I've worked with an accelerator that helps founders write the required pitches and plans for this …

And yet Germany still doesn't seem to have much more startup / entrepreneurial success than any other European country. What gives?

These things do work and created a few unicorns here in Malaysia. The catch is that they're usually very bureaucratic as it's public funds, and the more corruption, the more rules there are. Someone might say, come in from New Zealand to get a grant, then the condition becomes "must be 51% locally owned". A conglomerate creates a sister company to get the grant and then it becomes, "parent company must be less than 3 years old and have under $500k revenue". The rules just keep stacking on until agile is basically banned lol Companies funded this way were actually one of my income sources when I was freelancing, but sadly most don't continue on unless there's a Series B later on.

Good to see startup strategies which help build stable, solid middle-sized companies. Germany has a great success story by the name of the "Mittelstand" (SME businesses), which means a big part if the market are small to middle enterprises. This is far more consumer-friendly and innovative, as more competitive as it's not relying on a few big players like in the US that might also collude with each other.

That just sounds like traditional small businesses. Which is cool but re-branding them to "startup" seems silly. The US has 35 million small businesses and maybe 1 million would qualify as startups.

It's also connected to so much bureaucracy that you almost need to hire someone for that alone, because you wont have as much time for your actual business. Founding a company in Germany is so much unnecessary paperwork its crazy. Single handedly the only reason I will never try it in my home country.

So KFW (state investment bank?) has a thing called StartGeld (startup loan). I've wondered about few practicalities 1) What sort of collateral does bank expect from you? 2) Can you really get 125ke or more like 10-20ke? 3) Interest rate is a single digit number? 4) Can you really get 10 year payback periods? Reason why I'm asking is that in Finland(where I live) these startgeld terms seem like a dream come true for entrepreneur. To give you an example; 1) Tradiotional bank wants collateral for the loan. For a 5k€ loan, 5k€ in deposits are needed. 2) There a lots of Swedish/Norwegian "loan-houses" advertising their services for companies, with interest rates are somewhere between 23-30% per annum.

Parts of this feel a lot like Canada's SRED program, which is intended to be a subsidy for technology research but the expected bureacracy has spawned an industry of consultancies that work solely to find marginal & questionable activities within companies that qualify. It can be worth it for a company to jump through the hoops - especially if they get something while another company does all the work - but it's an incredibly inefficient way to grow tech businesses.

Only applies to people with a degree. Institutionalised nepotism. Just like how your chamber of commerce keeps out the competition. Typical western decay/corruption. Closing the ranks and drawing in other peoples money.