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Every layer of global commerce has been solved by software.
Except one.
@stripe solved payments. @flexport solved logistics. @deel solved payroll. But compliance - the rules that govern what you owe when you sell across a border - is still a patchwork of consultants, spreadsheets and guesswork.
There's a reason it's last.
Payments has largely been commoditized. A dollar moves the same way whether you're sending it to London or Lagos. Logistics can be optimized. A shipping container is a shipping container. But compliance doesn't work like that. You can't standardize it, because every country's tax rules are an expression of its sovereignty.
Brazil taxes software differently than Germany does. India's GST regime looks nothing like Japan's consumption tax. And here's the thing - there isn't a whole lot of alignment.
That’s because every tax code is that country codifying its own economic priorities, cultural values, and political environments. What gets taxed, what is exempt, what gets incentivized - those are policy choices that reflect what a society actually cares about.
This is, essentially, a complex adaptive system: 190+ countries, all acting as independent players, all changing their rules on their own timelines for their own reasons and in responses to each other. One country raises a threshold. Another introduces a new digital services tax. A third rewrites its e-invoicing requirements. None of them are coordinating with each other. And every change ripples out and interacts with every other change in ways that nobody planned for.
If you’ve worked on problems like weather modeling or autonomous driving - systems where you can’t just map the state of the world once and call it done, where the environment is changing while you’re trying to understand it - that’s the kind of problem this is.
The engineering challenge at @get_sphere is building a system that understands all of these different regimes - really understands them, not just stores them - and can reason about how they apply to any given transaction, even as the rules themselves are changing.
This is, by a wide margin, the hardest problem I’ve ever worked on.
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