Cologne Startup Scene - Whats Next?
Recently, the Cologne startup scene has been discussing how the startup ecosystem here can be further developed and what is missing to make Cologne more competitive nationally (against Berlin), but also internationally. This is how the new Facebook group Cologne Startups, which already has more than 500 members in less than two months, started.
In the last week Thomas Grota kicked of a discussion there titled “Thoughts on my balcony: ‘what’s next?’”, which is already around 100 comments long. Furthermore, we also discussed the case at the last Hacker News Meetup in Cologne (short summary can be found on Francis’ Blog). In this post, I will try summarize both discussions to give a better overview to people joining. I will quote a lot of different people, so forgive me if I forget some accreditation. If anyone misses their name somewhere please feel free to contact me. Same counts for anyone who wants their part anonymized or excluded.
First, we should mention that as Thomas wrote we already have several (co-)working places like Solution space, Coworking Cologne, betahaus, Friesenloft and the new clustehaus. We also have events like betapitch, (internationally renowned) European Pirate Summit, hopefully startupweekend Cologne soon and many more. However, there are some (interconnected) topics we still have to work on.