Disclaimer: This is not tax or financial advice. Depending on which city and country you setup your startup HQ in, you’ll need to pay different types of tax. If you’re building a generational startup to create and capture billions of dollars in value, frankly you can skip all of this by just incorporating in Delaware through Stripe Atlas or some other service provider (in another post I covered the pros and cons of different cities for starting a startup)
At a high level, one thing you should know is that many cities are aggressively trying to launch startup hubs to attract entrepreneurs. Why? Because these entrepreneurs, in turn, attract hundreds of millions—sometimes even billions—of dollars in investments.
For any city, this is a huge opportunity. If you attract just a thousand founders and they collectively bring in hundreds of billions of dollars, a significant chunk of that money circulates within the economy. It’s almost a growth hack for cities—even if most startups eventually fail, the money they raise still fuels economic activity for years before disappearing.
But the real bet isn’t just on short-term cash flow. The hope is that some of these startups will create massive value, making a lot of people wealthy and, more importantly, attracting even more entrepreneurs to that city in the future.
Every city right now wants to capture the startup network effect for itself.
Some cities and countries have been particularly aggressive about attracting founders. For example:
- UAE and Singapore have actively positioned themselves as startup hubs.
- London, Paris, Berlin, and Tokyo have also made efforts in recent years.
- In the U.S., New York and Miami are trying to become serious alternatives to San Francisco.
That said, San Francisco is still the best place in the world for startups.
There’s no real comparison when it comes to a startup’s chances of becoming a unicorn.
Gary Tan had a tweet showing that from the 1990s until today, New York has only produced two billion-dollar companies. In contrast, San Francisco has created countless billion-dollar companies and even multiple trillion-dollar companies.
Most other places in the U.S. aren’t even close to New York—let alone San Francisco.
Tax and Policy Differences
Countries like Singapore and Dubai have tried to become startup hubs by offering major tax incentives:
- Dubai has zero income tax and corporate tax. No taxes at all.
- Dubai has also introduced various founder-friendly visa programs, like the Golden Visa, to make it easy for entrepreneurs to move and set up companies.
- Singapore does have taxes, but they are very low compared to most Western countries.
These countries have made entry easy—incorporating a company and moving there is simple, everything is online, and bureaucratic friction is minimal.
But the real question is whether these are the best places to build a company long-term.
For some businesses, the answer might be yes. But if your goal is to build a unicorn, a world-changing startup, startups are already so difficult that you need every possible advantage.
Where Do the Most Ambitious Entrepreneurs Go?
From my experience, founders in places like Singapore and Dubai do well, but they’re usually not trying to change the world. If they were, they would have moved to San Francisco.
It’s tough to admit this—especially as someone who isn’t American.
I spent all of my 20s wanting to believe that you don’t have to be in the U.S. to change the world. I still want to believe that.
But the reality is: changing the world takes an extreme amount of resources.
And while you can find resources in other countries, you need to start with a lot more resources in order to access them.
The United States is the only country where you can access massive resources without already having them.
If you’re a young person with a great idea, deep intensity, and the tenacity to build it, you can actually raise a lot of money and gain access to incredible resources in the U.S..
That’s not to say it’s easy. It still requires intelligence, hard work, and obsession. But it’s possible. Joining a great founder community like ours is probably one great way to reduce the risk of living in a city other than San Francisco.
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