🤔 Who owns Berlin?
Issue #73 (16 Oct) – People & Culture festival; join our Pub Quiz; follow Laura; documentary about Berlin you need to see; how to get your CV noticed; two great bars and on reading well.
Programming note: Recalibration worked. I changed my workflow and the content of snippets. Expect much more focus. Looking at someone browsing my newsletter on their phone made me realise it’s … rich. Big. Long. Is it too long? Jobs are back next Monday.
🎉🍻 We are throwing a pub quiz on the 4th of November. We have a few tickets left. Get them fast while they last.
Check my Instagram review of Layla. And, of course, follow me so that I can reach another arbitrary milestone of 500 followers. Let’s get into it:
🌟 Handpicked Kleinanzeigen & Tech Events
🎪 Upcoming Events:
Advancing Speech Generation With Transformers from Grammarly | Tue, 17.10 at 18.30 | Grammarly Berlin Hub
Sx Tech EU conference | Tue, 24.-26.10 at 8.00 | Ahoy Berlin
Berlin Product Managers: When Products get tasty | Tue, 24.10 at 18.30 | HelloFresh Campus
😎 Cool stuff:
we did not look or offer anything cool this week
🔍 Searching for roles:
Pavithra is a fullstack engineer with around 2+ years of experience and has a published app on AppStore/PlayStore.
Anna is a Product Designer based in Berlin. She is driven by a passion for creating innovative and user-centric solutions, with a keen eye for sustainability at the heart of her design philosophy.
Juan just arrived in Berlin with his girlfriend and their dog, and is looking for his first role as a web developer (MERN stack). He is down to do a minimum wage internship if it's not too long and the team works in English.
FREE tickets for the People & Culture festival from Medianet are out. Handpicked is a proud media sponsor. Get them here:
👀 Handpicked two
📨 Readers submitted
Jobs return next week. Most recent positions in Handpicked online database.
❤️ Shoutout to Laura
I’ve met Laura Lewandowski on a random summer day in Berlin. Genuine and interesting people are rare—Laura is one of them! She does so many things: one of them is Smart Chiefs, a weekly newsletter with 7k subscribers to empower people to work smart, not hard. Productivity, AI, personal growth and storytelling. And the best thing? You’ll improve your German!
🗞 Top inspiration snippets
🇩🇪 Berlin & Other good stuff
🤯 It’s simple: we meet online in the early morning and work, everyone on their own topic. We repeat ten weekdays. Success towards your goal is guaranteed! Join the movement, hue hue (6 AM too early? Sing up; we will try different formats in the future).
🍻 How about meeting some cool people around a pub quiz? Bring friends or come alone; it’ll be fun!
🎥 You need to watch Arte's gorgeous documentary about Berlin, “Capital B - Wem gehört Berlin?” (Who owns Berlin?) after the fall of the wall. It’ll help you understand Berlin so much better. But it’s in Deutsch. You should learn Deutsch so that you can see this. 😜
📸 You can pair it with these 51 photos from ‘89 and ‘91.
🤔 Nothing has been confirmed yet (Tagesspiegel), but Miles was allegedly manipulating the telematic data to avoid paying parking fees in the range of €30M. Car-sharing is an extremely tough
promisebusiness where each cent counts. This won’t be pretty if true because their revenues were €91M in ‘22. It feels like it’s just a matter of time before Miles won’t be an option anymore (remember, almost everyone exited this type of business already). But I'm happy to be proven wrong for the sake of mobility options in town.💸 Here is an interesting insight into secondaries (🇩🇪) or how founders get a life-changing payout long before the IPO or an exit.
👨🏻💼 👩🏼💼 The gender pay gap is still a thing. How does it look for you? We had a female median (€57,500) significantly lower than men (€73,500) in our last survey. You can do research in the dashboard yourself.
🔍 How to Get Your Resume Noticed (And Out of the Trash Bin)? is a bit dated (2020) in the sense of Gen AI, but still offers some good tips that align with my research, especially to go through the keywords from the job description and the importance of a cover letter. (see the footer for links) BTW:
👚 If you are looking for second-hand stores in several German cities, here is a cool app/catalogue, Circle Hand.
📚 It turns out 90% of you are regular readers (poll in Issue 71). This is fantastic. I enjoyed this essay from Simon Sarris on reading well. I feel the need to finish each book I start, so I found this idea particularly interesting: “You should start many books and complete few. You should never feel beholden to completing them, there are simply too many worthwhile works to read.”
r/berlin choice of the week is this rant about warm U-Bahn stations. It’s the problem of ventilation, because the tunnel system essentially acts as a heat trap, accumulating warmth from train machinery, brakes, and even body heat from passengers. Which one is the warmest? U-Mehringdamm must be in TOP 3!
💬 Briefly:
Brlo is opening a new place in Charlottenburg, and Wax On Bar is the bar of the year. I was there once and am not surprised. The waitress moved drinks back to the fridge if anyone went for a smoke.
Birkenstock's IPO didn’t go that well. The stock price was down almost 13% on the first trading day last week.
Q3 European FinTech funding nosedived to €954M from €3.3B. Deals dropped from 206 to 134. (data by Blackfin)
Getsafe bought Luko's German clients, adding 50K contracts. Now serves 550K customers across Europe.
Personio delayed IPO till 2025, focusing on growth. Valued at $8.5B with $700M in investment, losses in 2021 €112M in on €51M revenue.
Bitpanda's 2022 revenue plunged 80%, with losses surpassing net income.
💸 Recently funded in Berlin & Germany
Upvest | Berlin | Enables companies to offer digital investment products seamlessly | €86M Series C | Careers.
Lanch | Berlin | Partners with creators to launch their own restaurant delivery brands | €6.5M Series A | Careers.
Bable | Berlin | Community driving the Smart City movement | €5.7M | Careers.
TransactionLink | Berlin/London | Empowers companies to build tailored business onboarding processes in minutes | €5M Series A | Careers.
Deta | Berlin/New York | Offers a Personal Cloud Computer service, empowering users to control their apps and data | $3.6M Series A | Careers.
Varm | Berlin | Dedicated to reducing heating costs and CO2 emissions by up to 50% through home insulation | €1M+ Series A | Careers.
Kodex AI | Berlin | Developing an AI-based copilot tailored for the finance industry | €1.6M Series A | Careers.
SynthFlow AI | Berlin | AI Agents at Scale with No Code | €1.5M Seed | Careers.
Soluterials | Beelitz | High-performance aluminium, reducing EU's foreign resource dependency | €1M Seed | No careers.
Orbem | Munich | Uses MRI and AI to transform sectors like agriculture, construction, and healthcare | €30M Series B | Careers.
Neura Robotics | Metzingen | Focused on cognitive robots that can see, hear, and learn, aiming for broad applications | €15M Series B | Careers.
Dyno | Offenburg | All-in-one solution for corporate retirement planning | €1.5M Series A | No careers.
😅 Meanwhile
you can impress some people with a simple trick! I wonder if he learned it here.
This is a footer slice of 🌎 fact for your. The Mississippi River system is the largest naturally navigable waterway in the world. Because transportation by water is 10x-30x cheaper this gave US goods an “unfair” advantage.
✌️ Handpicked essentials:
- Berlin Salary Trends Report 2023: How do you compare?
- Want to get reminded for the next salary survey?
- 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?
✨ Berlin Events Weekly: the best resource for events in Berlin ✨
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