Thread by @patio11

Thrilled to announce that Stripe Atlas can now help you form an LLC: stripe.com/blog/atlas-llc

I wrote a guide about tradeoffs between an LLC and a C corporation: stripe.com/atlas/guides/l…

I also have some thoughts:

Let me start with the obligatory disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer or accountant and cannot give you legal or tax advice. I'm just an entrepreneur who has started four LLCs in two countries and operated two of those businesses through sale.

I started all of my companies as LLCs because they're the low-muss low-fuss option for having something formal between you and the risks associated with a business, and because I wasn't ready to commit to the raise-money try-for-rocket-ship trajectory.

It always felt weird to me that you had to make that decision *first*. Part of the nature of entrepreneurship is it is both experiments about the business you are running and also a journey of learning about yourself, your goals, and your near-term and mid-term plans.

One of the things we wanted to do with the Stripe Atlas LLC is reduce how trapdoor the decision was. So we worked with our legal partners at Orrick to make the process for converting into a C corp as easy as possible.

And it works out of the box as an Internet company.

Why does that matter? Well, LLCs can (and are) used for everything under the sun, from restaurants to real estate holding companies to hedge funds. You can customize an LLC Operating Agreement to do just about anything.

Flexibility in legal documents is a blessing and a curse. One downside is that infinite flexibility that has to get interpreted by a highly-paid professional every time it interacts with *everything* means that it's difficult to reason about LLCs as a class.

By having a standardized Operating Agreement which is allowed to know "I'm running an Internet company with sane defaults, and will not be used as part of some quirky tax structuring for inheritance internationally use case", we can treat the Atlas LLC as a primitive.

The nice thing about well-defined primitives is that you can build on them, and let other people build on them. The hope is that you'll be able to reason about an Atlas LLC in the same way you can reason about e.g. a SAFE.

LLCs can scale quite nicely (*waves to Basecamp*) but they're also the classic entry point for businesses just getting started, and we are very, very interested in being there for businesses which are just getting started.

That's one reason we're launching at #MicroConf.

In Stripe's operating principles we have something about empowering upstarts.

My gloss on this is "Build the products that the type of people who show up for MicroConf want, and build the world that results in more MicroConfs and more people able to participate in them."