Some data we recently assembled on entrepreneurship/compute in Europe: eudata.vercel.app. We hope that one of the useful roles that Stripe can play is in collecting and publishing empirical data pertaining to entrepreneurship and industry in Europe. There's growing appetite to get Europe on a better footing, and cross-sectional comparisons can often shine light on where opportunities lie. If you're interested in this kind of thing, we publish more at stripeeconomics.substack.com.

I thought Germany and German bureaucracy cannot shock me anymore, but it did. I parked my TESLA (!) on an EV-only parking spot in @Konstanz and plugged it into an EV charger. Came back to this fine. Had to use Grok to even understand what was wrong. Turns out you need to have a special EV licence or an EV sticker to indicate it is a real EV. Guess the Tesla logo and charging cable was not enough. @levelsio @ffaebi @eurofounder

don't bother trying to sell to EU companies

I started a startup in Germany 🇩🇪 in 2020. These are all the INSANE things I've encountered. I kid you not the first thing we got from the government was the equivalent of the IRS asking us to estimate our revenue for that year. We didn't even have a tax number at that point! We were bootstrapping. We are not opening up a fucking bakery. There is no revenue!! The second letter we got was an invoice from the IHK (Industrie- und Handelskammer). To this day I couldn't tell you what they do. They sent us their magazine every 3 months though which is nice I guess. The third letter was for the "Rundfunkgebühr", which is the TV license. I swear, all of this is true. There is a fundamental lack of ambition in Germany. You can succeed but not too much. Too much success is greed. Too much success is evil. The sad part is I don't even see a way out of this. I wish there would be something I could do about it. But there isn't. People would hate you for even trying (look at Elon). Every ambitious person that I know already left or is thinking about leaving. I live in NY now and the difference is insane. The US still attracts the best people. There is no doubt about that. The only thing we are leading now is regulation. It's hilarious to say but very sad at the same time. I don't know where this ends. All I can tell you is that there will be no one left to pay for all the great social services that exist today. Of course I will never start a business in Germany ever again. I'm half German. I lived in 🇩🇪 for 10 years. But jesus christ have we lost the plot.

There has been a lot of attack vs. defense of Germany and German bureaucracy for start-ups following @patrickc's post on the matter. So let me give you a list of the FKIN insanity I faced after acquiring a German company - list is not exhaustive. In random order: * 16hs live read at the notary of financing documents * Embassy-apostilled wet signature to change address * Officer to monitor working hours of (remote) workers * Notarized Etherscan-printout to validate Ethereum tx * Notary to escrow a Safe multisig (lol again) * PostIndent on everything that moves (in German) * Purchase of nominal share price only in EUR * Pre-study for foreign investing in strategic (any) assets * BONUS: try to do performance management in GER Fun fact on (1): after 16hs reading financing docs, at 11.30 PM, the notary informed us that if we wouldn't have finished by midnight they would have had to change the date on the contracts and re-read them again from scratch. What I have seen in Germany blew my mind. And to anyone complaining of X anti-European spirit, I am European, born and bred, and I still think Europe is *BY FAR* the best place to spend your money. Maybe not the best place to make the money in the first place.

If you want to work in Germany as a freelance software engineer you'll need / get 4 IDs from the Finanzamt. - Steueridentifikationsnummer (Steuer-ID), your personal tax id - Steuernummer, your business tax id - USt-IdNr (Umsatzsteuer-Identifikationsnummer), your VAT id - WIdNr (Wirtschafts-Identifikationsnummer), just a new version of your business tax id How is it in other countries?

We have designated ChatGPT as a Very Large Online Search Engine and Reddit and Roblox as Very Large Online Platforms under the Digital Services Act. They now have four months to comply with additional DSA obligations. More: link.europa.eu/8bmk3M #DSA

Banks and insurers brace for biggest German pension upheaval in 20 years ft.trib.al/sKkUH4H

Met a German founder this week and asked him if all the stories one reads about the challenges of startups in Germany are exaggerated. "No, they're understated." Proceeded to describe spending a full day having a 90-page investment contract read to him (mandatory under German law; § 13 BeurkG) by a notary that then charged €30,000. That was for his first company. His second company, needless to say, was not incorporated in Germany.