Obviously not.
191 karma · joined April 30, 2012
Having done the move and spent considerable amounts of none trivial money, this is not worth it for anyone unless you need a physical presence in the US (wanting to open an office with employees, wanting some USG contracts, whatever). In that case, you don't need your hypothetical service. There's very little that requires a phsyical prescence when you're selling software or SaaS.
The US tax system is one of the worst in the world (compared to even "high tax" countries), on both a corporate and personal level, if you're running a company where your intention is to make money. Why do you think every big US software company keeps all their non-US profits offshore?
Avoiding all interaction with the IRS is the best thing going for any company outside the US -- it's worth its weight in gold. This makes things difficult when you want to hold USD balances or process USD transactions, but not impossible.
If you're taking VC funding, then it doesn't matter. If you're a small startup where 5% of revenue doesn't matter, than you have no reason to be wasting money on a US presence, because it's completely unnecessary in 2013. And no, lawyers don't provide proxy servers, but a micro instance at AWS is like $15/m.
It's pretty clear to me that you have never been involved with "private litigation".
If you're dealing with people who have potentially compromised immune systems on a daily basis, you should be taking every vaccine possible.
Once you gain a physical presence, you're now liable for both federal and state taxes (depending on where your location is). This is much worse than your 5% revenue share or equity fee.
Add to that any legal and accounting fees you've just added for the company in the US, and you're essentially giving up 5% for a whole heap of pain.
Keep in mind that most law firms already provide this service. And they don't ask for 5%.
Your "pain points" are also over-exaggerated. The only reason for a company to consider a US presence is dealing with VCs or if they want to use something like Stripe or Braintree. Both of those are expanding (or have already expanded) globally.
Nope...
Pretty sure they've done the analysis. :)
They're not the only ones though.
You're basically just renting the house from the bank. And this is common (not good, but common) in every country where interest is tax deductible, because you can multiply your 'renting' power by your top marginal tax rate.
I presume that's mostly the reason.
I'll leave you to guess which one. :)
For what it's worth, I was sent the URL above on a wink wink hush hush basis by a large EV SSL certificate issuer. We needed a cert for our non-US company, but they wanted a DUNS number. Nobody outside the US actually uses DUNS numbers (I don't care what D&B says). So yeah, that URL gives you a DUNS number for free within 1 business day, paid for by the US Government.
Software quality improves, sure, but you can still learn from the past.
We (in a new place) use our own fail over code now, but we're running databases instead of file servers -- and you usually don't want to STONITH a database.
For file servers we use Gluster, and it works great for us (I'm sure there are reasons GitHub are doing active-passive DRBD) and you don't need STONITH since it's shared-nothing.
We ended up with dedicated serial cards, and multiple network links just so STONITH worked properly. And even then, Heartbeat was buggy as hell back then, so we'd end up in a active-active situation way too many times and we'd end up with FS corruption.
We were running Reiser on DRBD (ahh, the good old days). Had to hack the kernel a fair bit to make it all work.
Anyway, in the end, we just abandoned the automated Heartbeat failover stuff, and just used it to alert us. We manually ran the failover scripts when a human determined that there was in fact a real failure.
We used to use Heartbeat in a similar setup back in 2001. It was the worst architectural decision we ever made, and after one too many a failure (where STONITH/split-brain/etc killed the wrong machine, or both machines) we threw it out.
TL;DR: This will happen again. Guaranteed.
Well done, sir/madam. Well done.
One of the (very few) things the US does better than most countries is the USPS. It should be a point of pride, not some problem that needs to be left up to the 'free market' to ruin.