What could the government do to make it easier to create and run startups in Czechia?

Jan Rezab
3 min readDec 14, 2020

Since commenting on the 15/23% company sales tax situation 2 weeks ago, there was a debate around how easy it is to have companies in the current ecosystem.

I was asked by several politicians what could the Czech government do to make things easier to run Czech startups — and why for example many startup opt-in to create a HQ structure in UK / US.

Here is my top list, feel free to comment with more:

  1. Need for notaries — Everywhere
    - we need notaries for every change
    - we cannot just sign a new investor via Docusign and bring in the money — this is a problem
  2. Employee Stock Options too taxed
    - today, employee stock options have to be treated as an employment benefit, and taxed fully at salary rates incl. social and health benefit payments.
  3. Immigration — Employing foreigners is hard
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    If I really want to employ someone tomorrow and I am willing to sponsor their stay and VISA, it takes a long process of several weeks — in an ideal case scenario — 2 months. With the Ministry of Interior affairs often being unreachable for days or weeks…
  4. Part-time Employment Options limited
    - Today, we have options for full-time employees, contractors — but part time is extremely hard. Czech has 2+ million people with “contractor” (IČO) permits — because the part time employment system is just terrible.
  5. Zero benefits for creating jobs
    - There are no benefits if you create hundreds of jobs in this country. You just go and create them — one wish there would be some sort of advantage
  6. VAT for software — I know this is a European / global issue…
    My companies have most of their costs locally — but not all. We had to be a VAT payer, and a VAT deduction. But a huge majority of our deals were outside the country, which means we had a negative VAT (vratka) — so the government had to return VAT every month / quarter. This meant we would get a nice visit every month or two from the tax authorities (which we always passed with flying colors). To get hurt for the system being bad is not cool.
  7. Creating companies is slow
    We are one of the worst countries in creating companies. It did get better, but compared to the UK experience — where its essentially filling out an online form and “downloading” your company, its still very difficult. And yet again, there are notaries! :)
  8. Too much bureaucracy
    We are still a fairly bureaucratic system — despite numerous advancements. E.g. even if you pay everything by credit card — you still have to deliver physical bills to the government when asked. Noone does it, and they make copies on their phones — but it is still the law.

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Jan Rezab

Founder & CEO of @timeisltd, Founder of @Socialbakers Productivity, social media, SaaS, life, yoga