Germany is slow. The simplest possible purchase of an appartment, without any hurdles took me almost half a year.

I was waiting for 3 months for my VAT ID to arrive. Then I just called my finanzamt and told them why I have no vat ID. I think they just forgot, finanzamt said over the phone that "they opened a ticket" and 2 weeks later exactly as promised in the beginning it was in my post.

There's so many things that are plain wrong in the European ancient and bureaucratic commercial and corporate law.

It's insane that giving stock options (core to attract talent) or raising capital for equity is so difficult across Europe.

And don't get me started on how difficult it is to fire people that just don't work and only pretend to, spreading doing jackshit across the company.

Europe has the talent and even the capital, but the incentives are just not here, neither to attract talent nor serious investments.

The continent is old and politicians keep trying to band aid the system, consistently claim regional-national policies over common European rules, they will claim Europe makes it difficult to do business, just to reinvent their own commercial, import/export rules, tax rules non stop.

I don't want to say it's a disaster, but we really need some party that looks at commercial, trade and corporate law across Europe.

As AI makes it feasible to build good things with tiny teams I recently am finding myself repeatedly in discussions with friends about starting a business. It would be the first time in 20 years for me to be founding a GmbH.

The thought of all that regulatory hassle you have to go through in Germany compared to those superniche ideas you would try out in our AI days, makes me weep [1].

I wonder if the gap we‘ve already saw in the last 20 years between EU and US in terms of tech success stories is just the tip of the iceberg of what’s to come.

[1] notary costs (every visit ~400€ like changing your address or business scope), registry costs (also for every address and business scope change), hiring a tax attorney to produce compliant balance sheets (2,000 - 3,000 € /year), multiple types of yearly, quarterly, and monthly tax filings (tax attorney 150-300€/ month), different taxes which will be collected federally and locally, mandatory membership in Commerce Chambers (~350€/year), legal requirement to have a „business bank account“ (here at least today there are some startups making this easier and somewhat cheaper), mandatory membership at a trade-coop (yes it costs money), public health insurers in your neck nagging you to find some legal trap you stumbled into to extract bankrupting amounts of premiums from you, same with the state pension program. And just because you close down, it doesn’t just stop (you have operate the GmbH for years after before it gets deleted, so you pay money for years after still). Then there is the Exit Tax, which on the rare case you were successful locks you into Germany forever (unless again you pay professionals insane amounts of money).

So this leaves you and your kindergarten-Management-slash-Single-parent-CRM vibe coding idea easily with effectively 500-1000 €/month just to deal with red tape.

But it’s not just the money, each of these points I listed are just sources of endless amounts of paperwork with people/Organisations that know they don’t have to respect you or care about you at all to extract money from you.

And no, UG is not helping at all because still exactly the same GmbH red tape applies. And I am 65% certain the proposed EU Incs will - in Germany - be not exempt from this.

I have heard it is also more difficult to get married in Germany.

One of the problems of the EU is that the largest countries (FR, DE, IT) are exactly the most ossified and bureaucratic ones, and their pro-endless-papering attitudes leak out through Brussels to the more nimble, but smaller players which find it harder to organize blocking minorities.

I find it interesting that most Germans don't seem to be aware of just how much worse their bureaucracy is than elsewhere, or even willing to defend such system as somehow optimal, even though it burns a lot of human energy and time while not even moving forward, just spinning the wheels in sand. Their refusal to even start thinking along the lines "maybe the Poles or the Balts or even the Romanians are doing something better and we should learn something from them" is very stubborn, probably stemming from surviving prejudice against the Wild East.

These days, no one can compete with China et al. by burying their own economy in endless rivers of paper. This is categorically the false way.

Try firma.de

Germany is a nightmare of red tape.

god bless america. cost me like $90 for a llc. all online.

this sounds like a total nightmare. those germans need to wise up

European 28th regime can't come quick enough.