. SEEDTABLE

September 27th | #44

This week in Europe: Das Berlin Startup Szene

by John McClelland.

“Berlin ist arm, aber sexy.” - Klaus Wowereit, Mayor of Berlin 2001 - 2014

“Berlin is poor, but sexy."

Next month is the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall. Crazy. This physical and political barrier single-handedly shaped the city to become the post-capitalist contradiction it is today.

I get a lot of questions about Berlin even though I’m American. Painfully American. I first came to Berlin on my honeymoon and moved here in 2015. Even though it has many quirks and faults, I fucking love this city. This take won’t do the city justice, but I hope it’s enough to put it on your radar.

Berlin before and today

As a divided city between 1961-1989, political volatility kept most major companies away.

West Berlin survived on subsidies from the government and military occupation, East Berlin on Soviet-sponsored socialism. Exclaves from Turkey and Vietnam, artists, musicians, punks–altogether created a city-state known for breaking the rules. That lack of a cohesive identity gives us the opportunity to create a new one when the wall fell on November 7, 1989.

But when you have a clean slate, Berlin struggles with its identity still, especially with tech. It took decades for Silicon Valley to go from orchards in the 1930s to Fairchild Semiconductors in the 1950s to Oracle, Sun, and Apple in the 1980s. Point is, Berlin is still in its tech youth.

That youth is mildly dominated by a few industries. There are plenty of lists out there, but at a 100K foot, non-exhaustive view of the startup scene you can see a few patches:

• E-commerce - You can’t talk about the Berlin startup scene without mentioning e-commerce and Rocket Internet, the engine that jump-started the deep e-commerce heritage. Some of the companies include Zalando (which now employs 6K in Berlin), Delivery Hero, HelloFresh, and Jumia.

• Music tech - Another patch of startups is music-tech. Many companies here don’t have the culture or scale of a typical startup, and the scene is anchored by companies are 10-20 years old like Native Instruments, Ableton, and SoundCloud.

• Mobility - Every major German automaker has some sort of incubator in this city. Incubated startups like FreeNow (Daimler, BMW) and Coup (Bosch). Then you have the independents like Circ, Tier, Unu, Miles among