It is one of the most complicated forms. A GmbH alone is good enough in 99.99% of cases, and its usually done really quick.
Also, if you believe in your product there usually isn't a reason to go for a GmbH this early. You can send invoices a lot earlier with just a eK or GbR. Its not an issue to adhere with your private money if your product isn't causing damages.
> Its not an issue to adhere with your private money if your product isn't causing damages.
Might happen really easily though. E.g. you install some package which has been compromised, infecting your software product and suddenly all your customer's systems are cryptolocked and you are on the hock for millions of €€€.
Or your db crashes in new and creative ways and your backups don't work for some reason and now your customer lost an expensive contract because critical data that was in your db is gone.
Of course, you can try to foresee every eventuality, but you will indubitably overlook something and probably never make it to market.
Isn't that what (liability) insurance is for?
(if there's anything Germans like as much as bureaucracy it's insurance)
Every good company in Germany has insurance. General liability insurance
Professional indemnity insurance
Business interruption insurance
Directors and Officers (D&O) insurance
Commercial legal expenses insurance
nowadays Cyber insurance
I think I might have forgotten one or two...
Not in mine. Check the post.
So basically you go for the legal stuff only really big companies use (instead of changing once its necessary) because you dont believe in your own product and dont want to be held liable, got it.
Every sane founder uses a limited liability company (e.g. UG/GmbH). What's a bit unusual is the "& Co. KG" part.
Do people in Germany see limited liability as some kind of crazy thing only a scammer would want?
If you just want limited liability, you'd go with a simple UG (takes a week and costs 600€, but if you do it right it takes 2-3h and costs 300€).
If you additionally want to avoid being taxed when you sell stock, the entire company, or transfer it to another country, you'd create two UGs, one as the primary company, the other as a holding. That takes 2-3h for both and costs typically around 800€, but can be had for as little as 400-500€.
This is what previous German YCombinator startups have gone with and recommended in the past.
Going one step further, because a UG is so easy to start, banks will refuse to loan you money in the first year, so you can only raise money by selling shares. If you want to avoid that, you can start a GmbH with an UG as holding instead. This will take a month and requires you to sign over at least 12500€ of assets to the GmbH.
Now, what if you want all of that, but you also want a shell corporation to hide the owners and investors? Then you'd start a GmbH & Co KG, where you set up a limited liability corporation, a shell corporation with multiple special classes of stock, and potentially additional holdings. This is what OP went with.
Nope.
But the GmbH & Co KG setup the poster wants is not needed for limited liability.
You get that with a plain GmbH (or UG), which is much, much simpler to set up.
Depends. Given OP built yet another AI tool, yea, I want to hold them liable in case something goes wrong (not that I'd buy these tools in the first place).
Useful info, explains a lot. Thanks.
But hey, at least they get to write about their mid company name ("Plenty" - lol) got (rightfully) rejected...