would you ever start a company?
Issue #126 (25 Nov) – jobs in sales & more; five great events; Coffee with Andrew; state of EU tech; does salary transparency really help?; do hard things; first victims of ChatGPT.
Programming note: Thank you, everyone: your follows helped me push the LinkedIn page to well over 2,000 followers, and I’m only three testimonials short of 100. Can YOU be one of the three?
On a side note, after meeting some extremely Berlinstraight-faced receptionists at the doctor’s last week, I can imagine how terrible it must feel if you’re from a more service-oriented country and don’t speak German on top.
🌟 Handpicked community
is a place where we meet, share projects and ideas and look for help.
📨 Submit your input here.
🎪 Meet — tech & other events:
🩵 Grammarly's meetups are always fun. This time, you’ll learn about their cloud infrastructure and their journey of building global platform components, migrating hundreds of services, and empowering dev teams with self-service tooling and resilient on-call practices. | Wed, 27/11 at 18:30 | Grammarly Berlin Hub*
🚨 Join the "Ecosystem Connectors | Berlin Kyiv" launch event focusing on exploring business opportunities between Berlin and Ukraine with networking and live pitches. Register here. | Mon, 02/12 at 17:30 | SAP Data Space*
Rise like a phoenix – leaving the UX crisis behind | R9. Berlin meetup #5 | Wed, 04/12 19:00 | Zalando
Berlin Product Managers: Funnel Optimization with Project A | Tue, 03/12 18:30 | Project A*
this could be your event - advertise it
😎 Show — Cool stuff / Shoutouts / Projects & similar:
🔍 Did you know that Arbeitnow helps you find your next job in Berlin? It’s English-friendly, and you can even filter visa sponsorship options.*
🔍 Ask — for a Service / Co-founder / Project help & similar:
Support the victims of the Gaza-Israel conflict and join us for a fundraising dinner to support victims of the Gaza-Israel conflict and other violent crises. Let's do something good. (Sun, 01/12 at 16:00) All proceeds from this event will go directly to Médecins Sans Frontières, Save the Children, and Amnesty International.
✍🏼 If you enjoy writing articles, I have plenty to cover. Drop me a line. It’s a paid gig, but I’ll be honest: it’s not gonna make you rich.
Looking for the submission link? It’s below the title ⤴️
This section is also featured on LinkedIn in the weekly post.
*Sponsored
👀 Handpicked jobs
is a rotating selection of around 20 jobs from companies I’d check out.
5️⃣ from the rotation this week: Sales, Cust Success & Ops
The remaining jobs (also outside rotation) are in the Handpicked online database.
You can also submit a job.
🇩🇪 Maybe it’s time you learn German?
Michael from SmarterGerman is running his Black Friday Sale starting this Friday with discounts of up to 70%. There are 200 coupons in total. Don’t forget to use the codes (also mentioned on the link).
Los geht’s:
I didn’t take his lessons, so I cannot say they helped me reach my C1-but-declining-since-I-am-in-Berlin level, but I enjoyed working with him on this no-nonsense article on how to learn German.
Your purchase will help sustain this project.
🗞 Top inspiration snippets
☕️ Coffee with Andrew Bulkeley
is where my guest contributes three links and an explanation while I write a short bio.
Today I am hosting Andrew, the other half of the sister publication 20 Percent Berlin. He is the funny one, but no wonder: he’s a stand-up comedian with a deservedly big presence on socials. I like his German accent and his takes, but I have yet to see him live. Here is what he prepared for you:
If You Didn’t Want Me Then — People always ask me about my favorite comedians and it changes daily but I had Beth Stelling’s (late) 2023 Netflix special on repeat all summer. Best German comedian? Filiz Tasdan. If you speak German, she’s on tour.
Heavyweight — The latest season is delayed as they look for a new home, but Heavyweight is a new take on the “missed connections” section in the classifieds. They go to lengths to reunite protagonists of a past event – two American women who met in the ’70s in Denmark, acquaintances involved in an accidental shooting (no one died). The host is often overbearing, like a Bavarian, but I still think about past episodes (the Denmark one gets very dark).
Undercurrents — I’ve always had a thing for personal histories. What were actual people doing when history was happening? My friend Kirsty Bell found out in her 2022 book, which traces the history of the building she lives in – as well as the family that once owned the place. Which necessitates her own view on what was going on in Berlin during that era.
🇩🇪 Berlin & other good stuff
is a selection of links focused on Berlin/Germany, career, timeless content and business.
I want to apologize to everyone offended by my comment on international names in the last issue. I’m sorry. It was only to give a perspective on the topic, thinking also from my own experience.
We are now officially the newsletter with the most engaging polls in the DACH region. The last one got over 500 responses. 39% never faked a sick leave, 33% did it once or twice, 21% a few times, 5% did it pretty often, and around 10 of you are experts in the topic. Not sure what to think about it. 😅
Everyone has already reported on budget cuts for 2025, and it’ll affect all of us. Here is the full list (🇩🇪). I still hope Nextbike somehow makes it.
Budgets are also a matter of the quality of governance: HOW WELL is each public euro spent? Not everything can be measured, but I cannot avoid the impression that it often falls short.
Strangely (or not?), the prices for the cheapest resident parking ticket in big German cities (€20,40 for two years, compared to €240 in Frankfurt) won’t increase. (RBB)The report on the state of EU tech from VC Atomico shows that
if we don’t compare ourselves to the US too much,the EU startup scene has made massive progress in the last decade (the biggest problems are regulation and getting enough capital). I am also pretty optimistic, even if everything looks very bleak at the moment (the grey November certainly doesn’t help!). How about you? The poll is, however, about something else…Here is a Spotify playlist called “Songs that mention areas or streets of Berlin in the title” with something for almost every taste. One of my favourites must be Prenzlauerberg from Beirut. Afaik, Zach Condon now lives in Berlin?
Career: The CEO of Zomato (an Indian food delivery startup) went viral looking for a Chief of Staff who would need to pay the company around €22k to work there for a year. It turned out the money thing was a filter to get yourself excluded. It worked because they received 18,000 applications, looking for people who still tried, even without having the money. Interestingly, all you needed to submit was a cover letter of 200 words. I’d love a 200-word experiment, is anyone doing it?
Career: The idea behind the Salarty trends survey (see footer) was to empower employees. But maybe we should stop the project because salary transparency could actually be hurting employees? Possible, because “wage disclosure enables employers in concentrated markets to tacitly coordinate and suppress wages.”
Career: Some of the first victims of ChatGPT/LLMs automating their jobs away: local news production in the US (Reddit post). Since they are at least 1-2 years ahead of us… if you know, you know?
Timeless: Do Hard Things or how Casey Neistat, the OG of vlogging, …
ah, sorry, no spoilers.What a talented filmmaker.Timeless: Save wisdom is a grassroots initiative to… save wisdom. They encourage everyone to start recording the answers to 1000 questions, but you can also just look for inspiration. They get progressively harder, from “If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be?” over “When did you first fall truly in love? What happened?” to “How did hitting bottom free you from emptiness to pursue meaning and passion?” Huh, ok.
📱 Weekly Social.
Reddit: Berlin’s f*cked up aesthetic and a great comment comparing it to NYC (the wet vs the sticky).
Twitter: Get some sleep, mate.
Instagram: Would you wait for a 1 cent döner? How about that Dubai chocolate? Lol, nein, danke.
💬 Briefly.
😔 Bad news: Automotive supplier Bosch up to -5550 (3,800 in Germany and mostly in automated driving software development), but the numbers aren’t confirmed yet.
VW and IG Metall still haven’t reached a salary agreement, so the union plans for warning strikes in December. (all German media)eRockit, an e-mobility company from Brandenburg, filed for bankruptcy.
Stats: The number of company bankruptcies in Germany continues to rise at double-digit rates since June 2023 (the exception is June 2024 with 6,3%). The Federal Statistical Office registered a 22,9% increase in the preliminary number of registered proceedings YoY. (Destatis)
Northvolt, a Swedish EV battery maker, and a big European hope, filed for bankruptcy in the US after a failed rescue plan. It’ll continue to operate and has $5.8B debt. It raised $15B in funding, also from VW and the German government. (FT) They scaled way too fast.
Police cleared the Tesla protest camp at Grünheide, citing repeated violations and public security concerns. The trees have been occupied since February.
Taco Bell was supposed to come to Berlin this summer, but will have a year of delay. (RBB)
Cirque du Soleil is also coming in 2025, but they plan to start in November 2025 (Theater am Potsdamer Platz).1Komma5° spun off energy management software Heartbeat AI as an independent subsidiary with a €100M investment.
Siemens Energy reported an annual profit of €1.335 billion and adjusted its medium-term growth targets to between 10% to 12%, up from the previous 8%. Promising!
N26 reported first quarterly profit of €2.8M in Q3 2024, but expects €20M loss for full year.
Trade Republic will soon also offer a current account (girokonto).Axel Springer sold Finanzen.net and its neobroker for a reported €400M.
Deutsche Bank invested in the German LLM hope, Aleph Alpha.
Did you read these? More of this or less of this? Drop a note.
💸 Recently funded in Berlin & Germany
is a list of companies that received funding over €1M.
Koro | Berlin | Online food and snacks retailer | €35M Series C | Careers.
Juna.ai | Berlin | AI for industrial process control | $7.5M | Careers.
Fahrengold | Berlin | Luxury garage services provider | €1M+ Series A | No careers.
COGNEE | Berlin | Semantic memory engine for AI | €1.5M | No careers.
Eye-Able | Aachen | Website accessibility software solutions | €20M Series A | Careers.
IonKraft | Aachen | Plasma-based packaging barrier coatings | €3.5M | Careers.
Gemesys | Bochum | Brain-mimicking AI chip development | €8.6M Pre-seed | Careers.
Ubitium | Düsseldorf | Open-source semiconductor development | $3.7M Seed | Careers.
The Exploration Company | Munich | Reusable orbital vehicle development | €150M | Careers.
Qplix | Munich | Wealth management software platform | €25M | Careers.
Apaleo | Munich | Property management platform | €20M | Careers.
Pruna AI | Munich | AI optimization for ML | $6.5M Seed | Careers.
AnovonA | Munich | Protein drinks brand | €1M Seed | No careers—only a shop.
😅 Meanwhile
IT IS Monday, actually. How many can you tick off by Wednesday?
✌️ Handpicked essentials and a treat:
- How to find a great company to work for?
- Signing a new employment contract in Germany? Read this before.
- Don’t make these mistakes with your side hustle!
- Football in Berlin: where to play, watch and how to get involved?
- Berlin Salary Trends Reports: How do you compare?
- ❓Surprise treat for the curious
- The best questions to ask at a job interview
- Write it down now! Or why you should journal at work?
- What do hiring managers look for in CVs?
- Handpicked in media (podcasts and articles)
✨ Berlin Events Weekly: the best resource for events in Berlin ✨
♡ 20% Berlin: all the Berlin news twice a week, in English! ♡
If you have made it this far, smash that like button or leave a comment!
"More of this" for sure. Or at least the same of this. It's my favourite part of the blog.
the funny one. I'll show you ze funny one!