Incorporation

Forming a legal company, and how the choice of entity and country shapes everything after.

Also known as: incorporation, company formation, incorporating a startup

Incorporation creates the legal person that owns the product, signs contracts, hires people and takes investment. The choices made here — entity type and country — echo for the company’s whole life: they set taxes, fundraising options, hiring rules and how painful a future restructuring (flip) will be.

decide:  where customers and investors are → pick entity investors fund → form early, cheaply
avoid:   exotic structures for a pre-revenue team; incorporating nowhere ("we'll do it later")

Default to the boring standard your likely investors fund: a Delaware C-Corp for US venture, a Singapore Pte Ltd for regional rounds, a PT operating in Indonesia. Clever structures optimise for futures that may never arrive, at the cost of complexity now.

The classic mistakes:

Incorporating nowhere. Founders build for a year as individuals, then discover the IP belongs to no company, contracts are personal, and investors need months of cleanup. Form before traction, not after.
Fancy structure too early. Offshore holdings with no revenue and no investors cost money yearly and confuse everyone. Start simple where you operate; restructure when a round requires it.
Founders’ IP outside the company. Code written before formation belongs to whoever wrote it until assigned. Every founder and contractor signs IP assignment at formation.
DIY across borders. One country’s routine filing is another’s trap (founder visas, foreign ownership limits, tax residency). Local counsel at formation is cheap; cross-border cleanup is not.

Talk to a notary, lawyer or tax consultant for your case before choosing — entity, country and timing interact, and this page cannot see your situation.

In Indonesia and Southeast Asia

Indonesian founders typically form a PT (or PT Perorangan solo), get NIB licensing and NPWP tax numbers early. Teams raising regionally often add a Singapore holding structure before a priced round — do it when investors ask, not speculatively.