Before anyone loses their mind over the title, let’s take a trip down the late 20th Century’s Punk Rock Lane. Sex Pistols were one of the most influential punk rock bands ever – it would not be a stretch that their influence does exist today. In a nutshell, the band became famous in a very short amount of time, gaining notoriety and spawning a gazillion copycats until they imploded. The unfortunate death of their bassist, the aptly named Sid Vicious made sure that no real return was possible. Malcolm McLaren, the bands manager has to take credit for a lot of the publicity, however his move to release the 1980 movie “The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle” where he claims that everything was manufactured by him from the get-go raised more than a few eyebrows. This was vehemently opposed by the remaining members of Sex Pistols and, personally, while I see the value and contributions of McLaren, taking credit for everything, given the resources we, the public, have at hand we can call the points raised by the film as an at least partially rewritten narrative.
Rewriting narratives is an exercise in complete intellectual dishonesty – not only topics get rewritten at will but even in the event something didn’t go as well as intended, you lose the power of reflection and future adjustment – this is why blameless postmortems are a great learning tool and yes,crap will hit the fan in your org and you’d better not repeat the mistakes of the past. . So, not only rewriting narratives is ethically wrong, it also represents a material loss of learning opportunity- one that your competitors might be utilizing to its fullest potential.
One such rewriting of history that takes place over social media is rapid deflation of Berlin’s startup up scene (June 30 2025, berlinstartupjobs had a few tens of jobs less than 150 – in the scene’s heyday it had easily an order of magnitude more) .Every so often, an entrepreneur will start posting how the antique rules of the German State, dinosaur investors and excessive taxation and a gazillion other reasons are keeping the startup scene DOWN and they need to GO NOW, gosh darnit! How about we change them labour laws while at it, them damn kids aren’t working as hard as they can.
What these folks conveniently leave out is that they had their chance and they blew it – royally. While I do not consider myself a member of the Berlin startup scene, I am by definition a member of the Berlin tech community. Given my time here I have seen a few different eras, each with its own anti-patterns. Before starting a cursory analysis, one has to keep in mind that while Germany is the economic powerhouse of Europe, Berlin was never affluent and for a long time was one of the poorest and cheapest country capitals worldwide. That was reflected in the local tech scene – a few software houses, a few agencies, maybe a German corp, the odd research institute and a few R&D centers of multinationals and that was about it tech scene wise – absolutely no comparison whatsoever with say, London (and its surrounding areas). While I was not born and raised in Berlin (which means I missed a hell of a lot of fun), I have been here more than 15 years – in a working capacity no less. As always, the rest of the article is in direct correlation with my own personal bubble but for the rest of this article, let’s consider that it is a larger than average bubble/ I also promise to report only stuff that I have either witnessed personally or verified – in case of verification sources will not proactively be revealed, to protect their anonymity.
Examining the history of Berlin startups a huge landmark stands out: Rocket Internet. Funded in 2007, the company initially started “deploying proven Internet business models”. This is one way to put it, another way would be essentially copying to the extent of cloning what worked in the US, rapidly executing these “models” initially in Germany and, after the local wells dried out, in parts of the developing world. If the startups caused a dent, they would be bought and “integrated” by the original companies (i.e. Zappos would buy its clone to shut it down etc) or in the unlikely case they ended up with one enormous hit – Zalando. If they failed to cause a dent, well, we can imagine what this meant, part of the business, huh? The timing for this strategy was proven to be favorable and the Samwer brothers became stinking rich (more power to them – no hate here). A few other places followed suit and that kickstarted the first era of the Berlin Startup “Renessance” – a careful reader will already see the anti-patterns forming. Some of the ones I have observed either in person (as a service provider to startups) or heard from people I trust fully (no hearsay, no Greek cab drivers here, sorry).
While the anti-patterns are almost too numerous to list, I decided to pick a few that I find substantial and, perhaps surprisingly understated in the narratives – protecting the memory of the faithfully departed startup scene perhaps? The first one, is what you get risk-averse investors with “make-a-buck-quick” founders? Episode II’s level of cloning. Sugarcoating as “execution excellence”, “tried and true business model” or “the X for Y” where X being the dominant player in a well-known field, Y being a vertical “LinkedIn for Continental Bulldogs” is a made up example and fueled by initial successes of Rocket Internet (and assorted) ventures, all bets were off. At some point, when Zalando was a runaway success, pitch-decks started ending in “-ando” appeared all over the place – a cargo cult way to replicate the success of Zalandi perhaps? If it worked, great! If not, everyone has their butts covered since a “tried and true business model was chosen”. Thankfully, funding was relatively small for a lot of startups (to the tune of 1 or 2 million euros so no real harm was done). The fact that copying someone else has significant drawbacks (extremely low barrier of entry which make it way too easy for competitors to rain in your parade stands out) but given the transient nature of copycats (“quick exit or bust”) who cares about solving a real problem or even examining product market fit. Just make sure you are the X for Y ending in -ando and you’re golden.
The actual startup organizational structure reveals a lot as well. I am not the kind of person getting too hang-up on titles (I would rather be caught dead if I ever put whatever companies want to call my seniority and the past is the past, none if that ex-whatever stuff on *my* LinkedIn heading) and paths but “flat hierarchies” was the Orwellian bane of Berlin startups. In Orwell’s classic “Animal Farm” once an autocracy started to form all animals were equal, just some animals were more equal than others. Similarly, in “flat hierarchies” everyone is that the same level, it is just some folks are flatter that others – usually those claiming to be “close to the business”. The situation was especially bad for engineers – who were often viewed as disposable execution mules with minimal say – “experts in their domain but not close to the business”. If we are to believe McLaren, while the decisions were supposed to be done by the creative elements (the actual band) they were made by him – how flat is that?
“Hey now mr. Engineer, just hold up one second – are you not engineers supposed to have been paid royally in your halcyon days? And is it not Berlin cheap? And how about them perks?” I can hear some naysayers go. And they will be false on all three counts. When all you are creating are CRUD apps with no real plan for reliability, security or scalability, the bar of who you need to hre to build what becomes quite low. Berlin actually got really lucky on this one for a short time: economic upheaval in a number of EU countries, including my ex-homeland Greece allowed to get some decent people for pennies on the dollar as startup salaries in Berlin were, are and I would be good, hard-earned cash will be way too low – not even competitive for the German market (and given the German market’s level of engineering salaries, that is saying *something*). The fact that Berlin was relatively cheap for the first few years of 10s helped to create the urban legend that “you do not need London money, here we are all poor-but-sexy” to create a fabricated myth to keep salaries artificially low. Of course, the very same folks working for a small fraction of their non-Berlin counterparts got the blame once Berlin got expensive – there were actual demonstrations against Google opening an innovation campus in Berlin but hey! Everyone can use a good scapegoat, right – especially in Germany). As for perks, there were actual company pages listing as perks the mandatory, paid health insurance – something that you pay for no matter if you want or not. So, once folks got their feet solidly on the ground they would either move out (pre-COVID) or use the remote work option (post-COVID). A number of people were also willing to accept the relocation package of certain companies (which was excellent – do not get my wrong, they got that right as German bureaucracy can be a nightmare) only to start counting the days before the “pay us back if you leave before 12 month” clause expired to go somewhere else and get a proper salary. Having been a conscript in Recon Infantry, I even found myself sharing the Infantry’s way to count the days remaining (for those interested: initially count time-in not time-left or else it becomes very discomforting) as not to lose hope. Of course, this pattern got noticed by HR of said companies and their solution was to consider that a person from certain countries using the relocation package fully would be a flight risk after 12 months. Simple and effective and saves the trouble of actually making a place where people would want to stay.
I have a habit of looking at Wired magazine’s top 10 of startups per city – published usually towards the end of the calendar year.. As an engineer, I value deep tech (which takes money, time, skill and excellent organizational skills to build and excellent marketing skills to succeed. Comparing the product complexity or tech level to some other hubs is non-starter. Even comparing with hubs from countries will less means to their disposals, the results can be surprising. However the meat is not what I mentioned – for someone who knows the anti-patterns is not a surprise. If you do follow up after a year with last year’s winner interesting stories emerge – left as an exercise to the reader.
I could go on forever, point way more issues that the “blame Government and lazy Berliners” point out – both of them have a reason to exist but they were not the reason effectively Berlin’s startup scene of today consists of shells of former companies and an ever-growing army of “advisors”, asking for a high fee so you can get a vanity funding (vanity funding being the fact that folks are more interested in who is doing the funding, big US VCs being the prize so they can cash out on the secondary securities market and put on their resumes “lead funding round by bigshot USVC”. And, true to intellectual honestly broad strokes do not exist and there is no individual blame – working people in those “startups” did the best they could, outliers did and do exists and people existed who took real risks as opposed to grifting money – it is just the system rewarded the wrong behaviors, i favor of short term optics.. However, I do have a gut feeling with Germany lagging behind in technology and the government preparing to “boost innovation”, we will get a re-heated version of the pretty vacant Berlin startup scene once more. Until next time folks!
Athanasios Kostopoulos 