It's not just the company bureaucracy, it's also laws and regulations. It's great to be a startup in the US where you have a large and fairly rich customer base

It's not just the company bureaucracy, it's also laws and regulations. It's great to be a startup in the US where you have a large and fairly rich customer base. But when you go international and have to deal with all the myriad laws there, often contradictory or poorly defined, your code will be messy. Very messy. Plus these laws keep changing and your customers keep moving to different jurisdictions or giving you wrong information. Add to that various attempts at fixing problems, adding features, partially removing unsuccessful features, supporting old systems, framework/library migrations in various states of completeness, different developer's ideas of how to do things, and that rockstar developer who wrote really obscure code and then left to grow pomelos, and you have an incredible mess without even having to bring in company bureaucracy.