Delve – Fake Compliance as a Service

There are well-used tax money, then there are stupidly burned tax money on ie buying favors of some part of population before elections, financing blindly without any checks social security programs that get abused to no end, or simply plain old corruption.

I love bringing Switzerland up to annoy most of western/northern Europeans since their success is so obvious and undeniable while going in very different direction than most of Europe. Low to low-medium taxes, yet state budgets are frequently in positive numbers, there is no end to money spend on infra projects, train infra, but also rather strong social programs (just not ridiculously bad as mentioned above), top notch free healthcare and education. VAT taxes are 2-8% instead of 20-23% in all countries around. Country simply works(TM) because population is not hard comfort-zone-addicted and entitled bunch of spoiled whiny kids, they work relatively hard and it brings results, consistently and long term. They don't work more than americans nor asians, but thats enough for their prosperity.

Do you think lets say a heavy tax burden in say Italy, or even France (not even going more into southern or eastern EU since that would be a small book) is really used well and efficiently? I visit those places frequently and it certainly doesn't seem that way. Random examples - Italy has garbage everywhere, people drive to highway stops to drop it there (so the wind blows it all around). Infrastructure seems like from 80s, with added age. From people dealing with bureaucracy there - its stuck in 19th century, direct approach will get you often nowhere. France - most communist state in western Europe, heck in all Europe, sans Belarus maybe. Yet if you talk to people, they are constantly pissed off at government, never happy with society or state they live in. I don't blame them, listening to French colleagues complain is often rather sad experience. Not something you read in travel guides, do you.

Ah ok. What's with the "unpaid labour" part?

> Not a single founder wakes up in the morning thinking to themselves: "oh I wish I could make my company XYZ-123 compliant!"

Somehow I doubt that you are in the B2B/Enterprise space. When you're pitching demos and you hear from people "we really wish we could buy your product but we can't because Finance won't approve the expenditure unless you get XYZ-123", and you hear that over and over again because that is the real-world industry that you live in, then you better believe that there are founders who wake up in the morning wishing that.

You clearly have no understanding of what compliance does. Compliance does not "shift responsibility". Compliance is you demonstrating to your customers that you give enough of a shit that you're willing to pay the table stakes to sit at the table. You can complain that the game has table stakes, but all worthwhile games have them.

A lot of startups move fast with a small team.

You build something great and big corporation X wants to buy a subscription but you need to be certified.

Much of this is a good checklist but some of it is very european.

"Where is the risk register to track controls in your 7 person company?"

Now instead of doing what your team does best, you are doing paperwork theater for frameworks designed for a 100,000 employee enterprise.

You are documenting things nobody will read, making up processes that don't exist and translating the operations of a lean company into bureaucratic language.

What's needed is a variant of these standards for small teams, which is proportionate and pragmatic.

It doesn't hurt that Swiss immigration is very difficult to get through, and they have all that Holocaust money no Nazi or dead Jewish victim is ever going to come claim.