One Month in Berlin
This post is by Mattan Griffel, CEO at @onemonthrails. Follow @mattangriffel on Twitter.
Our startup, One Month, recently moved from New York City to Berlin for a month. This was our experience.
We rented a three bedroom apartment on Airbnb in a previously gritty but quickly gentrifying area of Berlin called Neukölln. There are five people on our team and we were packed into the three bedrooms.
A lot of people have asked why we decided to go to Berlin for a month. I’ve come up with three reasons:
- Our team grew to five people very quickly and not everyone really knew each other. We wanted to build a culture where people feel comfortable sharing and asking each other for anything. There’s nothing like spending a month in a foreign city with a group of people to help you get to know them.
- Berlin is a very convenient place to go. It has a great culture and tech scene, it’s much cheaper than most of the other major cities, and most Berliners speak English so it’s easy to get by.
- My co-founder and I decided that if we weren’t working on a startup, we would probably go visit Berlin. In a few months as the company grows it will probably be much harder, so we said, “fuck it let’s take the whole team.”
Day One
The first day that we arrived the jetlag hit us pretty hard. We arrived at around 11 am, nestled into our rooms and passed out for most of the day.
When we woke up, one of my friends who was already living in Berlin told us that there was a party going on at a club called Ritter Butzke, so around midnight we got ready and went out.
That should have given us a good idea of what our trip would be like. We ended up staying out and dancing until sunrise.
Distractions
One of my worries was that it would be hard to get work done while in Berlin. I had read that there are a lot of distractions and people who often go to Berlin with good intentions end up getting comfortable and complacent because of how easy it is to get by.
Indeed, we found that on any given night you can probably go to a dance party and stay out until at least 8 am the next morning.
At the end of the day we managed to find a good balance between work and play, but there were definitely a few nights that I would characterize as more of a nap than restful sleep.
First impressions
As soon as we arrived in Berlin, we naturally started cataloguing all of the interesting differences that stood out to us between New York City and Berlin. Lee, our Head of Student Happiness, posted the following on Facebook:
First impressions of Berlin:
1. Pretty Chill
2. German is oddly english.
3. A lot of dog poop in the sidewalks that might make you want to step in the bike lane.
4. Watch out for the bike lane.
5. Cabs are mostly new Mercedes.
6. Americans don’t realize how ‘free’ our internet is. GEMA blocks A LOT of youtube videos for copyright grounds.
7. Mad bikers in the bike lane.
Followed up with:
More thoughts on Berlin:
- It might be the Portland of Germany.
- Business open at like noon and you never really know if it’s going to be open or closed.
- No one uses Credit. Everything is all Euro. All the time.
- I never know what to do with Euro coins. It’s weird to have like $15 in coin.
Here are some of the things that immediately stood out to me about Berlin:
- Things are much cheaper in Berlin than in New York City. You can get a $2 Bulleit Bourbon at John Muir. Rent is cheaper. Quality of life is very high in Berlin for low wages. As a startup, that means you don’t have to pay people as much and so your burn rate goes down.
- In Berlin everyone drinks Club Mate It’s a carbonated mate soda with a lot of caffeine (one bottle is about the same as a cup of coffee). Berliners drink it during the day and they drink it out at the club too — you get an opened bottle, drink a little down, and then they fill the rest up with vodka.
- People are less afraid of eye-contact in Berlin than New York City. Since coming back, it bothers me than in New York City people avert their eyes like they’re afraid almost immediately after making eye contact. I feel like there’s something wrong with that.
- Like Lee mentioned, the bike lanes are part of the sidewalk and you will get yelled at if you accidentally walk in it. This might seem trivial but it’s so subtle and very jarring the first time someone whizzes by you yelling obscenities.
- Almost everyone is really good at speaking English. That’s because most Germans learn English in high school AND another language too. Way to be on it Germans.
The scene
Berlin is a fascinating city.
It’s a hub for design, art, and creativity. And yet there’s not much in terms of business.
Why is that? To my understanding it’s because Berlin never had stability. Through the cold war, it was divided by a wall that wasn’t taken down until 1989. Had a full-scale war actually broken out at any point before then, Berlin surely would have been one of the first cities decimated, so few risk-intolerant businesses settled in.
It was also literally cut off from the rest of the world. Airplanes were the only way West Berliners could access the rest of the western world that wasn’t under East German control.
I think the thing that makes Berlin so awesome is the abundant infrastructure. There are large abandoned warehouses that are used for illegal house parties or co-working spaces or art spaces or for housing. That doesn’t exist in New York City.
In terms of tech, the startup scene in Berlin is still fairly small but it’s much more developed than I expected. There seemed to be meetups going on every night that we could attend if we wanted to. We did two breakfasts at Betahaus and attended some other startup events.
In terms of where we worked, ended up alternating between Betahaus (a co-working space) and St. Oberholz (a coffee shop), which are both really good places to work out of.
That was cool because it still felt like the scene was small enough to really get to meet a lot of people.
The time difference
Another weird part was the time-zone difference. Berlin is six hours ahead of New York City and six hours ahead of San Francisco, so calls and meetings can be really hard to schedule. Somedays my meetings went well into the evening because that was still daytime in New York City or San Francisco.
An unintended good side-effect of this is that most people in the US are still asleep until at least 2 pm Berlin-time, so the mornings are a really good time to get work done without getting distracted by the barrage of email or Facebook messages.
The downsides of living in Berlin
- There’s less investment in Berlin. There aren’t nearly as many VCs in Europe let alone Berlin as there are in Silicon Valley or New York City. And those guys are less likely to invest in a company based in Berlin because it’s further away. They won’t be able to visit as often and they don’t have as strong of an understanding of the industry and culture of Germany. You also don’t get a lot of the other advantages for startups of living in a major city, including the density of other startups, companies, and potential markets.
- People don’t work as hard in Berlin. The distractions available and the low cost of living makes it such that a lot of people only work a few days a week and hang out the rest of the time. People do a lot of drugs in the clubs of Berlin, so there’s potential to go off the deep end. That being said, there are an equal amount if not more distractions available in New York City.
- There’s much less business and industry in Berlin. You’re unlikely to find the kind of companies that you’d want to do business development or partner up with. That makes Berlin a tough place to be for some startups, particularly B2B startups. If you’re an enterprise company that relies heavily on offline sales, don’t go to Berlin. If you’re servicing the financial industry, don’t go to Berlin. etc.
Okay so would I recommend another startup move to Berlin or do what we did? Yes.
In general, I’ve always liked finding under-appreciated opportunities, and Berlin is definitely under-appreciated right now. It’s growing incredibly quickly and as an early-entrant into the startup ecosystem here you have the opportunity to be connected to what may end up becoming one of the biggest startup hubs in the world.
