implement a simplified UX for starting a company

[chadwhitacre]

Reticketed from @webmaven at gratipay/inside.gratipay.com#180 (comment):

In a sense, the problem you're describing is already solved for open source by Fiscal Sponsors like the Software Freedom Conservancy, at least for projects that are too small to merit their own 501(c)3 (eg. not The jQuery Foundation). I do not know how small their smallest project is. [...]

Can Gratipay do anything to help individuals (or small teams) either find an appropriate Fiscal Sponsor or establish a corporation to get them over that hump?

I'm thinking of how Stripe abstracted away merchant accounts for people, but really more like Braintree, because we want to allow people to bring their own corporation (Braintree allows you to bring your own merchant account and just use them as a gateway, or use their simplified one-size-fits-all merchant account).

We're wrestling with Gratipay's structure on gratipay/inside.gratipay.com#242 wrt @rohitpaulk's relationship to Gratipay, under pressure to bring back payroll (#3433).

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[chadwhitacre]

Closing in favor of #2569.

[chadwhitacre]

Actually, reopening, and making #2569 more general. We need to understand the underlying problem we're trying to solve, and decide if a simplified UX for solving a company is the right approach. There may be other possible approaches.

[chadwhitacre]

Actually, instead of making #2569 more general, let's use gratipay/inside.gratipay.com#242 for the top-level discussion.

[chadwhitacre]

Blocked on gratipay/inside.gratipay.com#242.

[webmaven]

This might be a point at which you should ask bkuhn about what the bookkeeping arrangements are for Fiscal Sponsors, and what the arrangement between a Fiscal Sponsor and the Gratipay project vs. the LLC would be like.

[chadwhitacre]

@webmaven Yup. Let's include fiscal sponsorship as an option on gratipay/inside.gratipay.com#242.