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”Labour protection here is insane too. It's not cheap for small and medium companies. And there is a thing that makes it even more complicated for startups: legally, the owner of the company is in charge of the labor debts even when the company is broken. So, if your company broke, you can't close it until you pay all the labor debts, and if you don't pay, you can lose your home or other assets that belong to you, not to your company;”

This is pretty normal, you need to lay off people before you run out of money to pay them. You don’t gamble with your employees paychecks.

As a business owner, you get the upside if business is going great. The downside is that you, the owner, only get paid if there is money left over after you pay your employees.

> This is pretty normal

Can anyone comment how common it is? Isn't normal in Europe? US? Other countries?

I can’t speak for all of the US, but this is California law: a business owner is _personally_ liable for unpaid wages in the event of bankruptcy. The Department of Labor does not take kindly to people or business who cheat their employees out of a rightfully earned paycheck.

But I'm not talking about wages. I'm talking about other rigths that an employee has, for example: if you bankrupt and need to fire you employees, you'll be forced to pay a fine of 40% of the FGTS (FGTS it's like a saving account the company is obligated to pay in name of they employees).

Speaking as a fellow Brazilian: so account for it beforehand, in the same way you should account for 13th salaries and other "hidden" worker rights, which are liabilities in the accounting sense.

Yeah, that's how we have always hired, and I don't see a big problem with CLT (the Brazilian employment law), perhaps with the exception of how vacation time and union membership is handled.

It's bizarre that the threads on this post seem to straddle "founders are only in it to make money off the back of their employees" and "worker's rights and compensation are onerous" simultaneously.

> entrepreneur classes are rare

It's not optimal, but it's pretty common in management courses. I wish I had more of that in Engineering (even though we hated it at the time).

> Open a company in Brazil is crazy

Crazy? Try shutting one down to see what's crazy.

> Labour protection here is insane too

I have to disagree with you on that one. As an entrepreneur, you have responsibilities towards your employees. Far too frequently you see entrepreneurs who think they are doing employees a favor by giving them jobs when very few realize that they hired people because they couldn't do it themselves. It's a privilege to have a smart team working to make your dreams true.

I didn't say that an entrepreneur should not have any kind of responsibility for the employees. What I said it's that we have too many responsibilities. For example:

- We have 13º salary, with may be easy for a large company to pay, but it's expensive for a small company;

- We have FGTS, that is like a saving account paid by the company in the name of employee;

- It's very complicated to hire someone with a non-conventional work contract.

And so on. I'm not saying that we should remove labor rights, what I'm saying it's that we need to find a balance that is good to everyone: employee, small companies, large companies and so on.

The 13th salary exists in other countries too (example: Switzerland). It's a dumb thing to complain about because you have to be able to pay an employee's yearly salary in a year. It's not a surprise. It comes every December.

FGTS also has its equivalents in several forms of unemployment insurance. It's a bad thing only in how the insurance is mismanaged by the government, not because it exists at all. I guess countries that do not have unemployment insurance are rare and extremely poor?

The point is that this is expensive to small companies, startups are small, with a budget that may not allow this kind of cost. To large companies, pay those things are fine.

I just found a report that claims that the cost of a employee to the company 22% over the wage, while in Brazil is 71%.

http://www.uhy.com/wp-content/uploads/UHY-study-on-employmen...

I posted something but don't have the time to double-check the math. I suggest you do your own calculations. In particular do not count income (13th salary, food tickets, travel reimbursements, etc.) as though it was taxes.

1) That's far from true. I had a company in an incubator associated with one of the largest federal universities. Professors were supportive, overall. A few helped with contacts in the industry and ideas.

2) The overall tax rate isn't that bad (I live in England now, you'd be surprised). The tax system is complicated but for small companies, falling under Simples rules, it's fairly easy.

Re. labour laws, the fact that labour debts aren't protected by limited liability is fairly bad.

Re. regulated, yeah, it's also pretty complicated to get good legal counsel, despite the amount of law school graduates.

1) Some universities are good, but most of our public universities are not. UFMG, USP, Unicamp, UFRJ and some others are exceptions, not the rule.

2) I agree completely that the tax rate is not bad, it's around 30%, less than Germany and other countries. The problem is the number of taxes and how complicated is our tax system.

It is not only in Brazil that only academics can be responsible for lectures at universities, it is all over around the world.