wanna help me with my events? 🙏
Issue #99 (29 Apr) – 20+ jobs with HR Focus; record submissions; dashboard upgrade & first gender gap deep dive; trash detective Bronko; sex survey; the secret of vorfreude & positive r/berlin!
Programming note: I’ve booked my first solo event after some time on Tuesday, the 4th of June: it’ll be a keynote/fireside chat followed by a special type of a “mixer”.
I am looking for people who would be interested in working together with me on Handpicked events (mid-long term). Send me an email if you are interested.
I’ve also created a special Handpicked calendar at Luma so you can sign up to get notified immediately after the official event drops.
If you are not subscribed to this newsletter yet:
🌟 Handpicked Community
📨 Submit your input here. Inspiration for all the categories on the link.
🎪 Meet — tech & other events:
Berlin Climate Meetup | Tue, 7.5 at 18.00 | Tourlane Office
Tech Playground | Tue, 14.5 at 18.30 | Ironhack
you can submit your event to get featured here!
😎 Show — Cool stuff / Shoutouts / Projects & similar:
Media Founders Program for media-related projects.
🔍 Ask — for a Service / Co-founder / Project help & similar:
we had no submissions; niemand hat sich gemeldet, schade.
Looking for the submission link? It’s below the title ⤴️
👀 Handpicked jobs
📨 Submitted by HR or readers
5️⃣ from the rotation this week: HR & Recruitment
The remaining jobs (also outside rotation) are in the Handpicked online database.
📈 Salary Trends Section
After publishing the results, I ran a poll again: “When I looked at my salary compared to others...” This year (n=219), we were a bit more disappointed:
3% more wanted to cry (23%)
7% less questioned life choices (25%)
1% more scheduled a talk with their boss (7%)
8% less felt satisfied and accomplished (30%)
Yuri asked me about better breakdowns of the gender gap, so I spent a couple of hours on the deep dive - in the case of leaders, differences are the smallest with team leads:
I also looked at age, education and years of experience and, again, underestimated the effort required! You will get more results next time.
💪 🚨 In the meantime, Ignacio improved the dashboard, so you can now also compare yourself based on years of experience and check the improvements to the compensation satisfaction chart.
What would you be interested in? Here is the list of all the questions with values for you to get inspired. You can also:
🗞 Top inspiration snippets
🇩🇪 Berlin & Other good stuff
👋 If you or someone you know would like to work with me on Handpicked events, please do let me know. It’s meant to be mid-to-long-term, building things up.
❤️ We have trash investigators like “Bronko” in Berlin (🇩🇪), so make sure you don’t do anything stupid (fines are going to significantly increase as well: 250€ for a fag, €3.000 for 2kg of trash and €8k for a sofa). BSR removed 40.000 m3 of illegal trash in 2022! I wish dogs would also leave a signature on their sh*t, because some of their owners clearly have no shame.
💦 The Berliner published the results of their sex survey (n=2,075). Findings include high acceptance and practice of non-monogamy (40% defining their relationships as some form of non-monogamy) and the cultural influence on sexual identity (35% reported that living in Berlin has changed their preferred relationship type).
🚫 Wiwo (🇩🇪) reported an unconfirmed rumour that Getir would leave Germany and its 1800 (or 1400?) employees behind on the 15 of May. On the other side of the pond, Amazon started an unlimited grocery delivery subscription for Prime members.
🤔 Bayer, the former German pharma champion and aspirin inventor, is in big trouble. €34.5B of debt, €2.5B loss in 2023 and poor pharma pipeline. Bill Anderson, CEO since June 2023, learned “that the company’s rules and procedures handbook was longer than War and Peace,” so his plan now is to save €2B by cutting most of the middle managers and asking nearly 100,000 employees to ‘self-organize’. (Fortune) Wild!
Career: LinkedIn compiled a list of the 25 best companies in Germany based (🇩🇪) on eight factors: advancement opportunities, skill growth, company stability, external job prospects, company affinity, gender distribution, educational level of employees, and employer relevance in the specific country.
Twelve of the companies have a presence in Berlin: Siemens, Sanofi, Boston Consulting Group (BCG), Kering, Karl Storz, Bain & Company, Amazon, Fresenius Group, Deutsche Bahn, Thermo Fisher Scientific, McKinsey & Company, and Pfizer.Career: The best way to get a pay raise is to:
Career: I wish I read this essay when I spent two months looking for a technical co-founder in 2021. But at least I got one great friend out of it.
Timeless: The vorfreude secret: 30 zero-effort ways to fill your life with joy has some great ideas for example: treat yourself, go on a mindful walk, make time for silence.
Reddit choice of the week is this rare burst of (spring-related?) positivity on r/berlin and the quote from Anneliese Bödecker added by someone:
“Die Berliner sind unfreundlich und rücksichtslos, ruppig und rechthaberisch, Berlin ist abstoßend, laut, dreckig und grau, Baustellen und verstopfte Straßen, wo man geht und steht – aber mir tun alle Menschen leid, die nicht hier leben können!” Goosebumped!💬 Briefly:
😔 Bad news: Tesla -400 in Grünheide, voluntary terminations (after 300 last week). They also cut prices in Germany and other markets. Bankrupt Galeria Kaufhof will close three branches in Berlin (Tempelhof, Spandau, Ring Center).
Stats: In 2023, the average asking rent per sqm was €13.60, an 18.3% increase from the previous year. Kreuzberg and Neukölln saw nearly a 25% increase. (🇩🇪, RBB)
Looking for ideas on what to build? Check the list of people and projects the Thiel Foundation supports with their Fellowship. Alumni include founders of Ethereum, Figma, Loom, Luminar and others.
Autodoc (Berlin, auto parts e-commerce) reached unicorn status (€2.3B) after taking on a private investment from Apollo Funds. In 2023 they generated €1.3B+ in net revenue and €130+ million of adjusted EBITDA.
Gelsenkirchen is the first German city to ban e-scooter rentals after Bolt and Tier refused to comply with their demand for the identification of the riders by uploading their driver’s licence or an ID. (🇩🇪, Tagesschau)
According to FinanceFWD (🇩🇪), Forge, a US-based company, expects to obtain a BaFin license within 18 months. This is significant because Forge allows insiders to sell shares ("secondaries") prior to IPOs. However, don’t get too excited yet, the transactions will need to be between €2M and €50M.
HelloFresh reported Q1: a 74.6% drop in adj. EBITDA to €16.8 million with record revenue of €2.07B. They target 2% to 8% revenue growth for the fiscal 2024.
Momox, a Berlin-based re-commerce, had a record-breaking 2023 with revenues of €347.2M.
Ultimate (Berlin, crypto wallet) was acquired by Jupiter.
Alstom sold its North American conventional rail signalling business to Munich-based Knorr-Bremse.
💸 Recently funded in Berlin & Germany
Parloa | Berlin | AI customer service integration | $66M Series B | Careers.
GetYourGuide | Berlin | Online travel experience bookings | ~€9M | Careers.
Terra One | Berlin | AI-optimized battery storage projects | €7M Seed | Careers.
Deltia AI | Berlin | AI and computer vision for assembly lines | €4.5M Seed | Careers.
goodcarbon | Berlin | Expansion of team and technology for sustainability | €5.25M | Careers.
roclub | Berlin | Teleoperations for medical devices | €4M Seed | Careers.
Cultimate Foods | Berlin | Cell-cultured fat components for meat alternatives | €2.3M Seed | No careers.
Smart Reporting | Munich | AI-driven medical reporting | €23M Series C | Careers.
Neoshare | Munich | SaaS for large-scale project financing | €19M | Careers.
neurocare | Munich | Digital therapies for mental health | €16M | Careers.
Markt-Pilot | Esslingen | SaaS for dynamic pricing of spare parts | €40M Series A | Careers.
Octomind | Karlsruhe | AI for web-testing automation | €4.5M | No careers.
😅 Meanwhile
some dishwasher vocabulary for you (via r/ich_iel)
✌️ Handpicked essentials and a treat:
- Don’t make these mistakes with your side hustle!
- ❓Surprise treat for the curious
- The best questions to ask at a job interview
✨ Berlin Events Weekly: the best resource for events in Berlin ✨
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“Die Berliner sind unfreundlich und rücksichtslos, ruppig und rechthaberisch, Berlin ist abstoßend, laut, dreckig und grau, Baustellen und verstopfte Straßen, wo man geht und steht – aber mir tun alle Menschen leid, die nicht hier leben können!” - pure copium 😁