🏠 Home
<aside> What we NOT want
<aside>
A lot of things need to be done right to make the EU-Inc successful. And it’s as important to know what we do not want.
</aside>
While it sounds great on paper to say you want the EU-Inc only for startups you quickly end up in a confusing situation:
What is a startup?
It’s impossible to limit what can be a startup and can’t be a startup. Many tried. And even if you would succeed (you won’t) your definition wouldn’t be outdated by the next generation of companies. Because, by definition, innovative companies – including startups – are ever-evolving how they look.
Hence, we should not try to limit or regulate them. We should enable innovative companies of any size or shape to accelerate in Europe.
What if we’d just make the EU-Inc for early-stage companies? Sounds like a great definition for “startup” – every young company until size X and age Y.
Now what happens if they grow out of this size and age limitation? Should they flip to other legal entities? This could easily destroy future fundraising rounds.
Should they just not grow bigger than said size?
Startups need more money, let’s make it easier to receive grants for EU-Incs. Add huge tax incentives. reduce employee taxes, make it easier to pass government procurements, provide legal exemptions from dragging regulations like GDPR…
Sounds all great. The problem now is that EVERY large company will argue their business is actually a startup… because they do R&D.
So what? Well… Member states do not want that. Even if they want their startups to get temporary benefits, they do not want their established companies to use this as a backdoor to avoid taxes.
Plus somebody has to pay for the extra government spendings, in times of recessions this will create a lot of friction in European Parliament.
So how do you fix this? You limit to startups, by creating a definition what a startup is… which is impossible… and you force startups to switch their legal entity once they grow out of this program… which might kill them.
Or you keep the EU-Inc clean and don’t connect the legal entity to direct government benefits that you wouldn’t want to give every other company too. This way the worst thing someone can do with it is to save a bit of bureaucracy when working pan-European.
You want additional government benefits and programs? Go for it, just create independent filters who should get in.
The whole point of the EU-Inc is to be an umbrella standardization.
If countries do their own EU-Inc interpretations, early-stage investors can no longer trust the EU-Inc as standard, can no longer use their standard tools and documents, and we are back to square one.
We demand an EU-Inc without a legal requirement for notaries to be part of individual steps.
Many countries – like Portugal eg – have shown that notaries are still needed, even if they are no longer legally required by law to do basics steps of the legal process.
It is our strong believe that notaries have an important role of advisory, mediation, and support for companies in Europe. Reading out shareholder agreements out loud is not one of them.
The GDPR regulation has shown what happens when there is not one clear last-decision authority for complex questions. Hence, we promote a specialised EU corporate court after all private and national mediation failed.
Next: Supporting Appendices
</aside>
<aside>
Got feedback?
</aside>