I recently started a company Zinc Labs Inc. . This is the what I have learnt from my experiences.

While there are a lot of articles on the big picture around starting a company and smalll tidbits in specific areas on how to handle things. I haven’t found a good set up tasks/tools that I can follow instead of figuring out everything myself by experimenting and sometimes making mistakes. I wish I had this when I was starting up first time. The stuff that I will be covering can be minor things and sometimes major stuff.

Step 1 - Register your domain

The first thing that you want to do is register your domain. Pick any domain registrar. I prefer google domains. Next step is to get an email service. While there may be many choices here your primary choices boil down to Google Vs Microsoft. I prefer google workspaces coz, there area lot of google docs/sheets floating around and gettnig access to them is easier with a google id.

Register a company

I used Clerky and it was a breeze. I picked their lifetime package costing $799/- Good thing abou using clerky is that they have partnerships with multiple vendors. One of them is AWS and you can get $5k AWS credits through clerky.

Do not forget to file your 83(b) election with IRS to avoid tax surprises later. In order to file 83(b) election you beed to send a certified mail to IRS. Do this by going to an USPS office.

You will need to do post incorporation setup in clerky once the company is registered. This involves things like setting up an equity plan, Claifornia foreign qualification and more. Get an office space before you do post incorporation steps. You don’t need office space while doing the company registration itself.

Get a virtual office

Before you go and do post incorporation setup, please get a physical office address. I chose a virtual office from Regus. This provides you with a physical address. They also forward physical mils to your home once a week.

Opening a bank account

Once you have your company registered, you can open a bank account.

There are many options here. I was highly recommended Silicon Valley Bank. They onboard you through their account team and waive charges for 1st year if I remember correctly. After some research I went woth Brex Cash. Brex cash has no charges for domestic or international transfers. One good thing that I liked about Brex was that, I could issue many virtual credit cardsa - one for each vendor :-) .

Fund raising

If this is a new setup you will most likely be raising funds from VCs/angels using SAFE notes. I struggled and wasted some time during this phase. I thought I could issue SAFE notes using a carta. That was a mistake. I ended up paying for carta, doing manual work of getting the SAFE notes signed using docusign. You could totally avoid carta to begin with.

Do yourself a favor and just use Clerky for issuing SAFE notes. It is fully automated.

Will add more as I go through my journey.