Serial entrepreneur Brian Requarth learned his lesson the hard way.
When he sold Brazilian online real estate marketplace VivaReal for $550 million several years ago, he had to pay more than $100 million in capital gains taxes due to incorporation errors made early on. It was an expensive mistake, and one he wants to help Latin American entrepreneurs avoid with his new venture, Latitud.
“I took the advice from someone in Silicon Valley who told me ‘You need a C Corp…that’s what we invest in,’” Requarth told TechCrunch. “The reality was, and I came to learn this through a very costly mistake, was that I ended up paying $100 million in capital gains taxes to the U.S. government because it was a corporation in the U.S. even though we had zero activity there.”
The lesson stuck with him and it became s …
