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We don't need startups, we need Digital-Mittelstand

mertbulan.com

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Re: We don't need startups, we need Digital-Mittelstand

#61
post #29
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did, it was super easy.

How long did it take you from start to finish? In Australia, Canada and the US I can open a company in about 30 minutes from picking the name to opening a bank account I can get money into. In Germany the last time I tried it was about 7 weeks.

Depends on the region and the form of the company. e. K. has next to no protections but you can start at lunchtime to do commercial activities, a seperate bank account is not required, an GmbH takes quite long and needs a lot of money prepared for the company, but if it goes broke you are safe.

Re: We don't need startups, we need Digital-Mittelstand

#63

There are a lot of such companies already in Germany. Basically most small/medium sized IT companies in Germany fit that classification. So I don't really see how this is now a new approach. And I'm also not sure what is proposed here to be done now. Invest more into IT infrastructure? That's a goal that many parties claim to do since many years. Many people fully agree with this. However, currently, the main topic i…

> And I'm also not sure what is proposed here to be done now.

The article lists 4 things under "What Should Be Done Next?" - Given your don't I think I can also be a bit snarky and ask: Have you read the article?

Re: We don't need startups, we need Digital-Mittelstand

#64
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long did it take you from start to finish? In Australia, Canada and the US I can open a company in about 30 minutes from picking the name to opening a bank account I can get money into. In Germany the last time I tried it was about 7 weeks.

Well, yes – you can't typically open a business in 30 minutes here but the process is not exactly complex either. If you cant' figure out the administrative part of opening a company, maybe you shouldn't. It also keeps baffling me how that is of any significance. Are people afraid that their "paradigm shifting industry disrupting" idea will lose validity over the the next week? If so, maybe the idea was bollocks to b…

The bureaucracy of opening the business is a proxy for the bureaucracy that the business will endure during this lifetime. Admittedly, opening in 30 minutes is the result of politicians gaming the KPI, no one needs to open a company in 30 minutes. But waiting for 7 weeks is also generally understood to be on the other side of the spectrum, and not really reasonable either.

And that the "easy" part (as we know that it could be done as quickly as in 30 minutes) takes forever does not speak well of the UX of managing a business on that country, because e.g. closing a business, which is by nature more complicated, could end up being a hellish ordeal.

Re: We don't need startups, we need Digital-Mittelstand

#65

For start Germany needs better internet connectivity. Getting 1gbps symmetric fiber or 5G coverage is a scifi! Even Romania has better infrastructure!

Fiber has been laid out in many areas already, it won't be long until most households are upgraded. But to be honest it's not as much of an issue as people make it out, in most areas you can get 250 Mbit downstream and 50 Mbit upstream through DSL, that is plenty for most home use cases, there's just not enough demand for higher speeds. Don't tell me people are regularly maxing out their 1 Gbps lines. In most rural places the fiber linkup stalls not because there's no will to do it but because not enough households vote to get it, providers typically need a quorum of 10-20 % and they don't get it because most people just don't need or want faster Internet (or let's say they are not willing to pay 50-100 € per month for it). Telekom and other companies have fiber running in most of the smaller cities already (otherwise they couldn't offer 250 Mbit DSL) it was just the last mile that was missing and that is mostly being fixed now, but again most households don't even see the need to upgrade. That might change once services requiring super high bandwidth become popular (but what might those be), even 4k streaming is possible on 25 Mbit already and with 100 Mbit you can stream 8k content...

And yeah, Romania might have better Internet in some places with high population density but certainly not in the more rural areas, there was a big EU project (RO-NET) to help them get that up and running in more places in the last 5 years. In Germany you can get fiber connection in most cities as well.

Don't get me wrong I love faster Internet myself but don't pretend like that is a chief reason why Germany can't have IT startups, we have some of the best connectivity and peering in Europe with DE-CIX and the hub in Frankfurt.

Re: We don't need startups, we need Digital-Mittelstand

#66
post #44
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I realized a few weeks ago how broken IT in Germany is when I talked to a guy who turned out the CIO of a known German retail company. We did not talk about technology, exciting projects, ideas or similar, but about the complexity of the privacy act and "Scheinselbständigkeit" (false self-employment, which is a huge issue for start-ups and self-employed people in Germany). Out brains are so busy thinking about stuff…

I think you got this wrong. Laws against Scheinselbständigkeit are protecting individuals from being exploited, and it's one of the things that characterizes the EU. Don't forget that outside of Europe, most big economies were built on the ongoing exploitation of the working class. I am not saying this didn't happen in Europe, but at least there are efforts to curb this. So a CIO complaining that he can't exploit peo…

The best argument against the EU is a 5 minute conversation with anyone who supports it.

Re: We don't need startups, we need Digital-Mittelstand

#67
post #52

The startup model works where there is capital specifically large upfront capital available. Large upfront capital automatically means you chase profit or growth. Just like McDonalds. Which is really what the SV model is if you scrape away all the whizbang tech bullshit. There is a reason McDonald inspite of "scale" and "low price" cant feed the world. Because of the cost of opening a new store and initial capital in…

>There is no German/Chinese/Indian version of McDonalds.

This is not true, there are lot of internationally successful fast-food chains, even the Philippines has one: Jollibee. They may not be as big as McDonalds but that's just because McDonalds had a few decades' head start.

Re: We don't need startups, we need Digital-Mittelstand

#68

The mythical German "Mittelstand" again. This word is absolutely meaningless. It has been used to describe small businesses, but also companies like Robert Bosch GmbH which has 400,000 employees. "Mittelstand" is nothing but a vague idea Germans cling to, so they feel special.

I personally have never seen Bosch listed as Mittelstand. By definition, SMEs have less than 500 employees. Are you mistaking the concept with something else?

Re: We don't need startups, we need Digital-Mittelstand

#69
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Scheinselbständigkeit" (false self-employment, which is a huge issue for start-ups and self-employed people in Germany) Can you provide more details about this? How is this a problem and why does it affect startups?

Well, if you employ self-employed people in your company and after a while you or they get audited and it turns out that you are their only customer, the will be classified as employees of your company. As a result you may have to pay social insurance, pension fees, etc. for the all time they have been working for you, which can be a hefty sum and may break your neck as a small company. Oh another problem that I had…

As someone who was CEO at a German company with more than 10 people: this absolutely overblown. Some people just want to larp US-style at-will firing power fantasies.

It's actually surprisingly easy to still fire people, you just have to have valid reasons: employee didn't come to work, employee works badly (Schlechtleistung), employee yells at customer, lack of work to do at the company etc. You just have to create the paper trail and follow the clearly defined process for firing (i.e. it has to happen at least two times, and you had a stern talk with the employee about it (Abmahnung).

You can also still fire employees without given cause in the first (up to) 6 months of employment.

What you definitely can't do is discriminate against employees, e.g. fire pregnant women because they are pregrant, fire migrants because they are migrants and so on. You have to have an actual, factual cause.

Also let's be clear with the concept of Scheinselbstständigkeit: This is simply a hedge against companies engaging in tax fraud by pushing people to be self employed when they really aren't. Scheinselbstständigkeit only triggers if a person gets over 80% of their revenue from a single customer, over a longer time, and has other things that hint at employee status, e.g. an own desk and company mail account, has to ask for holiday and so on. Simply having a large contract for e.g. 4 months with a single customer won't trigger Scheinselbstständigkeit.

Re: We don't need startups, we need Digital-Mittelstand

#70
I really like the idea, but I'm not sure how the traditional "Made in Germany" success stories would translate into a digital world.

For example Würth is the world leading producer of screws. I think it's a good example of how a lot of these companies make parts. But what are the parts in the digital world? It's libraries and frameworks, and nobody is paying for those.

Also the values you mentioned: excellence and stability. That's exactly what we see in libraries. Everybody wants stable APIs and the library to get out of the way.

Maybe another angle to look at this can be "parts" for a knowledge-based company. Like a software to model and simulate financial products or insurance risks, or - as the article mentions - complex 3D models. I have also already seen companies working on digitazing factories, digital twins etc.

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