speedracr

+1 for Roaccutane/ Isotretinoin - worked really well for me with a one-time 3-month treatment and I wish I had tried it earlier.

For anyone else wondering: author of Leo Explores is Leo Polovets @lpolovets

Twitter bio: "Partner @SusaVentures. Before: 2nd non-founding engineer @LinkedIn → @Google → early engineer @Factual. I love travel, good food, reading, and helping others. Palo Alto, CA · codingvc.com"

Regarding prior notice et al.: "Private API" is a slight understatement IMO. Uber is running a $3.4bn business and their car data is a lot of what makes them valuable. I wouldn't blame them for automatically blacklisting accounts with unusual usage patterns just to be safe.

The Blue Card requires that you have a job contract or very concrete job offer with a minimum salary, and will more or less be tied to that job: If you lose your job, they apparently can give you some time to find a new one, but you may get kicked out if you fail in that endeavor. Also, if you want to change jobs away from the one that originally got you the Blue Card, you'll have to get formal approval. (Edit: this would probably apply to a regular work permit, as well. I'm German, so I never had this problem. Still, you can apparently even apply to get a work permit as a freelancer, which would then make life much easier for you if you don't want to tie yourself to a Blue Card job for that long.)

Other than that, there seems to be no catch - the Blue Card is meant to attract highly skilled workers, so once that hurdle is cleared (>> minimum salary, university education, easier for certain high-in-demand sectors), the EU countries seem pretty happy to have Blue Card holders stay - as they should be.

To be frank, I don't share the excitement (or now sadness about loss) either:

  I was hoping it would set an example for the European ecosystem (...)
 but [we] decided to join another incubator instead.

  We ourselves ultimately were lucky to get into Seedcamp

That's 2 for 2 against HackFWD - apparently, the setup wasn't as great as the marketing made it look?

  (it is way easier to teach marketing & business skills 
  to engineers than the other way round)

Looking at the HackFWD companies, that doesn't seem to apply with the broadness that the statement suggests. Could it be that someone who actually went through the steps (Paul Graham, developer - built, founded and exited Viaweb) is in a better position to pass on knowledge on that than someone who didn't (Lars Hinrichs, business guy - hired developers, founded and excited Xing)?

While I find the passion, generosity and appetite for risk behind HackFWD more than commendable: it looks like it would have taken a larger vision (possibly even larger & more costly than YC) to carry a tech-focused EU incubator forward. I understand that the decision to cut losses is probably the right one, but if he's unwilling to stick it out for 5-7+ years - YC was started in March 2005! -, maybe he shouldn't have started HackFWD in the first place. The way it stands now, the one who benefited most seems to have been Lars through publicity and reputation (cf. European Commission etc.)

Incorrectness of linked article's headline was pointed out already. Also, this is not the "German Government", it's the CDU/CSU conservative party's election agenda. Yes, they are the party of the chancellor, but it's obvious that a whole ton of proposals buried in the election agenda never see the light of day despite the party winning a majority and having the Chancellor elect. So even IF the CDU/CSU decided to move away from data retention in their election agenda, it would remain to be seen if this translated into actual laws. And since they didn't even move away...

tl;dr: Esp. for standard positions, Berlin combines low salaries & rents with a growing (young & international) population and trustworthy German processes; bureaucracy is the same hassle all over Europe.

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Germany is no(t much) better or worse than other EU countries in terms of bureaucracy or immigration barriers. To deal with legal/ tax/ privacy stuff, you would mostly set up a formal HQ in Ireland, Luxemburg or Switzerland (the latter being home to Groupon EU's legal HQ).

The comparatively low salaries across the board in Berlin coupled with the potential for subsidies from the state make it a good proposition to have a working office. (If you're looking for engineers and highly skilled staff, Zurich and Munich still have an edge but are much more expensive.) Berlin is also large enough to have a talent pool for most positions/ departments and is growing due to perceived and/ or real attractiveness. And with the influx of young people from all over the world, informal immigration barriers like language are vanishing, too.