how to throw a good party?
Issue #170 (20 Oct) – fastest growing startups; destinations from BER; best cocktail bars; don't change your job to get promoted.
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Programming note #170: We threw a good party on Saturday, and I need to admit that those two last glasses weren’t really necessary. They never are. Yesterday late in the evening, I changed this intro because somehow my hangover caused me to buy a new domain: Handpicked Signals dot com. It will be a new kind of newsletter. What would you like to read about? The best 3 replies will be rewarded with books of my choice! The harder to do, the better.
Btw, think about your use of Twitter, Reddit or TikTok today or yesterday. Did anything stick in your mind? How many things - 1, 3, 5, more? Was it worth it? I realised I struggle with this, so this means Weekly social will mostly be Reddit from now on.
Thanks to our sponsor, Knuspr! (check out the coupon below)
The email subject is in Snippet #10.
🌟 Handpicked community
Meet — 6 handpicked events:
Join Grammarly's Engineering team for a ride on the Autobahn of innovation and discover how they removed speed limits in developing agentic features.
Register here. | Tue, 28/10 18:30 | Grammarly Hub at Fora*Discover how a single prompt can unlock new creativity. Max Kuwertz (RAM, Spells) joins Kittl, the design tool for a new era, to reveal the craft behind AI-generated design. | Wed, 29/10 18:30 | Kittl*
From AI Proof-of-Concept to production: 3 keynote speeches at Merantix AI Campus on architecture, software quality & requirements engineering. Discussion & networking with snacks. For architects & Developers. | Tue, 04/11 17:30 | Merantix AI Campus
The analog cafe | Sat, 08/11 14:00 | Café Cutie Pie
Model brawls I HackNight w/ Lyceum | Thu, 23/10 18:00 | Merantix AI Campus Berlin
Business model development (EN) - Seminar | Mon, 27/10 09:30 | Fachschule für Sozialpädagogik
This could be your event! Advertise it.
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sponsored: Most investors stop at stocks and bonds. The wealthy don’t. NAO gives you access to private equity, venture capital, infrastructure, and private debt — alternatives that move differently from the S&P500 and DAX. True diversification starts here (also with a savings plan). Disclaimer: Capital at risk.
Help shape Germany's 2025 employee benefits benchmark! Share your insights in our 4 min anonymous survey. Get free access to our research data that helps you compare your offerings and make smarter benefits decisions.
Applications for EWOR fellowship are open again (up to 500k funding).
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👀 Handpicked jobs
3️⃣ job highlights of the week
The remaining jobs are on the Handpicked job board. This week’s focus was design & tech.
Berlin’s online supermarket & farm shop – delivered to your door in 3 hours
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Knuspr is both an extremely well-stocked supermarket and a farmers’ market in one, delivered within 3 hours, always fresh, always convenient. Not satisfied? Get your money back, no questions asked.
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☕️ Coffee Talk with Michaela (Ela) Krause
Michaela is the founder and CEO of one of the most active Berlin comms agencies, Laika Communications. I love her openness to different ideas and also being able to share her experience. Here is what she prepared for you:
The Lir - Choosing a single Berlin favourite is impossible — Pinci near our office is perfect for drinks, lunch, and biz chats. But my heart? The Lir. Irish pub vibes, years of loyalty, and yes, it even makes me eye apartments nearby. (No wonder my secret exit plan is a Puppy Pub!)
After School - I’ll admit it: I’m an old(ish) fart. I subscribed to a youth culture newsletter just to keep up with Gen Z & Alpha (shout-out to Casey Lewis at After School — follow her!). Like cultural vitamins: not a replacement for real-life chats, but it keeps me sharp and in touch.
Contagious - I’m passionate about surrounding myself with creative sparks — sources of inspiration, fresh perspectives, that kind of energy. Ideas and comparisons matter. Shoutout to Contagious for being my go-to for campaigns that excite, challenge, and make the comparison game a lot of fun.
Snippets
Berlin & Germany, career & timeless
Don’t throw your broken toaster away yet! RaparaturBONUS (repairing of broken electrical devices with a 50% subsidy) is coming back in 2026 and 2027
How much are fines worth if they are not enforced? Not much, but it might be a good business case for the always-broke city of Berlin. After the first fine was issued last week, the housing crisis has been all over the media. Hundreds of tenants are reporting excessive rents (for example, Mitte 440, Pankow 200), but districts lack personnel to process them. Pankow will only get 2 new positions in 2027. Mitte will expand the current 0.5FTE to 2 over the next two years. It’s probably also a bit of a political topic, no? If the government really cared, they could do more.
The housing policy will surely be dominating the September 2026 election campaign. Not sure what the intention of the CDU was to suggest installation of access barriers at all U-Bahn stations, which faced widespread rejection. BVG commented that this would be almost impossible and very expensive to implement.
I looked for German companies in the top 50 companies from Sifted’s 250 fastest-growing startups in 2025. With career links: FINN (Munich) is #1 with 1078.32%, tl;dv (Cologne) is #3 with 736.66%, finmid (Berlin) is #8 with 582.90%, Nelly (Berlin) is #11 with 559.03%, Sewts (Munich) is #20 with 461.38%, and Frontnow (Berlin) is #36 with 336.62%. The data is self-reported, and not all startups submit it.
If you are one of the people who want to escape Berlin's darkness, here is a map of all the destinations you can fly to from BER. Newly added for winter season: Abu Dhabi from November 3x weekly, Kittilä in Finland from January 31 1x weekly, Marsa Alam in Egypt from November 9 1x, London Southend from November 1x, and Seville from October 27 2x. Ryanair cut its capacity from BER: Tel Aviv, Riga, Kaunas, Brussels and Krakow fell off.
If you stay in Berlin, a good cocktail bar would be a good idea! Berlin was again well represented at Mixology Bar awards: Green Door won "Bar of the year – Germany" for the second consecutive year and also took home "Bar team of the year." Buck & Breck received the award for "Bar institution" while their bartender Vito Nicotra was named "Bartender of the year." Arash Ghassemi from Bar Basta earned the title "Host of the year."
Career: Something to keep in mind when you plan your career is to “rise up, jump across” meaning that you should not change your job to get promoted, because it’s unlikely to work well, especially in startup environments. Dave Kellogg explains why.
Career: Starting a new job? Don’t work too fast: you will burn yourself out and your colleagues will probably hate you.
Career: The debate about the impacts of AI on jobs is alive and well. And it seems it does impact hiring of juniors, “the researchers found that while junior roles fell across the board after 2023, the decline over the next six quarters was 7.7% steeper at adopter firms”.
Economist (€) Timeless: 21 facts about throwing good parties includes several good tips on how to make a great party. I can also warmly recommend two-hour cocktail parties, I threw a couple, and the concept really works well.
Briefly
Bad news: Statista -80 in Germany; 4000 employees left Mercedes with severance pay.
Stats: Germany has 502 (!) different federal social benefits. An extremely fragmented system, impossible to navigate.
TAZ (die Tageszeitung), a left-leaning cooperative newspaper, stopped publishing weekday print editions.
Merz called for the establishment of a common European stock exchange. Sensible, but sind wir in der Lage?
Perplexity opened an office in Berlin. Careers. (2 jobs only). Related, look at the drop in traffic to Lovable.
Black Forest Labs (Freiburg, AI) might be the next German unicorn, reportedly raising at €4B valuation.
Can Hamburg-based Hyrox (sports) also pull it off?PSI Software (Berlin, utilities software) was acquired by Warburg Pincus (PE) for over €700M
Revolut has acquired Swifty (Berlin, travel), as the company builds out its AI assistant offering. It also has almost 3x more app downloads than N26 this year. N26 also reportedly has internal power struggles about the supervisory board seats.
All the patents from Lilum (Munich, airtaxi) were sold to their competitor Archer Aviation.
Tide (UK, business bank) will cooperate with Iwoca (UK/Berlin, credit platform) in their expansion in Germany.
Weekly social
Reddit: Animals that don’t sound how they look. My favourite is Piha.
Reddit: A couple of good comments in the Top secrets of Berlin that redditors are willing to share.
💸 Funded in Berlin & Germany
Afori | Berlin / Barcelona | AI platform for insurance brokers | €4M | No careers.
Bees & Bears | Berlin | Climate embedded finance platform | €5M Seed | Careers.
DiaMonTech | Berlin | Non-invasive blood glucose measurement | €12M | Careers.
Arbio | Gräfelfing | AI property management for rentals | €31M Series A | Careers.
Tubulis | Munich | Antibody-drug conjugate cancer medicines | €308M Series C | Careers.
HyImpulse | Neuenstadt am Kocher | Hybrid satellite launch systems | €15M | Careers.
😅 Meanwhile
the same is valid for vibe coding? Vibe coding is fun until the chatbot starts doing what it thinks you wanted instead of what you didn’t think through and explain properly.
Igor Ranc
Founder & Curator of Handpicked Berlin
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