Somewhat related to this, we founded https://code.berlin, an accredited university in Berlin with strictly project-based, interdisciplinary and self-directed 3-year Bachelor programs in Software Engineering, Interaction Design and Product Management.
We're in our 2nd year now, with 230 students from more than 40 nations. We've partnered with 42 US for student exchange last summer, and it was an awesome experience for our students who went there.
And there's the BAFA INVEST program (http://www.invest-wagniskapital.de, German language only) that refunds/grants 20% to any EU-based angel investor who invests in German startups. It's actually a really great and pretty unbureaucratic program.
I've built Germany's biggest online resume editor (https://lebenslauf.com), which started as a side project next to my main startup.
Some years ago a friend asked me to help her out with her resume, how to convert it into a proper PDF file etc. – busy and short of time as I was, I simply looked for some online tool to point her to.
Disappointed by the results of my search back then (2011) and motivated to fully design, code and market a small project on my own (after all those years mostly doing management), I started Lebenslauf.com and quickly got fascinated by the idea and technical challenges of a WYSIWYG CV editor.
For quite some time, it remained a side project where I'd spend about 4 hours per week maximum. Meanwhile the number of users grew slowly but steadily thanks to word-of-mouth from my friends and their friends and their friends...
After I sold my main startup in 2012, I finally found the time and fully realized the huge potential of Lebenslauf.com. So I started making it my main project in 2013 and at some point charged money for the created PDF files, which instantly led to five-figure revenues.
About one year later (2014), I sold it to https://xing.com (public company, essentially the German LinkedIn) for a higher seven-digit figure. I managed to get competing bids for it from multiple companies, so the whole sale process is a story of its own.
It's still astonishing to see what has grown out of it and how many people use it every day, and it was an exciting journey with totally different experiences than a venture-funded company.
Talks with other companies started when I planned to rent out white-labeled versions of the site to job portals etc., so they could have their very own branded CV editor and possibly get a revenue share.
During a lunch with the CEO of a German job portal, where we were talking about a white label, he asked me whether it was possible for them to get access to the CV data of my existing users. I replied "You'd need to buy the site then" without actually thinking about it. He in return asked for a price and I came up with 400k euros just to double it in an email hours later ("after carefully calculating again..." ooops double the price :D). When he still was interested, it struck me that a sale might be worth pursuing.
I then contacted his biggest German competitors to get counter offers, and they seemed pretty interested too. Funny anecdote: The CEO of one company told me that they're not actually interested at that price, but that I should tell the others they'd offer a million euros, just because he liked me and wanted his competitors to overpay. He even told me he would confirm that offer if they ask him. I didn't do it of course.
In contrast to the others, XING offered me a deal with a lower upfront payment but a huge earnout upside. I spent quite a few months tracking, testing and analyzing my users' behavior in regard to the earnout KPIs, calculating whether the deal would be better for me and of course negotiating during that time to make it even better.
That's essentially it, I tried to go into as many details as possible without getting into trouble :)
Do you have any advice on websites that generate a decent amount of traffic and email subscribers but are not generating any revenue? I have a website exactly like that but I have no idea what to do with it, and was actually playing with the idea of selling the email list. Would appreciate any advice!
Of course they would have, because they would have already have raised 2.1 million dollars to disrupt the online resume' market and wouldn't be thrilled to get a 7 figure buyout offer.
Fantastic! Thanks for sharing your experience here. We are also bootstrapping a similar product (https://www.resumonk.com) and it's been a great ride so far.
Can we get in touch with you and exchange notes? You are planning to launch an English version, so we might be competitors in near future. But I'm sure it's a big market and there is enough room for all of us. :-)
Would you be down to notify a list when this is done. Maintaining my resume is a huge pain and so far the only site I've been able to use is Resunate and your site is already leaps more user friendly.
The first one I more or less randomly clicked on was of course »Verordnung über Qualitätsnormen für Bananen (QNormBanV)« [1], quality standards for bananas.
Is this account actually maintained by Bundestag (or other actual piece of state administration), or is it just a mirror? Also, either German law is really mature and stable, or this repository is unmaintained: last commit oin master is Jan 2013.
I'd love to see such a repository for the acts in my country, by the way, but the official source is a PDF, and most of the published acts are actually patches to existing (already heavily "patched"), like "In the section II, item 13a, change words 'foo and bar' to 'foo, baz and quux'". This mess untangled into an actual, highlighted, unified text is an actual product, and lawyers happily pay the subscription. I imagine it is similar in other countries.
I'm the original creator of that repo. Keeping it up to date is unfortunately a time-consuming manual effort. Doing version control downstream is generally a nightmare because unraveling different law changes/typo fixes is complicated (yes, lot's of typos when humans consolidate laws by hand).
It's a financially independent (it has a "pro" version) non-profit owned by the department of justice and the faculty of law of the University of Oslo. It is an official source and as such laws published there are officially, legally published and it has been that way since 2001. Laws relevant to private citizens are available for free. It's pretty neat.
Edit: oops! I replied after reading the content in an 8 hours old tab, not noticing that the repo author had already explained it in a sibling post to this one.
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From their README, it's just someone that converted the XML version published by the "Bundesministerium der Justiz und für Verbraucherschutz" (Ministry of Justice and for Customer Protection) which as they note is available at http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/
About the Markdown version in GitHub: after a quick inspection, most diffs seem to be plain additions of content, presumably as it was converted to Markdown.
However, some diffs might have tracked changes in the laws, as this one: https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze/commit/3c1bada22f08b4e0...
I suspect the author ran the converter a few times and then abandoned it. In principle, it should be possible to keep updating it.
The improvement over the official XML version seems to be that with Markdown it's easier to get understandable diffs.
I'm not sure how they do it, but I guess that it wouldn't be extremely hard to have a small grammar to automatically convert the legalese patch into an actual git patch (most of the time, the sentences which wrap the editions are the sames).
If you have a text version, at least preprocessing and proposing changes could be doable (especially that as far as I know, formal French is quite uniform - but then, it's what I heard from others, all French I actually know comes from a Dexter's Laboratory episode). In Poland, though, the original acts are published as PDFs, and the text extraction itself needs assistance, if it's even possible without OCR: the international agreements that are side-by-side in multiple languages (Polish, other party, sometimes also English) are usually image scans saved as PDFs.
Whoa that's pretty crazy. It seems the pattern is a 6 being mistaken for an 8 but surprised Xerox didn't release the upgrade when they discovered the issue. Why wait for someone else to call you out on it?
These as startling statistics, roughly corresponding to the number in the linked blog post. Add to that that they can also probably analyse ~50% of meaningful e-mails (depending on the region) [1].
I should be in your hometown somewhere in the next few months, drop me a line at jacques@mattheij.com with your cell number in it and I'll buy you dinner.
I would love to see separate fonts for HTML, CSS, and JS only, as I would want to use it for lightweight HTML highlighting in textareas in a CMS.