Hacker News Reader

Comment by andai | Hacker News Reader

> Having run out of cash, an EU fund meant to boost promising tech companies will hand out certificates instead.

> Companies who are left without any money will get a "seal of excellence," meant to tell private investors that the EU likes the company.

View on HN

Now this is cringeworthy for sure.

As someone living in the EU, this makes me embarrassed. We should be able to do better than this.

Easier to top up than to have a pot available and no one using it... Its a new instrument so I guess they couldn't get a good estimate what was needed. Also better if you can select rather than fund everything.

I suppose they will pitch in other funds, e.g. they have encouraged countries to use some of the funds under the Recovery and Resilience Facility to fund projects that got these certificates of quality.

My startup received this "seal of excellence". It hurts because I'd rather have the money instead of a piece of paper, but hopefully we might be selected for the next round. They do this startup selection every 6 months or so.

TÜV Rheinland approves this message.

Looking up company details on an Excel sheet and selecting the correct mail template is a hard and complicated job, not everyone can do that.

They should have issued them as NFTs.

This must certainly be a joke, right?!

Strongly reminds me of USSR

So you think that in USSR there were startups and private investors? Interesting.

No but they had two kinds of money. Rubles and accounting Rubles.

No they liked to reward regular people with non-material things.

You mean experience is gulag is truly priceless for entrepreneur.

Well that was for very low key entrepreneurs. More serious ones generally got death sentence if caught

They did have startups and private investors, but it was obviously black market and was punishable by death.

I found this better than the nothing.

I doubt that. No VC or other private investor is going to give a shit about a "seal of excellence" handed out by the government.

I think you're still overestimating. VCs would run away from a company that was vetted by the government.

“I liked them, but not enough to find a way to fund them” isn’t the best endorsement ever

Is the job of a government to fund startup, I personally disagree. I prefer easing of red tape and support of administrative tasks.

An endorsement is better than nothing.

Ah, digital dividends from the government.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ei9iM_zzzQk

I prefer EU to just say 'We give up' LOLL

What the heck is that 'seal of excellence' supposed to mean?

That they applied for something?

As best as I can tell it means "we would have funded this company if they had been a bit higher up in the stack of applications and we reached them before we ran out of money."

Using the government as social proof

Reply on news.ycombinator.com