Hello you gorgeous people,
things are progressing nicely: now the newsletters are so big that it’s very hard not to offend or at least annoy someone with each issue. Last time it was my CCP comment. Sorry.
In other news, I now have an outsourced Berlin event calendar to Luma and events page. The concept of curation stays: I will gatekeep for quality, interesting events and good people. Do consider following the calendar, because why not? Thank you so much.
I will keep publishing the most interesting events in Careers, my Thursday newsletter.
📌 Pinned
This video about pensions made the rounds last week. The main problem is that boomers are getting old and will soon retire. And the pension system is pay-as-you-go, where 25% (!) of tax revenues are used for pension payouts. This is clearly unsustainable, and I have absolutely zero faith that boomers in power have the will and the power to make the painful (and unpopular) decisions that will mostly affect people most likely to vote for them. It’s an extremely hard political problem. At least the video ends on a slightly positive note.
Absolutely related: after 1 year of Merz’s government, AfD is now the strongest party in the polls. Merz is also the least popular chancellor ever at this point in time. And every single disappointment with public services (e.g. trains not running and streets being dirty) is potentially a win for the populists. Now, if people struggle with jobs, the state is broke and doesn’t invest in public services (also because it needs to pay for pensions), who is the easiest to blame? Yes, exactly: the immigrants.
Are you saving privately for retirement, beyond the state pension?
🗞 Berlin & Germany
If you are into compensation and benchmarks, join me tomorrow at a Ravio webinar. We will talk about Berlin tech salaries.
Big news: we are starting a new meetup series called Everyday AI Club, where non-techies will learn from selected techies about AI. You can also apply to become a speaker or to show us a demo of how you work with AI. We also ran our second “Build your first App with AI workshop” and again got great feedback. Our third event will be even better. Perfect for your learning & development budget.
German start-ups raised €1.7B from investors in Q1 2026 (+ 6% YoY). But three-quarters of the money came from abroad (primarily the US). This is where most of the potential profits will also go. AI-related startups are still hot (almost €1B and 58% of the volume vs 43% last year, whereas the top 4 US AI companies raised €188B). For comparison: Germany invests about €90 per capita in venture capital versus €510 in the US.
Related, SPRIND (federal innovation agency) launched "Next Frontier AI", a €125M programme funding up to 10 teams developing alternative AI paradigms beyond current models, with seed funding and 24 months of support.
The "Berlin autofrei" initiative has failed. By the Saturday midnight deadline, organisers had gathered around 140k signatures. They would need roughly 35k more for a referendum.
I ended up in Kalle Halle food court and somehow “Mogg” rang a bell. But I wasn’t sure where from. I asked what the best-seller is and, people, this Reuben sandwich was truly excellent. I went back to the shop afterwards to congratulate them. Warm recommendation!
Another culinary tip is Slovenian wine. Underrated for years, but now finally getting the credit it deserves. I am very happy to support the fourth iteration of the wine festival with mostly Slovenian wines, Wine Odyssey. End of May. 20% off with code HANDPICKED. See you there!
Hmm. If the IT Service Center Berlin (ITDZ) — our top digitalisation authority — spends €14M (🤯) on A4 copier paper over two years, plus another million on A3 sheets and watermarked certificate paper rated for ISO 9706 archival permanence, to be delivered raumgenau und ohne gesonderte Vergütung… how well is the digitalisation actually going?
Germany is planning to scrap the one-year tax-free holding period on cryptocurrency. Finance Minister Klingbeil confirmed the plans (details expected early July); options under discussion include taxing crypto gains at full income tax rates (up to 45%) or a flat ~26%. The change would affect around 7M crypto holders and aims to raise €2B+.
Stats: Corporate insolvencies in Germany hit 1,776 in April, the highest monthly count since June 2005, +10% YoY and 82% above the pre-pandemic April average (2016–2019). Hotels/gastronomy and real estate were hardest hit; Berlin and Bavaria saw the most cases (Berlin driven by an unusual number of hotel insolvencies). [more] Some of you might remember that the Senate plans to build more hotels.
Berlin-related headlines
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🌿 Worth your time
I still remember how the book “Why we sleep” destroyed my sleep. Here is a reminder that people commonly slept in two shifts each night. They went to sleep early and woke up around midnight for a couple of hours. What really works for me if I wake up during the night is to start reading a magazine or a book, instead of rolling around bed hating the fact that I am awake.
I enjoyed this essay on the 5 things to do before you die by Benjamin Mathes. Poetic and, weirdly, centre-aligned.
📌 Briefly
Outside interests #1: GitHub outages since the Microsoft acquisition. [more] Crazy!
Outside interests #2: LinkedIn rejected a free user's GDPR Article 15 request for their list of profile visitors (a feature it normally reserves for Premium). Privacy outfit Noyb is pursuing the case as a potential precedent on whether companies can paywall personal data they hold. [more]
Outside interests #3: Tesla's push for a fast EU approval of Full Self-Driving is running into safety concerns from regulators in Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Norway, citing speeding, behaviour on icy roads and the misleading "FSD" label. [more]
Layoff wave: DeepL (Cologne, AI translation) is cutting ~250 roles, citing the AI-driven structural shift [more]. Cloudflare ~20% (~1,100 jobs), same reasoning. Biontech (Mainz, biotech) up to 1,860 (~22%) and closing nearly all German production sites by end of 2027, with Covid vaccine production moving to Pfizer [more]. Festo (Esslingen, industrial automation) 1,300 of 8,200 jobs in Germany. Commerzbank (Frankfurt, banking) another 3,000 by 2030 (on top of 3,900 announced in Feb 2025), framed as defence against Unicredit's takeover bid [more]. Interhyp (Munich, mortgage broker) ~160, roughly every tenth role [more].
HelloFresh (Berlin, food delivery) Q1 revenue -13% to €1.68B (-7.7% currency-adjusted), adjusted EBITDA -60% to €24M. Already withdrew from Italy in February. Spain exit planned. [more]
Careful! A new phone scam is targeting Trade Republic (Berlin, fintech) customers — fraudsters spoof Berlin area codes to impersonate the company's new phone customer service and pressure customers into sharing sensitive information.
Accountable (Belgium, fintech) is being sued by the Berlin Chamber of Tax Advisors over its "tax coaches" feature, which the chamber argues amounts to unlicensed tax advice. The case is being watched as a precedent for AI in regulated professions in Germany. [more]
Zalando (Berlin, e-commerce) Q1 revenue +24% YoY to €3B and adjusted EBIT €64.8M, helped by the About You integration and B2B. ~10M customers have used the Zalando AI Assistant. [more]
Idealo (Berlin, e-commerce) launched its own retail-media product, "Idealo Ads". [more] Amazon is making a killing with their ads business.
When it rains, it pours. Hertha BSC's main sponsor CheckCars24 has stopped paying for six months, owing around €1M. The club is reviewing options to exit the contract while also struggling on the pitch after missing promotion. [more]
SAP (Walldorf, software) is acquiring Freiburg-based Prior Labs, a pioneer in tabular foundation models, and plans to invest over €1B in the company over four years. [more]
Bayer (Leverkusen, pharma) is acquiring Perfuse Therapeutics (US, ophthalmology) for up to $2.45B. Its first major pharma acquisition in years. [more]
Vonovia (Bochum, residential real estate) Q1 adjusted EBITDA +1.4% to €712M, adjusted net profit -7.2% to €366M. Average German rent €8.26/m² (+3.8% YoY); in Berlin, where Vonovia owns around 138k flats, the average is €8.23/m² with 0.8% vacancy. [more]
Germany has accounted for ~50% of European defence-tech funding since the start of 2024 (~€2B of €4B). It’s now Europe's primary defence-tech hub. [more]
This week's Coffee Talk: Elio Qoshi
A designer for open source systems. The full conversation, jobs, events & what the community is up to, every Thursday this week on Friday. Free.
😅 Meanwhile
so true
Weekly social and outside interests
Reddit: Conny is really losing their reputation, and the search “conny + reddit” is surely not doing them any favours.
Reddit: The mandatory “tipping in Berlin” thread. I have absolutely no bad conscience tipping 0% at the bar. Everyone hates it, but the terminal providers don’t care. Someone put it well: have no guilt towards a machine.
LinkedIn: now we know why the em dash is called the em dash. (It’s because it is the width of the letter m.)
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