Once you're at more than 1 million per year there are other challenges and you can probably afford to hire someone to take part of that burden off your shoulders, but until you get to that point you're on your own and it's very damn stressful (and by stressful I mean that that includes the possible inflated but all to real fear of getting to prison because of that tax-thingie that you didn't fill the 100% correct way or because some work your company did broke some municipal regulations or whatever and now you're on the hook for damages and, yes, personal liability).
Actually your VAT-skimming thing at the end is a very good example of that mentality, i.e. the innovators here having to have the Tax man front and center in their minds, before innovation and trying to build something useful off the ground, because if you don't know how to play the Tax man (at the limit of legality, as your example is) then you're toast. That "playing the Tax-man" thing consumes a lot of people's energy in the early stages, energy that would have been way better spent trying to actually make something new and innovative.
[the 50k and 1 million figures are just used as examples, maybe it's not 50k but 70k or 80k and maybe it's not 1 million but 5 to 10 million, but the idea stays the same]