Dear European startups, please ignore public subsidies

Dear European startups,

I am going to give you the most counterintuitive, unpopular, and politically incorrect advice of your career: completely ignore government guidelines, EU directives, and public subsidies. 

I know this goes against everything you hear from your mentors, accelerators, startup awards, and investor forums obsessed with the latest FOMO. But they are leading you straight off a cliff. Having seen thousands of startups over the years, I can assure you that in a market economy, following public sector mandates is a death sentence for an entrepreneur. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but definitely in the medium and long term.

Let’s break it down simply, step by step, to understand the economic trap you are falling into.

Our system works thanks to a highly precise and effective tool: prices. Money is just paper we exchange for the real value we create for others. On this playing field, prices act like traffic signals. If people desperately need something, the price naturally goes up, sending a clear signal to entrepreneurs: "Come here and build this, because society needs it." If no one wants it, the price drops or doesn't even exist. Prices tell you the truth about what the market organically demands.

What happens when the government decides a sector is a "strategic priority" and pumps billions into grants, subsidies, or mandatory regulations? It breaks those traffic signals.

By injecting this money, the government artificially distorts prices, creating a massive illusion of opportunity. As an entrepreneur, you chase the noise. You launch your startup in that sector, hire expensive talent, and watch your suppliers raise their prices because they know public money is available. You adapt all your technology to government mandates and bureaucracy. Everything seems great.

But that demand is fake. It doesn't come from citizens or private companies choosing to spend their hard-earned money because they actually need your product; it comes from a temporary political incentive.

And here is the unavoidable reality: political interests, by definition, clash with economic realities. Politics isn't driven by market logic, but by the crises and narratives of the moment. Today's top priority might completely change tomorrow when a new government takes over, a global crisis hits, or the budget simply runs out. The news cycle moves on, and the money faucet turns off.

The real tragedy isn't that the subsidy ends; it’s that you are trapped inside. When artificial demand disappears, you are left with a massive, expensive infrastructure. You get stuck in a ghost industry, facing enormous costs with a product that the everyday customer—the one paying out of pocket—never actually wanted. Your company suffocates under its own weight. I have seen this cycle repeat itself over and over again.

The only exception to this advice is if you are a purely opportunistic founder.

You have my permission to ignore this text if you are the kind of person who can start a company today to fight droughts in desert nations, and two years later, pivot to manufacturing hypersonic missiles without blinking or feeling like a hypocrite. If your only goal is to make a quick profit, if you find it ethically acceptable to swap your values and worldview every two years, and if you don't mind abandoning your employees and investors—the ones who believed in your original mission—the moment the political winds shift... then go ahead. Follow the government trends, milk the public funding, and run away before the bubble bursts.

But if that’s not you—if you truly want to build a business with substance, one that creates real value and outlasts the politicians of the day—do the exact opposite of what you're told: run away from the crowd. Ignore official guides, subsidies, and institutional noise. Real market opportunities are never found on the front pages of newspapers or in government plans. They are found in invisible problems. In those boring, mundane, and annoying daily issues that nobody talks about, but that a private business or an ordinary citizen desperately needs to solve with their own money.

Build your business on the solid rock of real demand, not on the quicksand of this year’s political agenda.

Good luck.