eu/acc
eu-acc.com
eu-acc.com
Yes, let's follow the guy who was "proud" of Google's tax avoidance scheme [1] or the guy that's happy that oxycontin and video games exist to keep poor people quiet [2].
If these are the parts of the US you want to import to the EU, no thanks.
[1]: https://www.itpro.com/644638/eric-schmidt-proud-of-google-ta...
[2]: https://prospect.org/power/2024-04-24-my-dinner-with-andrees...
If you don’t put forward a positive expansive vision for the future someone else will do it for you, like these guys.
(Edited)
There was a time when leftism and liberalism did this. Leftism put forward a vision of equality that featured workers cooperating to go to the stars. Liberalism and its relatives put forward a world of global trade leading to shared global prosperity and again, to the stars (either literally or metaphorically).
Now it’s all whiny doom and gloom and degrowth, which is a luxury belief for people who are already rich.
One of the biggest things that worries me about our discourse is that only fascists and adjacent types are talking positively about the future. That’s terrifying. Snap out this performative doomer nonsense or fascism is what we get.
What tends to happen instead? The cities/countries with highest tax rates (also in Europe) also seem to have an increasingly high violent crime rates. Public transport gets worse every year. The infrastructure rots and collapses everywhere. The public sector is growing increasingly fat and inefficient (pulling the taxes up with it), the queues for social help programs and payouts grows increasingly large every year (more and more people start depending on government payouts). Out-of-control asylum-driven immigration from 3rd world countries. Out-of-control expenditure on war and arms trading. Currency devaluation and high inflation due to bullshit government policies.
So as a tax payer, at some point, you start questioning everything. What are you paying for? Why? Where is this all going? And once you realize how the system truly works - yes, you start thinking about ways to minimize your tax footprint.
Tax avoidance is different from tax evasion: one refers to not voluntarily donating money to the government, and the other is a crime. The similarity in terms is misleading.
The characterization of the Andreessen quote is 1) inaccurate, as the antecedent in the actual quote is unspecified, and 2) described in the linked article as not being a direct quote.
Eu/acc does not appear to be promoting those two aspects of those two people. All people are multifaceted and flawed. Probably, the website is referencing them because of their apparent success as tech investors/founders.
This is like saying “Smoking is cool and good for you. Don’t believe me? Watch Big Tobacco talk about health”.
The unfettered addiction to growth and profit championed by the US is turning the world to shit faster. We need that to stop, not chase it irresponsibly and make the problem worse.
Stop treating everything like a competition while misusing the word “innovation” to justify the exploitation of other people.
Excessive bureaucracy? Sure, let's improve that.
Taxes? No need to turn into US and have barely functional government with no services for the poor.
The opposite of growth isn't things staying the same. It's the rest of the world leaving you behind. Not being competitive means being exploited by those currently occupying the nodes of power and money.
The EU directly opposes the growth model of the new-era tech startups (ruthless growth financed by investor money, take over competitors, market monopoly) and the regulations aim to keep markets at least a little bit competitive.
We (the EU) do not need or want this kind of deregulation.
I don't want to live in that world, and I don't think most people do either. Yes, if we don't join them, there's a possibility that we might end up being enslaved to foreign megacorporations rather than domestic ones, but at least we'll have a chance to create something less dystopian instead.
There's ways to make life for small-entrepreneurs easier.
I need this kind of deregulation. Example, i m taking microtransactiosn for my game. Giving out VAT invoices for all of them is an impossible task. You need to account for the different VATs in the area (and how they change over time). The cost of the accountant for all this would be many times more than the tiny amounts of the transactions. So i have outsourced the money collection to a US-based merchant-of-record who withholds a large cut and pays out once.
I think a lot of people can point to friction like this in all the places. This has nothing to do with "rughless growth by investor money", but with common sense. There is too much BS work going on in europe, much more than should be allowed
There's a whole nuance being lost on most of these discussions.
Thats why every smaller company selling digital products uses merchant of record.
You will probably still need MoR because similar schemes GST (australia, canada, india), russia and yes US sales tax. And those would be a lot harder for you to pay than VAT (US sales tax is particularly complicated ad changing).
Now of course you could not care about paying these (unlike EU that would find out quickly) but it could be pretty unfortunate if one gets stopped on trip to Canada about 7 year old unpayed taxes with fines adjusted for inflation…
Instead Europe should focus on what's stopping EU companies from scaling and leveraging their strengths: lower costs, better infrastructure, more diverse customers and employees.
As a founder on both sides of the Atlantic, I would keep it simple:
1. The EU needs a common credit rating system, similar to Duns & Bradstreet in the US (which is a private company mind you, so very possible) and more competition between banks that should be allowed to do business anywhere in the EU. The EU banking system is much better than the US one, but the above stop it from scaling across the continent.
2. EU needs to give higher incentives to EU companies to do business with EU startups. The fragmented EU market means that most valuable European companies end up being very conservative in how they spend their money (because competition is weak / settled). Therefore they are much less likely to do business with startups for normal business risk reasons. That's a chilling effect for B2B companies who are more likely to get traction in the US rather than the EU. A simple insurance or tax credit scheme would go a long way to reduce risk --and would help the EU get their money back from many startup / VC programs they are subsidizing anyway.
The US has how many states? With how many different rules and regulations between them? I'm sure some things are easier in the US than in the EU. But many things are not. There are some regulations, sure, but I can start a company within 2 business days and do business across the entire EU.
There are some differents in VAT across member states, but those are easily solvable by talking to an accountant. And sure, things get a bit more tricky when you grow to a multinational scale, but then I'm sure you can hire a few more accounts and other pencil pushers.
And hey, we've had free electronic payments across the entire area for nearly two decades. No friction of paper checkbooks here.
> From consumer markets, languages, laws, education systems, taxes, to funding – Europe acts like a network of small countries instead of one unified market.
"Europe" does not ACT AS, it IS a network of "small" (not quite) countries.
Their first project, smoothing out and equalizing the process of creating a new legal entity, seems like an unqualified good thing. Nobody likes notaries, outside of notaries and aspiring notaries. Having Estonia's level of simplicity in business creation would be a good thing for reckless 'disruptive' startups, but it would be a good thing for small brick-and-mortar artisans and shops too.
If one of their subsequent projects is going to be 'let's make tax laws nicer for billionaires', then yeah, screw those guys. But the first one is already a tall order and I frankly think they're unlikely to get political momentum (see: first paragraph.)
Thus I'm skeptical this article will change anything. Europeans have looked to America, and said no. (Or, gave up and moved there.)
EDIT: to be clear I think Europe should be the way Europeans like it.
Sure, experimenting at scale it creates talent in these areas but it also disrupts public life. Let Europeans live like Europeans and Americans live like Americans. Not everyone needs to operate the same way.
I just find it amusing that the linked website (and other calls to make "EU friendly for innovation") assume that the EU is like it is because of ignorance. No, it's because people want it to be this way.
Yet there are a bunch of unicorns in EU. How did they manage to do that in such a hostile meme culture?
I think we need an EUFO group (similar to NAFO) to counter those attacks
It’s not even close man.
America is the outlier here, not Europe.
Germany especially does not want startups to exist, they want to have companies which are large and succeed over the long term. The employee protection laws in Germany (which are often praised on this site) make it extremely hard to run a startup without violating the law. E.g. if you want to employ someone you need to pay their healthcare and pension insurance. They can't work for more than 10 hours a day, no this doesn't mean you aren't allowed to compell them, you have to actually stop them if they wanted to. How do you build a product while figuring out that bureaucracy?
The European model will succeed if and only if those large corporations are actually able to innovate at the same pace as American or Chinese companies. Which currently looks very unlikely.
If the way you are building a product requires you to risk the well being of your employees, which these laws are designed to protect, you and your product are not welcome here.
Please build it somewhere else.
This is a trade of. Startups can be extremely lucrative for people willing to take that risk. These laws exist to prevent abuse, yes, but they also prevent highly driven people from engaging in high risk, high reward economic activities.
As I said Germany does not want startups to exist. The only way the German economy can stay competitive if is the large German tech corporations are able to stay competitive.
Germany is really great in treating its citizens like infants and it shows.
If there was a legal category for "startup employee", with significantly fewer protections, but who can only be employed with a minimum wage of e.g. 3x the average income, would you object to that?
What are those employees doing for upwards of 10 hours per day? I've never met anyone who could put in more than 8 hours of high quality, attentive knowledge work for more than a few days in a row and if we're being completely honest with ourselves, most of us are lucky if we can consistently put in 6h of that high-quality work.
You might have people occupying seats for 10 hours, but you're definitely burning them out, and they'll make more mistakes, and quality of their work will drop off overall. Don't mistake "butt in seat time" with "innovation pace"
As far as I'm concerned, encouraging employees to work long hours is a dead give-away for bad leaders who want to be perceived as good leaders with a team of people who "get shit done". That's exactly the type of abuse those laws are designed to prevent.
If anyone is really capable, and willing, of doing more work, they'll keep thinking about the problem on their personal time. That's probably where they'll get some of their best ideas anyway and no laws can stop that.
Hypothetically there could be a very important deadline to meet. I absolutely do not believe that you can consistently do high quality mental work for 8+ hours a day, but certainly I have worked productively for 10+ hours in a single day on occasion, that was during University though.
To be clear this is in a startup context, an organization which is highly informal and tries to be extremely productive in a short amount of time to create some viable product.
> To be clear this is in a startup context, an organization which is highly informal and tries to be extremely productive in a short amount of time to create some viable product.
I understand, though I don't believe that working long hours is a productive use of anyone's time over time periods longer than a few weeks. From my personal experience working longer than ~8h impacts both concentration and quality, which decimate efficiency of any subsequent hours worked (more bugs then mean more time needed to fix these bugs, which just adds to the crunch).
After a while these side-effects begin to bleed into the next workday which ultimately nullifies the benefits of longer hours.
I don't know why you are talking as if I didn't completely agree, and already said so, that demand 8+ hours of high quality mental work is counterproductive over long periods of time.
My point remains that German labor laws make startups very hard to do. Not that I believe that you should work 10 hours a day over months, but in a startup there might very well be a situation where you can spend 12 hours effectively, which would be a violation of labor laws.
The government shouldn't regulate the work hours in the first place.
If you are an employer and allow this you are really, really dumb.
>About healthcare: wouldn't that make it actually easier to hire employees because they know they'll be covered if they join a startup (risky!) instead of having to worry about that as well?
No. It isn't about money, it is the fact that if you want to hire someone, you have to spend hours upon hours each month managing their legal rights. The process of legally keeping an employee in Germany is incredibly involved, healthcare is just one point, but there are many more.
In America you can just offer people enough money and tell them to worry about health insurance themselves. If you are running a startup and trying your hardest to make some product a reality the last thing you want to worry about is the details of your employees health insurance.
If you were paid 3 times your current salary, but you had to worry about your own healthcare, pension insurance and were expected to put in serious effort, would you take that offer? And, even if not, would such an offer be so immoral that companies aren't allowed to make it?
Finding people who'll work for free in the begining is hard... unless you're personal friends, no way. Working more than 8 hours a day is a no-go for most people, especially professionals in whatever field you need. 5+ weeks of vacation is a must (both legally and in a sense, that everyone will want and expect that). On the other hand, wages are lower than in US.
There are things that can be optimized.. i'm a coowner/employer in a small eu country, and we require workers to pass a health check to start work + additional ones every 5 years or less (5 years for office work and other "normal" jobs, and less for eg. truck drivers, pilots, etc). But somehow, those health checks are not transferrable between employers, even if it's the same kind of work (eg. office job -> office job), so if the employee of one company went through a check two months ago, changes a job to another office job, the new employer has to pay for a new health check which will check the same things as the previous one two months ago, so it's a few hundred of euros of cost and sometimes even a few weeks of wait time.
Need a really short-term worker (eg. organizing a concert/festival, need someone to work for two days only?)... no way, you can only get student workesrs, because the hiring process is too long, noone will change a job for two days of work, and you can't get the unemployed to do it, because they'd have to restart their unemployment process again (a lot of work), to get benefits back.
etc.
But you don't have to go further to see similar criticism of US bureaucracy for example.
I absolutely advise against people trying to do this on their own without consulting with specialists first. In the same way people shouldn't do this in the US (like opening an IT company in some random state).
But I'd say the attitude and market problem in Europe is harder (even in some more "market-oriented" countries)
Why is there a need to have specialists just to interface with one's local government (or regional governments) in the first place? This is what I see as eu/acc's focus: You shouldn't be doing proverbial song and dances as a small to mid size company to appease cushy government employees with Annexure B.5 page 12 section 3 subsection 25 form D every time you want to change the wifi password.
Running lifestyle or smal to mid scale businesses, especially with knowledge work, is increasingly hindered by inflexible government admin in the first world. And yes, you can be a startup without wanting to be a unicorn.
It is possible to want to make money AND not have your soul drained in the process.
> Why is there a need to have specialists just to interface with one's local government
True, in theory you shouldn't need it. And more than current officials, there's a lot of legislation that is to blame, but this is besides the point.
You consult with specialists because they know how to pick the best option for you and how to do it without wasting time. I'm all for DIY but sometimes you'll just bang your head trying to do it alone.
> Running lifestyle or small to mid scale businesses, especially with knowledge work, is increasingly hindered by inflexible government admin in the first world
For those kind of companies it's "easier-ish" to DIY. But you'd have to stay small. And I agree, it would be better if it was easier. And the difficulty is definitely not exclusive to Europe https://hn.algolia.com/?q=startup+taxation
Afaik, until recently it was difficult to send money between two bank accounts in the US for free - hence the proliferation of "tech solutions" like Cash App and Venmo. That just isn't a thing in the UK, banks have supported free instant bank transfers for years. So, maybe just maybe - we have fewer startups because our systems aren't as crippled as the ones in the US?
The USA has a lot of startups trying to solve issues that probably shouldn't exist in the first place (filling income tax reports for example, what the fuck?) but those bullshit products generate wealth to some people.
Tech side there is a wider issue though imo: Much of the EU thinking is unfortunately directly orthogonal to what’s required.
eg Google is basically one giant ad tech tracking co. That obviously clashes with EU thinking on privacy.
Not saying either is right or wrong but does seem like at least part of the clash is quite fundamental rather than being a pure red tape issue. Facebook Insta TikTok - they’re all fundamentally in same ad space
EU already has things like the OSS VAT scheme in the regard of making things easier for businesses across the union. More things like it to simplify admin for the rest of us is a good thing.
Yet Uber operates in most European countries.
It is very much the bureaucracy that’s holding it back, and the bureaucracy stems from the culture.
The corruption then makes it worse.
Why do so few countries in EU have ride sharing?
Fragmentation is an excuse.
Original comment: I _think_ that it’s not “real” ride sharing in many of the noted places. E.g. it shows Denmark, and in all my years living there I’ve never seen one. I’m pretty sure it’s illegal. I imagine they are just a front end for standard taxis.
AFAIK it's the same with food delivery apps now. (Sometimes both the rides and the food delivery is done by the same company - e.g. Bolt.)
If by "bureaucracy" you mean "not being allowed to blatantly break the law(s)", then yes, it is very much so.
> The corruption then makes it worse.
Blaming issues in Europe/EU (two different things by the way) on corruption seems to indicate you don't really have a perspective on corruption as an issue in the world. Take a look at South America or various Asian countries to see corruption as something actually having a huge impact.
> Why do so few countries in EU have ride sharing?
What countries are you referring to here exactly? I don't I've visited a single country in Europe that didn't have some sort of "ride sharing" (app taxis?)
In e.g. Spain IIRC Uber is just a front end for the taxis.
It isn't. In some places yes, but not in Spain
Same with Airbnb, having some guests over from time to time it's just usual life, hosting people to make money is a business and the business of hosting people has different rules than having a guest at home.
We can debate if such rules should be relaxed, if they make sense or need to be updated, etc., but these rules were created out of necessity through time, just allowing some tech company to completely sideline it because "it's tech!" is absurd...
What startups/companies/apps that people use in the US (which I guess is where you're from?) allow people to do this without treating it as a job or a side-job?
> In e.g. Spain IIRC Uber is just a front end for the taxis.
It is not, and if you take a moment to read up on the history of Uber in Spain, you'd clearly see that that's not the case. There has literally been violent protests about just this thing.
There is pretty popular EU one https://www.blablacar.com/ but its used mostly by students and people wanting to save. It’s not glamourous.
And most countries have Bolt and local taxi apps like Freenow or Liftago.
I dunno about you, but I definitely don't believe those two powerclowns.
Would that shield them from all the European bureaucracy?
Or would their government say something like "Sorry, since you are here personally, we consider the company to be here as well"?
Why does the EU need to accelerate it is fine as it is?
Accelerate what exactly? Everyone out of a job with AI?
No thanks.
If European companies don't succeed European states will collapse into poverty.
I would go for the latter.
EU exist exactly with the purpose of removing "fragmentation" and integration of Europe into a single giant market but European countries are not ready to let go their sovereignty and do a lot of things their way. As the UK found out with Brexit, EU removes red tape and simplifies bureaucracy, thus makes trade frictionless as possible and not the other way around.
Anyway, I don't think this is the root cause of EU lagging in "tech". EU doesn't lag in technology, it lags in high growth speculative businesses and I don't think that this is necessarily a bad thing.
Europeans can invest in these things in countries where people are willing to do it, reap the financial benefits if there's any and once the enshittification begins it can protect its own population from it. For example, once the enshittification begins and the companies resort in rent seeking EU regulates those to protect the consumers.
The reason Europeans don't do this "tech" business is cultural IMHO. No regulation or removing of regulation can change it.
In many ways it seems the fragmented economy was more liquid than the EU area is now. Instead of having pockets of acceleration in small corners of the EU, we now have uniformly heavy friction throughout. That's why businesses can find more dynamic business partners in china or turkey than they can in EU. Eastern european countries are often doing a lot to remove friction, but even they are often punished or asked to change their ways in order to keep with the rest of the block. It's turning to a crabs in a bucket situation
AFAIK EU is pushing to fix this through Eurozone and tax harmonisation but some European countries don't feel like it. Probably they have an advantageous position or an industry they would like to protect.
Like the whole idea behind EU is basically fixing this. It started as a single market and through the years Europe is trying to bring the continent together and how stuff should be done(all the EU standardizations are essentially about ironing out the legal differences between ~30 countries so that it function like one single country). Not there yet, unfortunately.
Don't believe me? Watch the Iranian minister of health talk about Europe. It's so common as an opinion that even many future organ traffickers in Europe start to believe it too.
To change this we need to create an environment where organ trafficking can succeed. If we want the innovation created in our bodies to be brought to the blood market by Europeans instead of Iranians we need to fix the root causes.
...
Or, you know, maybe the regulatory environment is deliberately the way it is because Europeans think that certain business models are not acceptable, would harm them or would otherwise be costly and don't want you engaging in them?
Have you considered that maybe European countries have different markets, rules, regulations, social security, taxation, procurement, etc. and don't want to change or erase their way of life just so you can earn more money?
If you wish to convince Europeans to change all that, assuming that everybody dislikes the status quo is a really bad starting point.
I work for an ex-EU (UK) startup, and I'm grateful for all the regulation. Yes, it means we innovate less, but we get to kill fewer people, which I really like.
Meanwhile, Teslas just run full-speed into barriers, and Tesla just goes "well, maybe you shouldn't have used our autopilot then, huh?".
Let's discriminate more.
No machine developed in Europe ever killed a person?
Europe does have its problems but not exactly this.
Your comment is a bit obfuscated, are you saying we, Europeans don't need Facebook, TikTok, etc.?
But those platforms are super popular here anyway.
EU OSS VAT is a great example of a program that simplifies these sorts of operations. eu/acc is clearly asking for more like that.
And what's up with the loaded statement about "tax and compliance laws just for your company to exist"...that's not true, any attempts to censor internet in EU are marginal so they could exist fine without that. But now that they want to extract profit of EU users and businesses, they have to navigate like everyone else.
No, the problem are administrative burdens dictated from a far away place (Brussels).
>Europe acts like a network of small countries instead of one unified market.
Yes, exactly. One still has to fill out customs declaration for packets inside the EU for example. The EU is just another burden on top national administrations, we can go back to EEA and would not feel any differences (but safe a lot of money)
And last but not least, the EU is not democratic:
>>Since 1979, the Parliament has been directly elected every five years by the citizens of the European Union through universal suffrage.
BUT
>>However, it does not formally possess the right of initiative (i.e. the right to formally initiate the legislative procedure) in the way that most national parliaments of the member states do, as the right of initiative is a prerogative of the European Commission. Nonetheless, the Parliament and the Council each have the right to request the Commission to initiate the legislative procedure and put forward a proposal.
This is false. Inside the customs union there is zero paperwork involved to send goods. Put it in a box, slap an address label on it, bring it to your favorite parcel carrier, done.
>>https://www.zoll.de/EN/Private-individuals/Postal_consignmen...