Today, at the social media week, a panel discussed if Berlin is going to be the new Silicon Valley.
In a nutshell, there were no complete new insights. Naturally, everybody agreed that at the moment Berlin is the place to be throughout Europe. It is Berlin’s internationality and wealth of ideas that thrills.
But unfortunately, there is no big money in town that could make those splendid ideas being done. Due to the panel discussion this is the big difference between Silicon Valley and Berlin. The Valley has the ideas AND the money. In Berlin there are no comparable big companies which could be interested in funding startups yet. Berlin young entrepreneurs lack the personal contact to VC since it does not belong to their social network, i.e. you would not meet the big players in a Berlin health club.
Commercially, Berlin’s internet startups are still not relevant since they are still too small. This is why big companies are not yet interested in. Thus, it seems to be quite difficult to reach a relevant commercial status.
Is it going to be another vicious circle…?
Finally, the panel discussion wished that Berlin could learn from the Valley’s willingness of failure. This might become a helpful advice since there are other cities too which are interested to become another Valley. Barcelona, another host of the social media week, wants to become a leading capital of digital technologies as well. In Catalonia, 5000 new IT-jobs have been created since the past two years. Interestingly enough, Berlin lacks especially IT-professionals as Mirko Caspar, CEO of Mr Spex, pointed out.