Ask HN: Must early stage startups hire a Data Protection Officer under GDPR?

While I fully support all or most aspects of the GDPR as a consumer, as a producer, I must admit it is a bit of an overhead.

Nevertheless, I feel that many of the requirements can be met by careful and deliberate design decisions at an early stage; by treating your users data as you'd treat your own.

I am however concerned about the "requirement" to hire a Data Protection Officer that is sufficiently independent. This seems rather onerous for an early stage venture. Anyone understands how to deal with this?