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).