I just spent a few days in Berlin. I occasionally get nostalgic for Berlin - I lived here in Reinickendorf as a kid from 1988-1990, and remember that it felt like something important was happening when the wall came down during my time there.
I asked my friend Douwe Osinga, co-founder of travel startup Triposo, if I could stay with him for a few days and he said yes.
I reached out to some folks for intros in Berlin and had breakfast with Marguerite Imbert, editor of Berlin-based blog VentureVillage. I expected that 2, maybe 3 meetings in Berlin would materialize.
Not so: In the last 72 hours, I've visited Triposo, Amen, ResearchGate, DailyDeal, Moped, ItsPlatonic, rules.io, EyeEm, PhoneDeck, Piabo PR, Earlybird, and Startup Bootcamp for a total of 12 stops. Turns out people here like visitors from the Valley.
Three takeaways:
- Berlin has excellent quality of life: Great public transit, excellent infrastructure, beautiful and affordable apartments and office spaces.
- Good engineering talent is easier to find and less expensive than in the Valley. No H1-B hassles either here for getting smart people from Eastern Europe.
- Series As are hard to get.While there is now an abundance of seed capital sources in Berlin, you'll have to look to London or the Valley for your Series A and beyond. More and more Valley firms are willing to invest in Berlin though.
I was impressed with the quality of the founders and their thinking here. Lots of smart people doing interesting things - far from the clone factory that BusinessWeek likened Berlin to when they wrote about the Samwer brothers a few months ago.
