Hacker News Reader

Comment by rf15 | Hacker News Reader

No, this is bad news; it's a smaller version of the economic bomb/distortion of creating a google campus somewhere. This will be bad for everything from housing up to the general health of startup culture in Berlin. Desperate move by the economically starved Brandenburg. (and of course they won't suffer the consequences)

View on HN

The startup culture in Berlin is mediocre at best. I think bringing in proper high tech will be very valuable

What do you see it lacking? Berlin already has a lot. Just many of the "startup scene" aren't really aware of stuff like:

Mozilla and HPI (Oracle JVM research) doing cutting edge work.

Ableton and Native Instruments as world leaders in niche but influential software.

Car2Go and Coup with major financial backing from Mercedes and Bosch.

Tons of small seed-stage companies funded by the great smaller VCs here. ECB central bank policy pushes a lot of money into startup investment.

Google is now hiring for engineering in Berlin adding to Amazon and Microsoft!

Well I am a part of the Berlin startup scene, so I have personal experience there, completing a fundraising attempt myself. I'm not saying there is no tech happening in Berlin, I just don't think that Car2Go and Coup are good examples of startups.

They are actually perfect example of the German mentality in investing in startups - fairly secure plays which they can understand.

As far as early stage investments companies go, it's not as nice as you make it sound. Have a look at any list of startups and apart from infarm (which is great and I've worked there) and maybe n26, most are ecommerce platform plays and some fintech (of which most are too late to the game). A lot of the people in my network wanting to do something different had to go elsewhere

Urbansportspass is a great example of a german startup: They have steady growth, good revenue flows, a great app and content customers.

I feel like in recent years the startup scene in Berlin has gone rather off rails, with obviously flawed projects getting funding. The truth of the startup scene is that >99% of projects are pretty bad, and never deserved to leave the brainstorming phase in the first place.

I also see a lot of hare-brained stuff in Berlin, fairly transparent money grabbing schemes with little hope to make a positive difference for anything and little innovation / originality.

Germany's most successful former startup is Zalando - they sell clothes online. Notably its success isn't selling the company to a stronger US rival who could have as well crushed it, but saved time and maybe money by buying instead.

Worse than Amsterdam's?

So it would be better for Berlin if this factory was in another city? Taking that to its logical conclusion, it would be better for Germany to not have this factory in the country?

As long as we don't know at least the amount of subsidies paid by the state and the amount (and pay level) of employees who will work there, no factory at all could certainly be better, yes. The subsidies could be spent elsewhere, and the people could find work in facilities that won't exist because the new Gigafactory displaced competition. Without actual numbers this is all guesswork.

What consequences do you mean?

I could imagine that the factory staff would often live closer to the site, in Brandenburg, not in Berlin which has housing problems and is accumulating more of them through rent regulation.

you can still live in Berlin and be close to the site and in that area of Berlin is is also less housing problems, if any.

Yes of course - but surely isn't putting pressure on the hippiest areas of Berlin where some people riot to oppose gentrification.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com