> GDPR [...] somewhere between place 1000 and 1500 of things that hinder startups.
No. GDPR was presented as a company ending regulation. You make a mistake - you are doomed. The fines are in revenue percentages. User data was said to be "toxic". You touch it, you better know what you are doing or else.
This kind of regulation has a strong chilling effect on the budding founder. Countless web-startups were never created because the most common monetization model (ads) became basically illegal (for European startups only, US/Chinese competitors kept enjoying full freedom).
> and a very small number of other applicable regulations
But it's not a small number. And regulations have a cumulative effect. See, startups are like distance running. You know it's a hard thing, but you believe you can try to do it. But then regulations are like potholes. You run around a few, but the more potholes to avoid the harder the run, until your main job turns from running to avoiding potholes. Then you simply say "why bother" and give up.
The more regulations you have, the more obstacles you put in front of startups, the fewer young people choose the entrepreneur path and decide to just get some bureaucratic job instead.
This is the tragedy we are living in the EU right now, in the clapping of bureaucrats who never build a product or service in their entire life and do not understand what those damn entrepreneurs are complaining about.
> No. GDPR was presented as a company ending regulation.
Bullshit
> You make a mistake - you are doomed. The fines are in revenue percentages.
Tell me you didn't even read a line of GDPR in the past 9 years or know anything about European regulations without telling me
> This kind of regulation has a strong chilling effect on the budding founder.
A moron who gets their advice from ads industry, sensationalist headlines and HN? Perhaps.
> But it's not a small number.
It is.
> The more regulations you have, the more obstacles you put in front of startups
GDPR is not an obstacle. It quite literally is "do not scrape user data and sell it to third parties without user consent".
> in the clapping of bureaucrats who never build a product or service in their entire life and do not understand what those damn entrepreneurs are complaining about.
Yeah, "entrepreneurs" complain about a lot, and then make a surprised pikachu face when they are told in no uncertain terms that no, sending precise geolocation data to third parties to store for 12 years is not okay: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1817122117093056541
> Tell me you didn't even read a line of GDPR in the past 9 years or know anything about European regulations
As a matter of fact, I am the founder&owner of a small ISV (nothing ad, privacy, crypto or AI-related) in the Eastern EU. Everything I am telling about European regulations comes from dozens of years of direct, painful, personal experience.
(long time no reply due to hitting HN's rate limit)
> Everything I am telling about European regulations comes from dozens of years of direct, painful, personal experience.
Strange that you then spew absolute bullshit about GDPR.
> How about you?
I've worked in large multinational corporations (banking, streaming) that were "hit" with GDPR and spent several years making sure they are compliant. Not because GDPR is bad, but because no one really cared about the data collected, and where it ended up. [1]
Startups had it and have it easy since they can just not siphon all the data. Especially now, when you have all the tools to handle data properly. Hell, a decade ago you couldn't even get privacy-preserving analytics. Now you're drowning in them.
We're also preparing to launch a few (admittedly small scale) projects with friends, and what do you know? GDPR is the absolute last thing that even bothers us. You know why? We know what data to collect and for how long to store it, and we're not sending that data to thousands of "privacy-preserving partners".
"Company-destroying fines" boogeyman or whatever other "chilling effect" bullshit belongs in the mind of children and morons. Hell, I've seen banking regulators come, list issues, and give a deadline to fix them. Much less GDPR.
[1] That's not entirely true. Payment and payment-adjacent regulations are significantly more stringent than GDPR, so everything related to that was and is extremely serious. As anything related to things like "data of persons under state protection". It's never black and white.
However, in big companies, especially at the time, you would eventually end up with a lot of data duplicated across many systems, often barely connected. 10 years ago cleaning up that mess required companies to reverse engineer and document 10-15 years of bad/hasty/adhoc decisions and assumptions. Surprisingly often that resulted in just retiring certain internal microservices wholesale (they just were no longer needed) and/or significantly reducing bandwidth and storage requirements in certain cases (because you no longer cary and store heavy duplicate objects around).
So the main opposition to GDPR came not from "poor chilled startups", but from companies like Facebook and Google who rely on 24/7 surveillance exclusively, ad industry, and large corporations who didn't want to deal with cleaning up internal messes.
No. GDPR was presented as a company ending regulation. You make a mistake - you are doomed. The fines are in revenue percentages. User data was said to be "toxic". You touch it, you better know what you are doing or else.
This kind of regulation has a strong chilling effect on the budding founder. Countless web-startups were never created because the most common monetization model (ads) became basically illegal (for European startups only, US/Chinese competitors kept enjoying full freedom).
> and a very small number of other applicable regulations
But it's not a small number. And regulations have a cumulative effect. See, startups are like distance running. You know it's a hard thing, but you believe you can try to do it. But then regulations are like potholes. You run around a few, but the more potholes to avoid the harder the run, until your main job turns from running to avoiding potholes. Then you simply say "why bother" and give up.
The more regulations you have, the more obstacles you put in front of startups, the fewer young people choose the entrepreneur path and decide to just get some bureaucratic job instead.
This is the tragedy we are living in the EU right now, in the clapping of bureaucrats who never build a product or service in their entire life and do not understand what those damn entrepreneurs are complaining about.