03/06/2026
There are founders in Europe who can complete a Horizon Europe application faster than they can onboard a customer.
This is generally considered a success.
The European startup ecosystem has spent the last twenty years and roughly €100 billion trying to remove friction from entrepreneurship. Most of the friction survived. It just found employment inside application forms.
A founder starts with an idea. The ecosystem responds enthusiastically.
"Wonderful."
"Here are seventeen instruments designed to support you."
She applies to an incubator. Then an accelerator. Then a regional challenge. Then a national grant. Then an EU voucher. Then a pilot program. Then a second accelerator that specializes in helping startups apply to the grants they missed while applying to the first accelerator.
At some point nobody is entirely sure whether the company is building a product or pursuing an unaccredited degree in administrative literature.
Each organization wants a business plan, a pitch deck, a three-year financial forecast, an impact framework, a risk assessment, a theory of change, a market analysis, a sustainability annex, a gender equality declaration, and a detailed explanation of how the startup intends to become globally scalable while remaining locally rooted, climate-neutral, ethically governed, and aligned with at least three Sustainable Development Goals of its own choosing.
Preferably in PDF. Maximum 5MB. Font: Arial 11. Margins: 2cm. Page numbers in the lower right.
The founder writes essentially the same answer seventeen times. Each organization calls it a different process and each insists their version is the simplified one.
Somewhere along the way, the ecosystem accidentally domesticated a new species of entrepreneur.
The Professional Applicant.
They know every open call. Every deadline. Every funding instrument. Every eligibility criterion. They can explain, in detail, the difference between six nearly identical support schemes that were each designed to simplify access to entrepreneurship.
Their calendar is full. Their reporting is immaculate. Their LinkedIn is decorated with logos of programs that paid them between €5,000 and €25,000 for slide decks no customer has ever read.
Their startup occasionally interrupts this process.
The hidden assumption behind these systems is that the best founders will naturally emerge from the application funnel. This sounds reasonable until you remember that some of the most successful entrepreneurs in history would have struggled to upload the correct attachment before the deadline.
The ecosystem measures applications submitted, calls launched, beneficiaries onboarded, KPIs reached, and reports delivered. The founder measures customers, revenue, and whether rent gets paid this month.
These are not always the same sport. They are not always played in the same century.
The mechanism is elegant once you see it. Public money flows in at the top. It is filtered through agencies, foundations, regional development bodies, and innovation hubs, each of which retains a percentage for management, communication, and what is delicately referred to as ecosystem animation. What reaches the founder at the bottom is a voucher worth slightly less than the time required to obtain it.
Everyone in the chain is doing their job. The job, it turns out, is the chain.
Eventually you discover a quiet law:
The more support becomes available, the more time is required to access it.
And so an ecosystem designed to accelerate entrepreneurship achieves, with admirable consistency, the opposite. Not maliciously. Not by design. Just through the accumulated weight of portals, templates, evaluations, registrations, eligibility checks, declarations, annexes, supporting documents, and mandatory fields marked with a small red asterisk that has, statistically, consumed more founder hours than any competitor ever has.
Every region wants more startups. Almost no one asks the embarrassing question underneath:
What would happen if founders spent as much time building companies as they currently spend proving they deserve help building them?
The answer would be difficult to measure. Which is probably why nobody has turned it into an application form yet.
Give it eighteen months.
