The City’s Startup Scene Keeps Growing
Young people move to Germany in waves. The country’s economy is booming thanks to its exports, a declining euro.
The question though is, where to go? When searching for jobs in Germany for foreigners, more and more people choose Berlin. In a recent survey about entrepreneurship in Germany, the Deutsche Startup Monitor, the German capital tops the list with the biggest share of employees from other countries.
More than a quarter of the city’s workforce, 33% to be precise, comes from abroad. Employers estimate that number will keep growing within the coming years.
That is for a number of reasons. But mostly thanks to the city’s talented and diverse workforce. Young people decide to move here precisely because Berlin is so open to international ideas and movements. Making it in a way, the least traditional German city.
It’s the city’s vastness giving young artists the space to create while encouraging young entrepreneurs to take a risk and start a company.
Others also favour the labor legislation, in comparison to laws of other German states, allowing for flexible working relations. Hence new companies can find the right people in the critical stage of beginning. Leading to a startup in Berlin averaging 3.5 employees just the first year.
A number of multinational companies also choose to relocate their European offices here, indicating lower labor costs than other EU markets.
Berlin is thus beginning to compete with other major startup hubs such as London and New York. In the European Digital City Index of Startups, Berlin came 7th while Munich ranked in 10th out of 35 cities.
Some of the famous startups that can be found here are;
Soundcloud. An online streaming service, which was found in Stockholm and later relocated to Berlin. Its users can upload, record and share their own audio while a big part of its content is podcasts and interviews. According to a Bloomberg article, the page boasted 150 million users by this summer.
ResearchGate. A social network for scientists, its users can write reviews on others’ research articles. The company has created quite a buzz when Bill Gates decided to invest in it. According to its Wikipedia page it has more than 7 million users.
6WunderKinder.The company has been acquired by Microsoft since last June for almost 200$ million. It is famous for the Wunderlist, a ask management, cloud based application, for free but with extra features in paid. According to its data it currently has 13 million users.
Jobs in Germany for foreigners
These companies are part of an “information economy”, having as products heavily researched and filtered data. In that way they produce software products in comparison to most of the heavy German industries producing hardware.
You will find a number of events about people looking to connect with others or hire them for their startup in Berlin every other week. We suggest you keeping an eye on Silicon Allee and Factory Berlin or you checkout job search pages like Heyjobs which make searching for open positions a lot easier than browsing Linkedin.
If you liked this piece please feel free to share it below.
[shariff]