YEurope: a Micro-VC for europe
it’s an inconvenient but somehow accepted opinion that society & politics in europe (and Austria probably in particular) don’t really foster entrepreneurship and small-scale business the way they do overseas. YEurope, a (Micro-)Venture Capital firm based in Vienna and launched earlier this week by Paul Böhm (Metalab) is a welcome change. obviously inspired by US-VC Y-Combinator, YEurope is offering small-scale funding to local web/tech-startups. for more info read the controversial at Y-Combinator’s forum or the followup at my not-yet-launched-officially, german-language blog.
IMHO it’s not so much the missing VC, frankly, you don’t need that much resources to verify whether an idea has potential or not. It’s rather the legal framework why Austria is almost the worst place in Europe to start a company. Compared to UK or US standards a start-up here can be seen almost as suicide…
However, I highly appreciate the intiative of Paul Böhm!
Christian, could you elaborate on why you think .at-legals are an issue? wheres the difference between a GmbH and a UK-limited company or US-llc? I’m really wonderig…
It’s mainly about necessary steps to legally found and run a company, compare LTD vs GmbH, whereas I think (I’m no lawyer or tax consultant though) LTD is way easier.
Another question is about consequences if your start-up fails (bankruptcy), because most start-ups do fail, it’s a part of entrepreneurship to fail. Here in Austria regulations are rather strict, which is good for employees, customers and clients (prevents fraud) but at the same time it makes it complicated for entrepreneurs to “try” one idea quickly after another.
while I haven’t been through the process of setting up a GmbH myself yet, I always thought the complexity of legals were fair enough…(at least that’s what I thought at university where we were supposed to learn this kindof stuff
). also, shouldn’t the “limited liabilty”-aspect of the GmbH assure that it’s _not_ sucidial to incorporate in Austria? I mean you can keep your private equity out of your GmbH if you want to, right?