don't miss the "Cool stuff" section!

Issue #83 (08 Jan) – 20+ Business & Strategy jobs; GEN AI hype or not?; optimize your holiday plans; €180M on what?; did Uber win? and the average life expectancy.

Jan 08, 2024

Programming note: This break was… a long holiday? Happy to be back! I was humbled by the results of my last survey—thanks to everyone helping set the direction for 2024: the theme will be experimentation. “Coffee with” is back and we have a lot of great stuff in the community section!

In other news, I spent my NYE in Berlin again, and it’s hard to believe how many adults in this country ~~are ready to spend hundreds of euros for~~ love fireworks. On top, 390 people spending a night in jail was widely praised as a success compared to the disaster last year. 😅

🌟 Handpicked Kleinanzeigen & Tech Events

🎪 Events:

I have a free ticket for the Road to START Summit (Fri, 26.1.24 at 18.30). Send me an email with your favourite link to get it. I’ll pick a winner.
Berlin Product Managers ━ #5: A blueprint for sustainable Growth | Thu, 25.1 at 18.30 | Babbel offices
Monthly Meet Up of Silicon Alle | tomorrow at 9.00 | Sankt Oberholz
FutureTalk: The Power of Female Leadership | Wed, 24.1 at 18.30 | Bettertrust

😎 So many things in the Cool stuff this time!

If anyone can recommend a good tax advisor for me and some of the readers (ENG or DE), please reach out. The need is big, but they are hard to find.
“A free night school/mentorship course for self-taught creatives looking to break into the commercial creative industry. Shift can be a career-changing/making experience! Remote, showcase in Berlin. Taught in German.”
This bot gets you an Anmeldung or any other service.berlin.de appointment! Create a GitHub issue if you want help using the software. Requires at least basic tech knowledge.
Nik made a cool web app: A fully customizable „BVG Anzeigetafel“ to see live departures of your bus/train/tram/s-bahn. You can place it on a tablet in your entrance area or just use it with your smartphone. Any device with a browser works!
“I am Rand, a one-man show videographer doing stuff from corporate through drone to event videos, documentaries on the side. I’m looking for gigs, challenges, collaborators. I’d really love to work with startups, small businesses that create value. Niche stuff. I’d love to film modern dance, performances, make portraits of artists.”
Vinicius is a “Full Stack Developer | Frontend (React, TailwindCSS, Next.js) & Backend (Node.js, Express.js, PHP). Architecting scalable solutions. GIS enthusiast merging web dev with geography.”

🔍 Searching for roles:

“Daniel, a dynamic data engineer, team lead, and product person, is on the hunt for a role as a senior/lead data engineer or engineering manager where innovation and team synergy are at the forefront. He keeps a positive mind and has unrivalled optimism on a quest to turn data problems into data solutions.”

🫵🏻 Daniel is alone, and that’s great for him. But YOU can get featured, too! It’s free for all the three categories.

👀 Handpicked twenty-something

📨 HR going the extra mile & readers submitted

OhMyV - two founding partners
submit yours on the link; it’s free

💾 On rotation this week: Business & Strategy

More positions (also outside rotation) in Handpicked online database.

🗞 Top inspiration snippets

☕️ Coffee with Steve Ewin

I found Steve based on a recommendation from a friend. He does great videos (Insta) about Cold War Berlin/DDR. I love his style, the content and, of course, his football shirts. This is what he recommended:

Behind the Bastards (podcast) - I would recommend this entire podcast, but the six-part series on Henry Kissinger is a must-listen to understand not just why Kissinger is derided, but what he influenced. And if you disagree, it is a delightful avenue to pick apart that viewpoint.
Brewing Socialism (book) - What can coffee tell us about East Germany, and what can this tell us about our current world? One of the most important beans in world history, it helped to both build and bring down the East German state. Kloiber goes into how both were possible.
Did the Japanese offer to surrender before Hiroshima? (article) - Alex Wellerstein illustrates with this two-part article what the average person doesn’t always see: how do historians engage and evaluate the past? And further, how do historians engage with work that disagrees with their conclusion?

🇩🇪 Berlin & Other good stuff

🥂 With great happiness in my heart I am announcing that I still have faith in the efficiency of the Berlin governance. The Yorckstrasse-mattress is gone! It took a while, but consider die Sache erledigt (issue #80).
🪦 Berlinfoodstories made a list of restaurants that permanently closed in 2023. This year VAT is back to 19% and everyone talks about recession, so the outlook for the restauranteurs isn’t the best. I cook a lot, but when I eat out, I don’t mind paying for the good stuff and complaining to people joining me if the food is mediocre instead of telling it to the staff (“Alles ok, danke!”). I know, stupid.
🎉 Some close, others open. Exberliner is doing lists of “the best” new restaurants and here is the December version. You can find previous months in the bottom. Good inspiration, but I am not sure if it’s advertisment or a genuine review.
🫣 Recession? What recession? People were happy to spend €58M (+47%) more on fireworks this year (a total of €180M) compared to 2019 (last year before the temporary ban). That’s the same as last year, but I’m not sure the interpretation that people were angrier last year is valid (Tweet). €180M. Think about it for a moment.
🚄 Have you already onboarded the (gen) AI train? If not, stay put because the hype is gone. Here is a great six-month-old essay from Ted Goia, where he claims that the “only areas where AI is flourishing are shamming, spamming & scamming.” In December, NYT filed a lawsuit against OpenAI on copyright infringement, which summoned threadbois to demonstrate their expertise for and against it. Zvi summed the copyrights topic up perfectly. For more on “‘AI, and everything else”, the annual presentation from Ben Evans. It's worth reading.

What do you think?
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📆 One of the favourite pastimes of some of my former colleagues was planning their holiday at the start of the year based on the optimal use of the so-called “Brückentage”. If you feel like doing the same, here is your chance because RBB made a helpful overview. I wish I had any visibility into my year.
✏️ A new year in a new job? Or maybe an old one? Get ready for your next salary review or interview with a “brag” document, a template by Julia Evans. I previously suggested a simpler work journal (see footer). I’d say keep things simple and maintainable because online advice is cheap, but the effort required can be expensive to the point of giving up.
🙅🏻‍♂️ Zapier has a good content blog, and they did an overview of the best to-do apps, a fitting topic for all the New Year resolutions. I went full circle, tried everything and ended up writing things down on paper.
😔 Bad news: Delivery Hero did layoffs again (-13% in 2023) just before Christmas (HQ and two tech hubs affected). Here is the Alumni directory.
r/berlin choices of the week are this thread on what has gotten better in Berlin in 2023 and a reminder of the fact your rent could potentially be illegal (since I am noticing a lot of ads from one of the law firms, the post could be related).
💬 Briefly:
1. Did Uber win the scaling game and will now jack up the prices? “Uber’s $129B market cap is now equivalent to the valuation of *ALL 16* of its top global competitors, across both ridesharing and food delivery… COMBINED!” (LinkedIn)
2. 2023 was the warmest year ever in Germany, and Berlin was the warmest state while Brandenburg had the lowest amount of rain. (RBB)
3. We got only three new unicorns in Germany in 2023: Helsing, DeepL and 1Komma5°. Raisin got its status back. (GSzene)
4. Clark (insurtech) is leaving Austria, and Ride Capital (fintech) has challenges because of their real-estate deals. (🇩🇪) Outside: Hyperloop One (vacuum train) shuts down in the US.
5. In 2023, 45.9M people in Germany were employed, the highest number ever since reunification (333k more than in 2022).
6. December inflation in Berlin was +3,9% YoY and +0,2% compared to November. Avg. annual inflation was +6,2%, which was down from 7,1% in 2022. (St. BB)

💸 Recently funded in Berlin & Germany

Enpal | Berlin | Innovative solar energy solutions for homes and businesses | €160M asset sale | Careers.
UltiHash | Berlin | Byte-level deduplication technology for data storage | $2.5M Pre-Seed | Careers.
Link11 | Frankfurt am Main | Global security cloud platform with patented DDoS protection | €26.5M | Careers.
Evum Motors | Munich | Robust electric utility vehicle manufacturer expanding in Europe | €25M | Careers.
Blickfeld | Munich | Specializing in LiDAR sensors for environmental perception | €53.5M | Careers.
Vectoflow | Gilching | Customized 3D-printed flow measurement tools | €4M Series A | Careers.
Kipu Quantum | Karlsruhe | Advancing quantum computing with innovative algorithms | €13.5M | Careers.
Zander Laboratories | Cottbus | Non-invasive brain-computer interfaces for human-machine interaction | €30M | Careers.
EmmySoft | Düsseldorf | Digital recruiting solutions transforming the hiring process | €4.5M | No Careers.
proSports.Zone | Leipzig | Cloud-based software for professional sports management | €1.2M | Careers.
suena | Hamburg | Trading-as-a-service platform for energy storage | €3M | Careers.

😅 Meanwhile

it sounds about right!

This is a footer slice of 🌎 fact for you. “In 1900, the average life expectancy of a newborn was 32 years. By 2021 this had more than doubled to 71 years.” (source)

✌️ Handpicked essentials:

- Don’t make these mistakes with your side hustle!
- 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?
- Do you want to sponsor Handpicked?
- Do you want to join the next event/meetup?
✨ Berlin Events Weekly: the best resource for events in Berlin ✨

Done reading, you legend, King of Getting-to-the-end-of-the-emails, Queen of Discipline and Persistence? 😊 Drop a like or a comment if anything was particularly interesting.