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EU entrepreneurs are tired.

I analyzed the 190 responses to my post about the major problems European entrepreneurs suffer.

Here are the results of what frustrates them the most (I let Claude rank them)

The clear winner in terms of frustration is bureaucracy and paperwork (9/10).

People are fed up with all the forms, physical visits, and ridiculous notary requirements.

It came up again and again in different contexts.

Tax system and GDPR tie for second place (both 7/10).

The VAT system gives everyone headaches, especially when operating across borders (ask me about it!).

GDPR is interesting because while people generally support data protection, they feel the implementation crushes smaller businesses.

It's especially bad for small new businesses that can get crushed by the fines (there are law partner firms specialized only in finding and fining them, disgusting).

Labor laws and what people called an "anti-innovation culture" were next (both 6/10).

Tbh, this is close to my heart and impacts me daily.

The employment regulations seem to be a real pain point - lots of stories about not being able to fire underperforming employees and being afraid to hire because of the risks.

Market fragmentation and cross-border complexity (both 5/10) are interesting because they highlight a paradox:

The EU is supposed to be a single market, but entrepreneurs are still dealing with 27 different systems.

AI Act and tech regulations came up less frequently (4/10) but when they did, people felt strongly about them.

Some fascinating patterns emerged:

There's this striking cultural contrast people kept drawing between the US and EU approaches.

The US "let's do it" vs EU "let's regulate it" mentality came up several times.

The size issue is really interesting - lots of people pointed out how regulations that might be manageable for big companies are crushing for startups. One person mentioned spending up to 50% of their income just on compliance.

What really stood out to me:

Beyond specific complaints about regulations, there seems to be this deeper frustration about what some see as a fundamental hostility to entrepreneurship in the EU culture.

This all paints a picture of a challenge that goes beyond just regulatory burden - it seems to be about the whole culture around entrepreneurship in the EU.

Let me know if you find posts like this interesting.

I just analyzed it for myself and thought, why not share it.

One of the hottest trends in Chinese consumer internet this year …

Revenue from short video dramas 短剧 — serialized stories of 1-2 minute episodes typically totaling 60-120 minutes, designed for vertical viewing on phones—has surpassed movie box office.

Operators compare them to “mini games” rather than traditional long-form media.

Creators attribute their addictiveness to the fact that they cram “2-3 movies’ worth of drama into one series” and the “3-7-21 rule,” where every 21 seconds must evoke a new emotion to maintain engagement. I forgot what the 3 & 7 stand for though 😂

I need only one simple example to convince you that OOP patterns are scams, and Category Theory patterns are superior.

In the OOP world, when you tell me something is a 'Visitor', you tell me nothing.

So are you telling me that this code traverses some values and maybe even recursively calls itself? Well, f*cking thanks, Sherlock, you just literally described 90% of every OCaml project.

Your words said nothing of value and wasted my time.

However, when you tell me that something is 'Applicative', I immediately know:

1. THE EXACT NAMES OF FUNCTIONS TO USE. Yes, the abstraction is THAT precise. It's and+/pure in OCaml, and the Star Wars TIE Interceptor ship operator/pure in Haskell.

2. THE EXACT TYPES OF EVERY FUNCTION.

3. How to create values of that thing: use 'pure'.

4. How to compose values of that thing: use 'and+'.

5. The parallelism semantics attached to the composition.

6. What extra rules and laws those functions follow.

7. An entire library of 100 REUSABLE FUNCTIONS I can immediately benefit from with my value.

8. What other abstractions are implied: every Applicative is Functor, so by definition, I know what else I can use with my value.

You said just one word — Applicative — and it singlehandedly absolutely f*cking destroyed entropy. I immediately know everything I need to know.

A single word says more than an entire useless book.

I’m curious how this would contrast with the way Peter Thiel would describe Mark Zuckerberg.

I’m probably wrong here, but I would have thought Peter would describe Mark as very ambitious with a precise vision of the future. Mark did reject acquisitions early on after all.

Someone with that much conviction seems like they’d have a clear vision in mind.

Not to say you shouldn’t start small or without flexibility. Those seem to be important prerequisites. And most people aren’t Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates. So perhaps they’re exceptions to the rule.

But sometimes I wonder if empirically the reason most startups fail is because they’re not maniacally ambitious enough. That seems unlikely. So perhaps Paul is speaking from the perspective of someone who has seen ambition lead many founders astray due to their stubbornness and grandiosity.