Startups
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The Kafkaesque German Bureaucracy
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7 min read
Let’s assume we meet for coffee, and that you’ve just founded a new company – very simple structure, 100% owned by you. If you now went on to tell me that, as part of your company registration, the so-called “transparency registry” has opened an investigation into your newly-founded, one-person company which is obviously 100% owned…
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I already wrote about the 14 steps required for founding a company in Germany, and I also wrote up all my notes and hacks for running a German company efficiently. Those two posts turned out to be some of the most popular posts on my blog, and I seem to have this weird thing of…
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What does Amsterdam’s prostitution have to do with B2B SaaS Sales? Good question. Let me tell you. First, some context. Our dev team just came back from Rails World in Amsterdam. It was fun! A great conference, and Amsterdam is a great city. It’s always a nice change of scenery to visit a city which…
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Choosing a Business Bank Account For Your German GmbH
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12 min read
So you’ve successfully founded your German GmbH company. You managed to follow these very intuitive 14 steps and, after waiting a very short period of only 2-3 months, you now have it – your own company. Congrats! (Irony aside, founding a company in Germany is indeed entrepreneurship on hard mode) Now, as part of the…
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No More VAT IDs: Did Estonia Quietly Kill Its e-Residency For Digital Nomads? (August 2025)
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9 min read
Okay, huge disclaimer upfront as I seem to be the first person on the internet to report this: All of this is based on only a few data points, I may be wrong and I’ve reached out to the e-Residency team for clarification and will post their response. Update #1 (08/2025): The e-Residency team has…
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Update (11/2025): I’ve started writing up all my German notes (mostly from paid consultants with tax advisors) on a new micro-website, Wegzugsteuer.info. Check it out if you’re interested! Here’s an interesting take on Germany’s exit tax, which I have written about before: Leave Germany before your business gets big. What do I mean by that?…
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At OpenRegulatory, we’re a small team of 4 people, and everyone receives the same salary. There are a lot of tangents I could go down from here – like: Etc., etc. But those are for another day. Today, I’ll be talking about paying everyone the same salary, regardless of location, and regardless of role at…
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So you want to build a business. You have two options: (This, by the way, assumes we’re already way too deep in the “startup bubble”, where the only two viable business models appear to be based on consulting or a product. We blissfully ignore the wider economic reality that there are lots of other viable…
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No Co-Founder Needed: Being a Solo Founder
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10 min read
You don’t need a co-founder. Just be a solo founder. It’s easy, and it’s great. But, as always, it depends. On what?It depends on you. My point is that the whole discussion of solo founding vs. co-founding is not a very rational one – sure, people online are shouting at each other that one thing…
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This article is a bit of the missing piece on on the differences between a holding-GmbH in Germany versus a “normal” GmbH. I briefly mentioned the holding setup in how to found a GmbH company in Germany here, and I summarized all my “hacks” for founding and running German companies here. So now it’s time…