Guten Morgen,
what a great sunny week! This isn’t an English expression, but I am still gonna write it: I was so busy I almost met myself. Who would have thought that splitting a newsletter into two and starting the biggest project of the year would be so much work? But I do enjoy the process.
Salary Trends had a good first week, and I’d be so happy if you could share it with your friends/WhatsApp group or your team (nothing better than a good Slack channel post, HR is gonna love you!). I prepared some blurbs to make it easier for you. Also, a big thanks to Ravio, our benchmarking partner, and Factofly, our independent work partner, for supporting this year's survey.
🗞 Berlin & Germany
We started something new: a list of financial products and services that we or members of our community use, especially useful if you are looking for a new broker, bank or insurer. This is intended as an experiment and will be updated regularly. Feedback is highly appreciated.
What happens when Isabelle provides a great one-day itinerary for what to do in Berlin if you only have one day? A comment on “which tours” and then free tours in Berlin: recommendations from Jonny Whitlam. Save it for when you get visits.
Remember the Pankow Smiley Portal, where you could see how clean/dirty some of the tested restaurants were? It’s no more. One reason is that the district couldn’t afford it anymore (€16k + €5k annualy in support on top of food inspection team’s regular duties), second is that there was no city-wide support and third, legal uncertainty because Berlin's parliament repealed the food inspection transparency law ("Saubere-Küchen-Gesetz") in early 2025, removing the legal basis for systematically publishing inspection results online. The Senate's position is that publishing results online eats up staff time that would be better spent doing actual inspections. 😅
Since I started my business, I used Papierkram for invoices (btw, you shouldn’t use only Excel and PDF). After Accountable advertised here a couple of weeks ago, I decided to give it a spin and… uf, so so much smoother. My invoicing now takes a couple of minutes compared with an hour before. And the invoicing (and a bank account) is for free. Try it. (This is an affiliate link with no additional cost to you, but your registration will support this project.)
We celebrated the 8th of March yesterday, which is always a good opportunity to point out the Gender Pay Gap. This usually brings out the mostly-male (yet to see a woman talking about it!) “well akshually” crowd claiming it’s “not that high”, “bad data”, “not looking at the details” and other arguments. This TikTok explains both sides of the argument. Unfortunately, in German, aber schau trotzdem rein. It fits well to add this article by Cee Cee on eight restaurants led or run by women. I’ve been to Ari’s and loved Hallmann & Klee. There is a useful list at the end of the article.
A Gender Gap is also real in startup financing. All-female founding teams received only 1 cent per euro of venture capital invested in 2024, while male teams received 90 cents (mixed teams received 9 cents). [more]
Google opened a new AI center in Berlin, an expanded office space in its existing offices in town. They announced a research partnership with TU Munich and a $1M grant to CityLAB Berlin, a public innovation lab. [more]
Related, Berlin's senate plans to build and invest in a dedicated defence startup ecosystem. Berlin Partner will take over the coordination. [more]
Tagesspiegel has a nice visual article on the prices in 2749 restaurants and cafes around Germany after VAT was lowered from 19% to 7% in January. Out of 346 restaurants in Berlin, 68% kept the prices the same, 19% raised the prices, but only 13% lowered them. Partly it’s because the personnel and ingredients prices have gone up. One of the places that is cheaper is Gazzo in Neukölln. I love their Zucchini, Feta & Lemon pizza.
Please, please, share the Salary Trends survey with someone. And if you haven’t yet, submit your data.
Stats: Germans spent an average of 180 minutes per day on smartphones (+30 minutes vs 2024). [more]
Berlin-related headlines
Senate inspection office: Suspicion of rent gouging in more than 200 cases [read]
2500 beds at Checkpoint Charlie: "Largest hostel in Europe" set to open in Berlin in 2027 [read]
What Berlin districts can do with the additional littering fines [read] (the main problem is actually the lack of inspectors)
Pilot project at five locations: Berlin tests free period products in public toilets [read]
Funding scandal: Witnesses raise serious allegations against Chialo and Wedl-Wilson [read]
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🌿 Worth your time
A great visualisation and calculation of the energy use of different devices, so you can see how much charging your phone costs in Germany. Spoiler, 1 cent.
For the Mac users out there, check out GrandPerspective to help you visualise what’s taking up space on your drive. I successfully cleaned up my disk as part of my “busy work that could be postponed, but I still did it because I wanted to procrastinate other things” this week, and it worked great with asking Claude to help.
Did you know that everything should be paid for twice? First, when you buy something and second, when you need to invest effort and initiative to gain in benefits. In any case, having less will mean having more time. An excellent mental model.
📌 Briefly
I mentioned Brewdog’s Frankfurter Tor closing last week, but actually, all the locations are closing, which is a pity because Mitte was an easy (but loud) option to host a meetup.
Goldies (burgers) plans to add 15 new locations to their existing 15 this year. [more]
An interesting rant from a German VC scene: Philipp Klöckner ranting about Frank Thelen. [more]
Since last week, the Anthropic/OpenAI/Department of War drama has been dominating the AI bubble. Here is an interesting insight on the matter by Ed Zitron (a well-known AI sceptic, but at least he doesn’t talk about himself in third person like Gary Marcus). Even if only half is true, who are the bad guys?
The mess at The Berliner caught me by surprise, but it’s been going on since last October.
The enshittification of the internet is a real problem. Next to this amazing video, the Norwegian Consumer Council sent a letter to the policymakers demanding they tackle the dependency on Big Tech. [more]
Axel Springer acquired Bisnow (US, B2B real estate platform) and merged it with Morning Brew to form the Brew Media Group. [more]
The IG Metall union again failed to win a majority in works council elections at Tesla's Grünheide factory. Independent union list 'Giga United' won the majority. [more]
Holidu (Munich, vacation rental) acquired bestfewo.de (Potsdam).
cargo.one (Berlin, logistics) acquired Cargofive (Lisbon) as part of their latest €17M investment round. [more]
X (aka Twitter) lost 11M EU users in the second half of 2025 — a 15% drop from 76M to 64.8M. [more]
Wolt, owned by DoorDash, launched Wolt Market, a weekly grocery shopping service and a direct competitor to Knuspr, Picnic, Flink and others. [more]
Bayer reported a loss of €3.62B driven by approximately €6B in legal costs related to glyphosate lawsuits. [more]
PwC Deutschland plans to hire approximately 2,200 new employees in 2026. [more]
Raisin (Berlin, fintech) is expanding to Italy, its 11th market.
This week's Coffee Talk: Raquel Fedato
She runs several legendary parties/festivals. Her tips, jobs, events & what the community is up to, every Thursday. Free, unsubscribe anytime.
p.s. We will also have a great raffle by Fotografiska.
😅 Meanwhile
Bavaria is a special place
Weekly social and outside interests
Reddit: No idea why the post was removed, but the discussion is still there: some (horrifying) stories from people working in “behind the doors” industries.
elsewhere: someone visualised the supply chain of cocaine in Germany: koksböse. An excellent project.
elsewhere: BahnBet went viral pretty much everywhere I hang out. A joke website with prediction market dynamics where you can bet paper money on the DB delays. I haven’t tried it, but some people seem to be very active.
Don’t miss
Need help with finding a flat, insurance, have problems at work or are you lost in career or life? Talk to our Handpicked Experts.
Handpicked Community talking about money.
How to learn German? Three very hands-on articles.
Handpicked recs: a growing archive of recommendations.
