This study examines the state’s role in shaping the regulatory environment for startup entrepreneurship in Central and Eastern Europe. Startups, as innovation-driven enterprises, are key to economic growth. However, they frequently relocate their headquarters abroad to access better financing and more favorable startup-specific regulations. Entrepreneurs consistently prioritize advantageous tax policies and administrative simplification as the most important forms of government support. To investigate these issues, the study employs content and discourse analysis of Hungarian entrepreneurship policy documents from 2001 to 2024, utilizing Python-assisted keyword extraction, TF-IDF vectorization, and K-means clustering. The results indicate that legislation rarely distinguishes startups from conventional SMEs, even though significant public capital has been allocated to the venture capital market. Overall, the legal framework shows limited engagement with the ecosystem’s calls for regulatory simplification and tax incentives. The analysis evaluates the alignment between state legislative activity and the practical needs of the startup ecosystem, highlighting gaps in policy targeting, particularly outside central economic hubs.