I am moving to Berlin

The last personal update I shared was in April. In the time since then, I made a couple of big decisions, one of them being to move to Berlin. January-2025-Felix would have been pretty surprised by that, and so were a couple of my friends. Here is what I did the last few months and how I arrived at the point where moving to Berlin is the logical next step.

I freelanced for 6 weeks

I wrote in Co-Founder Dating that I thought about freelancing for a bit. Mostly because it satisfies my urge to build useful stuff much more immediately than the very early phases of company building. And then I also have to think about my runway from time to time. So I agreed to a freelancing project to work as an AI engineer. We kicked off the project mid of April. I thought that this would mean 6 weeks of home office with a few days coming into the client's Frankfurt office, but...

I moved to Berlin for a three-month, in-person program

End of April, on the 29th, I received the confirmation that I made it into the first Merantix Hackerroom cohort, which started on 2nd of May. At first, I thought I was filling in for someone who declined their invite last minute, because it was only 3 days until the program started, but when I talked to the others, I found out that most had gotten the confirmation around the same time.

So I packed a suitcase, booked a train ticket for the 1st of May, and started looking for a room on WG-Gesucht. Somewhat surprisingly, it was fairly easy to find a room for a month in Berlin. I ended up at Bernauer Straße, which was within walking distance of Merantix AI campus, where the program took place.

On my way to Berlin, I decided to continue working on Docsy in earnest again. I still see knowledge management fundamentally changing with the advance of AI. Both because we now have intelligence available on demand and because the more agents we are surrounding ourselves with, the more we need to capture the signals human action provide. So for the first weeks, I was freelancing during the weekdays and spend the rest of the time building an agentic version of Docsy, building on what I learned with the workflow-version I had built earlier.

I delivered a Docsy pilot project

While I was rebuilding Docsy, I started cold-outreach to companies that were looking for technical writers. My pitch basically was "I will write docs and automate the tedious parts of technical writing away with Docsy". I did get 2 conversations out of this, but neither resulted in a project.

Fortunately and somewhat randomly, I met the CEO of a SaaS company who basically listed all the problems I thought companies might have with documentation in a conversation with me. We scheduled a 30 minute follow up call and ended that call with an agreement to do a project together.

Things clicked with a potential co-founder

With all of this going on, I continued searching for a co-founder for Docsy. Besides meeting a lot of people at events, I met around 20 people through co-founder matching platforms. One of them was Louis. When we first met, we both explained what we were working on. For Louis, it was helping local service businesses with Sylva. Helping local business owners win against bigger, franchised players that can afford full-time staff for marketing, reception, and back-office tasks resonated a lot with me. Right in that first walk-and-talk, I had a strong feeling that I would love to build a company to do so if(!) all of the other things that need to fit would turn out to fit together.

Louis impressed me with his structured and disciplined approach. Besides helping his mom with her business, which was how he got started, he already had a handful of pilot customers from cold outreach. We got to know more about each other using this questionnaire and by doing reference calls with people we worked with before. We also just started working on Sylva together; first for a few hours here and there, followed by days, and then transitioning to every day.

I quit Docsy (again) to focus on Sylva

I was content working solo on Docsy and in no rush on finding someone to work with. But the longer Louis and I worked together, the more Sylva was growing on me. The mission, the chance to work together with someone I respect who also complements me, the size of the opportunity, and how well our strengths fit to tackle that opportunity. It just felt like the right thing, despite my first success at Docsy and the newfound confidence that I could continue as a solo founder.

Once I made up my mind, I notified the pilot customer that I'd continue in another space and prepared to wrap up the project. I felt a bunch of different things on the last day of the project. I had some glimpses into what the future of documentation could look like. I had started working on Docsy with the aspiration to contribute meaningfully to the field, and I had to face that I would not be able to do that for now. But I was also proud that I got to the point where someone not only agreed that the problem I saw was real but also paid me to work on a solution. I was excited that I could now focus fully on Sylva.

Around that time, Louis and I sat down, had the co-founder equivalent of "the talk" and started preparing the legal part of founding a company together.

Louis and I both agreed that in-person by default is how we want to build the company. We are both from the Frankfurt region. Why not move back to Frankfurt?

Cities attract ambitious people

I underestimated three things before I came to Berlin.

1. I naively expected Berlin to be a scaled-up version of Frankfurt. So, between the 700k inhabitants of Frankfurt and the 3.5M of Berlin, I thought that most things I would encounter would be around 5 times the size of what I had observed in Frankfurt. I was wrong about that. Case in point: I was taking part in a program that in this form just doesn't exist in Frankfurt. There is a qualitative difference in the type of events you can go to, the people you meet, and by extension, the opportunities available to you.
2. Even though I already had found out how disorienting solo-founding could be, I underestimated how much it helps to have people around that are building something, too. I had a glimpse of that here and there in Frankfurt, but the network in Berlin with ideation-phase folks all the way to serial founders is very different from the places I was before.
3. I enjoy being surrounded by ambitious people. Studying Maths in Bonn, I was in an environment that made me ambitious to be smarter. During my year abroad at Warwick University I noticed that most of my peers were aiming for prestige and pursued consulting or banking jobs in the City. The ambition around me made me feel alive, even when I knew I wasn't made for academia or corporate-world. In the years between uni it dawned on me that I wasn't living up to my potential. I couldn't have put it into words then but quitting and working on my own business was mostly a result of this dissatisfaction. Most people around me didn't share the kind of dissatisfaction that comes from ambition. But now in Berlin, I am surrounded by people who do and act on it. (Sidenote: I recommend Paul Graham's post on cities and ambition.)

Of course those three points are related and reinforce each other. After having spend some time here, I strongly believe that the best place to build is where lots of other talented people do the same.

That's why I move to Berlin now

I am working on something meaningful in a place where lots of other ambitious people are. I feel very much at home here, even though I have only been here for three-and-a-half months.

P.S. The next challenge, according to everyone I told, I will move here, will be finding a flat. For the small chance that you happen to have a tip on that, please reach out!