FWIW: I am a 2nd-time entrepreneur. I bootstrapped a company in Germany from 2004-2011, and sold it to Google then. As part of that I moved to Switzerland. I started another company in early 2018 in Zurich, believing the hype about it being a good place to do business.
I won't go into details publicly, but: If your market and your potential acquirers are primarily in the US, and you think your startup will have a long-term focus in the US, avoid incorporating in Zurich. Go to London, Berlin, Paris, pretty much anywhere but Zurich. If you absolutely have to incorporate in Switzerland, move yourself to a startup-friendly Canton such as Zug. Do not incorporate in Zurich, and do not open an office in Zurich.
My experiences have been resoundingly negative, and I am not the only one - founders just avoid talking about the negative experiences for fear of causing more problems.
If your market will be primarily Switzerland and the immediate neighbors, starting here is likely fine (albeit you will get better price/performance on engineering in neighboring countries).
Man, thank you for writing the last paragraph. I looked at Rust, I quite like the language, I think it gets a million things right and is a substantial improvement over existing languages, but ... every time I point out that Rust does not magically solve all security problems, I need to spend two days dealing with people with less security expertise than me yelling at me that I am wrong and rewriting the world in Rust will deliver enlightenment. That particular fringe of the Rust community almost turned me away from the language.
So reading your last paragraph makes me feel welcome as someone that says "Rust is great - but rewriting everything in Rust will not solve security". Thanks. <3
s/cherry picking/showing an example with interesting properties that is different from France/g
So this is actually where the discussion should go: What properties does the Swiss wealth tax have (particularly in the wider taxation system) that the French wealth tax did not have?
What is needed for a wealth tax to have no negative effects? What about income and capital gains tax at the same time? Etc. etc.
I am not trying to make an argument pro wealth taxes, I am trying to make an argument against shallow and non-empirical arguments.
Perhaps notable: Switzerland has a wealth tax (of up to 0.3%), and there is zero evidence that this has any deterrent effect on wealthy people settling in Switzerland or startups being created in Switzerland.
Other features of the tax system more than offset the 0.3% wealth tax.
Personally, I am a bit disappointed by the lack of depth of the discourse: Wealth taxes and their effect have been studied quite a bit in economics literature, and there are various peer-reviewed papers that attempt to measure the effects, but the Silicon Valley crowd is strangely avoidant of examining evidence or explaining their opposition with real-world data. It's all 101ism and polemics.
There are also cultural factors about how you present your work. GC Rota wrote about the mathematics culture in the 50's that European and US researchers worked similar amounts, but the Europeans took great care to present an image of working less than they actually did, and the US researchers often presented an image of working more than they did.
My experiences of working both in the US and in Europe (Germany and Switzerland) was that the number of hours worked in the US was higher, but the intensity of work was lower: There was more office chitchat, more goofing around, more "watercooler/coffee talk", and so forth. There is also an extreme culture of "presenteeism" in the US that starts in highschool (where being physically present is much more important than being attentive in any form).
The "reduces their ability to compete"-argument does not hold water considering the data, though. One useful measure of a countries competitiveness is the size of their exports (because it implies that there is a lot of foreign demand for the products from that country), or in their "exports-to-population" ratio.
If you check https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/exports you can see that Germany exports about EUR 112bn worth of goods per month, on a population of about 83 million, about EUR 1350 per head. For comparison:
Canada exports about 49bn CAD per month, on a population of 38m, for approximately 1297 CAD per head.
The US exports about 208bn USD per month, on a population of 327m, for approximately 638 USD per head.
If anything, the big weakness of the German economy is not that it is not competitive enough, the big weakness of the German economy is a lack of domestic consumption due to not much of the money actually reaching workers pockets; this is a result of a fairly aggressive wage stagnation that set in in the 2000s.
While I am also walking down memory lane -- writing recursive SoftICE macros so that one could make SoftICE single-step 50k times and write the log to a file.
For those that like the history of the Cracking scene - there was a set of binary-patching SoftICE extensions called "nticedump" and "icedump". They were pretty nuts, too - one reverse engineer got annoyed by his music playback stopping when he was in SoftICE, so he hacked an MP3 player into the SoftICE driver.