How start-ups are drowning in bureaucracy

By Aafke Eppinga

In our Sunday newsletter, we, as editors, reflect on the past seven days. We do this on the initiative of our cartoonist Albert Jan Rasker. He chooses a subject, draws a picture, and we take it from there.

At Innovation Origins, we talk to start-ups every day. Efficient tools for weapons detection with AI, a foldable house, sensors that monitor medicine dosage: everything comes along. At the Gerard & Anton Awards, we gave the stage to 12 young tech companies.

We pay a lot of attention to start-ups because we need start-ups. As Camilla van den Boom said so aptly during her keynote at the Level-Up event, “There is not simply one question, one answer. There are many ways to find solutions; we need start-ups to address that.”

Unfortunately, eighty percent of start-ups fail. Ask any start-up founder about their biggest challeng9/96e; the answer is guaranteed to be funding or the bureaucratic system. If it were up to Van den Boom, we have to move towards a system where young companies no longer – as Albert Jan Rasker so catchily depicts in his cartoon – drown in paperwork, rules, and bureaucracy.

Because we are not there yet, Van den Boom developed a toolkit, or “a code that gives start-ups the right direction,” as she describes it herself.

All start-up founders, hop to that toolkit! And to the rest us: we should think very hard about how we can make things easier for start-ups, for that will benefit everyone.