Here's the deal. I'm GMing a game where the characters are associated with a guy selling a mcguffin to start up his corp. My question is How much nuyen would be necessary to do so? I personally would say in the hundreds of millions of nuyen, but looking at some of the bequests in Dunkie's will, it treats 50 million as a sizeable amount of funding.

Thoughts?

how much money do you need to start a corporation? earlier this year, a friend of mine and i put one together for a grand total of about $500, including lawyer fees--we even registered a false name for the corporation to operate under. if you know what you're doing, it costs maybe $250. now, as far as production facilities and the like go, you're probably talking in the hundreds of thousands, minimum, if not the millions--but it depends completely on what your corporation does. if you're researching and developing cutting-edge tech, you'll probably have a pretty expensive shopping list. if you're turning out bulk units of chocolate pudding, you can get what you need for pretty cheap.

touche mfb.

Yeah, my wife almost incorporated last year. In total it comes down to about $100 in fees here in MD, if memory serves. She just has to register herself as a business. Because she was selling computer art, the only start-up costs were her computer hardware and software (which we all already owned).

What is the corp in question producing and how much is it churning out? That's what determines the price.

It's producing software for cyberdecks. The plot in the first adventure involved protecting the CEO as he cuts a deal for licensing his first product to Microdeck for the funding necessary to take the company public. I presume their startup costs will be purchasing a decent Matrix Host, a place to put it, and some software geeks, along with the necessary costs of taking the company public.

Alright, I'm not a financial guy, but here's what I know about the subject:

In Canada, it costs 1000$ to become Incorporated. Note that you don't have t be incorporated to start a business.

After that, a business is not expected to make money for the first 5 years. So, you have to take into consideration that your company needs outside funding for those 5 years.

A sotware company doesn't need much materials, just personel. But this personel is very expensive. You also need offices, though in 206x you can have people jack in via the Matrix to telework and save costs there, althoguh I guess the Matrix setup will be expensive, particularly for a software corp.

Also, companies do not go pblic right away, it takes a few years. You have to build up a good track record, a reason for investors to buy.

Anyway, general ball-park figure, I'd say (based on not much) you're looking at under 100 milion to do this... maybe somewhere between 10 and 50 milion maybe. It's a lot, but if they are making deals with Microdeck I'm assuming they are hot shit.

That number also assumes that the founder doesn't have any 'ins' in the field already. It is not unreasonable that this guy already knows all the programmers personally (and is one himself) and thusly they will initially work for far less than they're worth. I don't know how much a host costs, though, so you'll need to make that number up. The development time will likely be between 1 and 5 years, depending on its complexity and the size and dedication of the team. However if the guy has another source of income, say a second business, he won't need all that money up front, so the initial costs will be much, much lower. Also the nature of the work allows for teleworking, which reduces the space requirements. $600k is reasonable for the first year, I'd think.

There are a number of factors to consider, but basically it comes down to the good old Who (meaning what sort of incorporation), What (what are you producing or providing), Where (where you incorporate), When (obvious), Why being a little less important but not completely irrelevant.

Who: There are different types of corporation ranging from public stock companies to sole proptietorships, the annual license fee is different for each type.
Where: Different States and Countries have different laws on incorporating, judging by the number of companies selling the service of incorporating in Nevada it must have pretty favorable laws.
When: Laws change over time, what the costs were in 2000 may no longer be accurate if the laws we're changed since then.
What: Startup costs will vary wildly depending on your "industry" ranging from almost zero if you are simply contracting out your knowledge and expertise to millions of dollars if you are going to be doing large scale industrial production.
Why: You can incorporate without really going in to business, for example some people self incorporate just for the tax advantages and I know a Family that incorporated themselves as a travel industry research group so they could write off their annual vacation.