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Comment by chatmasta | Hacker News Reader

What I like most about the long term vision for Atlas is that, if it's truly "as easy as spinning up an EC2 instance" to form a new corporation, then it will be possible for a single entrepreneur to create complex global corporate structures previously limited only to multinational corporations. How nice would it be, as say, a digital nomad, to be able to have a single "holding company" based in HK, and dynamically create a new corporation for every new project?

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From Accelerando (great book if you're into this stuff)

"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.

I just reread Accelerando and had forgotten how good it was.

And, the book is -- legitimately -- available for free, in a variety of formats -- details on the author's blog:

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.

Its the third book in a series of three, are the other two as good? Should I start with them or just skip to the third one?

> Its the third book in a series of three

I don't think so. The book has 3 parts, but it's not part of a series

I believe he wrote 3 books about the singularity (as opposed to one continuous story/series). I never read the other 2. You're safe starting with accelerando.

Slightly OT, but countries tend to dislike this brave new world where they cannot obviously and clearly collect taxes on business owners that reside in their country. It is going to be a tough day if the other shoe drops on this. No idea what it will look like if it happens though.

There exist some ways to abusively structure international tax affairs. That isn't what Atlas is about -- we help honest businesspeople get on a sound and legally compliant footing.

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.)

> We want to eliminate the stupid value-destroying busywork of complying with taxes, not taxes themselves.

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.

Having a U.S. based business serve as a sort of global corporate registry broker will also make it extremely easy for U.S. law enforcement to subpoena information that would otherwise be located in less cooperative jurisdictions (or in jurisdictions that are cooperative but just require a lot of paperwork and MLATs and so forth), so I can't imagine you'll have too much trouble with them.

I just have a hard time seeing how "going international" is going to be easier. Suddenly you have to deal with a completely foreign tax system and people who are well versed in international tax laws in your own jurisdiction. A lot of people can't start companies abroad without considering controlled foreign company rules, double taxation agreements, permanent establishment etc.

It's not necessarily going to be easier, but if your business plans to sell primarily to the US market and wants to accept credit card payments then incorporating in the US with a US bank account may be easier than trying to do so from many other countries. If on the other hand you are mostly planning on addressing your local market then a US based entity may make things more complicated for no reason. I think Atlas is targeted at the former.

I don't mind the money-cost. It's the time-cost: I need to take a week of vacation just to file taxes. Yes, I could pay someone to do it for me. No, I can't find anyone I trust to do it right.

How does making it easier to incorporate a business make it easier to evade taxes than, say, it is for an individual to do under-the-table services/consulting and not pay income tax?

We should have gone VAT-only (or VAT-mostly with some land and excise taxes thrown in) a long time ago. Perhaps we finally will.

I think we are a long way from this, over time our company has incorporated in a bunch of countries in order to get access to rates and services that otherwise would have been hard for a foreign company.

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.

It's still fairly expensive though, with Atlas costing $500/corporation. I think that's out of reach for most simple side projects.

Anecdotally, in Illinois it costs more than that just to file your LLC and reserve your company name.

Wow, why is it so expensive? In the UK you fill out a form online and within 24hours it's setup. It costs £12 so approx $15.

Variance in state law, plus our always-painful bureaucratic overhead. Many states will let you set up for $50-$100, but I don't think anywhere in the US is as cheap as twelve pounds.

I thought the problem comes with the fillings/taxes you have to do after you create the company.

Not just that, but it's "invite-only" at the moment. So it's all hype and advertising. I'm excited at the prospect of such a service on the horizon, though.

How do you avoid accidentally committing tax evasion with this?

They'll probably sell you tax advice to avoid common pitfalls as a service (no liability assumed, of course) in short order.

Unless I misunderstand, that's part of what you're paying for. From the Faq[0]:

  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).

[0]: https://stripe.com/atlas/faq#What-is-Stripe-Atlas

They say later on in that document that you're not paying for tax advice and won't get any: "That said, we’re not providing tax and legal advice. Stripe Atlas users have access to a legal guide prepared by Orrick, a tax guide prepared by PwC, and a free consultation call with an expert from PwC. PwC and Orrick will not provide tailored tax advice unless you engage them to represent you directly as a client.

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

You can easily spin up new corps, but laws are not going to make the structures in between them easy without paying a lot of taxes or equivalent lawyers.

Why would someone want to do that?

Let's say you've got five projects on the go right now. Maybe one of them hit it big enough to justify starting a company to wrap it in, so you run the other 4 under that umbrella.

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...

The more interesting thing is what happens when programs themselves start these companies, but I doubt people here are that far-thinking.

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