It's clear that there has to be some bureaucracy. If anything because you might want to do some auditing in the future.

PG and friends mostly spend their own money and they're free to do as they please, follow instinct or whatever.

You can't do that (thank god) with public money.

Grants are bureaucracy, sure, but if you understand how you navigate it - and every entrepreneurial person shoud - then it's really free money with a bit of strings attached. But it's primarily used for seed purposes (vs. series A, B...) in new companies or as a suplement in existing companies.

EU also does investment matching (one of our VCs had half of his fund matched by the EU). Based on my experience, this is an even better model, since it derisks investmens for local VCs - the biggest problem in investing here is not the lack of funds, but insane risk aversion. It really feels like everybody is looking for stable and good performing businesses and not for investment opportunities that would be moon shots.

From the 1st link there is https://ec.europa.eu/easme/en/news/deep-tech-europe-report-k... which claims that companies that received EIC funding have attracted 5Bi in private funding (the program is new so this is apparently a couple of years, maybe more)

By comparison: Total money raised by all YC companies: >$7 billion https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-stats/

I think companies would apply for EIC later than on YC hence it might be apples to oranges but it's an interesting metric nonetheless