// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
Have an LLC
Our ol’ grandpappy had it tough. Back in his day, when he wanted to build a new
startup, he’d first spend months coveting the right venture capitalist, undergo
hours of interrogations about his planned “agile development methodology” while
being assaulted with steaks and strip clubs, diligently select the right lawyers
to incorporate the company, and then he’d carefully spend a year or two
assembling a crack team of multi-decade tenured employees from Oracle and
Deloitte so they’d have just the right chance at cracking the $100k ARR mark by
the time Java 1.4 dropped.
You already know the joke I’m going to make here: some teenager’s agent just
ripped out a seven figure banger in the same time it took me to come up with a
funny way to shoehorn Java 1.4 into the opener.
All that to say: things are happening really fuckin’ fast these days, to the
point where the incorporation step isn’t an afterthought in the middle of a
paragraph; in many cases it’s the real blocker.
About a year ago, back when LLMs would take days to build relatively okay
software (ugh, so disgustingly long), I built
Calendearing, a very tiny piece of
software to fix an annoyance I had with merging all of my dozen-plus calendars
into one URL that I could share with my wife. That’s it. I’m pretty sure the
build phase took four hours before I got to a point I was happy with.
It was something small, valuable to me, and I figured hey, could be valuable to
other people, too, so I slapped a flat yearly price on it and deployed it.
Four hours for the build out, but it took something like a week before I could
actually launch it. I had to wait over the weekend for my EIN and legal docs and
everything to get set up in order to accept payments, separate the finances for
it, and so on. Even a week is practically light years compared to what our ol’
grandpappy had to go through, but when you’re now at the point where you can
conceivably build a real business in days or hours… the extra wait time feels
artificially annoying. (There’s a lot of great government work happening, too:
the IRS has been doing instant EINs for most people for years, and Europe has a
ton of exciting stuff happening with EU-INC.)
Something I keep finding myself telling other entrepreneurial people is: get an
LLC. Even if you don’t particularly have something in mind to launch right now,
it’s worth grabbing one to be able to move quickly in the event that you do.
They’re not particularly difficult to get: Stripe Atlas has been building out
LLCs alongside C-corps for awhile, and there are also oodles of other LLC
creators out there; just ask your agent.
An LLC will help you force a separation of personal and work finances from the
start, it’ll help you accept payments or sign up for a bank account, and it’ll
give you some legal liability shielding too. (You do pool your liability across
ventures, but that’s usually a reasonable tradeoff if they’re all early-stage.)
You can also use it for other uses, too, like using it for short-term
contracting gigs.
But I just love the idea of having a pre-made company at hand to try a number of
weird different directions; some of them might shake out to become real
businesses. GitHub, Inc., for example, was not started as GitHub, Inc.: the
company started as Logical Awesome, LLC. The goal was to create a suite of
companies — a version control system, maybe an issue tracker next, etc. — that
would form the basis of the overall revenue stream. GitHub itself just
accidentally became huge before other products could be made. Then we went back
and later re-incorporated as GitHub, Inc.
Cost-wise it’s maybe $500 a year, all in (unless you have the pleasure of living
in California, in which case you have to add their inane $800 on top). But
that’s pretty reasonable considering the optionality it gives you to just… build
shit these days. Ideas are cheap, and building them has never been cheaper. Be
ready the next time when that shower thought hits you.