Founder of Encore here (on the list). Great to see so many wonderful companies represented. Sweden is a great place to start a startup these days.
It's not my experience that Sweden is a great place for startups, the bureaucracy is extremely hit/miss. Setting up tax information for example is really difficult as a non-Swedish speaker and even tripped up my Swedish speaking friend (who is a project coordinator on the new Skane hospital: so she's somewhat aware of the tax system). How much of your daily work will be administration, how much will be selling services, how much money will you make do you estimate; you must give us an estimation: if it's too far off then we will fine you!
Information in English is... scarce, but gives the illusion of being available.
Hiring is also very complicated, you have to be very explicit in your contracts because anything not spelled out immediately falls in favour of the employed; which is nice, but as a novice employer that's very scary, because I don't know everything obviously.
What in your mind makes you think it's a good place?
(Sweden is still probably easier than Germany, though that's a low barrier tbh)
Edit: good to know about the UK
14GBP to Companies House, extra 10GBP to reserve the right to your name.
File your books every year, expect to be audited randomly for a few years.
Sure, I assumed this because you need that in any country you operate a legal entity.
> which requires a officer with a registered address in the UK.
This is the same in Sweden too
> Then you need to argue HMRC valuation discounts if you want to issue EMI options, which are only valid for 3 months, so you need to do it repeatedly. And then EMI option schemes are 15+ pages long contracts. Sweden has an equivalent stock option scheme that's ~2 pages, in comparison.
You have more experience than me there, I never had this as a problem to solve so you could be right.
You can apply for temporary exemptions, but they are temporary and you are supposed to have good reason.
There’s no explicit requirements that any particular position must be held in Sweden, you can be a VD in the EEA for example, but you still need at least one legal responsible person to be domiciled.
EMI itself is not a scam. Whether a company follows through on giving you the options in a reasonable timescale is another thing, and whether the shares are eventually worth anything is another again. As with all things startup option/share related, consider it a lottery ticket with an unknown chance of paying out.
That being said, £50k after all the tax is still better than £0 and if the £50k was paid as a one off bonus, you could pay it into SIPP without paying tax.
I remember when I asked them why I cannot get normal shares? They said that EMI will be better for me because I will save on tax. I said, why if I want to pay tax, it pays for our schools, hospitals, why should I be taking the advantage? So they said that the board don't want to do that, because it will create "a legal issue" when they will be looking for next round of investments.
So if any future employee reads that, if a company insist on EMI shares and don't want to give you real shares or money upfront, then jump the ship!
As with all countries there are definitely things you need to learn. We relied on our lawyers to draft employment agreements because we were already using them as part of our seed fundraise. There are companies like Pocketlaw (https://pocketlaw.com) that provide solid, standard agreements that you could use.
Unfortunately the employment law is written in support of factory workers, not knowledge workers. So many employers are very cautious when hiring because a non-performing employee is very expensive to get rid of, as long as they have been employed for 6 months or more.