Tell your story on the European obstacles to entrepreneurship and write to MEPs on the need for a real EU Inc here: euincomplete.eu/. To start Katalin Kariko, @TheRhineGroup member and Nobel winner for mRNA, and her daughter, shared their (nightmarish but typical) story of incorporating in Germany. Here it is in their words: "The process of establishing a German GmbH has been considerably more complex and administratively burdensome than establishing a comparable entity in the United States, and we have faced logistical challenges throughout the process. We first expressed interest in establishing a German entity in November of 2025 but were not able to complete the required corporate changes and obtain management and directorship until May 2026. Based on the advice of a German law firm specializing in biotechnology, we were advised that the fastest route would be to acquire an existing shelf company. A shelf company is a legally incorporated but inactive German company established specifically for subsequent acquisition and use by an operating business. Even using this expedited route, the process took several months. The ownership, articles, company name, registered office, business purpose, and management had to be changed from the shelf-company structure to Repeat Therapeutics GmbH. Those changes then had to be properly notarized and reflected in the Commercial Register. German law also required an updated shareholder list when the ownership changed. A German notary was responsible for authenticating the corporate actions and submitting the required filings to the competent Commercial Register. Because the owners/directors were outside Germany, documents, powers of attorney, signatures, and corporate authority had to satisfy German form requirements. In the US we had to arrange to go to a German consulate member to notarize forms at multiple stages in the process. Germany notary had to confirm to the commercial register that the share capital has been properly paid in. Even when we paid the share capital, we had to provide different proof of funds to even put the minimum balance in the bank. We were required to provide several different forms of evidence regarding the source and ownership of funds before we were permitted to contribute the company's required share capital. The company also had to complete or coordinate additional registrations and compliance requirements, including maintaining its shareholder information with the Commercial Register, identifying its beneficial owners through Germany's Transparency Register, establishing its German business address, completing tax and accounting registrations, and addressing local trade, payroll and employment requirements. Each of these required different documentation as well as scans of multiple forms of ID to provide proof of identity and residence. Many of the steps were also interdependent. We could not move to the next until we received the green light from the German law firm that they were ready for the next step. As a result, what might appear to be the simple establishment of a German subsidiary in practice required coordination among German corporate counsel, a German notary, the Commercial Register, German banking institutions, U.S. and German authentication processes, tax and accounting advisers, and multiple German regulatory and administrative bodies over a period of approximately six months." @patrickc @euinc_petition @andreasklinger

A call to all entrepreneurs, founders, small business owners in Europe and anyone else who aspires to star a company at some point. This is the moment to act and let your voice be heard on EU Inc. EU Inc is the proposed legislation to make it easier to start and grow a company across Europe. It is now in front of the European Parliament and also being negotiated by governments. The objective should be very clear: you should be able to start and grow your company in Europe as your home market. What this should mean is, I think, at a minimum this: 1, You should be able to start a company online and cheaply. 2. You should be able to have a simple registration that you can fill out by yourself, with secure identity checks built in. You should not be forced to hire and pay a notary for this process. 3. The basic rules should be the same across Europe and should be common. There should be one registry with common rules and you shouldn't have to go to the lawyers of each country to set up different subsidiaries. 4. There should be a simple way to give employees a share in what they are helping you build, through stock options. They should only pay the tax when they sell those shares and when they receive the money. 5. The paperwork should be much simplified. There should be one channel for doing the VAT across borders and use the time saved to do your job and not to do paperwork. 6. The rules should support the entire life of the business; raising money, growing, going public, and also liquidating a failed business should all be done under the European common rules. Opening a bank account in another country, hiring across borders should be seemless. The European Commission made an initial proposal that was not sufficiently ambitious in my view but that was a useful start: it had online registration in 48 hours for less than €100 and measures to facilitate the taxation of employee stock options. It had some rules on common liquidation of the companies. In my view it was not ambitious enough because it allowed national authorities to impose further requirements, such as notaries. It was already falling short on tax and employment, but the reforms that the other institutions are introducing are making it even less ambitious. The draft that is being discussed by the governments eliminates the European company register and replaces it with a website that is just a portal to underlying national systems. This does not improve the creation of companies in any way. They're also eliminating the common procedures to liquidate failed companies, which was very useful because it facilitates the financing of these companies. The danger in the legislation is that it will require so many national exceptions that the founders will, in fact, end up facing still all the different regimes and it will make absolutely no difference. What I suggest here is that you write to your member of the European Parliament this week. Tell them about the obstacles your business is facing: the paperwork, the difficulty of giving shares, of raising money across borders. Explain what it costs and why it makes it difficult to create employment. Ask them what they will do to help you to make this legislation useful. Your MEPs work for you. Here are their contact details: competecentre.eu/the-launch-… The MEP leading Parliament’s work is René Repasi. The other political-group negotiators are Axel Voss, Pascale Piera, Mario Mantovani, Pascal Canfin, Sergey Lagodinsky, Kira Marie Peter-Hansen, Arash Saeidi and Marcin Sypniewski. Share this with other entrepreneurs. Help make sure that the people writing the law hear from the people that the law is meant to help.

I just presented a new paper at @BrookingsInst on the "Vanishing Advantage of Specialization (new paper)". It explains why this will be the age of the generalist. We all understand that the key determinant of the economics of airlines is the utilization of the aircraft. The fuller the plane, the lower the cost per seat. The same mechanism explains the value of specialization. Acquiring a piece of knowledge is very expensive in terms of our cognitive effort. A specialist is a person who uses this knowledge sufficiently often to spread that cost over many uses. This explains outsourcing of "non core" capabilities in firms. A firm handles frequent problems internally and buys expertise outside for problems it encounters too rarely to justify maintaining the knowledge in-house. For instance, Microsoft has a large legal department, but it hired a corporate law firm to advise it in its purchase of Activision Blizzard. It is not because Microsoft lacks lawyers that it relies on outside service providers, but because it does not use sufficiently often the specialized knowledge of mergers to justify an entire department. Artificial intelligence reduces this fixed cost of acquiring knowledge and therefore also reduces the advantage of specialization. Suppose a capability (such as merger law) costs $100,000 a year to maintain, a firm faces the problem 10 times a year while the specialist sees it 1000 times, and suppose that briefing an outsider costs $2,000 per case. Since the specialist's advantage due to utilization is $9,900 per case, the firm buys the service from the specialist. Now suppose AI reduces the annual cost of maintaining the capability to $10,000 for both. The utilization advantage of the specialist is reduced to $990, less than the cost of asking for help across the boundary, so the firm prefers to acquire the capability itself. The specialist still spreads the cost over more uses; the saving from doing so is now less likely to cover the cost of crossing the boundary because the fixed cost is lower. Recent evidence shows workers using AI to cross their occupational boundaries. Chin and Richmond (2026) classify more than 800,000 work-related ChatGPT messages from users whose occupations are known. Each message is assigned to the occupation whose historical tasks look most similar. Most of the usage is generic, including what one would expect: help in writing, editing and planning represents 61.5 percent of all messages. But 16.8 percent of all work messages, and 43.5 percent of the ones which are specific to one occupation, concern tasks usually undertaken by a different occupation. Among the ones that cross occupational boundaries are calculating financial data, troubleshooting software, drafting promotional messages, and writing to government agencies. Note that the fall in the cost of acquiring a given capability did not begin with generative AI. Google and databases had already lowered these costs. Generative AI greatly accelerates this process. Consider lawyers, accountants, consultants and software workers: of the 337,000 jobs created between 2022 and 2025 by the four professions, 335,000 were outside their main specialist industries-- law is still being done, but you need less of a specialist law firm to do it. Professional-service firms can be squeezed in the middle between model producers and their clients. The experts can be squeezed from above, by model makers or labs who supply the general knowledge at scale, and from below, by their clients who can apply this cheaper knowledge themselves. The specialist's comparative advantage lies in expertise that clients use too rarely to maintain internally and that remains costly to acquire even with AI, including the expertise required to check and verify a solution. Thanks to Jan Ebberly and @JonSteinsson for inviting me to do this: Summary and links to paper and slides here: brookings.edu/articles/the-v… Paper: brookings.edu/wp-content/upl…