Where to start a company

 

Patrick Collison

@patrickc

Met a German founder this week and asked him if all the stories one reads about the challenges of startups in Germany are exaggerated. "No, they're understated." Proceeded to describe spending a full day having a 90-page investment contract read to him (mandatory under German law; § 13 BeurkG) by a notary that then charged €30,000. That was for his first company. His second company, needless to say, was not incorporated in Germany.

Yair Einhorn

@yaireinhorn

·

Aug 29

The harsh truth is that no entrepreneur in his right mind will choose to operate in the U.K or Europe! This excellent WSJ chart shows a sharp & rapid decline in European innovation stance which translates into its small global share of private tech companies valued >$1B - compared to the American & the Chinese share.

Beercat Alexander

@X_is_Arbitrary

The notary thing is a great example of just what it takes to start a company. After that, the real costs & risks begin. For example, if you get above 20 employees, your employees can vote to form a works-council. Then you effectively have a unionized shop. "Once a company regularly has more than 20 employees who are entitled to vote and a works council exists, the employer must inform the council in advance and obtain its consent before: - hiring someone new, - classifying or reclassifying an employee’s pay grade, - transferring an employee to a different job or location." And on and on and on. Anyone who wants to start a company in Germany should not be in charge of a company. Anyone who funds it should not be in the venture business.

Who wins the AI race?

 

Ricardo

@Ric_RTP

Elon predicted that China is going to win the AI race. And every day makes it look more right. "There's a good chance that they are the leaders at some point." Elon is building the biggest AI cluster in America. He has more money than any human alive, first access to Nvidia's best silicon, and a rocket company he wants to use for putting data centers in orbit. But he still thinks China will win the race. Everybody argues about chips because a chip is a thing you can put a tariff on. Washington has burned four straight years on export controls, entity lists, smuggling busts and levies. Elon says that whole fight is aimed at the wrong bottleneck: The real constraint outside China is power and cooling, and AI chips are already rolling off production lines faster than new electricity comes online. America is about to own more chips than it can plug in. And their models won't save them either: Elon said Anthropic is currently the leader in AI, and that Claude Fable 5 is still clearly the smartest model on Earth. But banning the Chinese models won't save it. Elon pointed out that Congress can stop American firms from touching them, but it has no authority over the other 190 countries, and everybody else keeps reaching for whatever is cheap and good enough. And the power gap isn't close either. China already generates more electricity than the United States, Europe and India COMBINED. Elon's guess is they end up at 4x American production, which is roughly what the population difference implies. Now here's where it gets genuinely bleak... Three companies on this planet build large gas turbines. GE Vernova told analysts in July it's taking reservations for 2031 delivery. So you order the hardware today and wait five years for a truck to show up at the site. Then you get in line for the grid: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found the median American power project completed in 2025 spent over five years just waiting to connect. Roughly 8,200 projects are sitting in that queue right now. Meanwhile China added 336 terawatt hours of new solar generation during 2025 alone. One year of Chinese building beat everything the United Kingdom consumed all year. You can't buy your way to the front of that line. Elon tried and it didn't work. So he quit. In June 2024 his team wheeled 35 mobile gas turbines onto a lot in Memphis and ran a supercomputer off them. Regulators later counted 59 turbines at the plant across the state line. Colossus burns over 500 megawatts of gas now, and he says he wants 20 gigawatts of it by 2027. The richest man on Earth looked at the American grid and built his own power plant instead of waiting for it. That's what the AI race actually looks like in 2026: A fleet of turbines parked on a lot in Memphis because the grid queue runs five years deep. Elon sells solar panels and batteries through Tesla, he badly wants permitting reform, and orbital data centers are his pitch. A power panic is exactly his book. China also burns a staggering amount of coal to post those numbers, and America still holds the smartest model and the best silicon today. But he said one more thing, and it puts a clock on all of it: Elon thinks China is closer than most people realize to solving the lithography problem. Chips are the only thing still holding Beijing back. China's chip problem gets solved in years. America's power problem gets solved in decades, if it gets solved at all. America spent four years fighting over who's allowed to sell China chips. China spent those same four years building the grid to run them. So what happens to every AI company in America the day Beijing stops being chip-starved?

https://x.com/Ric_RTP/status/2094204010366468359?s=20

the Prosperity Around Us

 

Hillbilly

@JamesHu27192912

Written by a 26 year old WE HAVE A PROBLEM: This is a well written and thought out article written by a 26 yr old college student by the name of Alyssa Ahlgren, who's in grad school for her MBA. What a GREAT perspective... My Generation Is Blind to the Prosperity Around Us!

I'm sitting in a small coffee shop near Nokomis (Florida) trying to think of what to write about. I scroll through my newsfeed on my phone looking at the latest headlines of presidential candidates calling for policies to "fix" the so-called injustices of capitalism. I put my phone down and continue to look around. I see people talking freely, working on their MacBook's, ordering food they get in an instant, seeing cars go by outside, and it dawned on me. We live in the most privileged time in the most prosperous nation and we've become completely blind to it. Vehicles, food, technology, freedom to associate with whom we choose.These things are so ingrained in our American way of life we don't give them a second thought. We are so well off here in the United States that our poverty line begins 31 times above the global average. Thirty One Times!!! Virtually no one in the United States is considered poor by global standards. Yet, in a time where we can order a product off Amazon with one click and have it at our doorstep the next day, we are unappreciative, unsatisfied, and ungrateful. ?? Our unappreciation is evident as the popularity of socialist policies among my generation continues to grow. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently said to Newsweek talking about the millennial generation, "An entire generation, which is now becoming one of the largest electorates in America, came of age and never saw American prosperity." Never saw American prosperity! Let that sink in. When I first read that statement, I thought to myself, that was quite literally the most entitled and factually illiterate thing I've ever heard in my 26 years on this earth. Many young people agree with her, which is entirely misguided. My generation is being indoctrinated by a mainstream narrative to actually believe we have never seen prosperity. I know this first hand, I went to college, let's just say I didn't have the popular opinion, but I digress. Why then, with all of the overwhelming evidence around us, evidence that I can even see sitting at a coffee shop, do we not view this as prosperity? We have people who are dying to get into our country. People around the world destitute and truly impoverished. Yet, we have a young generation convinced they've never seen prosperity, and as a result, we elect some politicians who are dead set on taking steps towards abolishing capitalism. Why? The answer is this,?? my generation has only seen prosperity. We have no contrast. We didn't live in the great depression, or live through two world wars, the Korean War, The Vietnam War or we didn't see the rise and fall of socialism and communism. We don't know what it's like to live without the internet, without cars, without smartphones. We don't have a lack of prosperity problem. We have an entitlement problem, an ungratefulness problem, and it's spreading like a plague."

Diane Harris

@twinsmomaz

·

2h

I hope your message gets to those who need to hear it before it’s too late. I am a legal immigrant and love and appreciate this country more than most of my American born friends, family and co workers. I believe this is in large part because of the propaganda spewed by politicians and MSM on a daily basis. You listen to the politicians and MSM degrade the President and the USA enough times repeatedly and you begin to believe it if you don’t discern and think for yourself. Our children are not taught to think, they are just taught to memorize and repeat. Our President is busting his ass to make America great again, and those who speak against him are sabotaging Why would any American not want American greatness???it gives me a lot of hope when I read your post that young Americans are waking up and seeing the truth