🤗 Thank YOU for being one of 5,000+
Issue #79 (27 Nov) – data & analytics jobs; Gezellig Sessions; fonts and museums of Berlin; Christmas markets season; what are LLMs?; culture at Google; dry funding week.
Programming note: A lot is happening. This week, I was featured in another great Berlin newsletter and published a review of Gezellig Sessions on my Instagram. I also celebrated reaching an arbitrary magic number of 5,000+ subscribers (🤗) by posting another selfie on Linkedin and everywhere else. You get used to it.
🎄 We are organising our last meetup of the season with
on Tuesday, 5th of December. We will meet at one of the best Christmas markets in Berlin at Charlottenburg Palace. Free tickets here.You can still join our Get Sh!t Done Sessions. We start on the 4th of December.
🌟 Handpicked Kleinanzeigen & Tech Events
🎪 Events:
Last minute, today! 🇩🇪 CA$H ME IF YOU CAN – Finanzierung und Förderung in Berlin und Brandenburg 2023 | Mon, 27.11 at 10.00 | Online
UX-Testing at the Startup Incubator Berlin | Thu, 30.11 at 17.00 | Startup Incubator
2nd International HR Tech "Weihnachtsmarkt" | Thu, 7.12 at 16.00 | Deel offices
😎 Cool stuff:
Juanma is looking for entities in Berlin that organize Bildungsurlaub in English. All the resources he can find are courses to learn English, which is not really what he needs. Can anyone help? (comments welcome)
Katja is looking to interview German (preferably Berlin) startups with office space. She'd be grateful for a 20-minute of your time to discuss the challenges you faced with finding and designing it. Book your slot HERE.
Some say Berlin is the loneliest city in the world. True or not, many of us feel more alone because we’re living hyper-connected, isolated lives. Why is that—and what can we do about it? Join Monika and her friends on the community exploration of loneliness.
🔍 Searching for roles:
this week, nobody looked for a role! If you are on a search, you can submit your “looking for a role” ad—you never know when and how the magic happens.
🫵🏻 🫵🏻 🫵🏻 You can get featured, too! It’s FREE for cool stuff in all three categories.
👀 Handpicked twenty-something
📨 HR going the extra mile & readers submitted
submit yours on the link; it’s free and gets you attention!
💾 On rotation this week: Data, Analytics & Finance
More positions (also outside rotation) in Handpicked online database.
🤩 2 simple ways to support my work
I spent hundreds of hours on Handpicked 1.5 years; I love all the support and the energy you and your feedback have given me! You can support me by:
liking and sharing my stuff on social media (we are slaves of the algos!),
telling friends or your enemies about it.
If you need my support with anything, don’t think too much—just ask!
Thank you so much! ❤️
🗞 Top inspiration snippets
🇩🇪 Berlin & Other good stuff
🎶 You should check out Gezelling Sessions (my Instagram review and their website), a cosy living room concert series, and the community Manoj is building around it.
🎄The season of Christmas markets is here. If you are looking for inspiration, look no further: Exberliner has a list and short description of them. You can join us to check out the Charlottenburg Palace one on the 5th—FREE Tickets this way.
🚌 Get ready to…. wait for your bus. BVG faces a shortage of 350 drivers, so it needs to cut 6% of the bus schedules starting the 10th of December. All 6500 bus stops will remain to be serviced, only less frequently. Essential lines to schools and hospitals won't be affected. (BZ Berlin)
🎁 Here is a treasure you should know about—a blog about the typography of Berlin by Jesse Simon. Sadly not active anymore, but it's great content where you can get lost. Here, for example, is an article about the fonts of S-Bahn stations. For more recent content, there is still Twitter.
I am thinking of projects for 2024 and need your input:
💸 Germany will invest €1B in the startup ecosystem. One-third of the fund is federal, with two-thirds from private investors like Allianz and Blackrock. The fund will invest in venture capital funds supporting startups, which means we will see more opportunities in the “recently funded” section. That’s good, because it is drying up radically!
🥙🥙🥙 Döner fans beware! Birtat, Europe's largest kebab skewer producer, believes current prices are too low, especially since ingredient costs have increased by about 50%. This means the prices could soon reach €10. (Tagesschau Instagram)
🧐 What are large language models? Here is a great talk by Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI. Basically, they are zipped parts of the internet that are afterwards “searchable” with the help of different assistants. Worth having a look.
🔻 A now-former Google engineer describing the decline of the culture in Google. It probably should be taken with a grain of salt, but throughout an interesting read. For example, the effect of layoffs: “/…/ after a layoff people can no longer trust that their company has their back, and they dramatically dial back any risk-taking. Responsibilities are guarded jealously. Knowledge is hoarded, because making oneself irreplaceable is the only lever one has to protect oneself from future layoffs.”
🤭 Why are funny people more desirable? “New research reveals that humor in a romantic partner is highly valued because it is perceived as an indicator of creative problem-solving skills.”
✉️ mailtolink.me is a great tool to pre-fill an email link. This is an email I prepared (you can test it, it will open your e-mail client).
😔 Bad news: unu (e-mopeds, Berlin) bankrupt; McMakler (real estate, Berlin) -58; Tumblr (still remember it?) almost dead; one of the German WeWork subsidiaries (Berlin-Moabit) declared bankruptcy; Verbally (Berlin) bankrupt.
r/berlin choice of the week is a discussion of great underrated museums and art galleries. It’s not underrated, but I am a big fan of the Jewish Museum.
💬 Briefly:
Merantix, a Berlin-based AI venture-builder, raised a €100M fund. I previously featured them here! Careers.
I was surprised to read that Klarna’s CEO Siemiatkowski used an animal farm analogy, calling himself a farmer in the recent crisis with Klarna’s union (supporters of which were called pigs). (more @Tech.eu) Spoiler alert! It ends like this: “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again: but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
Ups. The EU Commission is investigating Delivery Hero for potential cartel violations, conducting surprise inspections at delivery service companies in two member states. That’s unfortunate because it probably means they are 2nd or 3rd in the line. You can avoid severe anti-trust violation penalties if you admit it as the FIRST one. /compliance smartass mode off
ToolTime is expanding to the UK, after launching in Austria. Founded in 2019, it raised €30M in July. Careers.
GetYourGuide will postpone its 2024 IPO due to unfavourable market conditions.
Allianz is suing Revolut for £10.4M in an embedded travel insurance dispute.
Berlin's Natural History Museum was hacked, leaving up to 450 researchers unable to work since October 18. The hackers used ransomware to encrypt the museum's data and demand a ransom. I wonder what their Information Security budget was.
💸 Recently funded in Berlin & Germany
(driest since I am doing this!)
Seqstant | Teltow | Shaping the future of pathogen diagnostics with 1-click sequencing technology | €1.8M Seed | Careers.
Floy | Munich | Innovating for patient well-being in radiology through AI technology | €5.4M Seed | Careers.
Leevi/Lilio Health | Munich | Providing meaningful insights to parents about their child's wellbeing | €2.2M Seed | No careers.
Bace | Dortmund | Aiming to revolutionize logistics with expanded service interfaces for all | €1.3M Seed | Careers.
😅 Meanwhile
someone made a Spotify playlist
This is a footer slice of 🤝 facts for you. “When causally touching your face, you are often really unconsciously taking a big sniff of your hand, often to smell the scent of whomever you touched” (Twitter)
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Thanks so much for sharing our event and for pulling together this newsletter every week!
That Klarna story is messed up. Speaks volumes. Talk about toxic tech bros. Where is this crap coming from? Is this what they teach at business school?