American in Germany, former foreign correspondent, cultural geographer, communications strategist, business owner.
A place where I tie together the frayed ends of business, culture, technology, and immigrant life in Germany.
What is Tech, anyway? It's a question that has been nagging me since earlier this month, when my business partner Tommy and I went to Munich for the annual Bits and Pretzels startup conference. This year more than 7,500 attendees were there, including VCs, LPs (AKA limited
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There’s a part in the recent Ezra Klein podcast about the China Shock 2.0 that made me hit pause and whisper a few curse words. It was when Brad Setzer, Klein’s guest, was describing the car manufacturing capacity that China has created. It wasn’t just that
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I have been dancing around the term “pivot” for a few months. It felt like an admission of defeat. Like we made a mistake, and we’re using “pivot” instead of “mistake” in the hope you don’t notice that we’re correcting it. But I got over that as
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A good friend of mine once said something about networking that I still think about. She said to think of yourself like a glass of water. “There are people you meet who will drain that glass, and there are people who will fill it.” The trick is to spend as
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Compliance. It’s a word that sends a shiver down the spine of any entrepreneur. And it's something that causes me, an immigrant entrepreneur, a particular kind of anxiety. Germany is notoriously bureaucratic and private. And Europeans in general are increasingly skeptical of being surveilled by American tech
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As I write this, I am eating a few cut-up pieces of what Germans call a Schnecke (Schnecke means snail in German). They’re little pastries that resemble an American cinnamon roll, though these are made of sourdough and not covered in frosting, like their American counterparts. (Though one
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I started to make short-form content about a month ago. My plan was to talk about marketing and the challenges of doing business in Germany. The goal was simple: to make myself, and WestWord, more visible. (One of the great ironies of WestWord, a marketing company, is that until
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