Back in 2008, when the chief executive of SoundCloud, Alexander Ljung, was starting up his audio sharing service, he had to make the decision as to where the company’s headquarters would be. He was living on Stockholm at the time, so this was obviously a major contender, but after taking a trip around several cities in Europe he decided that it would be Berlin.
He says there were several factors that led to this decision, the German capital’s unique counter culture vibe which brought about a great intersection of technology and arts was very appealing, as was the fact that the mainstream in Berlin is to do something different.
SoundCloud now has 170 employees and offices in London, San Francisco and Bulgaria. With the volume of podcasts, music, audio files and interviews which users post on the service now reaching around 180m people every month, SoundCloud is now one of the darlings of the small but increasing all the time start up scene in Berlin.
There is no doubt that the German economy is a powerful one, and the World Bank Group ranked it in 20th place amongst 185 countries in terms of how easy it is to do business here. When you look at stats such as this, and everything else the economy has going for it, such as its long time engineering prowess, you have to wonder why the start up scene, particularly in the tech world, is still subdued, for want of a better word.
There are several reasons bandied about for this, from investors averse to any kind of risk to a lack of talent that has been Silicon Valley trained. VentureVillage, who examine over 50,000 start ups around the word, and are Berlin based, ranks the city at number 15 out of 20 locales for setting up a tech business. This could be all about to change however with something known as ‘Silicon Allee’.
Google have recently invested $1.3m in a large Berlin office facility which, in a reference to Andy Warhol, has been dubbed ‘The Factory’. This is a spot that is designed to bring a host of tech entrepreneurs altogether in the one place. Mozilla, the creators of the Firefox browser, are to open an office here and join a handful of start ups, including SoundCloud, in this new facility sometime in 2013.
Local entrepreneurs joined forces earlier in March to wave a flag at international investors with their hy!Berlin conference, whose sole aim was to change the mind-set regarding start ups that currently exists in Berlin.
