Germany Tries to Catch Up with Startup World
spiegel.de
spiegel.de
People here get judged if they start a business and fail. If you are successful then fine. If not, people don't give you credit. Personally I rate the person higher that tries several times, falls, gets up and starts over. Unfortunately that is not the case.
Nice example if you are from the USA. Over there it is more socially accepted to get married and divorced often than not at all. In Germany it is quite the opposite. You can't even make a failure in private how could you do that in business?
Many business here have roots and are decades old. That whole "Mittelschicht" is build on family owned business. That is actually a good thing and probably one of the reasons the economy in Germany is so efficient, but it doesn't give anyone the incentive to start something.
And don't forget Germany is all about bureaucracy. Lots of paperwork and money just to get a GmbH. And a GmbH is what you need to gain trust from other companies.
Sorry, there is so much to it. Hopefully there will be some change in attitude. It is already happening.
I was actually completely shocked when I moved to California, signed up with an internet provider, and had a technician come to my house the next day. Crazy!
(Other DSL companies can be hell, because they don't own much of the infrastructure, so you'll get stuck in endless finger pointing and shifting of blame. Cable internet providers have their own problems, but are generally a good option, as well.)
Currently work is being done to upgrade the phone network to 500/200 in the next years.
there is some DOCSIS (cable) service, mostly from Vodafone but also a smaller provider named telecolumbus.
There was versatel, but 1&1 smartly purchased it at what I believe to be an absolute steal. They have what is clearly the widest fiber network reach outside of Telekom, and 1&1 is actually going out there and selling it.
I could, if I really wanted to, get 1Gbps symmetrical for only 500EUR/month. The catch is the ~3000EUR install and minimum 3 year commitment. but, at least the option is there. Telekom, if they have fiber "available" at your address, will offer you 20Mbps for around 700EUR a month, then do this really weird delivery of an STM-1 (155Mbps) circuit, broken out into E3s (45Mbps) to a Cisco ASR1002 (a 5000EUR device, easily), that is converted to a rate limited GigE interface. Oh, and the install fee is about 1200EUR and takes a solid six weeks...but only if you call every day to remind them.
Berlin internet connectivity is a sick and twisted joke.
I really hope it improves though.
And even engineers at BMW or similar don't get paid in stocks, which means that the supply of engineers made rich by big exits is next to zero. Just look who founded all the hot startups in SV - it's mostly ex-Paypal/Google/FB/MS/BigStartup employees who found or invest the boatload of monies into new startups. And regular salaries may be enough to pay off credit on a house, but not enough to save for funding and bootstrapping a company.
Here, basically the only way to fund a company if you don't happen to have rich friends/family is by a line of credit - and thanks to EU banking regulations the banks now require real deposits of securities (eg a house/car) for a credit line; this again reduces the eligible persons to rich people. No way to see a poor immigrant fund a multibillion dollar company like in US... given the more and more xenophobic neonazi appearances (Pegida, AfD) immigrants actually more have to fear for their lives. (Okay, I've exaggerated here, but the xenophobist trend even in government massively worries me)
If you are European and have a bank account in your homecountry, from what I've read you don't even need to fly over to Estonia to get that bank account, the bank will accept that. If not, that's the only thing you really need to go to Estonia.
Did they really fail if they still have the money to try again? They certainly managed to con their investors at least once. What is a failure when it gets others to pay your rent for at least a year?
If you con your investors then there's no chance of starting over. If you make your investors aware of the risks and it just doesn't work out (but you handled the situation well) then you've failed but are still well ahead of those who never tried.
Also, although investors may pay your rent for the year, as a founder you're expected to take <50% of your market wage in most cases and you'll be working longer hours, so this isn't a great argument.
A new sucker is born every minute.
> as a founder you're expected to take <50% of your market wage in most cases and you'll be working longer hours
relying on the assumption that the founder is actually doing work he is getting paid for, or that he didn't hire several friends that receive most of the money.
> Chip on your shoulder?
Lets say I have a good reason to no longer trust any sheme that the founder can just kill with little consequence to himself.
These are the basic risks you need to control for before investing.
These are quite the sweeping claims you're making for all ~125 million american workers.
There are so many factors to consider, yet you make such broad assumptions without a trace of evidence or logic to backup your narrow-minded claims.
Also, please don't call my claims narrow-minded without giving me an opportunity to counter your arguments. I googled "america work culture." These are some of the links it sent me to:
http://www.businessinsider.com/difference-swedish-american-w...
http://www.expatfocus.com/expatriate-usa-business-culture
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/03/america...
All of the links above describe a culture where the employees feel underappreciated and overworked. This is during a time when inequality is growing to obscene levels, tons of good middle class jobs have been shipped overseas, and most new jobs are forming in only a handful of urban centers across the country. If you have any evidence to counter my broad interpretation of the US work culture, I would appreciate it.
>1. Practically everyone takes a summer vacation in Sweden
>2. In Sweden, it's somewhat easier to be a working parent
>3. Coffee breaks are serious business in Sweden
1,2 are consequences of semi-socialist policies. Also, coffee breaks?
On the other hand, most Swedes will pay between 49 and 60 per cent through a combination of local government and state income tax. No thanks.
Get back to me when software devs across industry start making six digits in europe.
> http://www.expatfocus.com/expatriate-usa-business-culture
> Discrimination in the Workplace
What else should the federal govt do, apart from outlawing it? Force employers to hire based on gender, racial quotas?
>There are fewer holidays and in some cases, American companies only allow two weeks a year for holidays. Christmas holidays are fewer with only December 25th being an official day and people do return to work on December 26th.
Depends where you work. If you wash dishes for minimum wage, I wouldn't expect multi-week paid vacations.
> https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/03/america...
tldr
> Why do so many people—particularly women—seem to have so much on their plates?
That's what they wanted
---
> All of the links above describe a culture where the employees feel underappreciated and overworked.
If they're underappreciated, they can switch jobs. If they're overworked, its by choice or a consequence of bad decision making.
Ultimately, there's much more personal freedom. And if some people fail to take advantage of that, its not the system's fault.
Career is a choice. But of course, most people don't have 100% job security.
>Also, the fact that you suggest that dish washers shouldn't get vacation is telling
That's not what I said. They should have all the vacations they want, but not at other taxpayers' expense. Otherwise, you have hard-working people give up to 60% of their income away for vacations of dishwashers. Perhaps this is a great achievement for Swedes, but would be looked down upon in the US.
> The lower and middle classes need stability too, yet in America, you've either made it or you haven't. It's way too binary in my opinion.
Inequality of results is a logical result of capitalism. You can't have the cake and eat it too. If everyone 'made it', no one would truly 'make it'.
> You act like there's no personal freedom in Germany, but with their paid vacation for _everyone_ and socialized healthcare, it seems to me like they have much more freedom than your typical American.
Sure, but the benefits fall largely upon the lower classes. Wealthier individuals don't need so much help from the state, yet they're the ones contributing the most.
By no means I aim to defend everything that goes on in the US - e.g. the healthcare situation is abysmal. But ultimately, there are pros and cons of both approaches to policy.
This is absurd. There are people who are making hundreds of millions of dollars a year while tens of thousands of people work minimum wage jobs because that's all they can get, and you're saying that it's their fault for not producing more? You really need to realize that our quality of life isn't because we are so amazing, but because of the opportunities our position in the world and society have given us. And in America, those opportunities are being offered to fewer and fewer people: economic mobility is declining, and has for a while[1]. A person can only pull on their bootstraps so hard.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/us/harder-for-americans-to...
I'm not sure failure should be praised, but it should be accepted without judgment, and entrepreneurs that haven't succeeded should be lauded for trying. Failure is a necessary part of success. It's cliché, but people really do fail their way to success. So why stigmatize it if it'll discourage entrepreneurs from trying a sufficient number of times in order to be successful?
I'm increasingly convinced that having the one automatically brings in the other. The hallmark of the American attitude is that you, and only you are responsible for your own success. This means that if you're not succeeding, it's because you're not working hard enough. It leads to a "rat race" culture, where everyone works harder to be labeled as a "go-getter", but all it ends up actually doing is raising the baseline expectation for how much work you're supposed to do.
I'd add that, in my opinion, there is also a lack of appreciation for good engineering in many of the few existing startups. You could almost say even software startups don't consider themself technology companies. The implementation of the product is just something that somebody needs to do and often gets outsourced to some agencies.
In general the focus is on the founders more than it's on the teams. Ultimately that also shows in salaries. Startups are considers something for junior engineers that accept worse pay because they are doing something hip.
Volkswagen Wolfburg has a very big IT devision, VW financials Braunschweig too... Audi and Porsche also do a lot of IT stuff... they work together with the local univeristies on self driving cars etc.
I was doing self driving car stuff 10 years back at tu braunschweig with VW.... I never been in a big german company where they outsourced IT work to india and co.
And regarding outsourcing to India: If you read through the software related job postings of Bosch you will quite often find the phrase: "You are the Software Architect and are responsible for coordinating our Indian implementation team". When I looked last time there were a lot more of these postings than "we are looking for an excellent software engineer with skills in X/Y/Z".
This is one of the most ridiculous things I've read on any web page in years.
Though, on the article, Germany is hardly ready for the Startup boom, the bureaucracy is hell.
I have been thinking about going self-employed as a sidejob, boost my student-income a bit.
I am part owner of a US startup now, we have to deal with as much bureaucracy there...The big thing that makes the US different is that it's way easier to get capital, but there are as many weird laws which differ from county to county..
This costs you 10 minutes and 25 bucks (Gewerbeschein). Then you can file taxes for your side income once per year, which takes another 30 minutes, because at the side-income level the calculation is: income - expenses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debtors%27_prison
(Note that the US is often criticized for court fines which result in jail time if you're unable to pay, but that's a much later meaning. Originally it meant jail if you were unable to pay someone back.)
The problem with this is that often it isn't entirely clear if a company really is bankrupt by that definition. A company can be nominally bankrupt in one moment and solvent again in the next depending on how you look at it from a technical / accounting point of view.
This again unfortunately sometimes is preyed upon by both liquidators, investors and creditors, who might try to sue the managing director in order to recoup their losses from the director's personal funds. A conviction for delayed filing of bankruptcy both applies additional pressure and makes a director personally liable, GmbH or not.
So, in short: No there are no debtors' prisons anymore but the effect you described very much still applies thanks to outdated and misguided German bankruptcy laws.
Also, if you think that there is no personal liability for the managing founder in a limited liability company, don't search for "Geschäftsführerhaftung" or you are going to have a bad day.
This is not a German exclusive. Managers of a company are nowhere shielded from legal responsibility when they violate the criminal code. (Okay, big banks maybe not, but at least from the letter of the law...)
That supermarket down the street? Almost surely run by a fully liable merchant. That consulting office next door? A fully liable partnership. This two-person software company? Both owner fully liable. It's a common choice and often better suited than it might sound at first.
Furthermore, it's better to control risk by getting the proper insurance for your business and NOT relying on "limited" liability of a GmbH (although I heard you have to do pretty dumb shit to really be held liable personally in a GmbH).
So I'm really wondering what you did that you almost ended up in jail. This is certainly not the case for 99.9% of all people who just want to file taxes on their Adsense income once per year or code HTML for a bit of money.
So? You are personally responsible and liable for a nearly everything you do in life. Typically, you'll only "go to jail" if you do something seriously wrong, and then the limited liability of a GmbH won't save you (whether you're an owner or an employee).
The limited liability of a GmbH refers mostly to financial liabilities in case of bankruptcy, not to, e.g., criminal negligence.
Spiegel online is huge, that extra bit of traffic shouldn't bother them, see http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/spiegel.de
Right now the site is down supposedly because of a power outage in a data center. Can't remember the last time spiegel online was offline, the outage is so high profile that #spiegelonline is trending in .de
Right now Spiegel is resorting to publishing on https://www.facebook.com/spiegelonline/
At first glance I thought this was a restaurant for tourists, like there are in all major cities. But what surprised me a lot was that the restaurant was full of locals, who seemed to go there often, if not every day.
People do seem very conservative there.
Bavarian restaurants are just one of many other options and they "only" offer traditional food, just like an Italian restaurant only offers Italian food, for example. It's quite delicious, too.
Waiters rarely wear costumes (certainly less than 10% of them).
Your experiences are unfortunate and annoying - no doubt. But even if it might be more likely to happen in one region than another this could happen in other regions as well. In the end it's anecdotical stereotyping.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_German_states_by_GDP
Munich also has the German HQ of Microsoft (which is suspected to be the cause of the city of Munich to drop Limux, according to some conspiracy theories)... and EADS Astrium has a huge complex near Ottobrunn.
As someone who is active in Munich's and Berlin's startup scene I can tell you that so far most people I've met are entrepreneurial minds that focus on getting stuff done. You will always have some lifestyle startup whose founders only care about their status or a business executive making a tech decision that he shouldn't be making. However, in saying that success depends on narcissism you are generalizing your personal experience which I cannot corroborate.
Northern Germany is a different topic all together, they have been making some nice advances but yet still the whole foundation around them is stuck in time.
Sounds like the only thing needed to transform it into a US-Style tech hub is VC money then..
Over 16 mio of germans/people living in germany have a migrant background, its the second most popular immigration country after the USA according to the OECD.
Src: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-05-20/immigrati...
It doesn't seem to me that immigrants are welcome in the USA either as a whole (disclaimer: i am german working for a NYC company), but the tech community is different there, more open and interested in what you can offer instead of how you look.
It's basically the same from my very own experience, your whole argument seems non sense to me, Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne for example are one of the most diverse cities i have ever been to especially when i compare it to South East Asia where i currently life.
Did you ever visit the SV to say that immigrants aren't welcome there?
Diversity does not mean mixing. You can put a lot of different fluids in a pot and they won't mix. I see a lot of different people here, but except for business (aka money) reasons, there is few mixing.
So yes, of course SV and NYC are more open to immigration then the countryside, same as in germany.
Compared to SEA both countries (DE and USA) are super welcoming, here in Thailand as a foreigner it's damn hard, i cannot even own a business as a majority owner. Nor can i buy land, it's also next to impossible to ever get a permant residency. Other SEA countries are the same, its pretty discouraging.
Contact info on my HN profile.
But children born there from those people who immigrated to reconstruct their country weren't considered German until jus soli citizenship be adopted (with caveats) only in 2000.
It is very normal to see in Berlin for example, German born people who aren't considered Germans, neither have citizenship, only because they are children of foreigners.
Stop making up alternative facts.
Germany severely limits double citizenship.
Apart from that I cannot see a real obstacle if they have lived here for years.
1) Jus sanguinis (latin for blood ties or right of blood), this means u get citizenship if one of your parents is a citizen of country X. 2) Jus soli (latin for right of the soil), which means u get citizenship by the territory you are born on.
Both countries the USA and Germany nowadays have a mix of those, Germany had 1. back in the day and then introduced 2. over time, also special foreigner laws like getting a permant residency permit quiet eaily after you have been there for 8 years.
SEA especially Thailand has still only 1. so it's quiet impossible to get permant residencies till today - but fear not, you can bribe urself in paying money and its called the thai elite card -.-
a lot of financial aid
That money is worth a lot more nowadays.
lot of money we got for
worth a lot more nowadays.
A lot of people in Berlin i know are tech guys from tel aviv.
http://www.jpost.com/Metro/Start-up-Berlin-472928 seems to be quiet a common thing.
What? Israel is one of the most diverse places I have ever seen. Everyone there has origins all over the world.
In a way diversity can perhaps even be detrimental to a developing startup community. Coming back to the example of Germany, citizens with a Turkish background very often are entrepreneurs and run their own businesses, much more so than citizens with a German background. However, those businesses are hardly ever what you'd consider startups: Fast food shops, food stores, import / export businesses, travel agencies. In summary: Tried and proven business ideas.