It's surprising to see how little people mention Adyen in this thread. One of the big benefits of Adyen is that they also supports many more payment options besides credit cards. For example: Paypal, iDeal, Card Blue & SOFORT Überweisung. If you're serious about receiving payments from consumers in Europe, supporting these is pretty much a necessity.
Since the GmbH is very strict and formal and compared to a UK Ltd is founded with more initial capital (min. 25k €), I also don't see why international investors wouldn't bother.
From the founders perspective the introduction of the UG (haftungsbeschränkt) is also great way to found a GmbH on a budget (the needed capital is down to 1€, while technically most laws of GmbHs apply), esp. if you are bootstrapping or dont look for external capital right on the start. When you are ready (25.000€ of capital in the company) you can convert it to a GmbH easily.
I do see problems for investments with GbR, KG or Gmbh & KG, though.
Note: I am not sure what the right translaion for "Stammkapital" is, I just used "capital", it might be "authorized capital" or "original share capital" or "corpus" according to my dictionary. Can someone enlighten me?
I'd love to agree.
Can you please provide proof for that.
I only experienced the complete opposite. Even if it was "ok" it would have lowered our upside by a percentage on the long run.
For Europeans: Create a UK Ltd holding company, and a local entity for each country you operate in. Happy to answer specific questions by email (we're UK Ltd holding with local AT GmbH)
You can also save that local entity by moving the UK Ltd into your country and registering it in the local company registry (EU only) - great article on how to do this: http://www.internetszene.at/2009/03/31/checkliste-limited-od... (German, unfortunately)
What was your reason to do both a Ltd in UK and a GmbH in Austria?
We've registered an Austrian GmbH couple of years ago and haven't had any issues with that so far. The break-down of voting rights and shares are directly bound to how the common stock (usually 35k€ in AT) is being split. When it comes to investment rounds, the investors either increase the common stocks or buy it from the other shareholders for the nominal price (the percentage of the common stock value). The whole process is strictly bound to a formal process (a notarial act), which can get quite expensive, which is the only down-side in the long run.
On the other hand, Ltds still have some shady smack for some reasons over here (one is that you're seen as being cheap), so when you're an Austrian or German company, I bet you gonna need to explain as a small startup why you have gone the Ltd path when talking to big potential customers, and I think this is something you want to avoid at that stage ("act like how you want to be seen, not like who you are", and each serious company here is a GmbH). I understand that it's a big turn-off for young founders to put in 17.5k€ in cash from the start (which is the minimum amount to be provided when founding), but it pays off when it comes to reputation, at least when acting in the B2B business.
The simple fact that GmbH law greatly differs from UK/US corporate law makes it uncommon, and therefore cumbersome for any interested UK/US investors. Though obviously if you've got the traction they'll just bite through.
Also things like stock options, reverse vesting, convertible notes turn into overly complex issues when trying to re-create them in GmbH law.
And besides the additional bookkeeping/accounting burden, I have not encountered any issues with our current setup.
In regard to why Ltd+GmbH: We found the move-the-Ltd-to-Austria process a bit complicated, and also encountered the issue you mention, that people think of Ltds being shady/not trustworthy.
If anything the icons would make it more suitable for "heavy use" because once you get used to them they are an improvement to the old text, defeating the point of this superficial article even more.
It's not only that they have changed texts to icons, but also that the icons are really ugly, they do not communicate well the purpose of the buttons and that they are all grey blobs that are hardly distinguishable, I actually find it hard to get used to them for this reason. Also, as a general point, you can get used to almost anything interface-wise by using something for a very long time, but does this mean we should tolerate bad design?
Except, you know, that goes against basic principles of usability.
Forcing a user to stop and think about "what does this icon do" -- and yes, even your "heavy" users are going to run into this -- just to make something look pretty is basically always a bad idea.
> If anything the icons would make it more suitable
No, this is incorrect. I'm a heavy user of Gmail, and I still can't find the damn new refresh button. How many weeks should it take for me to get used to this so-called "improvement". I preferred it when it was text. I just don't see the new spiral icon thingie as "refresh".
Another way to look at it is if you make an improvement to something I don't care about, it's not an improvement. Especially, if it makes my job harder.
You need to actually measure what users do, not generalize from unsupported assertions.
I'm exactly opposite. I had no problem finding the refresh button since the icon used is basically the same exact icon used for refresh in multiple apps that I use everyday, including every browser that I use (Chrome, Firefox, Safari). It looks to me like a lot of the icons that have been used seem to be a standard in a lot of apps that use icons without text.
The most important thing when learning design is to learn and use the right process. Except for the very abstract inspiration part, everything listed here would all fit in the last 50% of my process as an 'educated designer'. I believe there's much more low hanging fruit in the first 50%. It's hard to give concrete examples for this though because it's all very dependent on the kind of product you aim to design.
