Thanks for sharing that link, but it actually confirms my point. That article is about selling GmbH shares ("Share Deal"), but as explained in my post, buyers of smaller SaaS companies ($1-10M) almost never want to do share deals - they want asset deals.
Seller GmbH sells their assets, profits are taxed accordingly. Only when taking that profit our the individual is taxed but as I mentioned above the Teileinkünfteverfahren, only 60% being taxed.
True, creating a Delaware LLC is simple, but that doesn't solve the tax problem. Management decisions from Germany mean German tax liability, regardless of where the company is registered. The only way to benefit from US tax rates would be physically moving there - just having a US company adds complexity without fixing anything.
This isn't about "special treatment for the rich." When international companies buy German software businesses, that's foreign investment flowing into Germany - money that often gets reinvested locally in new startups and jobs. But our system actively discourages these transactions by treating business sales like regular income.
> our system actively discourages these transactions
When a foreign company is building a factory, even with tax breaks it's fairly easy to see how it's an investment. I'm less convinced when it's about buying existing businesses, if they are profitable why would you want the profits to be in the control of a foreign entity?
Whether they are initially profitable or not, we've seen what happens in other fields and in particular the industry: after a couple years, the businesses are dismantled and sold for parts.
So what? This is a global economy. If they don't sell the company, they can offshore the labor anyway. If they sell it, you end up with money in Germany and at least a few newly rich founders who will want to start more local companies.
1. You sit down at a blank screen and begin writing code.
2. You put your own money into launching your web app, then advertising it, then managing it every day and modifying things before you see a single penny in revenue.
3. You earn revenue, now you are already paying taxes on that revenue.
4. You sell the company which had zero value to begin with, you already paid tax on all the revenue you made. Any tax the government now puts on you is a tax for the initial work which you did. This disincentivizes anyone else from creating something new from scratch.
This is why it shouldn't be treated as regular income. It was done in your free time. Everyone makes regular income, and pays taxes on that, but only a fraction of people work extra hours on passion. Taxing one's passion is essentially to kill anyone's desire to do it.
If no one in your society creates anything from passion, and everyone works for a corporation, your society will not be competitive or dynamic.
Therefore there's a societal, even Socialist interest in encouraging this type of behavior - or at least not punishing it.
Same reason the last couple Kim Jongs have allowed the peasants in North Korea to grow small plots of private vegetables. Even they know that the creative instinct can only be suppressed so far before doing so creates a negative and destructive drag on even the most tightly controlled corporatist system.
But this is true for everything. A farmer puts a seed into the groud, takes care of it, harvests the vegetables, sells them, pays vat, pays possible corporate income tax, and if he wants to transfer the money to his personal account, he has to pay out a paycheck and pay taxes on that.
Where's the difference if you work 8 hours at your regulat job + 4 hours at a second job? Or 4 extra hours of that second job for your own company? Or just 4 hours of overtime at the first company?
The farmer paid tax on selling his vegetables, and property tax, and all the other taxes as you said.
If the farmer improves the land by constructing something on it, using his own money, then that is above and beyond the simple sale of products. It should be taxed as an investment that grew in value (i.e. Capital Gains), not as normal income, because the farmer had to risk his own savings to construct it.
If the construction is a hotel, of course he pays taxes too on the income from that. But he was already taxed for the money he saved which he put into building the hotel, so why should he be taxed twice at the income rate when he sells it?
The point of having a capital gains taxrate lower than an income taxrate is to incentivize people not to bury their savings under the mattress but to use it to create new growth. Whether that's by investing in listed companies or in their own startup.
The central difference between tax on earnings and tax on capital gains is that the money the farmer spends to build something new besides simply harvesting, is money the farmer already had saved after tax, and could have put elsewhere, but he took the risk of putting it here. That is why it's unwise to tax creating new value on existing properties, with your own funds, more than you would tax other investments. It prevents people from improving their own properties (or whatever startup or other project they're working on).
Obviously, if you believe that it's best not to stimulate anyone to create anything new, then you wouldn't subscribe to this idea.
I'd love to hear more about your UK exit! Most of my knowledge about UK tax rates and processes is theoretical research, so I'd really appreciate hearing a real-world experience. Did you qualify for Business Asset Disposal Relief (the old Entrepreneurs' Relief)? How was the overall process and timeline for you?
I was going to say that I'm not sure the article is quite right. While the UK does have BADR for up to £1m, it applies to individuals, not businesses. So if I sell the shares in my company or liquidate my company, I can use it. But if the business does an asset sale, there's another step: the company selling the assets. And that company has to pay its own taxes first.
If my British company sold its assets for £1m, it needs to pay 25% Corporation Tax on that. Then I could liquidate the company with its £750k remaining cash and pay 10% on that (for now, it's going up to 14% in April). This results in a total 32.5% tax, not 10%. Above £1m, it'll be even more as there's no more BADR (so roughly 40% tax total on the £1m+ chunk).
That's exactly the problem - you often don't plan to sell from the start. Life changes. Kids are born. Health issues emerge. New opportunities arise.
If you start successful in Germany without the right structure, you're locked in. At least if you plan to sell from day one, you have options (expensive ones). But most bootstrappers just build stuff users want. Then one day they get an interesting acquisition offer...
...and discover they've accidentally built a tax trap that'll cost them millions. No way out at that point.
You're paying the same amount as if you had been employed and earned as much as you're selling your company assets for. If that costs you millions, you're still having millions left.
Tried GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Claude 3.5 Haiku on the same image, and your tool was significantly more accurate. Could you share what model you're using? Is it a pre-trained model that you fine-tuned, or did you train your own model from scratch?
You're right, it wasn't magic. For the brand new WordPress sites, I believe it was due to the default pings that came with the standard WordPress installation.
When you published a new blog post on a fresh WordPress install, WordPress would automatically send out a ping. This feature, called "Ping-o-Matic" is still present in every WordPress installation. You can read more about it here:
Google likely picked up these pings and quickly indexed the new content. It wasn't an official process, but it worked reliably. The system is still in place, but Google doesn't seem to care anymore.
You're right, this post is based on personal anecdotal experience. I have access to Google Search Console data for over 100 websites, and most have many pages in the "Discovered - currently not indexed" and "Crawled - currently not indexed" categories, despite ranking well for some keywords and getting traffic. This wasn't the case 10 years ago.
Regarding "Google never indexed everything" - I'd say it came close. They did manual de-indexing for heavy spam sites and would even send an email when they did this. Apart from that, nearly everything was in the index, including duplicates. De-duplication happened at the ranking stage, not the indexing stage.
At some point, Google even had a second index, the Google Supplemental Index, for pages of lower importance.
But you haven't described what kind of websites they are, or what kind of content.
You haven't provided even any comparison screenshots from over the years, much less graphs showing that this is an actual quantitative trend, as opposed to you just noticing different things now and maybe not remembering things entirely accurately.
I'm not saying that you're not telling the truth about your observations. But I am saying that you provide absolutely no basis for making broad sweeping generalizations about Google Search changing its "defaults".
Maybe you work in a category of low-quality content, while people in other categories have seen more of their pages indexed.
The point is, your personal qualitative observations from a miniscule subset of 100 sites is nowhere near sufficient to make a provocative headline claim such as "Google Now Defaults to Not Indexing Your Content".
Like you run around with evidence all day to back up your comments and statements. Ever heard of experience? OP and I have been through this for years, no need for a PowerPoint for everyone who asks.
Also, you're just defending Google here for no reason, while they're breaking the web. Please continue if that makes you feel better and smarter.
I’ve been doing search engine optimization, and trying to rank websites since Altavista, Google Panda, Penguin, exact match domain spam, etc since early 2000s and almost all pages of sites I’ve created have been indexed. So we can fight anecdata vs anecdata all day.
And i’m not even defending Google. They’re awful especially their recent decision to sell their domain biz to Squarespace. I hate Google as much as you. But whether Google is good or bad has nothing to do with this. Thats an emotional strawman
