters who might be nascent entrepreneurs (reflecting the founders who created it), but sometimes those characteristics aren't what hiring companies are looking for when they have a specific role to fill.
Sometimes you interview people who would be outstanding in certain roles or for certain companies--but maybe not the one you happen to be currently working for.
I'm struggling here, but FizzBuzz is effective as a tool to weed people out, but FizzBuzz taken to the extreme doesn't necessarily equate to a tool to rule people in.
I really enjoyed the Stockfighter levels too, and reading The Big Short / Flash Boys / Moneyball in preparation. The levels had the right level of difficulty & I kept feeling I levelled up (especially when optimizing levels, I'm still proud of my Level 5 score). I didn't enjoy the AVR levels the same way & bailed quickly on those.
I got spooked after someone posted on HN that their Starfighter referral had only bypassed the CV screen of the job interview, not programming or whiteboard challenges. That made me question the time I'd spent on Starfighter - I kept a time log in Harvest along the way, and it's about the same amount of time I'd spend on developing a new product to sell online.
I still enjoyed playing Stockfighter though, and it helped me sharpen my Golang skills.
The advantage Starfighter had was that the most painful rejections for recruiters aren't necessarily the "no offer" at the end of an interview, but the "no response" to outreach - even when highly targeted.
Starfighter was designed to have a pipeline of qualified candidates who would conceivably be much more approachable than those who are cold-called/emailed by agency recruiters, not to mention the benefit of the names. Getting approached by Patrick or Thomas & Erin is much different for a candidate than getting approached by a recruiter with no name recognition. Even recruiters with a bit of name recognition don't get high response rates all the time.
I was personally rooting for Starfighter for several reasons, most of which to try and take recruiting in a bit of a different direction. I still hope the idea can be salvaged in some way, and wish Patrick and Thomas & Erin the best in the new endeavors.
But we're sourcing non-traditional candidates, and the --- you know what, I'm getting ahead of myself on a blog post I'm still tuning up.
In any case, that might explain what was so painful about the business for us: we had high frequency exposure to the worst part of it.
You also had cred with the hiring folks, so that was taken care of as well - hiring clients were going to be easy to identify without much effort.
The hard part would be scaling it to some degree - Patrick and you/Erin wouldn't be able to talk to every candidate if you were going to make serious $, and then you'd have to hire actual recruiters (who are wildly unpopular), and then you're starting to approach the problem of being like everyone else (other than the game) if the recruiters behave like...recruiters.
If you ever want to discuss recruiting stuff, I'm easy to find.
Yeah you are. Do you use this same username everywhere?
I always knew that if we continued to grow, that this part would go away, but I would have struggled to keep this going as long as I could. Even if it meant less serious $. It doesn't seem unreasonable to expect that had we grown to the point where hiring "actual recruiters," it would have been impossible to find ones with the same mindset.
Wow it actually makes a lot of sense. Especially since you seemed to handpick candidates and vouch for them from a technical point of view.
I wonder if classic recruiters have this problem as they (most of the time) just bet on the number and are not invested personally.
As such I doubt it impacts them much, if at all, beyond the obvious disappointment of not getting the salary cut, which they surely mitigate by just throwing candidates until one sticks.
I feel like, doing recruiting through work sample challenges is basically 80-90% of my whole brand.
That's a fundamental difference.
What I want to find are people who are spooky good at specialized, high-status tech skills. HFT is like that. So is reversing. So are like 10 other specialties I can think of.
My thesis is that the training requirements for these things are way overblown.
What sort of specialties do you have in mind?
I ran 0x41414141.com [1] for about 4 years. It was a set of CTF-style challenges of increasing difficulty with submissions via "secret" email addresses, a sendmail autoresponder and me - operating under the pseudo cavalier@0x41414141. It's singular goal was recruiting.
At the time, I was working with a totally badass team in a firm with a decidedly not-sexy brand for us security-types. We were hiring as fast as we could and _always_ had positions open. When we got someone good into the pipeline, we generally had no problem hiring them - the team and the work made that easy - but our candidate funnel was just too damn small. We had exhausted our referral pool, we were bringing on as many fresh grads as we could train, but it wasn't enough to keep up. We needed to broaden the funnel. Enter 0x41414141.com.
It was completely and totally unsupported, unrecognized and unreported through the official corporate recruiting channels. It was me, on my own time and my own dime with the quiet support of a few other guys in the shop. It had a singular purpose: to meet like-minded hackers and see if there was any chance they'd be interested in joining our merry little band of hackers.
Within the first year, I established the equivalent of a "repeatable sales process." There's the natural stages of the challenges themselves, but then the more delicate stages of transition:
(1) from the impersonal interaction with the service to the personal email exchange with cav,
(2) ...to a serious discussion about a new job
(3) ...to an IRL phone conversation
(4) ...to an open and honest talk about who we were, what we're doing and next steps
(5) ...to getting introduced to an actual corporate recruiter
Of course, like any "repeatable sales process" each stage is not only the continued progression but also qualification. The funnel was disappointingly ruthless, and that was just to get an intro to the recruiter. In any given year, I had:
(1) thousands of folks start challenges,
(2) several hundred make notable progress,
(3) traded personal email with dozens,
(4) got serious with 10s,
(5) interviewed a few,
(6) hired a couple
In the end, the results just didn't justify the effort.
To be clear - I loved running 0x41414141.com. I met a lot of great hackers and even hired a few. Many are HN'ers. (hi guys!) Many of the "security community rockstars" stumbled across the site and ran through the challenges as a fun exercise on a Sunday afternoon. I also watched - and coached - many clear newbs through the process, and was impressed with their grit, creativity and determination. I even hired a couple complete newbs, including a female, recent PoliSci grad working as a nanny who turned out to be an OUTSTANDING reverse engineer, when given the right support and environment to grow. She single-handedly kept my enthusiasm for running 0x41414141.com up for at least two years, even when the resulting hiring numbers made it clear it wasn't worth it.
I was really, really, really hoping Starfighter could "level up" the initial volume into that funnel, maintain (or improve!) the rough filtering percentages and have the resulting "hired" volume be higher and turn CTF recruiting into a sustainable business model. I'm disappointed it didn't work.
P.S. - this is the first time I've associated my real self with 0x41414141.com and the cavalier alter-ego. Congrats HN, you just got the scoop for this tiny little corner of history. While we're here...
Hello Internet, this is cavalier. If we connected
via that moniker, please reach out and connect
with my _real_ one. deets in my profile.
I am still totally sold on challenges and hiring! That's still what I'm doing! We're just changing the business model.
Would love to swap notes sometime. My wife is angling for an excuse to visit Chicago, but seeing as how winter's coming maybe y'all should visit Austin!
As one of the guys hired through this (who later helped, though 99% of it was cav), if you guys do catch up and trade notes, I would /love/ to be there. We're actually thinking of building something similar at my current company, but focused on a bit of a different type of hire.
[edit] look what I found: https://www.dropbox.com/s/4work5wxys4i29z/Photo%20Sep%2009%2...
You would not even believe how many weeks of my life I've spent the last ten years paying every cent I owe in Japan and the United States. Like every other business owner, I kvetch a bit about the rates, but I pay my taxes on time and in full because laws are laws.
We want to eliminate the stupid value-destroying busywork of complying with taxes, not taxes themselves. (Letting folks across the globe participate on equal and solid footing in the US market tends to increase value created worldwide, which is awesome, and also increases US tax collection at the margin.)
Oh yes! Italy was like that: it's not so much the taxes themselves, it's all the extraneous BS that surrounds them that takes so much time to deal with.
Now project #3 hits it big, someone wants to buy, and you want to sell... Get ready for months of trying to detangle your various business assets, server accounts, etc. in attempt to legally and properly give them the bits they've bought.
There's similar advice under "What Does the Timeline Look Like?" here https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/selling_s...
What is Stripe Atlas?
Stripe Atlas is a new product designed to give
entrepreneurs access to the basic building blocks
for starting a global internet business. We help you:
* Incorporate a company in the U.S.
* Open a U.S. bank account and get a tax ID number.
* Start a Stripe account to accept payments from around the world.
* Get guidance about U.S. law and taxes from Orrick and PwC.
* Access tools and resources from Amazon Web Services
(as well as $15,000 in AWS promotional credits for beta users).
If you have your own legal counsel or tax advisors, we also recommend speaking to them as you decide whether and how to set up your business with Atlas." https://stripe.com/atlas/faq#taxamplegal
"My name is Alan Glashwiecz, of Smoot, Sedgwick Associates. Am I correct in thinking that you are the Manfred Macx who is a director of a company called, uh, agalmic dot holdings dot root dot one-eight-four dot ninety-seven dot A-for-able dot B-for-baker dot five, incorporated?"
"Uh." Manfred blinks and rubs his eyes. "Hold on a moment." When the retinal patterns fade, he pulls on his glasses and powers them up. "Just a second now." Browsers and menus ricochet through his sleep-laden eyes. "Can you repeat the company name?"
"Sure." Glashwiecz repeats himself patiently. He sounds as tired as Manfred feels.
"Um." Manfred finds it, floating three tiers down an elaborate object hierarchy. It's flashing for attention. There's a priority interrupt, an incoming lawsuit that hasn't propagated up the inheritance tree yet. He prods at the object with a property browser. "I'm afraid I'm not a director of that company, Mr. Glashwiecz. I appear to be retained by it as a technical contractor with non-executive power, reporting to the president, but frankly, this is the first time I've ever heard of the company. However, I can tell you who's in charge if you want."
"Yes?" The attorney sounds almost interested.
"The president of agalmic.holdings.root.184.97.AB5 is agalmic.holdings.root.184.97.201. The secretary is agalmic.holdings.root.184.D5, and the chair is agalmic.holdings.root.184.E8.FF. All the shares are owned by those companies in equal measure, and I can tell you that their regulations are written in Python. Have a nice day, now!" He thumps the bedside phone control and sits up, yawning, then pushes the do-not-disturb button before it can interrupt again. After a moment he stands up and stretches, then heads to the bathroom to brush his teeth, comb his hair, and figure out where the lawsuit originated and how a human being managed to get far enough through his web of robot companies to bug him.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera...
This free ebook edition is made available by kind consent of my publishers, Ace and Orbit, under a Creative Commons license with certain restrictions attached. In particular, you may not create derivative works or use the work for commercial gain.
I don't think so. The book has 3 parts, but it's not part of a series
I think often the hidden costs in lawyers fees for complex advice on how various tax laws interact and accountants fees to meet various account requirement in these juristictions may eat up a lot of the benefit until you are a much larger company.
[1]https://www.kalzumeus.com/2015/05/01/talking-about-money/
1) 30k contracts don't line up, and you never know when the next opportunity arrives; steady income may be preferable even if it is lower.
2) Money isn't everything. Working on interesting problems with interrsting people is a lot more fulfilling than doing boring work that pays well.
It's very hard to do week in week out. Getting $30k per MONTH for a small business is generally a 3-6 month sales cycle. One-time projects can be shorter of course, esp. in network, but you're always on the biz dev grind if that's your model.
He wasn't 250k/yr salary for 2 consecutive years and a suspect accredited investor.
I think it's cool what he's done and what he's shared to the community, but I do think he gets glorified for his posts which are not always realistic for most people and the projection is that he's killing it when he really isn't.
Also, part of me read this and thought this was sad to see a fellow entrepreneur jump ship, even though I do like Stripe and Atlas.
It was lucrative, but not pleasant, and he made more enjoyable money working for himself.
Ultimately, the consulting business model for individuals or small teams sucks. You're only ever as good as next month, and juggling the sales v delivery cycles is hard, especially if sales/people doesn't excite you. (When you're charging $30K for the week, you can't bugger off for an hour to have a sales meeting.)
Consulting businesses can be scaled, but the dependence on finding the right, skilled people is harder than developing scalable product or software businesses - especially if, like Patrick, you have those skills.
I have to say, to me the downfall of starfighter was predictable. I LOVED microcorruption it was something I could get in fairly quickly and enjoy. But starfighter was requiring too much commitment to get the basics of operation and if I'm looking for a job I'd rather invest that time into brushing up my algorithms (since that's the hiring criteria these days...) rather than reading some background to play a "game" to eventually beat challenges and maybe get a job interview :/
All I can find is this:
> Starfighter is not only not hiring, but also closing its doors. We are 'pivoting.'
(FWIW, the "more to come" has so far been about the Ptaceks' next project, which is apparently something focused on security needs of startups, in collaboration with Jeremy Rauch, with details still apparently in flux; contact details for those interested are at http://latacora.com)
> We’re winding down Starfighter. I’ll have more to say tomorrow. Long story short: still doing challenges. Just not as Starfighter.
It all seems fascinating, but I am afraid to continue and do the last step of the enrollment. I don't know how is the process to close the company, what the representative agent can do for me, how much is to have an account on SVB (after the 24 free months), if it's easy to legally hire a person to work remotely anywhere, and if for some reason I will need to eventually travel to USA.
If someone have a answer for one of questions, I will be thankful.
Abracos.
Silicon Valley Bank's fees after the first 24 months vary depending on which of their services you choose to use, so there's no one-size-fits-all rate card we can point you to -- if you send me an email at edwin.wee@stripe.com, I'd be happy to chat more about this in detail.
Although we don't offer immigration or employment services as a part of Atlas, I'd love to hear more about your business to see how we can help and walk you through the final steps!
I'm not the person you replied to, but I have a question(s) I hope you can help with.
Is there a list of the minimum requirements to join Atlas? I can't seem to find it in your FAQ. Is it true that entry is granted (or not) based on an evaluation of the startups business plan? Do I have to convince someone at Stripe that my idea has legs before I'll be granted access?
Also, is the service exclusively for startups that deal in digital goods? Say I have a physical product that I need a US company to import and sell (via a fulfillment service). Would Stripe Atlas accept me as a client?
Once you're invited, we'll reach out to you for any additional personal or business information that's needed for incorporation and getting your bank account set up.
Atlas certainly isn't just for digital goods -- we've had quite a few businesses apply that sell physical goods.
You can request access at https://stripe.com/atlas#request-access, and please feel free drop me a line at edwin.wee@stripe.com once you fill that out, or if you have any other questions!
I am more interested in the Brazilian case.
I'm a gringo "permanently" living in Brazil and from a tax standpoint it was actually better for me to open a Brazilian company. You don't have to pay taxes on dividends you get from Brazilian companies but you do have to pay taxes on dividends from foreign companies. + Depending on your margins opting for the "simples" tax regime may give you lower corporate taxes than a US/EU company
In Brazil you don't pay tax on dividends because you pay higher taxes before. Otherwise you would paying double times. There are hidden taxes till you have the "dividends". And are you aware of the "Imposto de Renda" for companies and people?
I am very curious what formula you used to compare and reach the conclusion that in Brazil it's lower. This is also against some studies http://www.doingbusiness.org/rankings
A little off topic, but why is this? I don't doubt what he is saying but why is it not good enough to apply for a job via standard channels and not have to be in "the boys club" ?
What goes on the jobs pages is what's left.
At the highest level of abstraction, practitioners in different tribes do the same job, but the way other tribes do things might be unrecognizable and/or horrifying from your perspective.
You want to hire from your tribe. Buzzwords get picked up by people who don't really mean them in their original sense (see: enterprises doing waterfall and calling it agile) so buzzwords on resumes don't identify tribe, and an interview is only a few hours of a candidate in a contrived high-pressure situation where they're nervous/presenting the mask they think you want to see.
So you start with people you personally know to be in your tribe. When those run out, you realize you can trust the people you personally know to identify other tribe members, and this works up to the nth degree. If that's not enough, you learn that certain institutions (employers, universities, etc.) select, demand, or instill membership in your tribe, so you go looking for candidates who have been attached to these institutions first.
FWIW this is not unique to software by any means. I worked on the tech side of theater in college and have friends now working in that industry. Designers, stage and production managers, etc. in the real world are hired almost exclusively on reputation and recommendation. They are cold-emailed job offers (not ads to come compete for a job, but actual work) based on colleagues' experiences with them at previous gigs. Gigs often last only a few weeks, so you are playing this game constantly. You essentially cannot break in as a total outsider. You need to go to a school that is trusted to provide good interns (because its teachers are from the right tribe and it runs its student productions the right way), and impress at your internship, or else know someone who will convince their boss to take a chance on you. Sometimes hiring does have a formal application process, but you are not getting the job unless someone reading the application has heard of you or has a lot of respect for one of the institutions on your resume.
"The boys club" is a (flawed) attempt at instituting meritocracy by a system of recursive trust. I believe it's much better than the resume and interview dance, but I'd still love for software to discover its "blind audition" hiring technique.
I recently moved to Europe form Australia, I was a successful tribesman but voluntarily left my tribe because I liked the idea of relocation/traveling.
I was awarded an decent paying job in Netherlands but left soon after due to toxic culture which I wanted to protect myself from. I received other offers but non paid well so I tried to find a remote position. I had no options but "cold applications", which means I was heading for dire straights.
Essentially I went from a somebody to a nobody. I worked in a very successful team as a SRE/Production Engineer in Sydney to nothing, from precious metal to polluted soil.
The "cold apply" method has failed me for months, countless coding challenges and technical tasks (which I successfully completed) have left me without a job. Oh, I've done several dances and jumped many hoops without any fruits of my labour.
I fell into bad depression. I've had to work very hard to get out of the depression. Coming out of it I can see I need to change my approach and on the bright side it's been an important period of self discovery and learning.
I've now admitted defeat and will head back to Australia, start everything again and take little for granted. I'm blessed I have the option of retreat.
Thanks for the response.
The E3 visa is one of the best-kept secrets in the world. It's only granted to Australian citizens. It's why my employers (Pivotal) have around 10 Australians in our NYC office at any given time, because we've actively recruited from Australia ever since the E3 was introduced.
I'm an Australian and I am grateful every day that I am. I grew up in a wonderful country and now I can work for a great company in a vibrant industry in a vibrant city.
Email me (see profile) if you'd like me to pass you into our recruiters. If you want to stay in Sydney, we have an office in Sydney.
This is partly why the Bay Area is what it is for software.
I'm sorry you experienced this. It sucks. I wish you luck getting back on your feet in Australia.
As you can imagine, there is a ton of bookkeeping and bureaucratic pain associated with having an S-corp (like pretending to have annual meetings, and having to write minutes for them).
I don't think this is true. If you buy an ice sculpture for the office lobby, it's totally tax deductible (it's a business expense), but you can use money for whatever you want if you take it out of the bank as a "distribution" instead of a "paycheck." In that situation, you still pay income tax on the money, but not the other taxes.
So I think the trick here is, you pay yourself $70k in salary, but issue yourself a $30k profit sharing distribution.
Respectfully: it's also unethical, if you think about it carefully. Pay full freight on your payroll taxes: if you make so much much money that this dodge is material to you, you're the last person who should have a loophole to take advantage of.
Still, I totally agree that it's unethical.
Ha! "But foobar22 on the internets said it'd be okay if I claimed X as a deduction? Why am I being auditing?!"
There should be a global disclaimer when you sign up for an HN account that tells you to listen to your lawyer, your doctor, your accountant ...
Regarding your first paragraph, I'd agree that "claiming a low income" is a bad idea, and not just because it's illegal. Regarding the audit business, my accountant seems pretty confident that a straightforward tax return without too much any weirdness (real estate, huge equipment costs, etc.) is fairly safe from auditing, if I'm paid a salary that a software developer in my position might expect to make.
Regarding your second, more important paragraph: I'm pretty sure I disagree about it being unethical. I think the tax code is depressingly regressive, and I'd legitimately feel like I'd shirked a duty if I just ducked out on money I should have paid. I believe in the power of government, and having the money to back it up is important.
That said, the government decides what's taxable, and which actions should be incentivized. There are plenty of breaks that I probably "shouldn't have": Why do I get to pay less tax because I own a home, or because I got married? Why, as a "small business owner," can I deduct the cost of my insurance premiums, but employees can't? It seems silly, but I'm certainly not going to file at the single rate instead of the married one.
There are years and years of precedent about S-corporations paying shareholder-employees;[0] the "reasonable" salary bit comes up every time. The mental model I've been using has been: How much of this money am I making because I'm a developer, and how much is here because I run my own business? If my annual salary would be, say, $110,000 as a W-2 employee at some big company, but as a contractor I can bill $180,000 a year, I'd say the business grossed $70,000 farming out the work of a $110,000 programmer. To a certain kind of shop, working as a contractor is a valuable service: Companies don't have to go through the hassle of dealing with an employee, only a purchase order. Still, SOMEBODY has to deal with that hassle: Now, though, it's me.
[0] https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
tl;dr: if you do something commercial as a sole trader and not as a company, it's possible for you to be sued for your personal assets.
(Yes, it merely takes an publicly available work that the users could download themselves, and makes it available to each individually. That's essentially what Aereo did, and look at them now.)
If I was building an Internet of Things blender I would incorporate in a heartbeat.
If so, I have to say, that would make me a lot more concerned as a customer.....
Moral: back up your bookmarks.
In most jurisdictions, if you have control of a company (e.g. as the majority shareholder and director), and the company does something "bad" to the extent that it's illegal, the liability protection can be waived. Selling a self-driving car, in the knowledge that its behaviour is inadequate and would cause harm, may well result in loss of liability protection.
In short, insolvency is generally protected, but "bad things" often have less protection.
I spooked myself into starting the process with LegalZoom at some point, but then couldn't figure out how to transfer assets, and then I got real sleepy.
Just saying. :)
Probably more important, although I didn't realize it at the time, is that being a corporation gave Tarsnap more credibility, especially when dealing with other corporations. I saw a sharp increase in the number of large users of Tarsnap after it I incorporated it.
In my opinion incorporating only makes sense if you have multiple cofounders and want shared ownership, or if you get investment etc.
If you are running your business alone, I don't see the point of incorporation.
Limited liability doesn't magically protect you from lawsuits. But it does cost a lot of money (obviously this depends on location, but even if it's cheap to register a business somewhere, all the accounting and minimum taxes and reporting etc sum up).
I run my company as a sole proprietorship, and I'm not planning to incorporate any time soon.
I've seen people waste thousands of euros on incorporating and setting up a company, only to close up again a year later... what a waste of time and money...
* Same goes for anyone who sues you.
* Business partners and clients won't deduct taxes from your invoices, but often will if you're a sole proprietor.
* If you ever have employees and later liquidate the company, you can have arranged in advance for them to get a portion of the proceeds, which may or may not be motivating earlier on in the company.
Maybe few of these apply to you, since if you get sued you'll surely just flee to Antarctica to snark from amongst the penguins, who are likely to be the only employees you'll ever have either way.
Entrepreneurs know when they're making a bad decision, whether consciously or not.
[Edited for brevity. No disrespect, but hate to see a Developer give up on their independence]
Perhaps "I hope this new gig works out for you right now, but really hope to see you running something of your own again at some point in the future"?
Joining a larger organization can provide the opportunity to accomplish things that would be difficult or impossible on your own. And if it doesn't work out, or eventually becomes disappointing, it's still possible to hop back on the entrepreneurial horse and ride off into the sunset.
Same with countless other jobs, such as working at Facebook, Google, Amazon, Snapchat, etc
He'll come back to the dark side soon enough and build a sustainable business model (with the benefit of experience at Stripe, of course) :-)
If this is anything like how the company I'm at is doing internationalization there will likely be pushing (and some implementing) technical requirements to make the product culturally accessible. There will be B2B, and in this case B2Gov discussions. I'm sure he will also be heading up finding office space and hiring others to do the work.
This is a very likely a senior management position in addition to I'm sure a senior technical position.
People tend to see things through the lens of their own thoughts and experiences. The author of the post in question is probably just trying to provide advice based on how they'd feel in a similar situation. The wording probably made it seem more abrasive than it was intended to be.
I love what you guys are doing with Atlas and will be rooting for you and for Stripe Japan, sounds like a great opportunity to join that team for the right people!
sigh
If you know nothing, well...a force multiplier doesn't help much when you're multiplying it by zero.
I've since found a couple of good ones by cold applying. What helped the most was reading a couple of books about sales.
Essentially, when you're applying with a cover letter and resume/CV, you're making a very short sales pitch and need to make the most of it. The good news is that most cover letters and resumes people send out don't have this focus at all, so it's relatively easy for you to stand out.
Sometimes, the hardest part is accepting that there's nothing wrong or dishonest about selling yourself. When I've reviewed resumes in the past to decide who to interview, I've found that most of them overlook the fact that I have a problem I'm trying to solve, and I'm looking for someone to help me solve it. If the first sentence on your resume/cover letter shows me that you've read the job posting, understand the problems I'm trying to solve, and tells me why you're the right person to help solve them, you really stand out from the competition.
YMMV, of course. What I've observed may be atypical, and it's entirely possible I've just had good luck.
It's just worth remembering that while cold applications tend to have a low success rate, applications sent in response to job postings are really, really awful. Being non-awful significantly helps your chances, but not as much as meeting people and building a strong network.
All of my tech jobs I've found through an external hiring process or via recruiters.
Other than that, I totally agree with your question.
So I thought I'd try to draw your attention to a suggestion I made in:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12465972
;-)
This section worries me a bit, as it's the sort of thing that doesn't consider the possibility of a major world-wide crisis. There are plenty of conceivable futures where these things could happen. A simple one is a small-scale non-nuclear war between China and US, where they disconnect completely from the larger Internet, but we avoid a global thermonuclear war. The continental European countries saw a 50% drop in GDP through WW2, and it could very well happen again.
Atlas is an incredibly cool, potentially game-changing project, and Stripe was already a game-changing company before launching it. I'm excited to see what happens next!
Way to go, Patrick!!
You just made me discover Atlas (I must have lived under a rock last year) and I'm really impressed by the idea. It is not great, it is huge !
I quickly looked through the Q&A and the first thing that strikes me is that the effective cost is not clear. Ok 500$ entry cost, but there are many other costs like bank, taxes, IRS, 125$ yearly for the agent, etc. Most of these costs aren't even clearly specified. Thus it's actually like an offer to buy a cat in a bag.
The strength of stripe is its simplicity and clarity. You know upfront what it will cost you. There isn't any hidden cost.
So Patrick, if you can have some influence, please help making Atlas as simple and clear as Stripe.
Must the director be a Canadian citizen or permanent legal resident?
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cr7mNhuUEAAoHcM.jpg:large
Don't listen when people hate on you for sharing what you're working on. The only thing that matters in the end is success. :)
All three things turn what would be a boring, real-world project into a game, where only the pleasant part is left for you to do. At least for the kind of people they were looking for.
https://www.myob.com/au/small-business/atlas-website-builder
He's great at marketing. He should have spent a year building a network of employers with lower-tech solutions and then expanded it out with starfighter.
I've been following Patrick since the BoS days and all of his products have been pretty low profit. Enough to support himself only (some, not even this much) (I'm not including consulting, only products or services)
Money is the lifeblood of all companies and you will need it to truly change the world.
I encounter this so much in the states. Everything self directed is "sketchy", "is that legal?". It is really sad, because those same people would fall for scams that actually are sketchy and illegal.