[nabdab]

Sounds like standard bureaucracy.

They didn’t submit the required information in the required form. SF wants startups to behave, that doesn’t mean that behaving startups get to ignore the standard procedures or get exceptions from requirements.

[isoskeles]

Sounds like they made a mistake in their submission, rather than they wanted to ignore something or get an exception.

For such a large city with a huge amount of tax revenue, I would expect the bureaucracy in SF to do a little better with processes like this one. It would have been trivial to review these for required sections in advance or to give companies time to submit corrections. Obviously this isn’t how it works, like you stated “standard bureaucracy”, but I’d love to see certain parts of government move further away from this mentality of being some punishing Old Testament god to serving the community.

[nabdab]

> It would have been trivial to review these for required sections in advance

Absolutely. It is trivial! And the company making the submission is expected to do that. Which I think is very reasonable, considering that they know the requirements and make the actual submission in the first place.

It’s silly to want the reviewers to take on an additional burden in the process just because this one company made a dumb mistake which as you say would have been trivial for them to review and catch.

[xvector]

Reviewers are human. If they can’t use their human reasoning skills deal with something trivial like “Heading A3 should be above this paragraph” then frankly society would be much better off without them, and we should just automate them away rather than wasting our tax dollars on them.

[koheripbal]

Uou are assuming the forms have meaningful purpose.

The reality is that the bureaucrats just don't wantT more startups and so they use excuses to obstruct them.

[xvector]

I think the reality is much less agenda-based and much more depressing: a lot of bureaucrats couldn’t give two shits about their job and are just there to put in the minimum required effort to get their paycheck, without regard for who they might hurt along the way.

Certainly sounds like what happened here - a bored, lazy bureaucrat scanning the application for a heading and tossing it in the bin when they didn’t find it.

I’d far prefer a bureaucracy where the employees cared, even if it was caring about the “wrong” reasons.

[barney54]

I hear you, but let’s be honest about what this means—more work for attorneys...