
Germany Tries to Catch Up with Startup World - mpweiher
http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/germany-tries-to-catch-up-with-startup-world-a-1140130.html
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cntlzw
My time to shine. Where shall I start? First of all there is mentality. In
Germany people kinda expect you to get a job and push through with it until
you go to pension. Changing jobs a lot is often seen as a personal failure.
That poor accountant that hates his job and gets paid because he just sits in
the same stinky office day by day gets more honoured than anyone trying to
change.

People here get judged if they start a business and fail. If you are
successful then fine. If not, people don't give you credit. Personally I rate
the person higher that tries several times, falls, gets up and starts over.
Unfortunately that is not the case.

Nice example if you are from the USA. Over there it is more socially accepted
to get married and divorced often than not at all. In Germany it is quite the
opposite. You can't even make a failure in private how could you do that in
business?

Many business here have roots and are decades old. That whole "Mittelschicht"
is build on family owned business. That is actually a good thing and probably
one of the reasons the economy in Germany is so efficient, but it doesn't give
anyone the incentive to start something.

And don't forget Germany is all about bureaucracy. Lots of paperwork and money
just to get a GmbH. And a GmbH is what you need to gain trust from other
companies.

Sorry, there is so much to it. Hopefully there will be some change in
attitude. It is already happening.

~~~
mschuster91
IMHO, it's mainly the lack of any and all venture capital. There just is
nowhere near enough cash available to do the classic VC route, much less
investing 100 freaking million dollars to an app that does nothing but
broadcast "Yo".

And even engineers at BMW or similar don't get paid in stocks, which means
that the supply of engineers made rich by big exits is next to zero. Just look
who founded all the hot startups in SV - it's mostly ex-
Paypal/Google/FB/MS/BigStartup employees who found or invest the boatload of
monies into new startups. And regular salaries may be enough to pay off credit
on a house, but not enough to save for funding and bootstrapping a company.

Here, basically the only way to fund a company if you don't happen to have
rich friends/family is by a line of credit - and thanks to EU banking
regulations the banks now require real deposits of securities (eg a house/car)
for a credit line; this again reduces the eligible persons to rich people. No
way to see a poor immigrant fund a multibillion dollar company like in US...
given the more and more xenophobic neonazi appearances (Pegida, AfD)
immigrants actually more have to fear for their lives. (Okay, I've exaggerated
here, but the xenophobist trend even in government massively worries me)

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ykler
I have heard the complaint about no VC money before, and I guess it is true,
but I don't understand why. What is stopping Calfornian VCs from investing in
German startups? I understand that there is a bit more friction in long
distance business relationships like this, but we live in a globalized world.

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karthikb
Discovery, dealflow, pattern matching, and ability to check references. It's
best when the folks pitching you are 2nd degree connections (and got to you
through a warm intro). These connections to SV VCs are most dense in SV.

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kintamanimatt
Cultural issues aside, Germany needs to make it easy and inexpensive to start,
run, and close a business if it wants to compete. At the moment it seems to be
a bureaucratic burden. Unfortunately Germany isn't an anomaly in this regard
in Europe.

~~~
realPubkey
I'm currently closing a buisness in germany. It takes about 40hours of work
plus 400€ for notary etc. To close a f*cking buisness which had no cashflow
for the last 2 years.

~~~
kintamanimatt
If you were to do it again in a different country, where would you choose?

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tscs37
Apparently The Mirror was not ready for the sudden influx of readers...

Though, on the article, Germany is hardly ready for the Startup boom, the
bureaucracy is hell.

I have been thinking about going self-employed as a sidejob, boost my student-
income a bit.

~~~
WA
> _I have been thinking about going self-employed as a sidejob, boost my
> student-income a bit._

This costs you 10 minutes and 25 bucks (Gewerbeschein). Then you can file
taxes for your side income once per year, which takes another 30 minutes,
because at the side-income level the calculation is: income - expenses.

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mschuster91
With just a Gewerbeschein for a single person company you're personally liable
for all debts/obligations! Been there, done that and nearly went to jail.
Never again.

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BjoernKW
Same applies to the managing director of a GmbH (Germany-style Ltd.), even
more so because with a GmbH you can actually be held criminally liable if your
company goes bankrupt.

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signal11
Wow. I remember reading somewhere that an early American innovation (1833 in
Federal law) was - no more debtor's prisons, which allowed much more risk-
taking in American business. I did not realize this persists today in Germany.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debtors%27_prison](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debtors%27_prison)

(Note that the US is often criticized for court fines which result in jail
time if you're unable to pay, but that's a much later meaning. Originally it
meant jail if you were unable to pay someone back.)

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BjoernKW
There's no debtors' prison in the sense that you have to go to prison if you
can't pay your debts. The criminal offence is delayed filing of bankruptcy: If
your company can't pay its bills, it can't make payroll or its liabilities
exceed its assets you have to file for bankruptcy within 3 weeks.

The problem with this is that often it isn't entirely clear if a company
really is bankrupt by that definition. A company can be nominally bankrupt in
one moment and solvent again in the next depending on how you look at it from
a technical / accounting point of view.

This again unfortunately sometimes is preyed upon by both liquidators,
investors and creditors, who might try to sue the managing director in order
to recoup their losses from the director's personal funds. A conviction for
delayed filing of bankruptcy both applies additional pressure and makes a
director personally liable, GmbH or not.

So, in short: No there are no debtors' prisons anymore but the effect you
described very much still applies thanks to outdated and misguided German
bankruptcy laws.

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JonRB
Interesting idea - I've always associated germany with startups for some
reason.

~~~
Mo3
Don't kid yourself. Germany is much less than optimal for startups. I know,
I'm German, I had one here. The German mentality and refusal to advance
technologically is another huge problem. I live in Bavaria currently, deep
into beer county, where the hops for most of the worlds beer come from. People
who can reinstall Windows call themselves "specialists" here, their success is
largely dependent on social skills and honestly, narcissism. The more
narcissistic you are, the more you think you're the shit, people will believe
it immediately. Actual skill is not so much important, knowing each other from
drinking together, what other people say about you and inflated self-image is
much more highly regarded. It makes me wanna puke on a daily basis and I have
absolutely no hope for this part of Germany. A few days ago, I found out how
incredibly badly the Windows server at our secondary location had been set up
by a contractor before my time. No security, no logical file structure, all
the good stuff. This contractor was paid 200/hour and selected because he met
my boss at the local watering hole and told him about how he is the best
technician in a big radius. My boss believes it to this day. I have no hope.
Northern Germany is a different topic all together, they have been making some
nice advances but yet still the whole foundation around them is stuck in time.

~~~
JTenerife
How come Bavaria has the highest GPD per captiva (without counting Hamburg and
Bremen which are basically cities, not regions) and the second highest total
GPD in Germany [1]?

Your experiences are unfortunate and annoying - no doubt. But even if it might
be more likely to happen in one region than another this could happen in other
regions as well. In the end it's anecdotical stereotyping.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_German_states_by_GDP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_German_states_by_GDP)

~~~
mschuster91
I'm from Munich. Bavaria is by far the leader due to BMW (Munich) and Audi
(Ingolstadt), as well as their boatload of highly specialized suppliers.

Munich also has the German HQ of Microsoft (which is suspected to be the cause
of the city of Munich to drop Limux, according to some conspiracy theories)...
and EADS Astrium has a huge complex near Ottobrunn.

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rukenshia
I work for Volkswagen Financial Services and we actually opened up a
completely new department in Berlin (VWFS is usually in Braunschweig) mostly
to get closer to the world of startups and interact with them. So it _is_
reaching the big companies here, the Volkswagen Group is starting to have a
lot of new departments here in Berlin. It's awesome to see because there are a
lot of motivated people within the brand that want to work like this. It also
seems like the minds of our managers are changing on the topic and they quite
enjoy what we're doing here so far.

~~~
mafribe
What kinds of VC deals are they offering? What are they looking to fund?

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gragas
link is dead

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SyneRyder
Looks like the whole of Spiegel.de is down currently (503), even the front
page isn't working for me, and on desktop the AMP version is redirecting
straight back to spiegel.de.

~~~
notliketherest
Welcome to the startup world

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harryf
Google Accelerated Mobile Page version -
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zubale
Well, first they will need to learn how to deal with diversity that the
startup world requires.

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akie
I disagree that having successful startups requires diversity. Israel is a
counter example.

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otheotheothe
A lot of israelis come to Berlin btw. and vice versa - there's a whole kind of
exchange from .il and .de tech workers, not too ure why but i think both sides
find the other side interesting.

A lot of people in Berlin i know are tech guys from tel aviv.

[http://www.jpost.com/Metro/Start-up-
Berlin-472928](http://www.jpost.com/Metro/Start-up-Berlin-472928) seems to be
quiet a common thing.

~~~
m_fayer
A lot of young Israeli artists and designers are in Berlin too. When I go
outside here, what I hear is a mix of German, English, Turkish, Italian, and
Hebrew - not a mix I ever thought I'd encounter.

