The strategy offered mixed success, at best. Almost completely unnoticed by the city leaders, however, a generation of entrepreneurs who need little more than a place to plug in their computers has set about building the kind of high-tech industry core that promises to create thousands of jobs. The lofts and warehouses of the run-down neighbourhoods that stood for decades in the shadow of the Wall have become a magnet for Internet startups. Though some companies have made the trek to Berlin to take advantage of low rent and an increasing amount of state funding for startups, most have come because their founders and employees like the Berlin lifestyle. The key to being a magnet for dot-com startups, it turns out, is being a cool place to live.
Berlin has the good fortune that companies are coming without the city having to do much at all.
A count the next year turned up 250, and the latest count 400. While most employ only a handful of people, if just three or four become big successes, they could generate substantially more jobs than the handful of factories that have opened here in the past decade. In a back alley down a dirty side street in Kreuzberg, once the West Berlin stomping ground for anarchist groups, the gray steel door leading up to eBay's loft is barely noticeable. Upstairs, the floors still are bare. There were no hard facts that drove us to Berlin.