How Did I Get My Red-White-Red Card (Austrian Residence) As a Startup Founder
By John H. Shen
“Ok, that was faster than expected.”
I turned to my co-founder, as we just received a congratulations email from my lawyer about my rot-weiss-rot kart getting approved. The time frame from when I applied to when I got the formal approval took just 3 months, which was much faster than the average we have heard before.
Gotta Love That Bureaucracy
Having lived and worked in both New Zealand and China prior, I had to say that Austria is much more difficult and process-heavy compared to NZ, especially for those who were not EU residence. We were very fortunate as we were getting a lot of help from the local agencies such as ABA, VBA and FFG. If you are a startup founder and new to Austria, I recommend look them up!
Then, why Austria? So many people asked us this question, mostly Austrians. I always start the answers by throwing bouquets at the cultural vibrance and my love for the local classical music. It always bring smiles to their faces. I mean it though. Vienna is such an exquisite city, always ranked high in the top 10 liveable cities in the world, many times No. 1.
But for our establishment, a FinTech startup founded in Shanghai China, Austria is our gateway to the limelight of the European market. Furthermore, in comparison to other European countries, the support in the innovation sector in Austria is phenomenal. From the public funding to the supports from the agencies, to the innovative and professional ecosystem. It literally took us much less time to find our first 10 beta B2B customers than to open a company bank account.
Bureaucracy is annoying, but the ecosystem? Awesome!
A Little Bit About Me
I was born in Beijing, China. I went to New Zealand to study as a teenager. Graduated from University of Auckland with BSc - Computer Science in 2006. I worked as software developer, business analyst, then project/product manger. I decided to quit my job in the year 2015, to go full-time in entrepreneurship.
The first few ideas did’t work so well, no surprise there though. Then I met my co-founders in China in 2016. In that very year, I went back to Shanghai, China, to work with the team on the new business, Xencio. 16 years after living in New Zealand.
Xencio China offers corporate treasury automation via AI powered financial intelligence. We sell to many global corporates such as Unilever, Merck, GE, Herbalife, Didi, PingAn China etc. We now have 30 full-time hired hands in China alone.
We felt it is appropriate in 2018 to explore reconnoiter an opportunity to expand to the global market, and that’s when we finally picked Austria as our hub to the EU market.
To Start a Company, You Need Residency
Well, as long as you are not an EU citizen, you cannot really work here, let alone start a company. You can actually cofound a company, but you have to be a shareholder owing less than 50%.
But no worries, there’re 3 ways you could use inorder to obtain the red-white-red card which gives authorization to you to be the managing director, work in your business full time and get medical covers and kids to school just like the locals.
1. Red-White-Red Card Start-up Founder Category
2. Red-White-Red Card Self-employed Key Workers Category
3. Other Key Workers Category
You can find more details from here about the red-white-red card yourself: https://www.migration.gv.at/en/types-of-immigration/permanent-immigration/
The rule of thumb is, for startup founders, 1 is better than 2, which is also better than 3. but 1 is much harder. So if 1 fails, you try 2, and so on. In this post, i will talk about the Startup Founder Category mostly, because that’s the one I did.
Score Yourself Now!
https://www.migration.gv.at/en/types-of-immigration/permanent-immigration/start-up-founders/
Quite self explanatory, if you are young, tertiary level educated with good english and fair amount of accuaintance with work, you should be eliible with a >50 score.
In my case, I got total 60
20 - A university degree (not from Austria)
10 - Work Experience more than 5 years
20 - English C2
10 - Additional Investment of €50,000, and
10 - Selected to a business incubator in Vienna
I just turned 35 when i applied, too bad I couldn’t get the additional 10 point for age (yeah that age up to 35 means it does not include 35, grrr!!).
A Lil Hurdle to Get You Started - Frist Chicken and Egg
Ok, so far so good right? Here comes the fun part:
If you want your application likely to succeed (which you definitely want, right?), you had better have a company already registered. Wait a minute, didn’t I mention earlier you need residency to be the managing director of a GmbH? Exactly! So here you go:
Company <--Dependency--> Director having citizenship or residency
There’re only two possible ways of tackling this:
1. To apply for red-white-red without having a company (and risking getting rejected), or
2. To form a company without having residence (the company formation will come to a halt at some stage, but regardless). We chose the second one.
(actually there is a whole lot to talk about with company formation for non-EU citizens, I will write another blog about it.)
Document Preparation
While the company formation is underway for me, I started to prepare my list of documents.
Let’s start with the easy and pettifogging ones:
1. Passport and photocopies of passport
2. EU Sized Passport Photos
3. TOFEL Certificates to show sufficient language level (if your citizenship is not from a native German or English speaking countries)
4. Proof of Business Incubator - If you already in one, this is money for old rope. But if you are looking at a foreign friendly incubators to get into, here are some quick recommendations, google them: Global Incubator Network, Vienna Startup Package, Elevate by TheVentury, INiTS, weXelerate, ElevatorLab
5. Proof of Fund - for my case, i need to show a bank statement of more than 25.000 EUR. I also had to show that the new company bank account (Xencio GmbH) has over 50.000 EUR.