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Comment by silexia | Hacker News Reader

The larger problem Germany and other European countries have is over regulation. Startups are like brand new babies... easily suffocated by government and bureaucracy.

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I've seen a lott of EU tech startups over the years, and in litterally 0 cases regulation was a concern.

How many didn't you see because they got strangled in the crib by regulation?

I saw very many from near conception when they were applying for very first funding.

Don't get me wrong, regulation is a serious topic, but for startups outside of specific domains such as healthcare, it is not realy a thing that seems to stop people from entrepreneurship.

Part of that is certainly that startups just don't care that much and have a we'll worry about that once we are making our first 10 million arr attitude.

So, from you experience, what were the main show stoppers for the startups that you had the chance to see/observe?

Building things that nobody was waiting for without a sound businessplan. Grossly underestimating required technical knowledge and investment being a close second.

Why dodge the question?

The ones that got to the point of applying for the first funding are the survivors in the survivorship bias.

Given that these applications could occur before a company was even legally founded, I doubt much 'survival' before that point was necessary.

Really? You don't think prospective businessmen think "I'd like to do this, but those regulations make it stupid to even try?"

You can add at least 1 prospective company to that number. Mine.

I wanted to do something, but the costs of compliance were so high it would be stupid of me to even try.

It seems you're not aware of the distinct challenges startups face in Europe. Are you familiar with the GDPR? This regulation alone doubles the complexity of developing a startup. Beyond that, the European Union presents unique hurdles with its diverse languages and varying laws across member countries, adding significant complexity to the entrepreneurial landscape and impacting a founder's journey at multiple levels. Moreover, countries like Germany feature some of the most complicated tax systems in the world, further amplifying the complexity and challenges for entrepreneurs navigating the startup landscape in Europe.

I'm extremely skeptical of your comment. How does GDPR double the complexity of developing a startup, can you explain this clearly? And honestly, a startup is not going to be targeting more than one or two regions in the EU in the beginning, and even as it scales it generally won't target every single region, so I don't see how this also adds complexity too, especially at the beginning when the company is scaling.

Startups must navigate GDPR's complex requirements, such as managing user consents for data collection, which complicates both user interface and backend development. The focus on data minimization under GDPR requires careful system planning, limiting how data can be used. Furthermore, systems must accommodate user rights, including data access and deletion requests. Global operations face additional legal and technical hurdles due to international data transfer rules. GDPR compliance is a continuous process, demanding regular updates and documentation, diverting attention from other development areas. The need for thorough privacy compliance testing adds to the development lifecycle. These requirements make software development more costly and time-consuming, particularly compared to countries without such strict regulations. Of course, there are many other issues with GDPR, but delving into all of them would be akin to writing a book.

Yeah, no. For a small company its not really that complicated and it's also uniform. You can use a simple service for things like cookies and then manually comply in the backend.

Reading GDPR is less complicated than finding out precisely what unregulated in most states means.

This sounds like it was made by ChatGPT.

By the way, I recently had the experience of remotely setting up a corporation in the United States, and it took just 2 hours. In stark contrast, establishing a GmbH in Germany, a member state of the EU, is a much lengthier process, often taking at least 4-6 weeks. The contrast in efficiency and time commitment is quite striking.

No worries. More of that coming soon. CRA and NIS2 are right there around the corner.

With probably even more coming later ;) No such thing as too much, right?

I wouldn't be angry if not for the fact that I know how inefficient most processes are gonna be. Government processes have no incentives to be fast, so simple things easily can take months.

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