Red tape vs innovation: what it takes to start a company in Portugal

Four months in, a company-formation process I have been following closely is still stuck on the very first step: getting a name accepted. It has already run to three formal rejections and five names refused or discouraged, one by one, plus seventy-five euros paid to a public registry office and never returned.

The company still has no clients, no product, not a single euro of revenue. It is not asking for a dangerous licence nor bending any rule. It just wants to exist. All this time has gone into trying to convince a government desk that one name will not be confused with another.

This is not a story of bad luck, nor of one difficult clerk. It is a symptom. And it is worth looking at closely, because it says a lot about the distance between the country that says it wants innovation and the country you meet when you face its bureaucracy.

The invisible tax

What this process costs is not the seventy-five euros. It is everything else.

For someone starting a company, those four months do not go to the customer, the product, the first sale. They are meetings postponed because there is no tax number yet, accounts that cannot be opened, invoices that cannot be issued, hires left on hold. The real cost of a slow process is not the fee you pay. It is everything you fail to do while you wait.

The root of the problem has a name: discretion instead of predictable criteria. Concepts like the confusability between names, or the requirement that a company name be truthful, are legitimate and exist almost everywhere. What holds people back is how they are applied. When there is no clear, public criterion, the founder cannot plan. You submit a name, wait weeks, get a no without quite knowing why, try another, get another no. And because informal opinions bind no one, not even a written reply is a guarantee: there is no decision until the ruling comes, and that is always at the end of the queue.

There is a quiet inversion in all of this. Whoever decides knows the criterion but does not publish it clearly. Whoever submits does not know it but is the one who has to guess. The burden of getting it right falls, then, on the side with the least information to do so. In a well-designed system it would be the opposite: the rules would be visible from the start, and the system itself would flag the error before it cost someone weeks.

It is fair to acknowledge the other side. A company registry exists for good reasons. It protects the name of whoever built it, stops anyone from passing themselves off as someone else, gives legal certainty to contracts and invoices. No serious person defends a free-for-all in which two companies with the same name blur together in the market. The problem is not that there are rules. The problem is the how: the opacity of the criteria, the slowness of the replies, the absence of a fast way to correct and try again without starting over.

A single case is an anecdote. But multiply this by the thousands of people who, this year alone, try to open a company in Portugal. Every week lost at the front door is innovation that does not happen, a hire pushed back, an idea that cools before it is born. There is a lot of talk about attracting people who create, retaining talent, making the country a good place to build. The first thing many of them meet is a wall with no signs.

There is one more cost that no statistic measures: discouragement. Someone who spends four months knocking on a closed door learns a lesson the country would not want to teach. Some give up before they start. Others, especially those with mobility, look at a neighbouring country where the same step is resolved in an afternoon and conclude that is where it is worth building. The signal you send at the entrance is the signal that stays.

The private sector has already shown it can be different

To see that rigidity is not inevitable, just look at what has happened in the private sector over the past few years.

Opening a bank account, verifying your identity, signing up for a digital service. Things that a decade ago required trips, paperwork and weeks of waiting are now resolved in minutes, from a phone. And not because the rules disappeared: banking is one of the most heavily regulated sectors there is, subject to identification and anti-fraud demands far above those of a name registry. The difference is that someone designed the process around the person using it. Predictability about what is required, a fast response, a status you can always see, the ability to fix a mistake without starting from zero.

And you do not have to leave the public sector to find good examples. The Portuguese state itself has already proven it can, when it decides to. Filing a tax return through the tax authority’s online portal, authenticating with the national digital key, signing a document with the citizen card. These are services that work, fast, used by millions of people without friction. The question, then, is not one of capability or culture. It is where that care in the design gets invested, and where it has not been yet.

Artificial intelligence adds a new layer to this story. It can explain a complex rule in plain language, for someone who is not a lawyer. It can prepare and validate a document before it is submitted, and point out the field that is missing. It can anticipate the error that would get a request refused and warn in time, instead of revealing it weeks later. It can handle the repetitive work so people can focus on what requires judgement. None of this replaces whoever has to decide. It only reduces the friction up to the decision, which is a very different thing, and a more honest one to promise.

The point is this: we are not talking about science fiction, nor a promise for ten years from now. It is mature engineering, working today in thousands of products we use without thinking. If the private sector can make the complex predictable, the rigidity we meet elsewhere stops looking inevitable and becomes what it really is: a design choice. And what was chosen once can be chosen again.

What Syntropic does

Here comes the honest part, and it matters to be clear. We are not going to reform the state, nor promise that a public institution changes overnight. That is not what we do, and it would not be serious to say it is.

What we do is on your company’s side. You cannot change the country’s front door, but you can remove the friction on your own side, and that is usually larger than it looks. Every hour your team spends copying data between spreadsheets, answering the same question for the tenth time, reconciling systems that do not talk to each other, is an hour that does not go to the customer or the product. It is the same friction as the front door, only inside the house, and that one is within your reach.

In concrete terms, we work on four fronts. Bespoke software that automates the internal processes eating up the day. Artificial intelligence applied to your real context, with assistants that draft proposals, explain, handle documentation and answer customers. Integration of the systems you already have that live in isolation, so they stop demanding manual work between them. And training, so your team uses these tools with autonomy, without depending on us for every step. All with a single thread: giving you back time and energy.

A simple example makes this concrete. Picture a company of a dozen people that receives requests by email, copies them by hand into a spreadsheet, calculates a quote in another, and only then replies to the customer, two days later. Each step seems small, but added up they are hours a week and customers lost to the delay. The same flow, well designed, receives the request, prepares the quote and returns an answer the same day, with a person validating instead of typing everything by hand. It is not magic. It is design, plus the right technology underneath.

The link is direct. The frustration of hitting a rigid wall, of waiting without knowing, of repeating work a machine would do better, is the same inside many companies. That is the one we know how to remove. We believe technology should free people to create, not trap them in processes. That is why Syntropic exists.

If your company loses time on processes that technology already knows how to solve, it is worth talking. The diagnosis is free and without commitment: we look at where the friction is, we tell you frankly what is worth automating and what is not, and if the right answer is “leave it as it is”, we tell you that too. Too much red tape is a big, old problem, and it will not be solved in an article. Too little innovation, though, does not have to be yours.