czurnedden – Christina zur Nedden

1. Mai 2019

WeWork cares about sales more than community

WeWork is more interested in sales than building a community. It’s increasingly for big corporates. And it shouldn’t be described as providing “coworking” spaces.

These are the words of Tobias Kremkau, the manager of St. Oberholz in Berlin, one of the oldest coworking spaces which is now expanding all over Germany.

They come as WeWork’s parent company this week filed paperwork to go public in the US, just months after raising money from Japan’s Softbank at a $47bn post-money valuation.

WeWork describes itself as providing more than “beautiful, shared office spaces” but a “community” and “a place you join as an individual, ‘me’, but where you become part of a greater ‘we’.”

Kremkau knows more about coworking spaces than pretty much anybody else in Europe. Travelling from Barcelona to Stockholm over two months with his wife in 2015, they worked from a different coworking space every day.

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17. April 2019

European founders suffer from “reality distortion”, burnout and anxiety

After more than two decades in the German startup world, and head of one of the country’s most powerful accelerators, Jörg Rheinboldt has seen his fair share of founders collapse under the mental pressure of starting a company.

The managing director of the Axel Springer and Porsche’s accelerator “APX” in Berlin — who is also a powerful angel investor with stakes in companies such as N26, Zizoo and Blogfoster — says that founders suffer from “reality distortion”, burnout is all too common and “every [startup] team needs therapy”.

This is one of the reasons why the APX accelerator has developed a new mental health strategy called “mental mining”, which includes monthly programmes to help deal with anxiety, stress, bipolar disorder and depression.

Sifted met up with Jörg Rheinboldt in Berlin to talk about what founders worry and fight about, how APX now approaches mental health and why yoga, massages and mindfulness are not enough to help founders.

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21. März 2019

Waldemar Zeiler on condoms, menstruation and self-ownership

Condom-entrepreneur Waldemar Zeiler, the bearded founder of Berlin-based Einhorn Kondome, recently dressed up as a giant vulva to announce his company’s next goal to “unfuck menstruation”.

It was a high-impact stunt which has become characteristic of the 35-year-old as he takes Einhorn — which has been making vegan, sustainable and fair-trade condoms since 2015 — into the business of selling menstrual hygiene products.

When Einhorn first launched, attempting to make buying condoms cool and fun, it promised “up to 21 orgasms” from a pack of seven condoms. Customers seemed to like the idea, even if the German courts forced them to retract the actual claim.

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21. März 2019

Founders flee to Estonia’s digital paradise

With 12 guides, over 600 tours sold and plenty of positive reviews, Arzu Altinay’s company Walks in Istanbul was going well. Then the business started to go very wrong.

The political atmosphere in Turkey started to change around 2015 and there was a a bloody coup attempt a year later. Tourism dried up. Altinay, who had been a professional tour guide since 1998, lost the vast majority of her customers.

When PayPal stopped operating in Turkey in 2016, even those still wanting to pay for her tours couldn’t. “I was desperate because my business died immediately. I’m a single parent and had no money coming in.”

Altinay knew that she had to move her company outside of Turkey. “The business was working, it just wasn’t working in Istanbul”. weiterlesen →

8. März 2019