hello benja, i'm paul and i'm the one who mainly started this. your reservations are absolutely justified. who am i to think i can do this?
i haven't had any huge successes to show yet, and i really didn't want to launch like this. i had big plans of launching with my own money, and then i'd have prepared some nice texts telling my success story.

as things went, we are launching early. i'm certainly in a different league than pg, but i try. being where i am now, i'll also write down some more information about me and the other people involved, so that you can get a better idea.

basically i'm a computer security guy. started programming with 8, and then later spent a lot of time at university to get cheap net access using the DLX single-floppy linux distro that my brothers had developed in 96 (of course i had no student account at 14). met cool people there, tutors and such, and was trying hard to keep up with them. i started the teso security group in 98, and have been a computer security person ever since. i got involved with many NGOs, am really interested in game theory and reputation systems, co-wrote a paper on quantum cryptography, and started a company first trying to do social sorting, but ran out of money quickly (i wasn't checking against my own reality, but the reality i knew from my friends in SF, and expecting to get VC easily, so i rented an office, got myself a friend as a CEO who was good with words - i certainly wasn't back then). then i developed a bootable usb stick with a crypto IFS filesystem driver for windows, and loopback-aes for linux, to sell to local banks. we had a customer, and we finished the code, but my ceo got lovesick and didn't answer my calls for weeks. then i got a loan, hired a project manager to do this stuff for me. we didn't get anywhere, but she was really expensive. in early 2004 i had to close shop because we could neither get any funding at all, nor get anyone to manufacture the product. i made lots of mistakes. i got back into security consulting, and spent the last 3 years paying off my debt, and learning from these mistakes. i never managed to incorporate beyond my one-person-company. i spent my free time during the last 3 years building up the metalab, probably the most active non-profit and self-funded project center in europe. We have about 110 members, who pay 20 euros a month to finance our location. We are completely nonprofit and independent, and will remain like that. But one of the goals of the lab was to prepare both for my own next startup, and the startups of other people. so far we've been quite successful at sharing knowledge, experience, and instantiating projects. being wary of big endeavours with too many unknown factors, i'm organizing a computer security conference (http://deepsec.net/) right now and had planned to use that money to finance yeurope in a year. my startup probably is the most risk-averse of all we have in the lab right now. i was urgently aiming for success and start cash for yeurope. half a week ago, because we started lobbying as IG Startup (interest group of startup founders), an opportunity has arisen to do YEurope right now, by taking an angel on board. we certainly have worse cards than YC in the US, but i'm confident we can do this, or i wouldn't try.

i'll try to write these things down in a more readable fashion in the future. in the meanwhile you can read a slightly outdated but less prosaic CV here: http://kybkreis.org/~enki/cv_paulboehm2007.pdf

regarding the incorporation question: we have a harmonization regulation in the EU which allows us to start companies anywhere in Europe. we could start cheap LLCs or LLPs in the UK and still use them in Vienna, with Viennese law applying to all business except shareholder disputes which would be under UK law. for non-EU citizens we might have to find special arrangements. i have no idea how this might work. i'm not a lawyer though, and i'll leave this stuff to our lawyers.