As if we didn’t have enough beef already this week with Amen founder Felix Petersen and Gründerszene editor Joel Kaczmarek dissing each other in public. Now new beef has unfolded amongst two prominent members of the Berlin tech scene: Lukasz Gadowski (Founder of Team Europe) and Christian Reber (CEO of 6Wunderkinder).  

No, don’t worry! TechBerlin is not turning into a Gossip blog on Tech. This discussion is just too far-reaching to ignore and has people wonder in wich direction the German copycat debate will go from here or whether it will finally come to a conclusion as Mike Butcher (TechCrunch Europe) suggested at the end of a panel discussion with the title “Innovate or imitate” at ADVANCE conference. 

So what happened? In ablog post last Friday Gadowski accuses Reber of starting a hate campaign with his anti-copycat revolution. He says Reber acts demagocially and spreads „hatred”, “resentment” and “discord“. He goes on to accuse Reber of encouraging others to “not accept investments of copycats such as Team Europe and to ban them from events and meet-ups.” No concrete examples were given, but Gadowski did say that he was advised to hire a lawer to confront Reber because of his alleged actions damaging his business and being slander in nature. However, Gadowski turned the advice of legal support down and opted for taking the conflict public instead.  

Background

The original post from 6Wunderkinder dates back to August 9th and was a starting point for lots of discussions (i.e. on F@6, at Idea! Lab).

The article that calls for an end to the successful German practice of cloning US companies names Gadowski’s StudiVZ project as a despicable German clone example. Of course the Samwers are also called out. The article concludes that as a result of cloning „the tech scene .. was being strangled, both in terms of money and creativity.“

TechBerlin published its view on the debate two months ago (yes, we are just so darn fast :-)) and has nothing really to add to it. But Gadowski surely felt the need to add his point of view and his post goes on to question the validity of the list of so called innovators that the 6Wunderkinder post entails, stating that Jens Begemann from Wooga, for example, actually started the company with a game called Brain Buddies, which Gadowski considers a copy of an earlier game called “Who has the biggest Brain” by Playfish. 

With a spicy dose of sarcasm Gadowski speaks about Reber’s innovative spirit: “To those who don’t know the kids at 6Wunderkinder, they make a succesfull online and mobile to-do-list. Genious! Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein would take off their hat! A digital to-do-list. A wonder of innovation. That has never existed before of course. No, nobody has tried that before!” Gadowski argues that building on ideas of others is perfectly acceptable: “Nobody asks whether Opel or BMW were here first.”

Gadowski blames all companies that endorsed the initiative to not have thought through the consequenses. In his words this was „just cheap PR on the backs of other entrepreneurs.”

In conclusion, Gadowski suggests the creation of a pro-innovation statement instead of an anti-copycat statement and for everyone to work together on making Berlin a beautiful place for innovation driven startups. 

by Derk Marseille