Transcript:

Adam: As a potential business owner or even someone that’s looking to starting a venture, of course it’s a pretty difficult time to do that now, but in the grand scheme of things, would you suggest Hamburg is a viable location for people to really build a business that can stand out in the market?

Sebastian: Yes, so the money isn’t attached to any geographical parts, so if you have a good business running, you can get money from everywhere in the world or anywhere in Germany. But you have a lot of help in Hamburg for startups. So you have the Handelskammer. It’s like the parts from the city, which will help you find someone to help you if you need to have some instructions, there are a lot of hubs here in Hamburg which will help you on your startup just getting started and to continue. Since it’s a bit smaller than Berlin, people get to know each other very quickly. If you don’t have a hundred pitches a day, but you have two or three events where you can go a week, but it’s like a better quality instead of mass events, and so you can connect and increase your network faster and easier here. You’re not so anonymous compared to such a huge city like Berlin.

Adam: With Berlin as well, specifically, there is almost three times as many listed businesses within Berlin as there is in Hamburg, but within the specific markets, the density is actually around the same, so there’s around 30% software businesses in both locations. In Berlin, as you’ve mentioned, that market is so much more dense that sometimes, you know, building that network can be more difficult, and with Hamburg, of course, it’s the complete opposite.

Sebastian: And since Berlin is hyped, as a company, you will be more in a competitive situation, getting to hire really talented people compared to Hamburg. If you have anything to do with machine learning or image recognition, I would suggest coming to Hamburg because there are not as many companies in this area, and there are a lot of very good universities here, with very good students doing their master’s thesis or just finishing university who are looking for possibilities also in startups when it comes to machine learning so that you can find quite good candidates here, and if you’re coming from some other country and want to move to Germany or to Hamburg, you will also still find a very diverse culture and people from everywhere in the world. So it’s a quite good balance living here. One thing that I don’t like about Berlin, I’m sorry, but it’s very hectic. So life there is very fast. They have a different vibration there than you have in Hamburg, everything here is a little bit more settled, I would always say it’s a little bit more family-friendly. So if you want to move in with your family, Hamburg is really, really good for that.