Rocket Internet: Waiting for lift-off
ft.com
ft.com
Not at all -- entirely the opposite.
Samwer is a high-pressure boss, well known for treating his reports and employees with belligerence and hostility. That attitude trickles down to the leaders he places in his shell companies. Rocket-family companies demand the long hours commensurate with typical SV startups, but pay developers below-market salaries, and provide negligible to no equity. They're notorious for shoveling a lot of core business work onto a huge, rotating cast of systemically-underpaid interns. I won't get started on the state of their (universal, mandatory) tech stack.
It's actually an adage among devs in Berlin: to studiously avoid anything in the Rocket universe.
I chuckled at that line too. Rocket Internet is toxic and their culture is poisonous. They tend to copy the hilariously worst ideas from Silicon Valley and believe that only hustle and posing will lead you to success.
People outside Germany should stop glamorizing them.
* Noisy Open Offices.
* The notion that real devs stay in office at least till 19:00
* Clueless technical staff. Hodgepodge of Scala, Java, Clojure, Groovy running on microservices/Docker/Hadoop/WhatsThatCurrentFad
* Below market salaries. There was an uproar in Zalando open house that some Sr. Devs are paid less than Jr. Devs.
* Interns as underpaid minions. One Rocket company even had the interns do the dirty dishes, clean kitchen and check on toilets.
I honestly wasn't aware that clueless technical staff was a common plight in SV (such that someone like Rocket would emulate it). That some developers or companies get caught up in fads, certainly wouldn't inherently indicate that they're clueless.
Maybe I'm behind the times on this. Is Silicon Valley now regarded as being filled full of low quality / clueless engineers? And what location has replaced SV as the best in the world?
SV is and will be a leader in technology for a foreseeable future.
Rocket internet is a copy shop. Some rocket websites even had the name of the copied companies in their legal notices. Nothing innovative, mostly online shops.
I really enjoyed working in Berlin for a few months though, it was excellent fun and I had an enormous apartment all to myself for about a third of the cost for the same thing in London.
There's a business right there - doing the first part of expanding startups in Europe, India, Africa, China, etc. I'm sure you could scale it pretty well. I don't know what the costing/charging model would be. I suppose Y Combinator has access to some of these things already but not in the way programmers would think about it...
* Translation that actually tries to transfer jokes/tone of a site and explains said translations in English. Maybe you could crowd source/do multiple translations.[1]
* Tax Rules, Incorporation, Local Laws - as an API where possible.
* People who could be good from local markets that could be useful. Hiring abroad must be very difficult.
[1] http://gengo.com/ looks like it does this bit I suppose, but I'd like to see more of a market and people being able to discuss pros and cons of each translation.
I don't agree. I think it is very hard.
You even mention some of the problems! Law, tax, language, getting 4 translations done quickly enough for you to release new things on a regular basis
Seriously? I have no idea why they would say such a thing. I guess they have a rather odd definition of "technology company".
Stock of Zalando vs. Rocket: http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&c...
Even using a narrow definition of technology company, SAP has consistently been Europe's most valuable tech company. They're worth $91 billion, with $21b in sales and $4b in profit - they make Rocket Internet look like a piker.
Even smaller companies like ARM are far beyond the size of Rocket. ARM is worth $22 billion, with $400m in profit.
They localize their products and services extremely well, even outside of the EU[1].
This IMO is paramount to their success.
With regards to them copying other companies.
People need to understand just how hard it is to get a company up and running successfully in Europe.
I find it ironic that for all the talk about how ideas are useless and only execution matters, people surely do seem to be very sensitive about them. Most Italian restaurants copy each other, do we complain about that?
[1] http://tropicalconsiderations.com/2013/04/04/why-rocket-inte...
Thanks!