Germans don’t do tech startups – more access to capital might change that

Right now I'm at the point of giving up again because it's so damn hard to find customers here. In my opinion, for deep tech startups the problem is not primarily access to capital but access to customers, as the corporate culture is extremely hostile towards startups. Large corporations are very risk-averse and most of them won't ever consider buying a product from an unproven startup. The ones that want to work with startups often have started their own incubators where they try out ideas by hiring teams and building startups that they fully control (50 % shares belong to the parent company from the beginning).

Also, from my experience getting seed funding becomes harder the more experienced you are here: If you just finished university it's easy to get a so-called EXIST grant, which will pay a little more than 100.000 € to fund a team of three people for a year. That's how most (or at least many) of the successful startups get funded here. The thing is, if you have been working for 5 years or more you will be ineligible for that program, and your options for getting seed money are very restricted. This is weird as people with industry experience usually have a much better chance at building something relevant and successful than a recent university graduate with no business experience. They have a much harder time finding money though.

There are counterexamples and very successful deep tech startups of course, I just think we could have many more of those if we had a system that actually encouraged and helped people to build these companies.

I can understand that many people decide against it, especially when you're a good technician / engineer you can earn much more in industry and there's very little to gain by leaving your position.

There’s been a German eBay, PayPal and Facebook.

Europe doesn’t really do major companies though, and part of that is certainly a lack of demand to go global from capital investors, but there are other parts as well. Like language and regulation.

I went to harzen for holiday this summer, very retro I know, and almost no one spoke English. In fact I had bigger luck with Danish than I had with English because they see so many Danish tourists. I’m not sure Americans can really understand how big the language and cultural barriers are from creating global companies when you’re de-attached from the Anglo-Saxon world.

I think the reason that a lot of European startups that made it to the global scence came from Scandinavia, is exactly because we’re so attached to American culture that’s it’s almost second nature to us. Sure we don’t understand American individualism, not really, but we’re all brought up watching American tv-shows and movies, hell American politics and economics sometimes take up more news space than our own national news...

The rest of Europe isn’t like that, so while Germany had its own eBay, that made its founders billionaires, no one outside of Germany has ever heard about it. Except for maybe eBay who couldn’t enter the market.

cool startups: https://github.com/azer/notebook/blob/master/berlin.md#cool-...

venture capital firms: https://github.com/azer/notebook/blob/master/berlin.md#ventu...

PRs are welcome.

* Lack of capital

There is just much less VC available, even if normalized for the difference in size.

I know the VC scene a little bit in Germany. Total monkeys.

* Lack of attitude

Germans are much more hierarchical. Both in science and entrepreneurship I found the American personality much more suited.

* Lack of vision

You will find money in Germany for a personalized cereal/granola mix shipment service (was just an exapmple, but in fact I think it exits) but if you are into a disruptive technology they will balk. Both have different risks but both also have different pay-offs.

Edit: Reasons given due to the downvote

http://www.pr.uni-freiburg.de/pm-en/online-magazine/invent-a...