😳 Was geht, Berlin? Are we in crisis?
Issue #71 (02 Oct) – marketing and comms jobs; solar plant subsidy; Friedrichstraße in 1896; tree catalogue of Berlin; the Leading European Tech Scaleups; on focus and reading books; MrBeast.
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Programming note: When was the last time you worked in complete silence? I usually use background music, but produced this issue only with the background noise of my keyboard and the fridge. Refreshing! (But also: why is my fridge so loud, Samsung?)
You can make my day and recommend my Instagram to yourself or someone else or follow my LinkedIn page. Vanity metrics, you know? Also:
🌟 Handpicked Kleinanzeigen & Tech Events
🎪 Events in the next two weeks:
Unicorns in Tech Afterwork | Thu 5.10 at 18.30 | St. Oberholz Cafe
Monthly Meet Up from Silicon Allee | Tue 10.10 at 9.00 | St. Oberholz Cafe
Nobody submitted an event. What a pity. Down below ⤵️
😎 Cool stuff:
Cat is a freelance digital designer who creates beautiful, engaging and accessible websites, apps, branding, leaflets, magazines, banners and whatever else your imagination can conjure. Check out her portfolio!
🔍 Searching for roles:
Nida is looking for a Quality Assurance Engineer position. She’s ready to jump-start into a Manual QA engineer role but also start building automation using interesting frameworks and AI models. 6 years of experience.
Marina is looking for writing work! She crafts creative content as well as technical & SEO-optimized pieces. For a poem that will never end, she keeps a running list of Google searches.
Kumar is actively seeking data analytics roles. Skilled in Python, MySQL, and Tableau. Experienced in data cleaning, machine learning for classification, regression, and clustering. Open to collaborative projects.
👀 Handpicked twenty-something
🚨🚨 A friend is looking for a first class data scientist with strong LLM/NLP experience to be a part of a founding team. Berlin and London. Do you know someone? Drop me an email or LinkedIn DM. (No service provider BS please!)
📨 Readers submitted
submit here link; it’s still free.
🧞♂️ Marketing and Communications
More positions in Handpicked online database.
🤩 If you find value in my work, I would love you to upgrade and become a supporter. Not only will this help sustain it, but you will also invest in your growth and learning. It is the minimum allowed by the Substack platform: €5.00 per month and €30.00 per year. That’s cents per all useful links here:
Benefits here.
🗞 Top inspiration snippets
🇩🇪 Berlin & Other good stuff
🚴🏻 🚨 Jonny Whitlam, that blond long-haired Instagram star, still has some places free on his unique Berlin Cold War history bike tour this Sunday, 8th of October. Which also happens to be the best day of the year.
☀️ If your balcony is big enough, you can get a subsidized Balkonkraftwerk, a.k .a. a small solar plant! Gloomy_Intern8345 wasn’t particularly gloomy writing a short guide on it! ❤️
😎 In early summer 2024, we’ll get the €29 ticket back. Hip, hip …. hooray. Meanwhile, Last generation activists glued themselves to their own cars on the A100. Genuinely innovative!
🎃 When someone asks you, “What is the record weight of a pumpkin in Berlin and Brandenburg?” you can reply with “989,5 kg." How is this even possible? (RBB) Since its the season, I recommend this thai pumpkin soup from my lindy collection.
☺️ “(B)ut how could the shops survive without parking?!” comment made me chuckle (r/berlin). Friedrichstraße in 1896:
🌳 You’re not gonna believe this, but we have most of the trees (cca. 840k) in Berlin tagged and catalogued (age included!) You can also adopt a tree and help water it.
😔 Bad and crisis news:
Snap terminated its AR department, so all the employees in Berlin-based Fit Analytics got laid off (Gründerszene). Snap took them over 2y ago. I published Snap positions previously, but I'm not sure if Snap = Fit Analytics!
According to a recent study by the Ifo Institute, German companies are hesitant to hire new employees. The study shows the employment barometer dropped to its lowest since February 2021.
Okay, this is almost the last one, I promise, but: Leading German economic research institutes have revised their forecasts, now expecting the German economy to shrink by 0.6% in 2023 instead of growing by 0.3%. Expect a lot of not gonna make it (ngmi) excuses in the coming months!
🐣 But! There is an opportunity in every crisis! In case you struggle at work or finding work, maybe you can start something fresh on the side to get your energy levels up? I don’t want to sound like one of the cringe life coaches from Instagram, but starting something helps. A hobby, a book, or, hold on, a newsletter? Yes! GET IN THERE!
🤮 Imagine you buy a flat, and then the developer goes bankrupt? This happened to 800 privately funded apartments across 12 sites in Berlin after Nuremberg’s Project Immobilien went belly-up. (RBB) In the meantime, the average real-estate prices dropped by 9.9% year-over-year and 2.1% since last quarter. Phew! More at Destatis (sorry, they constantly change the links, so I removed it!), but the chart doesn’t look nice and means the biggest y-o-y drop since they measured the thing from 2000 onwards.
r/berlin choice of the week is this discussion on the reasons why good coffee is expensive, and the reason is “the combination of increasing minimum wage, actual coffee bean prices, energy (heating and electricity), and rents going up...” This makes it expensive to run a cafe. But you could also take your home coffee routine too far.
🎪 Since you like to plan your month, here is the Exberliner list of events to attend this October. I plan to do a couple of impromptu Handpicked event reviews (Instagram).
Career: working for a startup vs big tech from a software engineer perspective (Pragmatic engineer). This is another article I could do, but more like working for a German Großkonzern vs. working for a German scaleup.
📚 Do you read books? I did, but I stopped. 🥹 Let’s get back to reading: these 38 reading rules from Ryan Holiday are a good motivation. “You say you don’t have time to read but what does the screen time app on your phone say? What does your calendar say?”
🦄 According to France Digitale, the Leading European Tech Scaleups 2023 from Germany are: 1Komma5, Anydesk, Billie, Clue App, CoachHub, FINN, Getsafe, Isar Aerospace, LeanIX, Lingoda, Moss, Pitch, Spryker, Sunfire, Urban Sports Club and xentral. More info here.
💬 Briefly:
Sixt, an extremely well run company, made a strategic investment in Blacklane. That’s a good vote of confidence for Blacklane (which is partially owned by Mercedes at app. 30%). Careers.
Renk, a defence contractor from Augsburg, will IPO this week in Frankfurt.
1Komma5° extended its €215M Series B but didn’t say precisely by how much, double-digit million sum. Hmm.
Online supermarket Knuspr is aquiring Bringmeister, a Berlin-based grocery delivery service.
In 2021 Cologne-based DeepL reported revenue of €28.2M (vs €13.4M the previous year). DeepL has been profitable since 2013, with a 2021 annual surplus of €1.5M. Careers.
Berlin-based Raisin crossed €50B of customer deposits. Congrats, have a free Careers link!
💸 Recently funded in Berlin & Germany
numa | Berlin | Offers short-term room and apartment rentals with a digital hospitality platform. | $59M | Careers.
Novo | Berlin | Dedicated to the decarbonization of real estate at scale. | €1M Pre-Seed | No careers.
Concular | Berlin | A digital ecosystem for circular construction | €2.5M Seed | Careers.
osapiens | Mannheim | Specializes in automated solutions for transparency and sustainability in global supply chains. | €25M | Careers.
traceless | Hamburg | Develops compostable packaging solutions with innovative biomaterial technology. | €36.6M | Careers.
Resourcify | Hamburg | Aims to dramatically reduce waste in companies through waste management and recycling. | €14M Series A | Careers.
smatch | Hamburg | Focuses on stock management, specifically addressing surplus inventory in the textile sector. | €2.5M | Careers.
Vamo | Köln | Specializes in heat pumps, offering planning, installation, and maintenance services. | €3M | Careers.
metergrid | Stuttgart | Aims to provide clean, affordable, and decentralized energy in multi-family homes. | €2.7M Seed | Careers.
🤓 Timeless and useful
I opened with working in silence. It’s because I re-read my own notes on the beautiful book Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. It’s one the most unusual books I ever read. I wanted to share this quote about focus, about burning like a good bonfire:
“In order not to leave any traces, when you do some thing, you should do it with your whole body and mind; you should be concentrated on what you do. You should do it completely, like a good bonfire. You should not be a smoky fire. You should burn yourself completely. If you do not burn yourself completely, a trace of yourself will be left in what you do. You will have something remaining which is not completely burned out.
Do you feel the heat, the fire? Are you focused on doing this and this thing only, so that there is nothing left at the end, only ash? Burn, because smoky fire will make you cough and cry. Read my complete review here.
And try to eat focusing on the food only.
😅 Meanwhile
light without the context
This is a footer slice of social media facts for you. It took MrBeast 14 years (Tweet) to reach 184 million subscribers on YouTube. Still lots of time for Handpicked! 😂
✌️ Handpicked essentials:
- The dashboard you missed on the Salary survey!
- Get reminded for the next salary survey!
- Write it down now! Or why you should journal at work?
- What do hiring managers look for in CVs?
- Submit your position for free: your TA team will be grateful
- Do you want to sponsor Handpicked and reach all these enaged readers?
✨ Berlin Events Weekly: the best resource for events in Berlin ✨
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