What is the fear about startups? If you look at the ones you actually use reliably for a decade, very few would have been stymied by GDPR. To add on to this, for every successful startups there seem to be many mostly replaceable ones.
If anything, a reduction in the rate of new startups would indicate that perhaps the market is growing MORE rational, which corroborates the recognition of risk of PII that the GDPR manifests.
For some reason when I read your comment I had a vision of the Reddit founders in the very early days, waking up in the middle of the night to restart the server when it had crashed. Their sanity was very nearly wrecked because they didn't know about the existence of daemon supervisor tools yet. God help them if they'd had to deal with GDPR while still sleep-deprived.
Early-stage startups do not, in general, have their shit together. A straw may not break a camel's back, but a camel embryo would have a harder time with it.
If anything, a reduction in the rate of new startups would indicate that perhaps the market is growing MORE rational, which corroborates the recognition of risk of PII that the GDPR manifests.