What bothered me is that in all the above countries, they try to encourage entrepreneurship through rigged government programs. These programs offer grants and other benefits to 'the right kind of startups' - usually ones that are fashionable because the subject is currently hyped - ai, climate change, etc. Bureaucrats who know nothing about business pick whom to award grants through bullshit means. I imagine there's a lot of 'who you know' going on, too.

That wouldn't be so bad but, because these countries have such high taxes and other restrictions, the only benefit to starting a business there are these programs.

With these countries, it's not important that your startup is actually making money as long as you can brag about how you're changing the world at parties.

Finland's startup culture is especially bad in this department. It was disappointing as Finland is otherwise awesome.

> It makes no difference if you have a great idea, or even your own funding

Most european countries (most countries in the world, actually) have some kind of entrepreneur/investor visa, but most importantly:

You might be able to start a company in the US while officially traveling for tourism/business, but that's actually a flaw and not an advantage: If you're lucky you might be able to regularise your position, but you might just get denied entry back in the US the next time that you'll travel. Good luck running your business in the US, then.

If you want to move to the US and start your own business, something like the O-1 visa won't cut it, since unlike any European work visa, it won't give you a path to permanent residency. You want the EB-1, EB-2 or EB-5 visas. The first 2 are much harder to obtain (even if you got a O-1), and the EB-5 is not open to all nationalities. Finally, you'll need way more than 100.000$ (probably at least 500.000$) to be able to be approved for an EB-5.

US requirements are steep, and even if you have a great idea and funding that's probably not going to be enough. Getting to work for an established local company, owned by natives, is the most straightforward way to get a work visa. That's true in the US just like in most other rich countries (but obviously it requires finding a company willing to sponsor you, like a FAAMG, but those have a famously selective interview process. And on top of that you have H1-B caps.)

- Spain has an entrepeneurship visa, that any founder from anywhere can apply for. To apply I think you need to produce a credible business plan which shows it'll employ a certain number of citizens (I don't know if EU or Spanish specifically) eventually.

- France similarly has an entrepeneurship visa for founders from anywhere. I believe one of the requirements is to raise a certain amount of seed from specifically French accredited investors.

But, while I think it's better than you're implying, I definitely agree with your general thrust that visas need to adapt to embrace the growing popularity of people moving country not necessarily for employment, but to create new companies, jobs and growth.

It's unnecessarily cumbersome to do that basically everywhere (particularly in strong economies) right now, not just the EU, and that's a net loss for the citizens of the respective countries.

There's actually quite a lot of incremental innovation happening in Europe, but they're in non-consumer spaces so they're less visible.

But you're right, a lot of European innovation is in the area of refining and improving proven ideas. The pool of technical expertise in Europe is vast and strong so it makes sense to leverage the competitive advantage there.

The U.S. on the other hand is much stronger at defying norms and inventing completely new categories.

U.S. companies know this, so the joke in industry is: invent in the U.S., perfect in Europe (setup R&D labs etc.), and manufacture in China.

https://shawnindutch.com/ discusses it.

The requirements are pretty basic - "have something resembling a business and €4500" if I remember right.

I'm an American in Europe (Ireland myself) and once I got stamp 4 (takes two years) I become every bit as eligible for state grants and supports as a citizen.

Coming back to the topic of the original post though, in order to work as a freelancer in Finland, you do not need to incorporate to begin with and you certainly don't need to set up an LTD right away as the guide suggests. In fact doing so, can be counter productive, since while setting up a company is easy, shutting own down and becoming an employee again is not simple around here.

I'm running Toughbyte (https://www.toughbyte.com/) and we act as one of the brokers for freelancers in Finland such as the ones mentioned in the guide. What I've been recommending to those wanting to go freelance is that they first try to become employed by a broker on a fixed term contract or work through a cooperative (osuuskunta in Finnish). After that, they can set up an individual entrepreneurship (toiminimi) and only once they've had consistent revenue for about a year, consider setting up an LTD (OY). The limited liability that an LTD provides isn't strictly speaking necessary when working as part of a team on a times and materials basis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DAFT

(edit, I see now that someone else has pointed out the same thing)

https://www.infofinland.fi/en/moving-to-finland/non-eu-citiz...

https://e-resident.gov.ee

Yes, you might be able take a risk because your healthcare is covered in the beginning..but once you want to grow to an actual thriving company, it becomes very difficult.

This is why almost all of the moderately large companies in places like Finland, Denmark, or Sweden are incorporated elsewhere.

For the ones I looked into becoming a permanent resident after X years was also not that challenging and IIRC (might be wrong) that gives you basically full work permissions for all EU countries

Well, actually, no. They're reciprocal, actually.

US citizens in Austria are generally treated similar to the way Austrian citizens would be treated in the US. Reciprocation is a basis of international relations.

Also, its entirely possible to get residency in "Europe", if you understand that "Europe" is not just London or Paris.

(Disclaimer: non-european citizen with 20 years residency and legal work/founder status, lived)

I was under the impression you can start a business as long as you have a residence permit.

https://www.suomi.fi/company/starting-a-business/foreign-ent...

...as opposed to I suppose the amazing 'innovations' coming out of the US, such as shiny overpriced phones with overpriced proprietary cables, a taxi service with an app, some media-streaming services grown large based on their media content rather than innovation per se, and a plethora of disguised surveillance programmes? Wow thanks America, life is so much better in this emerging dystopia!

Amazon I'll grant you does deserve praise for amazing logistics.

The ones that managed to grow, are exceptions. Nokia and Kone are probably the more familiar ones (look at the next elevator you ride, there's a 50/50 chance it's made by Kone).

Finland is a capital poor country but rich in ideas.

But like I said elsewhere, Finland is capital poor so the authors did not have resources or the business partners to move it forward.

I remember reading that PSOE wants to amend it, but I don't know how much of that was just campaign rhetoric.

You will be unable to hold any financial asset other than cash or deposit (no broker will let you do stocks for example - or an ETF)

You will have to report and pay taxes on the fantasy gains on your locally accumulating pension funds, even though you will not have access to them until retirement (if then).

You will have to file your company paperwork locally, but also as if it was American - with requirements that become more onerous with your ownership percentage (starting at 10% or 25%, can’t remember - luckily for me in that respect, I was below the reporting threshold most years - but I did have to translate and file financials at some point)

I had done all of these for many years. If you don’t enjoy the bureaucracy, you might be better off NOT owning a non-US company.

https://punkrockdev.com/accounting-austria

Ideally, we would have crowd-sourced instructions and spreadsheets with taxes, pension calculations etc. – like a Wikipedia for entrepreneurs.

[1] http://github.com/trending

About finding it, yes. It's gotten #1 on /Finland subreddit, I myself have an extensive network in Finland, and it's gone relatively big on twitter and linkedin. So given the size of Finland and the software dev community, I think word of the mouth will eventually spread it to most people who are interested in freelancing.

[1] https://github.com/sam-hosseini/freelancing-in-finland#now-t...

I just want to underline that, unlike most European languages, Finnish grammar is highly systematic, and so is Finnish pronunciation. Very few exceptions, it feels almost mathematical in nature.

There's quite a lot of grammar, putting off non-nerds who think "cases" are hard because after all, they are hard in eg German and Latin (they're peanuts in Finnish). But for a geek with mathy tendencies, Finnish grammar is a warm shower compared to eg Polish or French or, for that matter, English. It's all so super consistent, it's as if it's a designed language.

A fun exercise when learning Finnish is writing a tool that can conjugate verbs or nouns, which is totally feasible in an evening or two, showing just how straight forward the grammar is.

The pronunciation is also super consistent and phonetic, which means that if someone teaches you a word or a name, you can simply hear how it's spelled. This makes it much easier to remember the word, since you can store the sound and the letters visually in memory, even if nobody writes it down for you.

Another fun hobby project is coding a Finnish speech synthesizer. You could just have it concatenate audio fragments for each letter. It'll sound like shit but it'll actually be understandable.

The real challenge with Finnish is the vocabulary.

(source: I'm Dutch, lived in Finland for a year half a life ago, tried to learn the language, walked away speaking it close to accent-free and knowing all the grammar but still not able to understand shit because seriously not a single word is anything like anything else I knew) (except appelsiini)

Of course I would like to learn more Finnish, but daily life and childcare interferes with regular lessons. (Of course being able to work in English also means that speaking Finnish at work is also difficult.)

Since moving to Finland four years ago I've bought a couple of flats, found a job, filed taxes, visited doctors, dentists, and similar things all in English.

I understand a lot of Finnish, I just speak less. Ordering food, etc, is something I'd usually do in Finnish although it has to be said a lot of people will either initially greet me in English, or reply to me in English which is a bit frustrating.

Things have changed a lot in recent years. In the 1970s, or even the 1990s, then sure, learning the language would have been very difficult due to the limited selection of learning material and dearth of social opportunities to practice (the Finns being so famously taciturn). Today, however, there are so many different textbooks for Finnish that a foreigner can find one that matches his or her particular approach to language-learning, and there are lots of meetups now in Helsinki for foreigners to practice.

I learned Finnish many years ago when things were rather more difficult, and I envy the opportunities that immigrants to Finland today have.

"or even Swedish, which most of them speak due to historical factors that I will politely gloss over"

Most finns _don't_ speak Swedish, or it's very limited. It's a second language in law only because Finland was part of sweden from 1300 - 1800. There is nothing too politically awkward to gloss over. Finland was not conquered by sweden. We basically were swedes for 500 years, with a weird local language that no civilized person spoke.

Historically Finland could have been part of either a feudal society that became inclusive (Sweden) or that became stereotypically exclusive (Russia). As part of Sweden Finland was among the forerunners of countries that got a modern legislation and administration in the 1600's and strong cultural ties to the rest of europe. During this time the elite spoke Swedish.

The political interaction with Russia during this time was handled mostly by military means.

Finland's population rose from 50,000 to 800,000. The population of the entire country was less than the population in global biggest cities (a trend that continues to this day).

There was not much input to scientific or cultural development of the world as most energies were spent in surviving winters without famine and evading capture into slavery by invading various eastern entrepreneurs. Industrialism took it's first faltering steps, but there was not much capital to invest (a trend that continues to this day).

Then came Napoleon, who wanted to pressure Sweden to join into an embargo against England. At this point France was allied with Russia (this would change eventually) but for now Czar Alexander in 1808 was happy to oblige.

The initial plan was not to take control of Finland, just to occupy it until Sweden acquiesced. Things happened, and Alexander decided to keep it. But what to do with it?

As it turned out, there were two trends working to the benefit of the finnish polity. First, the czar was pretty sure sweden would eventually like their dominion back. Secondly, this idea of small nation states as buffers between big players was taking hold among the great nations (Belgium was one of these as well a few decades later). And there were no resources that the czar would really like. The country was foreign, there were no feudal lords the czar could command, the whole area was controlled in a totally unrussian way. Sure, he could put his boot down and russify the lot, but all of the things discussed above lead to the fact that instead Alexander accepted a plan that Finland would become a semi-autonomous duchy with it's own constitution and money. This would have been quite an impossible idea a century later but now it felt as an excellent idea.

There was only one problem.

There was no finnish national sentiment to speak of. And you can't have a strong autonomous nation state without a sense of nationality. At this point all educated people spoke swedish. Basically, it was an area ripe to return to sweden.

So, czar happily supported and encouraged the few individuals that thought that Finland should have it's own national spirit (the sentiment of nationalities was already spreading in europe and was not totally foreign in finland). So, in effect, they machined a campaign that it was effectively _cool_ to be finnish. Swedes changes their names to finnish in droves.

At this time, finnish language as a written tongue started to develop as well. It had more or less stagnated until now, but as finnishness was becoming a thing, surely something should be written in it as well.

So that is the reason there are no great literary works in Finnish before the early 19th century. There was no literary tradition, and everyone who would have been capable of producing great works wrote in swedish and other european languages any way.

So now we have a country with more or less modern administration, a national sentiment and a language. But it's still dirt poor.

This would be remedied eventually. The russian governors recognized that their domain was mostly unindustrialized backwater, and they heavily supported industrialization efforts. The funny thing is, that on the other side of the border the russian state did not support extensive industrialization, but on the finnish side it actually supported it quite a lot.

In effect, russian domination gave finland it's national identity, it's governing body, it's industry and supported it's literary and artistic efforts. Finland effectively was a dominion under czar's direct authority, and finn's loved their czar.

This love changed to something else in the late 19th century as the russian state started a strong russification push in all of it's dominions. But finns were still more or less content as their life went on. The finnish elite is strongly part of the russian high life - St. Petersburg has a large finnish population and finnish artisans produce goods for the wealthy. For example more than few of the Faberge eggs were made by Finnish artisans.

Come 1917, the czar dies, the house of Romanoff is no more, and the finns discover to their horror that legally they are no longer a duchy under russia as the way it was legally written was that finland was under czar's domain and not part of the russian state. Legally, it seems they are now on their own. Horror changes to realizing a possibility of an actual nationhood. So, a few politicians travel to Lenin to kindly point out that legally they are no longer part of russia, and, ahem, they would be very greatfull if the bolsheviks could awknowledge this. Lenin can do whatever he likes with them, but frankly, he has bigger political problems at hand (he will have for a while as the russian civil war will rage for years) and so for some reason or other he let's the silly finnish bourgeoise have their cute little state. The communists will anyway take over soon as the masses will rise in rebellion.

Except, they won't. There's a bloody civil war in 1918, finns settle it, continue existence as a parlamentarian state and... that's where it all comes from.

In II. world war they block soviet invasion with strong support from Nazi germany (yes, they were basically in league with the nazis but the alternative would have ranged from soviet opression to total annihilation - had he won Stalin could have basically destroyed every finn if he felt like it. He killed ten times more soviet people as an afterthought as there were finns in total.).

So, basically, Finland is country filled with people who for the most of civilized world history have died of starvation and have been hunted as slaves. Only in the last 150 years the country emerged from a rural backwater into a fairly succesfull nation state.

This history explains quite a lot of the typical finnish egalitarian sentiment. We've died of starvation. We've been sold as slaves. There's been no rich local lords since everyone has been equally miserable. There's been no big cities. Most of the urbanization has happened in the last 50 years. So, we're a bunch of people who's families are mostly country yokels, who's families have been quite poor, but who really like to read and write, do maths and enjoy cool gadgets.

I think the main reason Finland is pretty successful is it's centuries long history of inclusive institutions, and intentional investment into human capital (i.e. education). This history is very strongly linked with the swedish state and language, in one way or another, hence, there is nothing impolite about it.

Sorry about the long post.