Berlinstartup – retro

Posted by Mr. Startup on Jul 19, 2012 in Fun in Berlin, Startup | 3 comments

berlinstartup goes back into 2000, take a look…
House music thunks off exposed concrete walls in the cavernous, darkened fourth floor of this 19th-century factory on Grünberger Strasse, in the Friedrichshain district of East Berlin. Well-dressed twentysomethings chain-smoking HB cigarettes pack the place shoulder-to-shoulder, drinking Heinekens bought with D-marks showered down by VCs.
The bash, hosted by the megapopular dooyoo.de, feels strangely, well, familiar: two parts Multimedia Gulch, one part Mitteleuropa, a slice of dotcom with an umlaut. When dooyoo.de’s founders, including 32-year-old Wasmuth, launched their Teutonic knockoff of Epinions last winter, the buzz quickly hit autobahn speed. The company has since opened offices in Paris, London, Rome, and Madrid. Now, flush with $20 million raised in the latest round of funding, dooyoo HQ is expanding from its crowded third-floor digs into additional space next door and this yawning space above. The e-financed face-lift of the building, a textile plant in the days of the German Democratic Republic in a neighborhood once used to dump wartime rubble, bespeaks a far larger transformation. The new economy is finally uniting this still-divided city, Wasmuth earnestly explains while the techno beat pounds like pile drivers. The Internet is forging a new future where no one cares if you’re Ossi or Wessi. Of course, leveling the playing field isn’t as simple as point-and-click in a land defined by walls and wars, by digging up the past while burying it. Yet somehow, he says, Berlin’s latest resurrection will reinvent the national identity.
“Everybody is here,” Wasmuth shouts, beaming. He can’t hear me ask where, though, in the strobe-lit reverb, and my PR escort Daphne disappeared long ago, almost as soon as the music started. I turn to three guys in white eBay.de T-shirts. Oliver Samwer, one of the founders of eBay Deutschland, is looking for a parking place and will be here “any minute,” one insists. Alexander Artopé, another Web Mega-Erfolg (super success), should show up soon, too. By 2 am, however, there’s no sign of high-profile movers and shakers or any Silicon Valley-ish networking, and no one seems too concerned. And finally, I understand: These guys are throwing a dot-de party so they can dance.

“We pay peanuts for this place,” Wasmuth says proudly as we tour dooyoo’s offices, the company’s base since last October. The ceilings are freshly painted; the ambience, comfortably SoMa. “And,” he laughs, half-joking, “it’s scalable.” All he had to do for the recent expansion was call the landlord and ask to rent another floor.
The building, a short walk due east from what once was the Wall, stood empty before dooyoo appeared. Abandoned structures still dot the street; in the neighboring courtyard, someone has spray-painted NAZIS RAUS (Nazis out) and SANDRA, ICH LIEBE DICH (I love you). “It was totally GDR-style,” Wasmuth says of the building, pre-renovation. “It even smelled like the GDR.”
It sure wasn’t wired like the GDR, though – in fact, hooking up dooyoo’s Internet connection was easier in the former East than it would have been in the West. In a classic case of technological leapfrogging, the once infrastructurally challenged Berlin is now one of Germany’s most fast-forward cities. When the Wall came down on November 9, 1989, East Berlin’s electrical grid relied on equipment installed in the 1920s; the copper telephone network, in many places, was equally old. There was just one phone in East Berlin for every 10 people, and the only working exchange was the one used by the Stasi – the East German secret police – to monitor private calls. Since reunification, $100 billion a year has been poured into renovating the former GDR. As a result, East Germany has next-gen fiber optics: $5 billion went into building East Berlin’s digital network alone.
East and West, the number of Net users has doubled in the past year to 18 million. Today Germany claims the world’s third largest ecommerce market, projected to hit $32.5 billion by 2003, according to IDC. And that was before federal coffers were flooded with more than $50 billion from August’s auction of third-generation wireless licenses expected to pave the way for the next wave, mcommerce.
But until very recently, there was neither the venture capital nor the precedent for tech-savvy, experience-poor young entrepreneurs to be CEOs of their own companies, Silicon Valley-style. German business culture is notoriously conservative, dominated by a handful of corporate behemoths, such as engineering and electronics firm Siemens, publisher Bertelsmann, and auto giant DaimlerChrysler. And Germans aren’t, traditionally, entrepreneurs. Getting bank loans for fledgling companies – the term for VC money, Risikokapital, translates as “risk capital” – is historically next to impossible.
Even though Germany had the largest number of Net users in Europe, as of early 1999 the country’s online world looked very much like its traditional industries. Monolithic, old economy print-media houses such as Bertelsmann and Spiegel Verlag – slow to innovate and slow to embrace the Web – dominated the market to such an extent that, midway through the year, only one of Germany’s top 10 content providers, a weather report site, was a pure-play Internet company. Deutsche Telekom, deregulated in 1998, still exacted per-minute local phone charges that made Web surfing unpalatable to most Germans. (Flat fees weren’t introduced until this summer, after metered pricing had become not just an economic concern but a political football.) In mid-1999, one industry insider estimated that the German Internet economy was a full five years behind the US.
And then came eBay. In June 1999, the US-based online auction titan paid $43 million in eBay stock for alando.de, a Berlin-based imitator started less than three months earlier by six twentysomething college friends. In the States, this wouldn’t have made for much of a news story. But in Germany, it touched off a storm.
Valley buyers had sniffed around before; people knew their startups could prove to be lucrative bait. But the alando.de deal drove the message deep into the economic brain stem, where it proceeded to incite revolution. If wunderkinder in white T-shirts with almost no corporate know-how could make $43 million off a copycat site cooked up in a former factory, then maybe the old-line mentality needed retooling.
The zeitgeist seemed to change overnight. Germans started adopting Silicon Valley-style business models, business culture, and venture capital funding. And as Berlin’s startups gained stature, so did Berlin. The former poster child of the Cold War, a city of 3.4 million – the largest capital in continental Europe – began to emerge as the center of a brave new economy.
Munich, long the German nexus of information technology, has generated its own batch of Internet startups, but they tend to be launched by ex-consultants or ex-Siemens engineers in their mid-thirties. The region’s continued prosperity has bred affluent stability; Munich’s bridge to the 21st century is built, as a ruling-party slogan puts it, on a tech-and-traditionalism platform of “laptops and lederhosen.” The Bavarian startups, not surprisingly, are plagued by a residual conservatism. Chaotic, quirky Berlin, on the other hand, is quickly becoming the place where venture capitalists from all over Germany (and now the US) scout for ebusinesses to bankroll. Werner Dreesbach, a VC with Atlas Ventures in Munich, puts it quite simply: You won’t find a young, sexy startup in Germany – “except in Berlin.”
There’s no question that the city has seen an explosion of new companies: Berlin is home to an estimated 500 ITventures, and 50 new dot-des appeared in the past year alone, according to Berlin-based Berlecon Research. Others put the number as high as 400. (This despite a local government that has been famously inept at fostering startup activity – it offers large subsidies to help pay salaries, for example, but getting a grant can take years.) The name players range from allmaxx.de, an e-campus store, to pixelpark, now a multinational Net consultancy whose Berlin office takes up five factory floors in Friedrichshain, while work includes producing sites such as financial-times.de and incubating new brands like the Boris Becker-sponsored Sportgate.
Berlin’s rise has several roots. The 1997 opening of the Neuer Markt, Germany’s equivalent of the Nasdaq, has allowed unproven nestlings to raise money by going public. The number of German venture capital firms has rocketed since the Neuer Markt’s debut, from an estimated 20 to 250. Incubators have also begun to form, like Econa, “Germany’s first new economy investment house” lodged inside a 19th-century locomotive factory in East Berlin. And face-to-face networking has picked up speed. A few months after the founders of alando.de became eBay.de execs, they formed Silicon City, a floating club that helps entrepreneurs “foment friendships and foment ideas.”
In a classic case of tech leapfrogging, the once infrastructurally challenged berlin is now one of Germany’s most fast-forward cities – and the center of a brave new economy.
Berlin also has a leg up on its staid southern rival in terms of human resources. Munich startups have to compete with safe, established companies for employees. But Berlin, home to some 20 colleges and universities, is the stomping ground for more than 120,000 students, most of whom would rather stay in the boho city than move to straitlaced Munich for a job. And thanks to the former GDR’s ties to the Communist bloc, Berlin also boasts plenty of expat Russian and Eastern European programmers.
Then, of course, there’s the cheap, plentiful real estate. In wealthy Western cities like Munich, Frankfurt, and Köln, rents and office space are expensive. Berlin, on the other hand, has spent the past 10 years in rebuilding efforts sometimes called Schickimicki (think gentrification): renovating abandoned East Berlin factories, remodeling crumbling GDR-era high-rises, and building new office space on formerly vacant ground. Hopeful orange ZU VERMIETEN! (for rent) signs hang in empty windows citywide.
But one of the biggest factors feeding Berlin’s appeal for startups goes deeper than infrastructure: Berlin is cool. More than 180 nationalities live here, according to local officials, making it the most – and Berliners say the only – cosmopolitan German city. There are reggae concerts by the river and fire-breathing sculptures inside all-night cybercafés; Abba fans can dance until daylight at a bar in Kreuzberg with walls covered in thick synthetic fur. Statues of Marx and Engels stare directly at Ronald McDonald and his imperialist golden arches.
“The whole city is like a startup,” says 28-year-old Jörg Rheinboldt, cofounder and European managing director of eBay.de. “We thought about moving to Munich – for about 10 seconds.”

The revolution in Berlin might never have come this far if it weren’t for the distinctly American vision of three young brothers who ventured to the original land of e-pportunity.
The story, now firmly part of Berlin’s dot-de creation myth, goes like this: In September 1998, 26-year-old “Ollie” Samwer got his business school degree in Koblenz and went hiking in India and Nepal for a month. Upon his return, he and his 23-year-old brother, Alexander, moved to Silicon Valley to join their 28-year-old brother, Marc. All three got tech internships, and within a few months, they had a plan: Launch a German auction site similar to eBay. By January 1999, they had moved home to Köln and, working with Rheinboldt and two other friends, rented apartments and office space in Berlin.
Taking their cue from what they’d seen in the Valley, they insisted on meeting with venture capitalists, choosing Wellington Partners of Munich. “We just called up and said, ‘Why don’t we come by at 10 tomorrow?'” recollects Oliver Samwer, a gym-built, dark-haired man who looks like a German version of an American Gap ad.
The very un-German strategy worked: Within a week, the six partners had raised $1.5 million; by March 1 they had launched their site. By May, alando.de claimed 6 million pageviews. By June, the founders announced to the world that they were $43 million richer, courtesy the generous embrace of eBay. The Samwer Brothers & Co. became instant media darlings. “Before,” says Oliver, leaning forward in his chair and grinning, “it wasn’t cool to do your own startup. Now, it’s really cool.”
If the story sounds like a made-for-SV movie, it’s not an accident. While in Silicon Valley, the brothers took careful note of their surroundings. In addition to bringing eBay’s business model back home with them, they brought a quintessentially Northern California business culture. They did away with the standard office hierarchies and installed an office Ping-Pong table. They brainstormed guerrilla marketing. They all use the informal du to address one another. “It doesn’t matter who has an idea – here, the best idea wins,” they proclaim, in a tone that suggests they may have discovered the concept. And they wear T-shirts for every public appearance.
Certain Valleyisms, however, wouldn’t translate at all. Fully stocked office kitchens are one thing, but the American ebusiness rhetoric of World Wide Web domination is quite another, a metaphor that is near-taboo in Germany. In the testosterone-charged Valley, it’s standard procedure to tout everything from Sun Tzu to the Marine Corps as a useful model for corporate management. In Germany, militarism of any stripe is unthinkable. “Aggressive,” explains one dot-de CEO, “is not a positive term in Germany.”
Ask any young Berlin Internet founder what makes his startup German, and he – almost all are male – might talk about language, or audience consumer habits, or business practices. But he will, without exception, talk about World War II.
The relevant past for most dot-de dreamers begins in the 1930s: The Nazi Party’s dev-astating rise to power, not the onset of Metcalfe’s law, is the common point of reference. This difference makes itself felt on several levels, from body language to marketing vocabularies. CEOs pitching their ideas often don’t make eye contact: Even at hyper-American eBay.de, purposely casual exec Jörg Rheinboldt giggles and casts his eyes down before ascribing some of his company’s success to the fact that “we really are the best.”
Thinking globally can also be tricky: One dot-de founder mentioned that maybe his German-language site would eventually be produced in other languages and “go from Germany all over the rest of the world.” He immediately caught himself. “Oh, God, you can’t say that,” he said. “I didn’t mean that.”
The very un-German strategy worked: within a week, they raised $1.5 million. By may, they had 6 million pageviews. By june, they were some $43 million richer, courtesy eBay.
In a very tangible sense, Berlin’s entrepreneurs encounter the past on a daily basis. After World War II, the Russians stripped their side of the city; the GDR was perennially short of cash to rebuild. As a result, the East is still, in many places, frozen in time, pockmarked with bullet holes and gaping lots where Allied bombs took out buildings. Blocky socialist monuments on street corners proclaim a hearty friendship between the Soviets and the German Democratic Republic. In both East and West, plaques, museums, and exhibits commemorate Berlin’s 150,000 Holocaust victims.
“My bike ride to work is like a history trip every day,” says eBay.de’s Rheinboldt, like the Samwers a native of Köln. “The first thing I see every morning is the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag, with its new dome, which for me is a symbol for a new start. Then I pass the old headquarters of the Gestapo” – the main offices on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, where detainees were interrogated and tortured. “Next I cross the line where the Wall used to stand” – an area almost constantly under construction in the past decade. In the previous wave of Berlin’s reconstruction, corporations like Sony and Daimler built monumental European and divisional headquarters as close as possible to the centrally located Potsdamer Platz or the Brandenburg gateway to the East. eBay.de’s new headquarters, complete with basketball court and gymnasium, lies far south of Kreuzberg, outside the city limits. It’s in the former “Death Strip” bordering the Wall, a 100-yard-wide, dog-patrolled no-man’s-land where 191 people were killed trying to flee westward.

It is at the Reichstag, Germany’s newly redomed parliament building just north of the Brandenburg Gate, that Alexander Artopé – an unofficial doyen of Berlin’s Internet scene – suggests we meet. Before 1999, the imposing stone building was last put to leg-islative use when Hitler gave speeches there; it even played a role in his ascent to power, after the Nazis blamed a fire in the main hall on their political enemies and used the incident to jail liberal and Communist opposition leaders. The building was damaged in the war, then languished until the German government last year formally moved the capital from Bonn back to Berlin and rehabilitated the structure. The one provision was that it be renovated to reflect the change in ideology. The government commissioned a gleaming, see-through dome; the transparency signifies that Germans today can keep watch on democracy.
Artopé, an elegant, soft-spoken, 30-year-old business-school grad, turns up in an expensive-looking suit. He suggests we climb the dome with a stream of German tourists and afterward have cappuccino on the roof. Blond-haired, blue-eyed Artopé is the founder of datango.de, a voice-enabled guide to help companies direct surfers through their sites; headquartered on the border of Berlin’s central Mitte district and the crumbling, artsy Prenzlauer Berg, the company has just snared $10 million from Atlas Ventures and eBay’s Pierre Omidyar. Additionally, Artopé is one of the founders of the local e-power base, the Silicon City networking club. A Munich native, he also seems to embody the contradictions in the early stage of a hybrid German-American Internet business world. He extols the virtues of a casual workplace but tends to wear suits; he stresses the importance of his employees having “fun!” but is a picture of reserved German politeness; he is regarded as a guru of press relations but impatiently cuts interviews short because he “has to get back to work.” He is also a man who, when I ask him about East Germans – are biases keeping them out of the Internet picture? – snaps, “That was 10 years ago. Nobody cares anymore.”
It is a wildly sunny day. From the rooftop, we can see the city skyline, with its gleaming church domes, monotone prefab GDR high-rises, and hundreds of yellow construction cranes. Artopé points to the Französischer Dom in the distance due east and says that his family was part of the wave of persecuted 16th-century French Huguenots who found refuge in Berlin, and for whom the church was built. Artopé gazes silently at the city. “We have a terrible history,” he says, suddenly. “The Germans. Really terrible things.”
For our next interview, Artopé emails me a map to datango’s offices, and I take the U-bahn to Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz. (Luxemburg, a Marxist revolutionary murdered in 1919, was much celebrated in the GDR.) I find the address on Strassburger Strasse and, as instructed, walk back into a courtyard off the street. I pass a rusted corrugated steel shed leaning against a brick wall on which someone has spray-painted, in English, NO DOPE, NO HOPE. At first I’m not sure if the office is in the building to the left or the right, until I realize that the building to the left is completely abandoned. Like almost all of Berlin’s Internet startups, datango is located in a Hinterhof – literally, the back courtyard. In the 19th century, Berlin’s metal, leather, fabric, and railroad industries built workers’ compounds, with housing bordering the street and factories in the back. This was once home to a furrier.
On the wall inside datango’s offices is a homemade poster with a map of the US, the Atlantic, and Europe. Little pink fish labeled “Epinions,” “eBay,” and “About.com” (standing for US Net companies that have inspired Berlin-based copycats) point toward Europe, their tails squarely in American territory. A larger gray fish, labeled “datango,” is pinned to Europe, pointing toward the US.
“Oh,” says Artopé, when I ask about the poster, “in German we have a saying: Wir schwimmen gegen den Strom – we’re swimming against the stream. That’s what we’re illustrating here. We aren’t copying US ideas, but taking ours to the US.”
If the fish prove right, datango will be a bellwether for the next phase of Berlin Internet efforts. The successes to date have mainly involved American models, even American-ish names (space2go, virtualley), with a Saxon twist. But some observers, including Konstantin Guericke, a Silicon Valley-based startup coach who is working with datango on its US plans, believe a new day is coming: Berliners will soon start exporting ideas.

The successes to date have mainly involved American models, and names, with a Saxon twist. But a new day is coming: Berliners will soon start exporting ideas.
Berlin’s new economy brainstormers don’t have any single gathering place, like a Buck’s or South Park, to meet and greet. (One contender: Cibo Matto, a glass-brick and leather-bench Italian restaurant in the now-snazzy Mitte district where the food is good and the waitresses all have tattoos.) There isn’t a geographically distinct Multimedia Gulch or a Silicon Alley, and though clusters of dot-des might give several avenues a claim as the new Siliconstrasse – Chausseestrasse in Mitte, for example – the truth is that startups lurk in Hinterhofs citywide.
Enter the Silicon City networking club, brought to life, as the official history puts it, by Oliver Samwer and Alexander Artopé. Of course, the German capital also plays host to periodic meetings of the pan-European First Tuesday gatherings, which started in London. Silicon City, by contrast, is echt Berlin, though it in turn has seeded offshoots in Frankfurt, Hamburg, Düsseldorf, and even Munich.
This month’s Berlin meeting takes place in a windowless GDR low-rise on Chausseestrasse, home of the startup meOme, which raised an “eight-digit figure,” according to public relations manager Boris Hageney, in the second round of funding. The office appears peopled entirely by well-groomed young Robert Redford look-alikes in button-down shirts.
Hageney, a man as earnest as dooyoo’s Boris Wasmuth, explains that meOme is a personalized Web portal along the lines of About.com and that its staff happens to include “a wide range of characters. Like, we’ve got the computer guy, a kind of freaky guy, Philipp’s a prince …” After some discussion, I realize he’s not kidding: Chief executive Philipp Stolberg really is a prince, with roots in nearby Saxony-Anhalt. Does that mean meOme gets angel funding from royal coffers? “No,” Boris says, but the company has “counts and a duke, and Philipp’s brother, who’s also a prince, of course. And,” he adds, “they get invited to all the royal weddings … It makes networking really easy.”
Actually, networking in Germany, thanks to the clubs and parties and slaphappy VC scene, is really easy right now even for nonroyals. So eager are venture capitalists that Berlin, at one point, had no less than four Epinions copycats; various other forms of networking sites have also become hot properties, from the proactive Yellow Pages at yellout.de to absolute-career.de.
The meeting comes to order, buzzing with nervous energy. There aren’t enough seats around the foldout tables, so some of the meOme founders – including Philipp Stolberg – sit on plastic crates full of Heineken and Coke. The slacks and shirts here look like 1950s high-school chess club attire; a lone woman wears a skirtsuit. After the introductions, founders ask questions about how to find good corporate legal advice and discuss the merits of renting floats to advertise in the summer Love Parade, a massively popular musicfest they say is the Berlin equivalent to advertising during the Super Bowl.
The Love Parade sets off a Q&A session on marketing. Are people happy with the PR firm run by Andreas Dripke, someone asks. Jawols all around. One man tells how Dripke sent out a press release for his company that he thought looked terrible, but it got a terrific response. The consensus seems to be that Dripke is a genius.
Still, American-style public relations is as new to Germany as startups themselves, and members of the press bristle at the idea of being barraged with overblown emails from local firms. Berlin tech journalist Stefan Krempl says he’s so appalled, he just erases them. “They’re always so hooray! hooray!” he says, waving his hands as if to flap away a bad odor. “No one reads them anymore.”
German companies in the past were loath to spend money on advertising, instead reserving their funds for product development. As of 1999, one of the main reasons there was no major German portal was that the ones in existence advertised only at trade shows. But for today’s startups to attract the kind of audience that can make burn rates defensible, they have to try American tactics. In August 1999, Internet-related advertisements were virtually invisible in Berlin. By the spring of 2000, dot-de ads were on TV, at the movies, in magazines, and on billboards, including one where the first letter in a company name was formed by lines of cocaine. Above it, the slogan “yoolia: It can be addictive.”
Berlin’s mainstream press has taken the bait. Berliner Zeitung ran a two-page Sunday spread on the Startup Szene that pictured Alexander Artopé jogging, Jörg Rheinboldt playing Ping-Pong, and Boris Wasmuth eating pizza. In the weekly magazine Zitty (a play on the English word “city”), another feature introduces the hot concept that “With the Internet, you can earn money. Lots of money.” And the Berliner Morgenpost in August rolled out yet more racy dot-de billboards, including one displaying a large, two-pronged vibrator.
Even the innate resistance to triumphalism seems to be slowly eroding. While pixelpark’s motto is the measured “Move first,” incubator Econa, located just a few doors up Chausseestrasse from meOme, does business under the unapologetic banner “Be first.” (“Who was second to climb Everest?” asks one self-promotional campaign. “Who was second to discover America?”)
Artopé arrives late on this Silicon City night and greets people warmly on his way to sit down. He seems tired. The man respected as a veteran among these untested entrepreneurs wants to talk about handling journalists. Everybody at this table, he says, needs the press to write about them. This will generate “der Schneeball Effekt” – the snowball effect – and that’s how to get publicity. Do not tell variations on a story, he continues: Stick to one version. “It’s like throwing tennis balls,” he says. “If you throw 10, the journalists won’t be able to catch them.”

The S-Bahn to east berlin’s Adlershof district leaves Friedrichstrasse station and passes Museum Island’s blackened 18th- and 19th-century stone buildings, some of them still peppered with WWII bullet holes. The train stops in Alexanderplatz under the TV Tower, East Berlin’s symbol of technological domination, circa 1969, and still the tallest structure in the city. Along the route, well-tended vegetable gardens alternate with plots of rusting junk.
This part of Berlin, though it has the smarts to join in the Internet revolution, is still largely untouched by the wave of startup success overflowing from the better-connected, better-prepared, better-financed Western side. Popular wisdom has it that “the Wall is still up in people’s minds.” It’s not unusual for people from West Berlin to have never traveled farther east than Mitte, and the converse holds for those who hail from East Berlin. Wessis dismiss Ossis as Marxists or lazy ingrates, or both; Ossis resent Wessis as self-satisfied dolts who think they’re right because they’re rich.
So eager are vCs that at one point Berlin had no less than four Epinions copycats. other hot networking properties: the proactive Yellow pages at yellout.de and absolute-career.de.
The walls have become subtle, says Stefan Smalla, a 23-year-old dooyoo employee who grew up in Dresden – a city reduced to ashes by Allied firebombing before disappearing behind the Iron Curtain. Sometimes the inequities are almost intangible. And sometimes they’re a clear result of history. Dresden was the center of R&D for the Soviet computer company Robotron. The GDR had excellent engineering schools and agile computer scientists. One of the surprises when the Wall fell was that East German computer experts were only three years behind the West. But without the Wall, the industry, and the GDR economy, imploded.
“Of course there is some bias,” Smalla says. “Most companies are founded by West Germans. Usually their prerequisites are better – East Germans have only experienced Western life and culture for a few years.”
There are attempts now to fill the gaps. Humboldt University, historically Germany’s premier institution of higher learning, now offers a comprehensive high tech entrepreneurship course designed by Miroslaw Malek, a professor who came to Berlin from Stanford. Informatik students get regular guest lectures from tech insiders – VCs, government officials, and datango’s Patrick Paulisch, to name a few. The technical and natural science facilities have already moved from the central grounds in the heart of Mitte. Humboldt’s Adlershof campus, about an hour southeast from the main campus, is in the process of becoming the “City of Science and Technology,” one of East Berlin’s ambitious new building projects. Once the last cranes are gone from the acres of current construction – slated for completion in 2010 – Berlin will have a state-of-the-art technology park filled with 10,000 tech workers.
But the prospect of teeming tech parks seems far away on the Thursday night, close to 10, that I meet tracklist.com’s East German founders, Jan Peter and Johann Habakuk Israel, at a dark, empty bar on the edge of Mitte. Peter and Israel order orange juice and lament that the DJ isn’t spinning tonight.
The two computer programmers, both 25, grew up in Strausberg and Neuenhagen, suburbs of East Berlin, and met in secondary school. Peter’s father was a pilot in the East German army. Israel’s family was devoutly Christian, something near-verboten in the GDR. When his father refused to enter army service for religious reasons, he was jailed.
Israel got his first computer, a Commodore 64, in 1986, from relatives in the West. What he didn’t get was an instruction book, so he had to figure out how it worked by himself. When he was 14 he refused to perform his Jugendweihe, the Communist coming-of-age ceremony, an act that could have serious consequences for his entire future. In the GDR, just being openly religious was enough to get a student barred from receiving an Abitur, the degree required to pursue higher education. But before he turned 15, the Wall fell.
Israel moved to Berlin, where euphoria converged with the chaos of wedding two incompatible cultures. Israel, who described techno music as a kind of religion when he was younger, thought of the idea for tracklist .com in 1997 while dancing at Glashaus, one of the famed techno clubs in East Berlin’s Spree Treptow district. “There were many houses in East Berlin that no one owned,” he explains. “Many clubs and a lot of new music came to Berlin. People made new music to correspond to the new situation.” Prosperity ruined it, he says, gentrified the scene. “Now, of course, those places are all owned by people with money,” he says. “A lot of clubs had to close.”
The bar music is so loud that it’s hard to speak. Israel shouts his site’s concept to me – tracklist links a song-by-song schedule from Potsdam radio station Fritz to a CD store. So, for example, if you hear a song you like at 10:23 Monday morning, you can go to tracklist.com, look up what song was playing on Fritz at 10:23, hear a clip, and click to purchase. They’ve also got a database of information, tracks, and music clips from their favorite Berlin DJs, and they’re applying for a patent on their technology. So far, the site deals with only one radio station and one store, though Berlin’s Radio One will likely be added in October.
I try to picture Israel and Peter in white eBay.de T-shirts, pockets full of D-marks from having closed a megadeal, heads spinning with possibilities for Berlin’s neu-new thing. But they say that’s impossible – for now. “We don’t want to sell out our idea,” Peter says, as earnest as Wasmuth at his party, as earnest as everyone I seem to meet in this city.
The two friends describe their other Net schemes – brandenburg-buch.de, for one, an ecommerce site for books about Brandenburg – glancing off occasionally at the twirling disco ball on the still-empty stage. In a city with so much accreted symbolism, I can’t help but wonder if this underpopulated bar is somehow representative of the East German startup scene, but the conversation shifts, and the hours pass. And when we stand to leave at 2 am, the bar is so packed we can barely squeeze through the throngs to make it out the door. Peter leads the way to a late-night cybercafé inside a squat turned arthaus so we can check out the tracklist Web site, and the music follows us down the street, throbbing through the walls.