It is definitely a weird cultural thing. I can speculate a bit. It might have some roots in social well fare. But I've also lived in Sweden and Finland which h

It is definitely a weird cultural thing. I can speculate a bit. It might have some roots in social well fare. But I've also lived in Sweden and Finland which have a very different attitude towards building tech companies. Especially Finland is quite successful at doing startups and scaleups. Especially considering its small population. And of course both countries have a strong social well fare culture. And Germany is actually fairly conservative on the spectrum. E.g. minimum wage did not even exist here until fairly recently. State pensions aren't that great, etc. I'm from the Netherlands originally, our social security is a lot better and more efficient. And so is our economy, infrastructure, healthcare system and all the other things that are clearly very broken and neglected in Germany. It's very visible when you cross the border. The state of the roads is very different on both sides of the border. That's true for most countries that border Germany. Germans just seem very reluctant to change anything. There's a lot of hesitation doing anything. That's also why their infrastructure is such a mess. Big investments are risky. So they prefer not to. Their default attitude to almost anything is "no". Modernizing anything is frowned upon. So they still bank like it's the nineteen eighties, which is stupidly annoying. They stubbornly stick with a lot of paper based processes. And they employ a lot of pencil pushers, accountants, lawyers, etc. that actually rely economically on things not changing. And of course they refuse to modernize rules that flat out barely make any sense. It's always been this way, it can't be that bad, etc. They are very proud of keeping their national debt low. But that also means they've been neglecting their infrastructure for decades. Which is now affecting them economically. The way out would be massive investments. But that requires changes they are not comfortable making. So they are just dilly dallying and going around in circles. With startup culture, their own rules are stopping foreigners from investing in their german companies. Too hard. too risky, etc. That's irrational. They should be welcoming that cash. Not putting up lots of obstacles. That money would go directly into their economy. But instead it's going elsewhere. Lots of German companies with their headquarters in Amsterdam, Dublin, London, etc.