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October 30, 2006
Garages For Future Millionaires
The Financial Times Deutschland has a tongue-in-cheek article in its weekend edition about how unsuitable Germany's garages are for startups, alluding to the legendary origin of some of Silicon Valley tech giants.
In all our years of interviewing tech business founders, we have never had one complain that the lack of a garage, or cheap office space, was his biggest challenge and the FTD is clearly aware of that. Who knew it had a sense of humor too -- we translated a bit of it here:
The FTD says Germany's garages don't have windows, many get used as a sauna, and while Zapf's Clou garage (shown here) has some windows, there's only room for a car. (image source: Zapf)
In Germany's garages nothing gets started - except for the car. It is a purpose-built construction without charm. The best idea you can get in such a spot is "get me out of here". 'In this country you go into the garage and end up in a black hole,' complained the Hamburg Architekt Stephan Heymann. If you live in Flensburg, Bochum or Leipzig and have a business idea, you use a hobby room or scrape the money together to rent an office in a Startup Center."
Besides, a recent post about a startup called box.net on our sister blog, the alarm:clock, shows that garages are uncommon and that this image is more like the reality for West Coast startups.
Read - Garagen für künftige Milliardäre (ftd)
Posted on October 30, 2006 07:08 AM | Posted to Being European | Permalink
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