of which I am not affiliated with nor won't endorse here in any way. Sadly, in Germany at least, startups that aim for maximum positive impact and less so profit, are called 'social startups' which outside of Germany probably has a completely different connotation.
The news websites I usually frequent, are not very full of news; they are rather SV & VC company theory megaphones. Avoiding those websites sometimes leads one to people with a bit different entrepreneurial mindset.
This having said, would you work for such a company? And which compromises would you accept (on the ethics-, but also wage-scale)?
If you are asking me, my answer is yes. I do not care very much for money. If I make enough so that I can eat and not have to live in complete misery, I am ok.
Ethics, that is harder. I guess if you look hard enough you can find problems with anything, but that's probably just the way the world is. If it does more good than harm, it's ok in my book.
(there are many more super-interesting companies in this area!)
Computing:
- Mill Computing; though quite dubious
- D-Wave
and than there is Microsoft Research working on super interesting stuff in programming languages, computer architecture (FPGAs).
Additionally, I believe really challenging problems will alwyas be coming from creative people, companies in that area; such as Pixar, architecture, and design (keywords, just to give a start: generative {design, art, ...}).
I agree but only due to my lack of knowledge in both areas -- and I only have second knowledge by attending a talk of a former D-Wave user and "programmer". That is, and contrasting Mill Computing, D-Wave has implementations in the field.
Yes, they're obviously not Scandinavian (where the name means male genitalia, plural).
Funfact: in the northern parts of Norway, calling a policeman a "horses penis" is not illegal, as that is a somewhat common thing to call another person. Yes, this was tested in court in 2008.
Interestingly enough, the number of <5 letter words in English is of the order of 10-15 000 [1], while the number of languages is 7000. Since most languages (I guess) have more than one word for male genitals, it is technically possible for all English <5 letter words to mean precisely that.
Funny coincidence, in some Spanish speaking countries kuka refers to the female genitalia. I have never heard kuka used in Swedish though. It does mean who in Finnish.
If you (or anyone) is interested in a role on the remote sensing team (satellite/drone suff) or the Climatology team, you can reach out to me directly at [email protected]
> Germany, despite being technologically strong, is not very inovative. At least not in the sense of new, scaling products.
That's the result of a tech-centric worldview (read startups, sw). Quite the opposite is true, for instance in the area of 'Green Tech'.
> While that indeed is one of the cornerstones of the german economy, these companies are most of the time too small for an interessting tech IPO.
I don't your argument here. You mean success == IPO here? There are plenty of highly profitable Mittelstand companies with a profit and revenue much higher than e.g. LinkedIn. What does that mean here, that LinkedIn is unsuccessful or that the other Mittelstand'ish company is?
IPO is not a value of its own as some reports might indicate. Looking at Mittelstand, as the author wants us to, is about the values surrounding a company, for instance to re-invest money in a sustainable way, that it is not about growth for growth's sake (which seems to be an inevitable by-product of going public!) but making better products.
> Finally, what in my opinion makes it very unlikely that a company has a sucessfull tech IPO in germany anytime soon is people. There's education, focusing on producing people for the existing technologies and, even worse, companies.
For University-level education, this definitely and absolutely does not apply.
Actually, I mean IPO. Not in the case of success, but general success wasn't the question. Beyond that, I agree with you here, both linked in and german mittelstand companies are successfull in their own right. Yet, they are very different.
Green Tech is en vogue right now in germany, yes. But after what happened to the solar industry and is currently happening to the wind power industry leaves me a little bit sceptical. But I have an opinion all of my own on all of the green tech stuff which I'm pretty sure is very different to yours.
Having studied in Germany, I disagree with you regarding education. My experience was that trying out new things, experiment and question the status-quo is not actually encouraged.
Sometimes quite the opposite. In Germany, a lot of effort is spent on improving exiting technology, which is, again, one of the key strength. But as strengths go it can be really weakness in a different context. And when it comes to disrupt things (which start-ups should do) this attitude becomes quite a handicap.
Yes, and fragmentation of your data. Resulting in e.g. data quality problems. It's not just choice, it's choice with downsides that many seem to not really care about at all.
You are right. In the talk I gave I briefly referred to Hierarchical Database for instance. It's not in the slides because of the timeframe for the talk.
what they describe there basically is the current state of affairs: different database technology for different purposes (in-memory, hierarchical and journal). I love the paper for it shows how things do actually not change.
The paper describes a system that is a library which adds distributed transactions to effectively every data store available (distributed and non-distributed).
I see no reason why this technology should not be available really soon given the broad applicability.
