how much can you make by organising a marathon?
Issue #119 (23 Sep) – 20+ Business & Strategy jobs; your CV from recruiter's perspective; everyone burned out; Amazon RTO; €12B for WIN; LinkedIn tips; 75 nice things for yourself.
Programming note: I redid the testimonials and the whole landing page; thanks to Anastasiia, we have a new article about recruiters reading your CVs. You can still participate in our event survey for a 10% discount on all Handpicked events until 1.7.24.
Also, check out today’s sponsor, the People and Culture Festival and get your free ticket for the 17th of October.
🌟 Handpicked community
is a place where we meet, share projects and ideas and look for help.
📨 Submit your input here. Inspiration for all the categories on the link.
🎪 Meet — tech & other events:
How Grammarly Uses LLMs and Human Evaluations to Ensure High Quality of Suggestions | Thu, 26/09 18:30 | Grammarly*
BIH Digital Health Forum | Wed, 25/09 18:00 | Museum of Medical History of the Charité*
Mobility Innovation Tour Experience at The Drivery | several Wednesdays at 9:30 | The Drivery (Ullsteinhaus)
this could be your event - advertise it
😎 Show — Cool stuff / Shoutouts / Projects & similar:
“Antitext," an exhibition exploring decades of Ukrainian literary and cultural resilience during the Soviet era, will be on display at the Hotel Continental Art Space in Exile in Berlin from September 30 to October 12, 2024, offering free guided tours for those seeking a deeper understanding of Ukrainian literary history. More info.
🐈⬛ Attention all cat parents - have you ever been clueless about your cat's health? The startup Feniska developed a cat tracker, helping you catch health issues early, reduce vet bills, and ensure peace of mind. Check them out.*
Looking for the submission link? It’s below the title ⤴️
*Sponsored
👀 Handpicked jobs
is a rotating selection of around 20 jobs from companies I’d check out.
3️⃣ from the rotation this week: Business & Strategy
The remaining jobs (also outside rotation) are in the Handpicked online database.
You can also submit a job.
🌟 Medianet’s People and Culture Festival: The future of work starts with you
🗞 Top inspiration snippets
🇩🇪 Berlin & other good stuff
is a selection of links focused on Berlin/Germany, career, timeless content and business.
We published the second article in the series: Your CV from a recruiter’s perspective, this time hosting Anastasiia from Moss. Great stuff.
Results on burnout from last week are scary, with 74% of people either having experienced burnout or currently dealing with it. Only a tiny fraction (4%) report never having experienced burnout.
Drop me a note if you are interested in the topic.AfD didn’t win Brandenburg. SPD wins with 31.1% (+4.9%), followed by AfD 29.8% (+6.3%), BSW 12.3% (+12.3%), CDU 11.9% (-3.7%), Linke 3.0% (-7.7%). (data from Sunday, 19:43)
The 50th anniversary of the Berlin Marathon is coming to town this weekend, with more than 50k finishers paying €205 to start the run. It’s the world's fastest, one of the largest and flattest marathons (along with NYC, Chicago, London & Boston).
Running is a big business (look at On & Hoka disrupting Nike & Co.!), and the organisers, SCC Events GmBH (owned by Sport-Club Charlottenburg e.V.), are undoubtedly doing well, but are, according to their boss, totally dependent on sponsors.
They organised 11 events in 2022 and collected 200k participation fees. RBB failed to get concrete profit numbers (🇩🇪), but according to Northdata, SCC Events had revenues of €20,9M in 2022 and around 200k in profit. The pre-corona study assessed the event as adding €383M of total added value. Wanna work there? They currently need two employees.Last week, we had Habyt in the funding rounds section, raising €40M after raising €40M Series C last October. I found a horror story on Reddit that really made me think that operating A WG ROOM AS A SERVICE must be a total nightmare because how can you convince people to clean up after themselves? I’ve done my share of WGing, and wow, it can sometimes be a disaster.
This chart below looks terrible, but hopefully, it’s a sign of turning tides. Maybe that’s why we got the WIN-Initiative: “Germany will invest around €12B to strengthen the venture capital environment for startups, according to a declaration signed on Tuesday at the Startup Germany Summit.” (RT) This was the first summit. EU Commission will also get a Startup Commissioner.
Career: Big news from Amazon this week. Five days a week Return-To-Office mandate (by 1.1.25) and decrease the number of managers by the end of Q1 2025. (Full letter by Jassy, CEO) A combination of a strong flex, natural attrition acceleration, and a look into the future — others will almost surely follow, but the question is only to what extent.
Career: Two discussions from Reddit. First, a discussion on r/berlin about the current job search for immigrants. Second, a broader Germany & software-related one from a couple of weeks ago. It's anecdotal: the market seems tough, but also improving? If you are looking/intend to look, investing in learning German in parallel will help. Speaking German is an advantage!
Career: After replacing my LinkedIn banner, I figured I should finally write my About section. I don’t buy the “I’ve reviewed 1,000+ profiles” hook, but eight tips from this chap are still very reasonable.
Timeless: 75 nice little things to do for yourself. I like the idea of fart walks and smiling whenever you see yourself in the mirror.
Timeless: Try bullshit remover on your work or the work of others. A great use of Generative AI.
📱 Weekly Social.
Twitter: Judd hosted a men-only dinner.
Instagram: A tip for avocado lovers (visual & 🇩🇪).
💬 Briefly.
😔 Bad news: Watergate closing with 1.1.25; Zolar -50%.
Stats: Berlin tourism: 7.2M guests (+6% YoY) with 17.3M overnight stays (+3.2%) in the first seven months of 2024. (St. BB)
Flink (Berlin, instant groceries) raised $150M from investors with plans for 30 new locations, targeting 20% revenue growth to $600M. Aims for profitability by Q2 2025. (Manager Magazin)
🌞 Solar shakeup: Zolar exits B2C, cuts over half staff. 1Komma5° may step in. With Zolar dropping out, it looks like the German solar market is consolidating from 3 to 2 major players (Enpal and the company with the name very hard to type without copy-pasting). Meyer Burger’s CEO resigned amid restructuring and a 200-job cut. Related, Swedish battery maker Northvolt cut jobs and scaled back operations due to the EV market slowdown and Chinese competition. This means their planned gigafactory in Heide is in danger.
Planned SellerX (Berlin, roll-up aggregator) auction was unexpectedly cancelled. Here is a good deep dive (🇩🇪) on the failure of this business model. Spoiler: consolidation & resulting efficiencies often only work on slides.
N26 is discussing launching a mobile phone service with the telecom-as-a-service startup Gigs (which is now based in San Francisco but has strong Berlin links). (FinanceFWD)
Great news. European Court of Justice ruled against Booking.com's "best price" clauses. Hotels can now offer cheaper rates through their channels. (HB) You can probably try to get a better deal by calling the hotel directly.
Berlin-based KoRo exits non-food, focusing on three core categories. (Lebensmittelzeitung, €, 🇩🇪)
💸 Recently funded in Berlin & Germany
is a list of companies that received funding over €1M.
Smalt | Berlin | Solar installer training platform | €8M seed | Careers.
Sirius | Berlin | Digital music education platform | $4M seed | Careers.
Noah Labs | Berlin | Cardiovascular health monitoring software | €3M | Careers.
Reverion | Munich | Reversible carbon-negative power plants | $62M Series A | Careers.
DeepDrive | Munich | Efficient electric vehicle motors | €30M Series B | Careers.
CPTx | Munich | DNA nanofabrication platform | $29M | Careers.
Phlair | Munich | Direct air capture technology | €14.3M | Careers.
Reactive Robotics | Munich | Medical assistance robots | €5M | Careers.
VidLab | Munich | AI-powered video content platform | €3.5M seed | Careers.
Symphera | Munich | All-in-one surgical system | €2.4M seed | Careers.
Freda | Passau | High-quality frozen ready meals | 7-figure | Careers.
😅 Meanwhile
they felt sad for the model being trained on AI-generated stuff that almost nobody reads
✌️ Handpicked essentials and a treat:
- all the Handpicked Articles worth reading
- How to learn German and get over “Genau” and “mit Karte, bitte”?
- Learn German at SmarterGerman—HANDPICKED11 for 11% discount.
- Football in Berlin: all the links you will ever need
- Berlin Salary Trends Reports: How do you compare?
- ❓Surprise treat for the curious
✨ Berlin Events Weekly: the best resource for events in Berlin ✨
♡ 20% Berlin: all the Berlin news twice a week, in English! ♡
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