Berlin Startup Scene

Posted by James

So something I wanted to do before I came to Berlin was check out the Berlin startup scene. I'd been hearing rumors that there were a lot of startups in Berlin, and I thought it might be interesting to check them out. I had actually become a bit fed up with the pretentiousness and arrogance of the startups in Silicon Valley, where every little tweak on providing access to domestic services through an iPhone app was trumpeted as a world shaking innovation. I was curious to see what things were like in Germany.

Well, as it turns out, there is a fair amount of startup action in Berlin. Something like 3 out of every 4 startups in Germany are started in Berlin. I think that has something to do with the favorable factors here, which the Bay Area also had in the 70's and early 80's: cheap commercial real estate, a high quality arts scene (including music), and great weather. Of the three, Berlin has the first two. Unfortuantely, it fails miserably on the third, with winter being pretty cold and wet.

There are a co-working spaces and startup accelerators all over the place, especially in Kreuzberg, one of the hippest places in the city to live. These not only feature cheap office space, but also a place where you can meet with other (mostly young) folks and talk about your ideas. Living costs here are also reasonable too. Prices for rent are about half London or Paris for the equivalent apartment, and food is reasonable. As for arts, the last two posts on street art (here and here) give you an idea about the visual arts scene. For music, there seem to be a lot of parties and concerts going on, mostly EDM  techno or house genres, because there are posters up about them everywhere. Though I wasn't living there at the time, I get the impression that's what the Bay Area was like in the 70's and early 80's.

I've attended a couple of startup events. One was the ZED Berlin startup night (picture above), sponsored by HP, Intel, and Nvidia in an old power station in Kreuzberg that has been converted into a startup incubator called Umspanwerk. This was a high budget event, with free food and drinks. A panel session of founders who had started hardware startups talked about their experiences. After the panel session, several founders gave quick talks about their startups. Most of the startups were doing hardware for consumers, like electric scooters or induction coils for heating tea water (everyone in Germany has an electric induction tea pot).

The other was at Betahaus, another incubator in Kreuzberg. This was more a low budget event. Entry was free, but a small bottle of mineral water cost 5 euros. The event was organized by Society3, a company formed by Axel Schultze. Axel is a German entrepreneur who moved to Silicon Valley in the early 2000's. He organized Society3 to try to get the Silicon Valley culture transferred to Europe, and in particular Germany. Most of his talk was about how to create a billion dollar company, like the so-called "unicorns" in Silicon Valley. In Berlin, a $100 million exit is considered to be eye-popping, whereas in Silicon Valley, that's the entry price for getting into the successful entrepreneurs club, but it certainly isn't going to turn heads.

The whole monetary scale in Berlin is about an order of magnitude less than in Silicon Valley. There's a lot of young people in one and two person companies, and some that are a bit larger, working on very low budgets. Recently, I got a Meetup announcement about how to form a 100 euro startup. The idea is to use very little money to get some data about whether your idea might have traction in the market before actually spending a lot of money developing the product. This is exactly the opposite of what people do in Silicon Valley. They burn through their order $100 million investment capital buying market share through offering goods and services at steep discounts then go broke or are sold for a fraction of their investment capital. The German government also has a fund for startups. A colleague of mine at work has a small startup that he's running from this fund. Government money is nice because you don't have to give away any equity, but it's relatively limited.

On the other hand, the ideas people are putting into startups are pretty much the same as in Silicon Valley, services that use moble or Web applications to outsource or automate some process. At the Betahaus event, I talked to a young startup founder looking for a co-founder who had a company that gamified marketing research. He had developed an app that allowed a company to set up a game for people in a country where the company wanted to introduce a product. People would play the game for points and the company would get valuable data about how well the product might do. Another founder at that event had an HR startup. Most companies interview multiple candidates for a job but only choose one. The others go into a file to be forgotten. His startup takes the candidates and offers them to other companies that might be interested. This guy was an HR professional and was looking for a CTO to handle the technical side of developing the Web app.

There are a few corners of the startup scene that I haven't explored yet, so I may change my mind, but I get the feeling that the focus on doing a startup is kind of a lifestyle thing here in Berlin, rather than the major business focus of Silicon Valley. With so much money at stake, the Silicon Valley startups can waste a lot, but they need to make a coherent argument that they are going to be unicorns within a couple years. To paraphrase Garrison Keillor's Prarie Home Companion "Silicon Valley is where all the startups are above average". In Berlin, the startup founders don't seem to feel that their idea is going to cause some major revolution in people's lives, but they don't have to make that argument because the scale is so much smaller. 

World's Largest Street Art Gallery

Street Art Mural Showing Teufelsberg's Former Function as an NSA Spy Station

 Posted by James.

Hot on the heals of Town Mouse's post about street art, this post is about the world's largest street art gallery, on Teufelsberg in Gruenewald.

Teufelsberg, which translates into English as "Devil's Mountain" has a checkered history. In 1915, it was ceded into the public domain with the proviso that it remain as green area in perpetuity. At that time, Berlin was a rapidly developing industrial city with lots of heavy industry, and the workers needed a place to relax on the weekends. Hitler build a university for military research, the Wehrtechnischen Facultaet, on the site in the late 1930s as part of his project to turn Berlin into a "World Capital Germania". Actually, the Wehrtechnischen Facultaet was administered as part of the Technical University of Berlin, where I'm currently teaching, but after the war, the faculty and administration of TU Berlin decided to no longer do military research. As a result, faculty can't take any money from the military, even for research projects on cryptography and security.

After the war, the buildings of the Wehrtechnischen Facultaet were blown up, and the site, which was in West Berlin served as a dump for the remains of bombed out buildings. About one third of the rubble from West Berlin was deposited on the hill, eventually making it the second highest point in Berlin. In the 1950's, the US Army hauled a radar dish up onto the mountain and discovered that the reception of East German and Russian signals was excellent. As a result, the NSA built a spy station on the mountain. The spy station consisted of listening facilities, and also a radar with 300 km radius. The listening facilities were occasionally enhanced by other environmental factors, like a Ferris wheel during the annual German-American festival in Zehlendorf. With 400,000 Russian troops in East Germany, Teufelsberg served on the front line for knowing exactly what they were up to, to prevent the Cold War from becoming a hot war.

Nonmilitary uses during the Cold War include an international ski competition in 1987 to celebrate Berlin's 750 anniversary as a city, but it was only after the Cold War that things really took off. The NSA abandoned the site in the early 1990's after the reunification of Germany. The mountain was bought by a group of investors from Cologne in the late '90's in response to a city-initiated contest about what do with the site. They planned to build luxury ($1 million euro) apartments and a restaurant there, and did some initial development. The locals, however, were of a different opinion and initiated a court case against the building, which succeeded and building was stopped. During the Dot Com bust of the early 2000's, the developer went bankrupt.  In 2008, the Maharishi Foundation had plans to build a university there, financed by David Lynch (the director of Blue Velvet), but later that year gave up the plans. Also, the Berlin techno music community moved in in the late 2000's and held parties there, until the local residents, not satisfied with an alternative use for the site either, called the police.

In 2013, the pre-WWI concord dedicating the mountain to open space surfaced, and since then the city has been trying to decide what to do with it. The investors still hold a mortgage on it, so the site is today leased and rented out to various parties, and there are daily tours. The site is also used as a setting for post-apocalyptic movies, and is the largest street art (and graffiti) gallery in the world.  On Friday, I did a tour with two friends (the 2 hour historical tour costs 15 euros per person).  At the entrance, you can see this sign, with two foxes on it welcoming you to the Teufelsberg:

The foxes accompany you throughout the site, with ironic commentary that at one point turns quite political (as most good street art tends to be). Like most of the surfaces on the site, the sign is covered with a mixture of street art and graffiti. Below, you can see the remains of the advertisement for luxury apartments (110-220 m**2). 

The guard house is similarly decorated, this time with a three dimensional head, possibly an ironic spoof on the Art Nouveau architectural decoration style in the part of Berlin that has been preserved from before WWII:

Also, down in the lower right corner, you can see a honeycomb, a comment on one of the current uses for the mountain, raising bees:

The lease holder has plans to put up to 500 hives on the mountain, today there are around 30.

The street art gallery begins in the courtyard of the site, where politicians and service people entered the building:

This picture resembles a famous painting by the Spanish painter Goya, The Third of May, 1808, which hangs in the Prado in Madrid. The painting commemorates the war against Napoleon in Spain. This indicates that the artist probably had some classical artistic training. Here's another more artistically inclined painting on the third floor of the ruined building:

A minority of the art on the site is more decorative, like this example, but most is spectacularly surrealistic, like this tiger:

or this wall in the courtyard below the tower:

In addition to bees and honey, the site also serves as a warehouse for used building material, and as a workshop for people with ideas about experimental lifestyles. When we were there, a two person team was building a bicycle-powered trailer for public art actions (which are kind of like Burning Man but not confined to a festival):

The vehicle is just narrow enough to not qualify for a license, and has an electric motor and battery in case the load is more than two people can handle. A similar vehicle has been used for transporting a piano.

We were allowed to climb up in the tower, which you can see here:

The dome in the foreground and to the right, as well as the intermediate levels of the tower, all were partially destroyed, and were used for signal intelligence. The dome at the very top, was constructed by the German Air Traffic Control agency in the mid-2000s because the radar from the Tempelhof airport in southern Berlin was experiencing interference from all the cranes in Potsdamer Platz during its reconstruction.

From the top, you have spectacular views of Berlin:

 In the distance about middle-left center of the picture, you can see the television tower at Alexander Platz over the trees of Gruenewald.

On the way out, I got this picture of a three dimensional sculpture, a decorated "art car":

With any official development of Teufelsberg blocked by the concord, the city seems inclined to simply let it slowly decay into ruin. Some have suggested that it become a monument ("Denkmalschutz", something like historic preservation in the US but with a much stronger legal component blocking any development), but so far, the city hasn't seen fit to act on this suggestion. In the meantime, Teufelsberg is a great place to view street art and, as a bonus, get a spectacular view of Berlin.

Street Art

Graffiti and Other Street Art

Last Sunday, we finally got around to doing a bike tour of Berlin Street Art. We'd been wanting to do it all along, but a 3-hour chunk on a Saturday afternoon is not so easily available.

We joined a group of 5, for a total of 8, and our guide took us to different "galleries" and explained different techniques. First, he explained that in some parts of the city, home owners will hire artists in self defense, hoping to avoid graffiti by not offering an appealing white wall.

I've seen that work, but I've also seen it fail, as with this wall where the art is visible, but graffiti has been added at the bottom.

But there's much more to street art than just graffiti. Our guide explained that many artists move away from the spray painted letters to much more sophisticated art. We enjoyed this gallery along the river, which was visually interesting and had been around for a while.

One artist took advantage of the reflection to create a full image.

And there was even a small sculpture, in a way poking fun of the traditional bridge sculptures.

Sculpture was rare, but we saw another one at a "gallery" in Mitte. 

That gallery featured different artists and techniques. One had printed photos of dancing women on thin paper and pasted it on the wall, with a Time to Dance slogan and some confetti surrounding the dancers (you see them approximately in the middle of the picture, and then again to the left of the yellow face.

Another artist, also featured in the first picture of this post, paints on paper and pastes the painting on the walls. The big advantage of pasting or stenciling is that it can be done quickly, with the risk of detection and arrest significantly reduced.

The gallery also included a Little Lucy paste-up. She, for some reason, doesn't like cats and is also seen making cat stew. In the picture above, she says "6 Lives Left".

Some artists really to show off their art as if they were in a gallery - and for some, the main form of expression is verbal, as in the yellow sign.

"Where is the place that shall quench the thirst of your soul? You have slept for innumerable eons and now you don't want to wake?"

Well, I don't understand it so it must be art...

I do understand this pretty little paste-up crane on top of graffiti - so maybe it isn't art?

Regardless, we came away from the tour with a new appreciation of street art. Now, instead of being annoyed, we're happy to explore, have a closer look, and be surprised. For me, graffiti itself is still an annoyance, but I'm now more able to see that there's more to it than meets the eye.

Spreewald Visit

Bicycles on the Regional Express to Luebbenau

Last weekend, Renate and I spent a few days in the Spreewald, a region of swamps, twisting small streams, and beautiful old towns an hour and a half by train to the southeast of Berlin. The Spree, as you probably will remember, is the major river flowing through Berlin. It rises in the hills outside of Cottbus, then flows into the Spreewald where it breaks into lots of small, twisted streams surrounding islands. The Spreewald geography is a consequence of a collection of Ice Age moraines that formed in a particular way, the islands being the moraines and the streams being the drainage channels of melt water from the ice sheets. On the other side of the Spreewald, near Maerkische Buchholtz, the twisted small streams join together as the river begins its journey to its end in the Havel on the west side of Berlin. A large part of the Spreewald has been designated a UNSECO Biosphere Reserve, in recognition of the unique flora and fauna contained within.

Since like most of the area around Berlin the Spreewald is relatively flat, we decided to take our bikes along to do some bicycling. We left from the Berlin Bahnhof Zoo. Above, you can see the collection of bikes on the train to Luebbenau. Actually the train ended in Cottbus but we departed in Luebbenau where we were staying. As we departed from the train, I noticed this Slavic-looking name on the train station:

I commented about it to Renate, saying that I wondered whether there was a Polish minority population, but she said that actually the situation was more interesting. There was a Slavic minority population but they weren't Polish. Later, I looked up the history on line. It turns out that the area was originally settled by two Slavic tribes, the Sorben and Wenden in around the 600s.  The Sorben were in the Unterspreewald and the Wenden in our area, the Oberspreewald. Around 1200, the area was integrated into the Holy Roman Empire, and German settlers began moving in. Mostly, the German settlers clustered in the towns and the Slavic indigenous inhabitants occupied farms. Today, there are still around 60,000 people who speak these languages, and after WWII teaching of Sorbisch and Wendisch was once again introduced into elementary schools for those students who were from this linguistic minority.

After we checked into our small hotel, we did a 40 km bike trip to Burg, one of the major cities in the Obersprewald. Burg was celebrating its 700th anniversary as an incorporated city:

 And it was celebrating in style. A huge folk festival was in swing, with lines of cars backed up on the highway to Berlin, thousands of people walking around town, and, as you can see above, a folk dancing group in traditional costume, on the grounds of the festival.

The traditional costume for women in the Spreewald is a kind of headdress where the sides stick out like wings. You can see it better below:

The headdress requires between 70-100 needles to keep in place, and a piece of cardboard or paper to spread it out. Every town or small area in the Spreewald has a different style of traditional dress, the style you see above is found only in Burg.

They also had an exhibition of traditional crafts. Below, you can see a blacksmith working on a horseshoe:

Being a biosphere reserve, you would expect to see wildlife. While we didn't see any mammals, we did see a lot of birds, including this stork in a perannual nest on top of a power pole:

The indigenous Sorben and Wenden people have lots of myths about animals. One of them involves a Snake King, which you can see a statue of here on the Dammstrasse in Luebenau:

This reminded me of the Hindu/Buddhist myths about the Naga Raja, the Snake King.

The second day we did a tour of Luebenau and Ledhe, a small village that's part of Luebenau, by flat bottom boat. Below you can see an example at the harbor in Luebenau (and yes that's rain you see prickling the surface of the water, it rained heavily while we were there):

Many houses in Ledhe can only be reached by boat. Our guide on the boat (who was a woman) lived in Ledhe and told us that the mailman, police, fire, ambulance, and even trash pickup were all done by boat, like in Venice. Below you can see some of the watery "streets" in Ledhe:

People in the Spreewald use boats to get around, and in the biosphere reserve (where Ledhe is located) motorized boats are not permitted, except for public services, so our guide and the other tourist guides used a pole to drive the boat, with a hook on the bottom for grabbing onto branches.

Besides tourism, a major industry of the Spreewald is agriculture, mostly crops like hops, horseradish and specifically, pickles. They make and export tons of them. Below, you can see a pickle platter that I ordered for lunch one day. It came with three varieties of pickles and some pickle bread:

The Spreewald produces many different varieties of pickles, and the ones I tried were really good, a spicy kind, a sweet kind, and a mustard pickle.

Since there isn't much stone in the area, traditionally most houses are made of wood. They use fast growing poplar, put it into water for 10 years to let it harden, then build with it. Roofs are traditionally made of woven reeds, as you can see from this picture taken in the Open Air Museum in Ledhe:

Like most places in Germany, there's a castle in Luebbenau. Renate and I had a great dinner in the restaurant. Below you can see the entrance:

Today the castle is a four star hotel, but it was originally the residence of the family of the Count to Lynar, which originally came from Tuscany. During WWII, the count Wilhelm Graf zu Lynar was the personal adjunct to General Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben (maybe a member of the same Witzleben family that donated Lietzensee to Charlottenburg?). Von Witzleben was executed in 1944 for organizing an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate  Hitler, and Wilhelm zu Lynar, being on his personal staff, was too.

On the last day, before leaving back to Berlin, we visited the Spreewald Museum in Luebbenau. It had many interesting exhibits about the history of the area, including ones from the time when the area was part of the DDR, East Germany. At that time, there was a huge brown coal power plant and mine that was, essentially destroying the ecology of the Spreewald. The power plant was spewing out coal smoke and the mine was draning down the water table. Both the mine and power plant were closed down after the reunification of Germany in 1990. We also saw an exhibit about the Spreewald Railroad. Below, you can see a top view of a steam locomotive:

The railroad was built in the early 1900s as narrow gauge track from Luebben to Cottbus, and was taken over by the East German Reichsbahn after the WWII. Steam locomotives were used until 1970. The railroad was shut down in 1983.

After our three day trip, we left the Spreewald to return to Berlin in pouring rain. Below you can see the beautiful public art display at the entrance to Luebbenau:

It represents a dragonfly, and though we didn't see any, dragonflies are normally common in the Spreewald. Signs are posted at various places saying "Dragonflies are sensitive". People in the Spreewald want to protect drafonflies because they eat mosquitos, of which there are normally a lot in the Spreewald, though again we saw only a few.

The Spreewald is definitely worth a visit, lots of interesting culture, nature, history, and great food to top it off. 

Botanical Garden in Summer

Daylilies and Astilbe

A little while ago, I went on a second trip to the Berlin Botanical Garden. It's always wonderful to follow a garden through the seasons, and this garden did not disappoint!

Lavender and roses

I especially enjoy how this garden works on combining the aesthetically pleasing with the scientifically interesting - it educates and delights the senses. Above, a traditional lavender and rose border, with the lavender visited by many happy pollinators, and the rosehips waiting to be eaten by birds and other critters.

Same here - mediterranean plants such as lavender and salvias, labeled clearly, but also the beautiful sitting area and lamp.

Moss garden with removable cover

I was especially taken by the wetland area and the moss garden. The moss garden is being protected from animals and has an astonishing abundance of species. A sign explains the different types of mosses and lychen and where they occur. The exhibit is dedicated to a scientist who died at an early age - her mother continues her work by supporting the garden.

Last time, James and I had just followed the first path, whereas this time I followed the path to the best summer bloomers and it started, interestingly, in the greenhouses. I'm wondering whether the map was prepared this way because visitors are usually tired by the time they get to the greenhouses, but, regardless, I enjoyed them a lot more this time and was just astounded by how much space was devoted to them.

It makes sense, of course. A large percentage of the world's plants does not tolerate frost, so tropical, dessert, and subtropical plants must be sheltered in winter.

I can imagine coming here on a cold day, enjoying the colors, the sound of water, and the warmth.

Visiting the greenhouses is included in the entrance fee, so, unlike SF where you pay extra for the conservatory and the arboretum, you get a 2-for-1 deal (the museum is extra, but it seems I'm always ready to go home after several hours in the gardens).

California in Berlin

Another joyful discovery was the California natives garden. While it seemed a bit of a mix of desert plants and high-sierra plants, it looked beautiful.

Most impressive was how well kept the garden was. I met several gardeners, hard at work with clippers and other tools, keeping invasives or inappropriate plants out of each botanical region. I can't even imagine what a job this must be, but clearly the funds are there to pay a dedicated and educated staff. The garden is part of the Freie Universitaet Berlin, one of the big universities in the city, but I believe funds from the city itself are also available.

I especially enjoyed the mock-latin writing on the garbage cans. Above, Payurus antiquus, or old paper.

And here, Plasticus berlinensis, or Berlin plastic.

Even when I finally started on my way home, flowers on the electrical cabinet gave a final good-bye. And yes, I'm sure I'll go back!