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Great interview with Amen’s Felix Petersen the day before they officially launched Amen at TechCrunch Disrupt. Also read Mike Butcher’s TC post...
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Business Angel, Super Angel, micro-VC, VC - how does one keep these investment players apart?
Once upon a time the startup investment landscape was...
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Photography by Tyler Shields…
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30 posts tagged startup
20 Books Berlin Entrepreneurs recommend you to read
These are the books Berlin startup entrepreneurs recommend. The poll was done amongst Berlin founders in the “Berlin Startup Group” on Facebook. You can find a visualization of all these books here:
- Managing Oneself (by Peter F. Drucker)
- Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got: 21 Ways You Can Out-Think, Out-Perform, and Out-Earn the Competition (by Jay Abraham)
- It’s Not How Good You Are, Its How Good You Want to Be: The World’s Best Selling Book (by Paul Arden)
- Getting More: How to Negotiate to Achieve Your Goals in the Real World (by Stuart Diamond)
- The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything (by Guy Kawasaki)
- Rich Dad, Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money—That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not! (by Robert T. Kiyosaki)
- Behind Closed Doors. Secrets of Great Management (by Johanna Rothman)
- Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love (by Marty Cagan)
- Losing My Virginity: The Autobiography (by Richard Branson)
- Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (by Dan Ariely)
- Jeffrey Gitomer’s little Red Book of Selling: 12.5 Principles of Sales Greatness (by Jeffrey Gitomer)
- The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win (by Steven Gary Blank)
- The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses (by Eric Ries)
- Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered (by E. F. Schumacher)
- Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers (by Alexander Osterwalder)
- The Art of Profitability (by Adrian Slywotzky)
- Getting to Plan B: Breaking Through to a Better Business Model (by John Mullins and Randy Komisar)
- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (by Stephen R. Covey)
- Funky Business (by Jonas Ridderstrale)
- Getting Real (by 37 Signals)
Do you have any other essential reading tips? Please share them below.
Paging Mister Mayor
Berlin startups have recently started discussing the need to have an open exchange with Berlin government officials. High on a wish list that is still being formulated by various startup representatives are periodic roundtable discussions with representatives of both the startup and government worlds as well as faster Visa approval for non EU-residents.
When Christian Reber (Founder and CEO of 6Wunderkinder) wrote an email to the Mayor of Berlin Klaus Wowereit, he received a brief letter of refusal stating that “the busy schedule of the Mayor would not allow a meeting.”
Although the decline may be due to the lack of government protocol on behalf of Reber (no formal addressing, call for a “near-term meeting” and generally short mail with little explanation of the context), it does not speak for the Mayor’s office to not engage in further communication, but rather send a final refusal instead.
Now the Mayor’s office is facing a social media backlash as Reber decided to make all email communication public (1. Email by Reber, 1. Response by Mayor’s Office). As expected people are retweeting the Mayor’s email rebuff and blogs are picking up the story. Let’s see whether this will end up hitting classical print media, too.
Reber has since written an open response to the Mayors office (2. Email by Reber), arguing that the fact that startups have created more than 10.000 jobs in Berlin and received millions of investment, should well justify a meeting between government officials and the startup community. Now that i could generally not agree more with!
Skype a Founder #11: Marcel Duee, Tweek
Ok, this one is very dear to TechBerlin’s heart since Tweek and TechBerlin started out at around the same time! In fact, this is already the second interview I did with Tweek co-founder Marcel. The first one was actually the very first interview i ever did for TechBerlin!
Why did our ways cross so early? At the time I was working as Venture Partner at Catagonia Capital and the Tweek team, introduced by biz savvy Holger G. Weiss, was pitching us. Catagonia ended up investing in Tweek with the investment being announced in December of last year!
Today Tweek is crushingIT and likely to become the next big hit in Berlin. And rightly so! Not only are its founders uber-sympathetic and willing to help out wherever they can. They are also great professionals (ex Nokia) who created a kick ass beta product! And yes, they know how to throw parties, too!
So what the hell is Tweek?
Ever felt that the over supply of online video content (i.e. on portals such as Youtube, Netflix or Apple TV) is rather overwhelming and makes it difficult to discover videos that you love? Tweek may come to your rescue! The super slick iPad app allows you to discover video content via your social graph a.k.a your friends and interests! It is beautifully designed and features a neat user experience.
Watch the video to hear about the forthcoming disruption in TV and find out more about Tweek and how it seeks to differentiate itself in this highly competitive market.
Beta Access: Tweek is still in closed beta, but gave TechBerlin 10 access codes. Sign up on the Tweek website and then send an email to info(at)techberlin.com with the subject line “Tweek Beta”. The first 10 people to do so will get beta access.
TechBerlin Top 5
Today we introduce a new format to TechBerlin. From now on we will post a Top 5 list every Thursday. Some will be curated like the ones we start out with today. Others will be polls like the one we did last week. If you have recommendations or want to research something specific for you such as (Which Berlin startups employ the most people?) just send us an email at info(at)techberlin.com.
Since this is the first Top 5 post, we present you 3 TechBerlin Top 5’s this week:
Top 5 Berlin based Startup Founders according to # of Twitter Followers
1. Alexander Ljung, Soundcloud (6,228 followers)
2. Anthony Barba, Pistachio (5,892 followers)
3. Peter Bihr, Third Wave (3,435 followers)
4. Edial Dekker, Gidsy (2,713 followers)
5. Felix Petersen, Amen (2,142 followers)
Top 5 Berlin based Startup Founders according to # of times listed on Twitter
1. Alexander Ljung, Soundcloud (395 times listed)
2. Matthäus Krzykowski, Xyologic (207 times listed)
3. Peter Bihr, Third Wave (198 times listed)
4. Edial Dekker, Gidsy (165 times listed)
5. Flo Meissner, EyeEm (86 times listed)
Top 5 Berlin based Internet Companies according to # of Facebook Fans
1. Soundcloud (376.254 fans)
2. Wooga (161.182 fans)
3. Zalando (94.972 fans)
4. Groupon (84.806 fans)
5. Tape.tv (76.657 fans)
Note: We hope that we have researched well and those lists are final. Please let us know if we did miss somebody.
The 10 “Hottest Startups” in Berlin right now
Last week Thursday we made a poll on Facebook, looking for the hottest startup in town. The poll to date received almost 4.000 votes!
Here the result:
1. Smeet (658 votes)
2. 6Wunderkinder (326 votes)
3. Twago (281 votes)
4. Soundcloud (270 votes)
5. Ezeep (169 votes)
6. Tape.TV (138 votes)
7. Wooga (120 votes)
8. ResearchGate (120 votes)
9. Gidsy (109 votes)
10. Orderbird (94 votes)
Almost 100 companies were added to the poll, which gives a nice overview of the startup scene in Berlin. You can find all startups and votes here. Some of the companies i had actually never heard of before.
Since many companies asked their followers on Facebook and Twitter to vote for them it should be noted that the more established, bigger companies had an advantage over the early stage companies. So “hottest” may actually translate into “most community outreach” or “most social media savvy” here. We will therefore make another poll soon, where only companies younger than 6 months (from date of launch) are asked to participate. This way we shall find the hottest early stage company!
Update: Twago passed Soundcloud in the amount of votes just minutes after this post was published and the list was therefore updated. Since Facebook does not allow the poll to be closed without deleting it, the poll may change over time. We will therefore check the list every couple of weeks and write an update if the ranking changes considerably (i.e. new players entering the Top 10 list, etc.).
What is Berlin’s hottest Startup?
A lot of people from other parts of Germany and abroad have asked me about Berlin’s hottest startup. Since it is the perception within the whole community that ultimately counts, I pass that question on.
You can vote and find out what the community perceives as the hottest startup here. You can make multiple votes, so next to voting for your own startup you can show which other startups have your love.
“MADE IN BERLIN” BADGE CONTEST
More and more Berlin startups design “Made in Berlin” badges for their websites and thus publicly showing their love for this great city (examples below).
ABOUT TIME TO MAKE A CONTEST FOR THE BEST DESIGNED BADGE
The Goal
The goal is to show off the city’s design skills and have the community vote for their favorite badge.
It is not that we want to find the one-badge-for-all-solution that all startups should be using in the future. We do however ask all entrants to make their badge publicly available to everyone so that those startups who do not want to create their own badge can adapt someone else’s.
Here some recent examples (We are looking forward to your design!)
Skype a founder #9: Ansgar Oberholz, Founder, Sankt Oberholz (includes a tour of the new “ko-working” space)
It is the place the New York Times calls “the center of the Berlin tech scene in the brick-and-mortar world”. Its guests are often referred to as the Digital Bohème. TechCrunch Europe held their meet-up here. And the Berliner Zeitung just recently argued that while the digital future once lay in Silicon Valley, it is now present at Café Oberholz in Berlin, a place full of people who dream to take the road nowadays frequently travelled of being a semi-professional coffee drinker to becoming a startup millionaire.
Meet Ansgar Oberholz the founder behind Berlin’s legendary Café and find out how an ex- ad-man turned a brothel into the epicenter of the Berlin tech scene.
F@6 Friday at Six Radio Show at Ezeep today
The Friday at Six radioshow presents: EZEEP episode 12!
The questions that we will cover this week:
- What problem does Ezeep solve exactly? What phase of development are they at?
- Stefan Wolpers (EntrepreneursClub Berlin) wrote an article about Germans being afraid to fail. What then can be the German model for innovation and growth?
- Letters are Bärbel Bolds best friends! How can the right choice of font/typo increase conversion? Are they really that important? (yes!)
- Company number 4 takes us along into the world of navigation for biking trips. Komoot will provide you an inside look into their company.
As performing live artist tonight Candice Gordon will take the stage. This young artist will make the office of EZEEP feel like a smokey jazz club.
Feel free to come by at Ezeep’s office at Ohlauer straße 43. The show starts at 6pm. Just have a look. There is free beer and lots of people from various other Berlin startups. Meet your partners in crime have some fun!
And the beef goes on…
Amen vs. Gründerszene: Round 2!
Today Gründerszene, one of the biggest German tech blogs, publicly addressed the accusations Amen founder Felix Petersen (one of the most well known German internet entrepreneurs) made against their editor in chief, Joel Kaczmarek. Recap: TechBerlin had first reported about the tension between the two one week ago. The essence of the argument is Felix’s accusation of Joel allegedly blackmailing him in order to get a scoop.
While one week passed without any public wrangling, Felix Petersen yesterday wrote a blog post to expand on his side of the story. In the post he advises fellow entrepreneurs “… against working with this publication and with this individual.”
It took less than 24 hours for Joel to answer to the allegations. In a long blog post titled “Amen: Does the Hype startup really deliver?” in which he extensively analyzes the performance stats of Amen’s first two months on the market, Joel says that Felix and him had a “bumpy ride” when negotiating the way to handle their launch announcement, but that he did not blackmail Felix. Unfortunately he did not want to go into further details. We all know that the devil very often lies in the details. The Gründerszene article itself was long planned and not a reaction to Felix’s blog post. According to Joel, he had invited Felix to comment on the post and performance figures some days ago, which Felix did initially. Later however, he asked Gründerszene to not post his his comment.
Anyway, in conclusion Joel said that he wanted to meet Felix in person and resolve the argument. Felix also wants to “toss the negativity out the window, concentrate on kicking ass, help each other out and make Berlin the BEST startup city in the world.”
But this morning Felix wrote on Amen “Today’s Gründerszene Article on Amen is the Best Bullshit to read on the Web this Year.” It is unclear whether he will meet with Joel.
From today on Joel is on a three months sabbattical wich was announced earlier. He states that this has nothing to do with the Amen “conflict”.
Venture Capital firms focus on berlin
Another Reuters video highlighting Berlin’s rise to becoming THE startup capital in Europe. The title may be a little too optimistic though or maybe the “s” of “firms” is simply a mistake.
For a full list of international media articles and videos about the Berlin startup scene, click here.
Asaf Moses (Upcload) straight from TechCrunch Disrupt in Beijing
UPcload, the startup that seeks to revolutionize online shopping by giving shoppers a simple way to measure their exact dimensions and thus lower return rates for e-tailers, was the only startup from Berlin that participated at TechCrunch Disrupt in Beijing.
Founder Asaf was kind enough to give TechBerlin a skype video call the same day he pitched UPcload on stage and share the experience with all of us.
Unfortunately UPcload did not make it into the finals, but that should not sadden Asaf and his team. Having been chosen to compete at Disrupt is a major achievement for such a young startup, something that most early stage companies can only dream of. He shares that experience with Berlin based Henrik Berggren from Readmill and Felix Petersen from Amen who took centre stage this year at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC and SF.
The question that remains: When will TechCrunch will bring Disrupt to Berlin. I am sure not only Asaf thinks that the time is ripe!
Skype a founder #8: Edial Dekker, Founder & CEO, Gidsy (includes a private tour of their new office!)
Gidsy, together with Readmill, is surely one of the most anticipated new startups in Berlin. The p2p marketplace for authentic experiences is said to launch very soon, but organizers can already create their listings.
Former Etsy designers and founders of acclaimed design agency Your Neighbours, the founding team takes design seriously. Finally we are seeing a trend in Berlin towards functional AND beautiful design - it took long enough! A great example of their design work is their handbook on making the perfect listing on Gidsy.
The Skype A Founder interview above includes a private tour of their great, new office!
Henrik Berggren (Readmill) on how the support of the Berlin community almost made him cry
No, its not about the Beef in the Berlin tech scene. It is foremostly about support for one another and shared passion for the common trade. In this short interview at Betahaus Festival Henrik describes how the support of the Berlin tech community during his TechCrunch disrupt experience touched his heart.
Readmill is a very promising product and we wish him all the best in coding those last lines so that he can finally meet Paul Grahams advise and launch. (Click here for Henrik’s office hours with the almighty Paul Graham at TechCrunch Disrupt.)
TECHBERLIN EVENT CALENDAR
Berlin has a social startup scene with many events, meet-ups and conferences taking place every week. We created a Google Calendar where you can find all the infos you need to keep track of it. We also included some major national and international conferences (i.e. LeWeb, DLD, NOAH etc.), which many Berliners will attend.
If you want us to add an event to the calendar, please write an Email to events@techberlin.com.
You can find the calendar on the left under “Pages” or at www.techberlin.com/events.
