Why a Brit chose to start a business in Berlin
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I came to Berlin roughly 5 years ago before the investment started pouring in and most startups were existenz grundungs, this is when you get 50k from the government and you underpay some interns to build your MVP. It was pretty shabby back then, and things have changed dramatically in the intervening years, but most people came for this vague idea of living cheaply and doing what they want - you could say they washed up here as tourists and stayed. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but these people are being replaced with people coming here for startup jobs that pay real salaries. It used to be that ~500 euros a month was a good startup job, now it's more like 4-5k.
All of this change is happening while Berlins administration is still the bureaucratic and slow machine that it always has been, they haven't built affordable housing in 25 years, there's no plan on how to reduce congestion or prevent gentrification from wiping out existing communities. Registration takes ~3-5 months to get an appointment, god forbid you're a foreigner and have to also register at the ausländerbehörde and wait from 3am for the 1 of 50 tickets available that day.
It's nice that people still see a future here, but i take an issue with such a rosy picture of what it's like to live here, because it really isn't the case.
Your bureaucracy makes American bureaucracy seem amazingly efficient in comparison. I did not know such a thing was possible outside defunct communist states.
What i mean by registration is that you have to register where you live, to do that you'll need your passport, copy of the contract and a letter from the landlord saying you have the right to live there. Sounds easy, but then not many landlords will rent to you if you're not planning on staying a long time or you don't have a permanent contract for your job...
you need the registration for everything here, you don't really exist without it, you can't get health insurance, you can't pay tax, you can't be paid your salary by a company, and you'll find it hard to open a bank account.
Yeah, and I thought waiting at the DMV in the USA was a bit of a pain as a foreigner. :)
"Wait from 3am for the 1 of 50 tickets available that day" makes Berlin sound worse than even the third world country I come from.
You can still make an appointment at the Ausländerbehörde (foreigner's office) a couple months in advance, and then you just have to show up on time. And as recently as a year ago, the last time I needed something same-day, showing up two hours before they opened (6 a.m.) was still enough to be at the front of the line. There were at that time not a fixed number of tickets for the day. Historically (meaning over the course of the decade I've lived in Berlin), if you needed an appointment same day, at any time, you'd usually wait less than two hours, no matter when you showed up. Much of this has worsened recently because of the refugee crisis, but it's a temporary overload of the system, not a systematic failure.
Where those figures come from is the time my gf had her wallet stolen with her blue card inside, she was travelling outside of the EU and needed to replace it or get a note asap otherwise she would have a lot of trouble re-entering the country. We queued up from 3am on monday morning at the Ausländerbehörde and were turned away by the administrator because my gf was officially registered in mecklin-vorpommmern and she had to travel there to get this temporary pass. Problem is, she could only take the first train on tuesday morning so she got there at ~9:30am, she was ticket 51, and the office only deals with 50 tickets a day. i kid you not. she was the last in the line as turned away at just pass 17:00, and told to come back tomorrow and try again.
My first registration was in Bürgeramt Wedding - appointment was scheduled one month before via Internet. There were lots of people waiting. Later on when I moved and had to register again, I tried to make an appointment, but it was impossible. My co-worker went to the Bürgeramt without appointment one hour before opening. Then he had to wait 3-4 hours. I went to Bürgeramt Pankow on Friday around 10:00 and there in 30 minutes it was done. It was not crowded. Later on when I asked around at work how is that, they told me that people seem to prefer to go to the nearest office (with hope that it will be quick enough) and wait several hours, than take 20-40 minutes of journey more and wait 0.5 an hour.
Also, it's horseshit that €500/month was a good salary 5 years ago. More like €3500/month. Rent is also still far cheaper in Berlin than virtually any other western European major city.
I should have mentioned the 500 was from a eXist funded startup and i worked at as an "intern" although i was qualified, i just wanted to keep myself fed until i found something that paid, but for internships that was a lot as most got ~300 or nothing, with 500 a month + coffee I could rent by day a bed off of WG gesucht and subsist on falafel. Back then the number of jobs in berlin was really minimal, i struggled to find anything so i moved to Munich.
[1] http://www.exist.de/DE/Programm/Exist-Gruenderstipendium/inh...
So it really boils down to this for her: Berlin is affordable and it has a good meetup scene. Affordable is relative, salaries are lower in Berlin than in many other cities and the cost of living has been on a rise as more people move in, but at the moment she is absolutely right about this much: cost of living is still significantly lower in Berlin than in London (https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...) [1]
Depending on your product Berlin can be good or bad. I think its almost always a great fit if your product targets the German market initially and you want to eventually expand out from there. The other way around will be much more difficult, mainly because you're sitting in Germany and you're whole business side of operations must be run in German, under German law, rules, and regulations.
Having said this, as far as her specific product idea goes, I could see Berlin being a good fit for her. The super young hipster culture is pervasive throughout Berlin, and it seems like an idea that would work well in that market.
1. I worked on a German startup for 3 years in Berlin
With regards to "liberal metropolitan" viewpoints, Berlin won't challenge you anymore than London did. It's just another global city where inside your group of people you are likely to meet (given what you work in) they will more than likely be liberal and metroplitan.
Nothing is perfect - this was just the best move for me at the time :)
RIP Fabric...you'll be sorely missed. Now you'll have to wait in line for Berghain. Best of luck on the new business!
I was just meaning in regards to differing opinions to liberal metropolitanism it will be very similar to London. Best of luck in your endeavour!
If you're using your own money to fund it and have customers who don't care about your location you'll have much easier time finding employees, especially non-technical staff like art/marketing/sales/customer support.
That said I would certainly consider Bratislava if I was moving East. Its proximity to Austria (Vienna in particular) means that you can, in many ways, have the best of both worlds.
It depends on what you want, but you can actually compete for staff even if you have < million € in seed capital, rent and office space is cheap, etc. if your goal is to bootstrap your company then moving to Eastern Europe can help you with that.
Taxes are not theft you know, they're supposed to buy you and your fellow citizens things (health care, infrastructure, cheap education, services, etc), some of them highly beneficial to a startup.
If we're talking about single healthy people working for equity trying to cut cost of living in hope of big payout down the road then the difference between 40% and 10% income tax is huge and you're not really getting much out of your taxes.
If the idea is something more highbrow, again, surely they could just subscribe to the Telegraph? Or watch Fox News?
Or heck, just use reddit? Lots of different viewpoints there.
Providing people with news that violates their own political biases and then getting them to pay for it seems very difficult. The more open minded ones who are willing to pay for views different to their own have lots of places they can seek out such views already.
(Good luck getting decent internet, though.)
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/431672/commercial-proper...
If going for cheap, Wroclaw or Prague would be better.
That is certainly subjective (and offensive). I have not been to Dresden but I found Berlin to be quite an interesting aesthetic environment and hardly sore on the eyes. It has huge, lovely green parks and I find the wide open spaces throughout the town rather refreshing.
I need to go to Dresden.
Nevertheless I would not count on them surviving. The AfD constantly has to fight the Nazis in there, split itself in one German state (Bawü), wants to get rid of their subdivision in another state (Saarland) and has members from Nazi parties they have to exclude of all over the place. Meanwhile Merkel and the established parties already moved to the right and the refugee crisis is largely over - at least in Germany. Lately Merkel is even gaining in popularity polls again.
These are people who don't value freedom or equality. They are driven by hatred of anyone different from themselves and accept as moral only what confirms that hatred, sometimes bastardizing religion in the process.
They're not special. They are no different than the people so many have fought throughout human history to get the freedom and the approximation of equality we have reached today.
The only noteworthy thing about them is that they've shown that many people are too comfortable in their human rights. Those rights aren't natural and they aren't self-evident only our belief in them is. Human rights do require work not just to acquire but to maintain, wherever and whenever you are.
NPD, Rebulikaner and so on have much less potential, because most people even with far-right views would still avoid to be associated with grunting skinheads and risk to be socially excluded.
My view on them is a bit different than yours. I don't think that we necessarily have to talk to them. They often live in their own world with their own conspiracies and mistrust the press, the state, the West and so on. I doubt that talking to them would give us any great insights. So the "die Sorgen der Menschen ernst nehmen" meme ("to take the worries of the people seriously"), politicians played for a while is bullshit.
I do think so that especially since they do not have a very nuanced view on the world at all, we should analyze them very carefully. They are not just evil nazis. There are so many reasons for them (and other populists, see Trump, Brexit etc.) existing:
- one crisis after another (financial, Euro, refugees)
- rising complexity of the world
- their conspiracies regarding NSA/CIA have an actual basis
- stagnation of the West
- lived behind a wall for decades with no immigrants at all
- feeling to be left behind Western Germany
- and many more possible explanations
I also think that not every right idea is bad. The most liberal regulations do not give you anything if the whole system collapses under you. Britain is already gone, we should be really careful now. I think the people badly want control over what's going on, so they are turning to easy answers and to smaller circles. Out of globalization, the EU, the US, back to Russia (in case of Eastern Germany), the country, the family and so on.
We need the planned immigration law. We should help refugees (even though we should have complied with the Dublin regulations), but I don't think there is anything wrong with copying the places Germans immigrate to and specifying clear rules about what kind of people from outside the EU we want to let in.
Unfortunately the EU has no actual leadership, so Merkel has to step in as the defacto leader, take Hollande by the hand and make some bold moves to show the people that the EU can act and is in fact a successful model. Maybe even pissing of the US a bit and rejecting TTIP to show strength.
1. There's a huge tech scene in Berlin and it's easy to meet bright people.
2. People want to live in Berlin. The art and music scene attract people.
Affordable alone can be found in many places. Combined with 1 and 2 is a pretty unique proposition.
So it became clear that the most important part of the ECC was to create a trusted brand.
Otherwise, I spent about a year trying to figure out a solution to the filter bubble. I was looking at RSS feeds, new types of algorithms, and it was all very complicated. The idea of a newsletter MVP made sense.
After I get to about 5k subscribers I'll be putting on events - with the aim of creating a B2B qualitative research firm. But that's a long way off - who knows where the journey will take me.
Feel free to add me on twitter so we can discuss more - would love your thoughts! @alicelthwaite
Even more strange, Berlin (and perhaps much of Germany, I don't know), places much greater emphasis on cash than on electronic payments like credit cards. I gave a credit card to a vendor once and they looked like they couldn't figure out what it was. In fact, as they were trying to understand it, I motioned that they were in fact studying it upside down! Other restaurants would tell me it was the first credit card they had seen in weeks, and the owner simply hadn't bothered to bring the credit card machine in from his house in a long time. Not a problem, just a bit strange to me.
Berlin is a neat place, though, and I love German food (and beer) a lot, but it cannot be overstated how you quickly come to realize that you currently take for granted speaking the same language as everyone around you, and unless you know German already, that convenience will evaporate immediately upon moving there. Even all the Holywood movies and U.S. TV shows are dubbed into German -- it is the largest overdub market in the entertainment industry, because Germans generally place low emphasis on learning other languages (just like Americans do).
The only reason to have a credit card as a German is for buying this outside of Germany.
Amazon.de e.g. offers the choice of * credit card (as internationally) * direct withdrawal (meaning you give them your bank account details and they withdraw the amount directly - sort of sketchy from the customer's point of view, but no different from credit cards - if anything goes awry, you just challenge the charge directly with the bank instead of the card issuer) * bill-based (generally only for small amounts or trusted customers - might involve a "credit score" check from Schufa (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schufa) to deter fraud)
Credit cards aren't any more popular in the UK, but our debit cards tend to be Visa/Mastercard and we use them the same way. I think mainland Europe has some catching up to do to London as far as being a cashless society :)
I would say the opposite is true: If you need Visa/Mastercard, your country's banking system is broken. Sending cheques via physical mail is something nobody would even think of over here. I think I have never even seen one.
I agree with everything you say, except that. Older people form Eastern Germany obviously did not learn English in school.
In Germany it is not like the Netherlands or the Nordic countries, but I would say in Western Germany you have a much higher chance to meet people who can speak English or French at a decent level than you have in France or Italy to find someone speaking English or German. And that is inspite of the German market being much bigger and people from Eastern or Northern Europe also often being able to speak German.
Of all highschool student exchanges to France or Britain I know of, the students ended up speaking the other language, not German. I remember a neighbour had an exchange student from England over at his home. He supposedly learned German in school, but just repeated his sentence "Um 5 Uhr fährt der Zug nach Berlin.". This really changed my perspective on the foreign language education in Germany.
The start-up scene speaks English fluently and buying stuff etc. doesn't need much talking.
The start-up I work with has 2 employees who don't speak German at all and they say it's only a problem when they are in smaller villages.
If you want to incorporate a business, you do not necessarily have to do it in Germany, it is the EU after all.
Edit: And I was right, haha.
While London is one of the most expensive cities in the world, Berlin is cheap for German conditions. At least the parts that haven't been gentrified yet ;)
Berlin is really cool and has lots of alternative people and seems to be the only german city with a bigger start-up scene, but it's poor AF. I'm living in Stuttgart and while I prefer to hang in Berlin, the money is in the south.
This is unusual, because typically you pay a premium for working in the capital of the nation. In Berlin, that is explained by the history (West Berlin was an enclave within DDR and the capital of BRD was in Bonn; Berlin was subsidized and had lots of relatively cheap housing which is not yet fully priced up 25 years after German unification).
I guess it works better for pure internet companies that sell directly to consumers.