If you look around, you'll see some interesting things. When I go to Arby's, I sometimes read who actually owns their registered trademarks. It reads something

If you look around, you'll see some interesting things. When I go to Arby's, I sometimes read who actually owns their registered trademarks. It reads something like "Arby's Intellectual Properties, LLC" (don't quote me on that, but it is an LLC). My apartment complex is fairly sizeable. Before it was sold off to the current owners, the property itself was owned by an LLP and the property management arm is an Delware LLC. This is a national property management firm. The last time I was out on the road and stopped at a truck stop -- Pilot -- I noticed that Pilot was owned and operated as an LLC. In Columbus, OH, there was a stadium built maybe eight years ago, called the Nationwide Arena. Nationwide Insurance may have sponsored it, but the stadium itself is held in an LLC. My point in this is that there isn't really a stigma attached to an LLC. And looking at it in a different way, an S-Corp and an LLC are two different investment vehicles for any future investors you might be looking for. From those above examples, you might see that LLCs are often used when it comes to holding assets. And as for an S-corp, you can always convert it to a C-corp later on; and depending on the size and how much isolation you want to protect the business assets, you'll end up with multiple entities anyways. Money used to setup the corp can be reimbursed by a board meeting to the incorporator (either with the LLC or the S-Corp) and declared as "capital expenses". It has to be documented; in the case of the S-corp, it should be documented in the initial board meeting and recorded in the minutes. The money you reimburse to the incorporator is paid back in a lump sum, but the capital expense itself is amortized and carried on the books for X number of months (for which, I don't remember value X off the top of my head). But yeah, it would be private money. So you'll want to figure that into your calculation when you setup how much you're going to capitalize the company at. With a Corp, you take additional capital by selling more shares. If you don't have any more shares to sell, you will have to amend the articles of incorporation to authorize more shares, and you generally have to file the amendment with the state government. If you have some shares left, the company can sell them to the investor. Often, there are buy-sell agreements in place, to protect the current shareholders from suddenly getting a shareholder they don't want (massively scaled up, it is like the hostile takeover attempted by EA with TTWO, or with the whole Ichan/Yahoo/Microsoft). LLCs sell additional membership interests, and how you account for that depends on how the operating agreement (read: software configuration) is setup. Some LLCs express ownership in terms of percentages; some express ownership in terms of numbered shares (just like a Corp). How you determine how it is expressed is explicitly spelled out in the operating agreement. The buy-sell agreement you find in a corp is often folded into the operating agreement (example: member may not sell their shares without the unanimous approval of all the current members of the LLC). There are tons more stuff. Definitely look into the Nolo books. The publisher was started by a lawyer, the books are generally comprehensible. They lay out for you a number of different options you might have so that when you walk into a lawyer's office, you can make informed choices. And just like configuring software, it isn't necessary to enable all the options -- some might even be security risks -- it depends on what you are trying to achieve.