Ricardo Correia
Co-Founder & Head of Business
Business & Strategy
Industry & Trends
Reading time: 6–8 minutes
Earlier this year, I was in Brussels for the Global App Economy Conference, organized by ACT | The App Association. Two days of meetings with founders from across Europe, followed by direct conversations with MEPs and policymakers at the European Parliament.
I will be honest about what I expected going in: a dense agenda of regulatory topics that would be important but distant from the day-to-day of running a company. What I found was something different. The decisions being discussed in those rooms have a direct line to how much it costs to launch a product in a new European market, how much legal uncertainty a startup carries while it is still small, and who gets to influence the rules before they are finalized.
This is what I took back from those two days. Not as a policy summary, but as a founder thinking about what participation in these conversations actually means.
In short
European regulation shapes the operational reality of startups, whether founders engage with it or not. The problem is that small companies rarely have a voice in how those rules are written. GAEC is designed to change that, creating accessible opportunities for policy engagement, backed with educational resources.
Key takeaways
- Regulatory decisions made in Brussels are not abstract. They become compliance costs, market access friction, and legal uncertainty for founders on the ground.
- SMEs make up 99% of the EU economy, yet they are rarely at the table. While large corporations hire specialized government affairs teams to shape policy, ACT provides a platform for small companies to close that gap. We’ve proven that when we come together, our collective voice carries the weight of the majority we actually represent.
- The most valuable part of these events is not the agenda, it is the access. Direct conversations with MEPs and policymakers change the nature of the input they receive.
- The 28th Regime is one of the most consequential ideas being discussed for startups wanting to scale across Europe without rebuilding their legal setup in every country.
- The 28th Regime would allow us to treat Europe as a single 450-million-person market rather than a series of expensive legal hurdles and compliance risks."
- If small companies do not participate in shaping regulation, larger companies will. The outcome reflects whoever showed up.
- Participation does not require expertise in policy. It requires being specific about operational reality to show policymakers the real-world consequences of the laws they create.
Why most founders delegate this, and what that costs
There is a pattern I recognize in how we relate to policymaking in Brussels: we wait until it's too late. The connection between a legislative vote and our daily operations isn't obvious until the compliance bill arrives. By then, the window for influence has closed. We delegate this work because we're busy building, assuming that a lawyer or a trade group has it covered.
But while we delegate, giant companies are leaning in, sending their dedicated lobbying teams. They invest in these relationships because the ROI of a favorable regulatory environment is massive. Small companies can’t match that scale individually, but through associations like ACT, we can share the realities of building and scaling a company in the EU.
What the Global App Economy Conference actually is
GAEC is not a conference in the traditional sense. You won’t find keynotes or exhibition booths; instead, it’s a focused gathering of founders organized around the actual rules currently being written in Brussels.
The first part is educational, deliberately so. This was only the second year the event ran, and many of the founders attending, including me, had limited familiarity with how EU legislative processes actually work, how long they take, and where the points of influence sit. Understanding that context is a precondition for the advocacy work that follows. Briefing day works as a two-way street: while the ACT team helped us understand the mechanics of the EU, we provided the day-to-day realities from our side.
The second part is the access. We moved from the briefing room into direct meetings with MEPs and the Commission to share our stories. At a reception hosted by MEP Walsmann, I saw that policymakers are willing to learn from founders, but they need us to show up with specific examples to understand how their laws hit the ground. That combination, shared understanding among founders, followed by coordinated access to decision-makers, is what makes the format useful rather than purely symbolic.
The human dimension that does not appear in the agenda
Something that stayed with me from those two days was how quickly the group dynamic formed. People from different countries, different sectors, different stages, who had never met, were sharing operational realities with unusual directness by the end of the first day.
That is not incidental. When you realise that the founder from another country is dealing with the same compliance friction you are, on a different version of the same regulation, the abstract becomes concrete. And that concreteness is exactly what makes the conversations with policymakers more useful. You stop speaking in principles and start speaking in examples.
The topics that matter most right now
The agenda covered several active legislative dossiers. I want to focus on the two that struck me as most consequential for founders building in Europe today.
The 28th Regime: the idea of a genuinely single market
One of the most discussed ideas was the concept of a 28th Regime, a European-level legal framework that would allow companies to operate across all 27 member states under a single set of rules, rather than having to navigate each country's national implementation separately.
The operational problem this is trying to solve is real. Right now, if you build a product in Portugal and want to expand to Germany or France, you are not entering a single European market. You are entering a regulatory maze of 27 different regulatory environments, each with their own interpretations, reporting requirements, and legal exposure. For a large company who can afford to hire compliance consultants, that is manageable. For a startup with a small team and limited runway, it is a significant drag on the speed and cost of expansion.
The 28th Regime, if implemented as a Regulation rather than a Directive, would create a common baseline, a single registration, standardised procedures, reduced jurisdictional risk. It would not eliminate the complexity of operating in multiple countries. But it would make the starting point significantly less punishing for companies that do not yet have the resources to handle country-by-country compliance at scale.
This is the kind of structural change that doesn’t grab headlines, but it dictates the future of European tech. It’s the difference between a startup scaling across the continent or being forced to move its capital and operations elsewhere just to survive.
Platform regulation and the second-order effects founders often miss
A second topic that I found genuinely surprising, in the sense that I had not thought through its implications, was the discussion around platform regulation and what changes in how large applications distribute their products could mean for smaller ones.
The short version: as very large platforms gain the scale to distribute directly without relying on app stores, the economics of those stores change. The revenue that large apps currently contribute to the platform infrastructure gets redistributed. And the costs and conditions for smaller apps that still depend on that infrastructure can shift significantly as a result.
This is not a theoretical concern. It is a question of who pays for discoverability and distribution infrastructure when the largest contributors to that infrastructure no longer need it. For a startup launching a product and depending on organic discovery through a store, the answer to that question has a direct impact on user acquisition costs and the viability of early-stage growth.
The legislative decisions being made now around DMA implementation will shape how this plays out. Whether small companies have a voice in that process, or whether it is resolved entirely by the interests of the largest platforms and the largest competing apps, depends on participation.
What it means to bring concrete examples to these conversations
The meetings with MEPs and policymakers were the part of the event I had been least sure about beforehand. I was not certain what the format would be or what kind of input would actually be useful in those conversations.
What I observed is that specificity matters far more than volume. A policymaker working on a particular dossier has access to position papers, economic analyses, and general advocacy from many directions. What they have less of is specific operational examples: what happens to a company's hiring decision when a compliance requirement arrives without implementation guidance, or how long it takes a small team to respond to a documentation request that assumes legal infrastructure the company does not have.
Those examples, grounded in real situations rather than general principles, change the texture of the conversation. They make the trade-offs visible in a way that abstract arguments do not.
At Untile, we work with clients in sectors where regulation is not a background consideration but an active constraint on what can be built and how fast. That gives us a view into how these decisions propagate through product teams, timelines, and investment decisions. Being able to bring that into these conversations is part of why participation makes sense for us — not just as advocacy for our own business, but as input that reflects the reality of the companies we work with.
The case for showing up
I came back from Brussels with a clearer sense of something I had understood abstractly before but now understand practically: regulation is not a fixed condition that startups have to adapt to. It is a process that is actively being shaped, and the outcome depends significantly on who shows up and participates in shaping it.
Large companies have always understood this. They invest in it because the return on influencing a regulatory environment is significant and durable. Small companies have historically been excluded from that process, not deliberately, but structurally, because the costs of participation were too high relative to any single company's capacity.
Associations like ACT exist to change that equation. The model is straightforward: aggregate the voices of many small companies, build a coherent set of positions that reflect shared interests, and create the access needed to get those positions into the rooms where decisions are made. A hundred signatories to a well-constructed position letter carry weight. One company sending the same message does not.
If you are building a startup in Europe and navigating any of the regulatory areas currently in discussion, data compliance, platform dependency, or cross-border expansion, the decisions being made right now will affect the environment you are operating in for years. The question worth asking is not whether that matters, it’s whether you’re okay with someone else writing them for you or you’re ready to be part of how it gets resolved.