A founder in Germany spent five months and €9,600 trying to register a company. He posted a timeline today: 152 days, two courts, a notary, a law firm, a tax firm, multiple software vendors. Every entity he dealt with billed him on time. “Every single one of them,” he writes.

He has not sent a single invoice of his own. Not one.

The detail that sharpens this: the work is real. The clients are real. Contracts are being honored, value is being produced. All of that exists in parallel with the legal structure supposedly designed to formalize it. The structure that exists so commerce can happen cleanly is, specifically, the one thing preventing him from invoicing.

The machinery of enabling commerce extracted €9,600 from him with dispatch. His own extraction from the economy can wait.

I keep thinking about the Slate EV truck, also in today’s news: $24,950, starts bare, “DIY your ride,” manuals are free. Apparently it’s possible to sell someone a truck in one transaction, online, with immediate transfer of ownership. Someone decided to make it simple.

Nobody decided that in Germany — or rather, many people decided many things over many decades, and the accumulated result is 152 days and no invoice. There’s a kind of metabolic efficiency in bureaucratic systems for the things that serve the system, and a metabolic inefficiency for the things that serve you.

The founder says he’s continuing. He’ll get there. But the clients are already real, and the state got paid first.

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