MBA Mondays - Business 101 for startups by Fred Wilson

Legal & finance 101: Corporate Entities

I'm taking a turn on MBA Mondays today. We are moving past the concepts of interest and time value of money and moving into the world of corporations. Today, I'd like to talk about what kinds of entities you might encounter in the world of business.

First off, you don't have to incorporate to be in business. There are many people who run a business and don't incorporate. A good example of this are many of the sellers on Etsy . They make things, sell them, receive the income, and pay the taxes as part of their personal returns.

But there are three big reasons you'll want to consider incorporating; liability, taxes, and investment. And the kind of corporate entity you create depends on where you want to come out on all three of those factors.

I'd like to say at this point that I am not a lawyer or a tax advisor and that if you are planning on incorporating, I would recommend consulting both before making any decisions. I hope that we'll get both lawyers and tax advisors commenting on this post and adding to the discussion of these issues. I'll also say that this post is entirely based on US law and that it does not attempt to discuss international law.

With that said, here goes.

When you start a business, it is important to recognize that it will eventually be something entirely different than you. You won't own all of it. You won't want to be liable for everything that the company does. And you won't want to pay taxes on its profits.

Creating a company is implicitly recognizing those things. It is putting a buffer between you and the business in some important ways.

Let's talk first about liability. When you create a company, you can limit your liability for actions of the corporation. Those actions can be for things like bills (called accounts payable in accounting parlance), promises made (like services to be rendered), and lawsuits. This is an incredibly important concept and the reason that most lawyers advise their clients to incorporate as soon as possible. You don't want to put yourself and your family at personal risk for the activities you undertake in your business. It's not prudent or expected in our society.

Taxes are the next thing most people think about when incorporating. There are two basic kinds of corporate entities for taxes; "flow through entities" and "tax paying entities." Here is the difference. Flow through corporate entities don't pay taxes, they pass the income (and tax paying obligation) through to the owners of the business. Tax paying entities pay the taxes at the corporate level and the owners have no obligation for the taxes owed. Your neighborhood restaurant is probably a "flow through entity." Google is a tax paying entity. When you buy 100 shares of Google, you are not going to get a tax bill for your share of their earnings at the end of the year.

And then there is investment/ownership. Even before we talk about investment, there is the issue of business partners. Let's say you want to split the ownership of your business 50/50 with someone else. You have to incorporate to create the entity that you can co-own. And when you want to take investment, you'll need to have a corporate entity that can issue shares or membership interests in return for the capital that others invest in your business.

So now that we've talked about the three major considerations, let's talk about the different kinds of entities you will come across.

For many new startups, the form of corporate entity they choose is called the LLC. It stands for Limited Liability Company. This form of business has been around for a long time in some countries but became recognized and popular in the US sometime in the past 25 years. The key distinguishing characteristics of a LLC is that you get the limitation of liability of a corporation, you can take investment capital (with restrictions that we'll talk about next), but the taxes are "flow through". Most companies, including tech startups, start out as LLCs these days. Owners in LLC are most commonly called "members" and investments or ownership splits are structured in "membership interests."