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Help us make Finland better place for startups

We, the Finnish Startup Community, are inspired to make Finland the best place for startups.

However, we know that unfortunately that is not the reality yet. We’ve heard frequent stories on the ridiculous bureaucracy on opening bank accounts, getting your ID’s and waiting multiple hours in front of the Finnish Immigration Service (Migri) in cold windstorm. Fortunately these kind of extreme examples are thing in the past but the work is definitely not over.

That’s why we are launching this anonymous board for all startup founders, employees, immigrants or anyone likeminded to share their stories publicly. The feedback can be anything you’ve personally experienced, positive or negative. For example, if you have had to wait months for basic services, we want to hear about it. Likewise, if your work permit was obtained within 24 hours, please share these positive experiences with us as well. The Finnish Startup Community will utilize this as one of their sources on when pushing for changes which ensures that Finland is the best target country in the world for labor migration.

Posts are fully anonymous and do not require any personal information. Finnish Startup Community moderates only to ensure that the feedback is relevant and does not include any personally identifiable information.

You can read more about our work here.

This board was directly influenced by the launch of this great Portugal board

Share your experience

Tax-incentives for investing in startups

Startups require fuel for growth. One essential part of the fuel is private funding. Compared to US startups, their European counterparts raise much less funding. This means the startups in the EU and Finland are competing against better-funded competitors. We should look into tax incentives that increase the available capital for startups. The US has the QSBS system, and the UK has SEIS. Could this be implemented in the Finnish tax system?

1 year ago

Shares and stock options as part of compensation package

Start-ups can rarely attract talent with high salaries so giving out shares and stock options as part of the compensation is vital. However, the taxation regulations for this are extremely complicated, and more importantly, they do not seem to accept that most start-ups fail and the shares and stock options are worth nothing. Even if there is a successful funding round with a valuation, that does not mean that the shares/options are really worth that amount as there is no market to sell them and the likelihood of their value ending up at zero is still high. These are facts that should be taken into consideration in taxation. Ideally, taxes should be payable only when the shares are sold, or at least when there is a reasonable certainty that the company will survive. In the set-up where shares/options are taxed as income, it should be at least possible to claim the paid taxes back if the company ends up going bankrupt. This is just common sense as the recipient has not benefited financially from these shares/options at all and they have still paid taxes for them.

1 year ago