The German startup bureaucracy debate is back, this time lit by a post from Sifted-covered Stripe chief executive Patrick Collison, who shared an account of a founder spending a full day having a 90-page investment contract read aloud by a notary (a legal requirement in Germany) and then being charged €30,000 for the privilege. The founder’s conclusion, Collison wrote on X, was that the stories of German startup hardship are not exaggerated: they are understated. His second company, the story goes, was incorporated elsewhere.
The post set off a familiar argument, with founders adding their own notary horror stories and pointing to systemic problems around tax, VAT, and employment law. Which leaves an obvious question: if this is so well-documented, why hasn’t it changed?
Why notary fees in Germany are so hard to escape
Part of the answer lies in how the system is structured. Notary fees in Germany are regulated by the Gerichts- und Notarkostengesetz (GNotKG) and, according to S&S Consult, cannot be freely negotiated. That means there is no shopping around. For a simple GmbH set up using the standard Musterprotokoll (covering up to three shareholders and one managing director) fees typically land in the mid-three-figure euro range. Move to a custom Gesellschaftsvertrag with multiple shareholders or non-standard governance arrangements and the bill climbs to four figures, sometimes higher. An investment round with a complex structure is a different proposition again, which is how a notary session ends up costing a founder €30,000.
innoWerft notes that the GNotKG does give notaries a certain amount of leeway in how they price in the various legal aspects of a contract, but the underlying scale is fixed by statute. The notary lobby, multiple founders noted in the thread, is politically entrenched enough to have kept that arrangement intact.
Florian Huber, cofounder and managing partner of German accelerator EWOR, wrote on LinkedIn that burdens like these are pushing founders to register their companies elsewhere and are creating what he called “devastating second and third order effects” for Germany’s reputation. Even Elon Musk weighed in on Collison’s post, a detail that attracted its own commentary about the optics of the moment.
German startup bureaucracy debate: rejection, but not dismissal
Not everyone in the thread was ready to treat the notary as the villain of the piece. Torsten Reil, cofounder of defence tech company Helsing, pushed back on what he called defeatism. Speaking on a recent podcast, Reil argued that “it’s underestimated how much of a difference aggression and ambition makes… Everything else is excuses. Regulation doesn’t matter. Yeah sure it takes longer to start a company in Germany. Yes you have to go to a notary. Who cares?”
Judith Dada, a senior partner at VC firm Visionaries and co-CEO at AI startup Langdock, struck a more layered position. She agreed that Germany’s labour laws, energy costs, bureaucracy, and low investment into future technology are real problems and need urgent, drastic change. But she pushed back on the framing: “to speak of all the ills in Germany like it was some doomed hell hole without even for a second realising or acknowledging that the country still has SO MUCH to offer makes me disappointed and angry.” She described herself as joining the harsh criticism while rejecting the defeatism entirely.
Christian Miele of Headline, based in Berlin, added that bureaucracy is a genuine problem but not the primary explanation for Germany’s absence of world-class startups. His diagnosis was more about mentality: “more ambitious input will mathematically produce more ambitious output,” he wrote, before getting to capital, talent, and reduced red tape as secondary factors.
The frustration with the system is long-running. Berlin-based founder Jérôme Bau told Sifted back in 2024 that every formality as a founder felt like “building a factory for metalworking in the 1800s,” with paper, notaries, and nothing digital.
What the debate often sidesteps is that German startups are still attracting capital at scale. Three companies (Helsing, Quantum Systems, and Neura Robotics) together raised €3.83bn, accounting for 44.3% of the €8.64bn raised by all German startups from January through July, according to Sifted data. The paperwork, it turns out, has not stopped everyone from writing very large cheques.
