| June 1.-3. i'm organizing a Startup Weekend in Frankfurt Germany, to get a strong Startup culture and community started here, and this will include more events in the future. I set out to do this not to copy the culture of silicon valley, rather the culture of the Amsterdam Startup scene and especially the Appsterdam Initiative. When i was at Startup Weekend Amsterdam and got to meet Mike Lee and others it occured to me that this was a concept that was much more realistic for a european and especially german city. In Germany getting VC Money is not easy and you have to be very careful how the deal is done because of Tax issues. Taking risks is very unpopular in Germany and failed startups are viewed upon as wasted money and time, failed founders are looked upon as pariahs. To combat this all that helps is a very strong community that has a common denominator where people share their point of view which is different from most of the people around them and help them with problems that are common only to startups in germany. Non-Startup-event-wise our city isn't bad. Our Webmondays draw >100 people, our Barcamps over 200. We've got a local Hackerspace which offers 3D Printing Workshops among other things. We have a strong web culture, although Co-Working spaces are still being set up and are still more expensive than i would like them to be. Frankfurt is known mostly as a banking city and some Venture Capital Groups are based here. It's not ideal as office space doesn't come as cheap as elsewhere, but the infrastructure in Frankfurt is superb and I've never met so many qualified Freelancers as in the Rhine-Main-Area. The founder of one of the current YC Company Popset, Nicolas Bös, is from Frankfurt and very excited that we're building something here, which comes to show that we have the potential here. |