There is more to setting up a company than incorporating it, of course: insurance, business license, unemployment compensation, various things with the IRS. I’m not even sure what the list is, because we, ah, skipped all that. When we got real funding near the end of 1996, we hired a great CFO, who fixed everything retroactively. It turns out that no one comes and arrests you if you don’t do everything you’re supposed to when starting a company. And a good thing too, or a lot of startups would never get started. [5]
[5] A friend who started a company in Germany told me they do care about the paperwork there, and that there’s more of it. Which helps explain why there are not more startups in Germany.
This reminds me of something Paul Graham wrote in How to Start a Startup: