In 2014, I left a rewarding but comfortable job in New York City to work for a start up in Berlin...
Six months later the company folded. I was charged with selling the furniture.
Luckily, I stuck around.
The folks at SoundCloud took a chance on me and I was able to find personally fulfilling work that taught me a tremendous amount, understanding how SoundCloud was transforming musical careers, providing a platform to access unique content, and understanding the source of the product's tremendous popularity in cities like Cairo and Jakarta. (In Cairo I got hugs walking around the city with my SoundCloud t-shirt on).
After some turbulence within the company, I left Berlin in 2016 to join the team at Balderton in London. And now, almost six years and several lifetimes later after I first arrived in Berlin, I’m moving back to the Hauptstadt. I’ll be continuing to invest for Balderton from Berlin, finding ways to do what we’ve already done well even better in Berlin and across DACH.
It’s the first time in my life that I’ve moved back somewhere, and it’s no coincidence Berlin is the place which pulled this constant wanderer back.
The city and the shape one’s life takes here is at once both exotic and calm. It’s the capital of one of the industrial engines of the world, but you’re more likely to befriend a wandering artist than a titan of industry. The city was a battleground for all the great ideologies of the 20th century, and only recently has had time to come up for air.