The Delta Blog
Insights, stories, and updates from Europe's leading startup ecosystem
Stop Reading CVs. Run a Hackathon.
The engineers you most want to hire are the least likely to apply. They're employed, they're building, and they're not refreshing job boards. A hackathon inverts the whole thing. Instead of assessing how someone performs in an interview, you watch them do the actual job. In 48 hours, you learn more about how a person thinks and builds than five interviews will ever tell you.
The Nerd Who Turned Down Hasso Plattner and Built a €1 Billion Company Anyway
At the 8th edition of Gründerszene x The Delta, Dr. Gero Decker shared the full story behind Signavio: from a nerdy kid building a computer game for Zaha Hadid, to turning down Hasso Plattner's HANA project, to a cash crisis caused by two months of unwritten invoices, to a bazaar-style negotiation that ended in a 957 million euro acquisition by SAP. It is a founder story about picking the market everyone calls boring and proving them all wrong.
When Is It Time to Upgrade? The Key Signals Your Startup Has Outgrown Its Current Office
Most office upgrades do not start with a desire for something better. They start with small workarounds. A hallway call here, a café meeting there. Startups adapt, and that adaptability becomes the problem. Workarounds quietly drain time, focus, and team energy until friction starts to feel normal. If you are starting to recognise the signs, it is probably time to pay attention.
Why the Best Hackathons in Europe Happen at The Delta
Hackathons stopped being about free pizza and toy demos. The new kind is curated, challenge-driven, and built around real problems. When the right builders meet the right space, the output speaks for itself. Here's why the best ones run at The Delta.
How We Built a 500-Person Conference in Under 90 Days
Al Gore opened it. 500 hand-selected founders, investors, and builders filled the room. And it was conceived, built, and delivered in under 90 days. Here's what it actually takes to produce a flagship event at that level, and why the venue you choose makes all the difference.
How to Design an Event That Feels High-End on a Startup Budget
Most startup teams want their events to feel polished and memorable. Most startup teams also have tight budgets. The good news is that premium experiences are not built on spend. They are built on intention. The right venue, the right atmosphere, and a focus on what actually shapes how people feel. Get those right, and expensive production becomes unnecessary.
What Happens When You Take a Travel Company Public During a Pandemic
Most founders treat an IPO as an arrival point. At the seventh edition of Gründerszene x The Delta, Dr. Patrick Andrae explained why he never saw it that way, and what the years since listing have actually looked like. From a pandemic fundraise that hit a wall, to a counterintuitive decision to go public in the middle of the travel shutdown, to a company that has delivered on every public commitment while the stock has not yet caught up, it is one of the most grounded accounts of public company life from a European founder we have heard.
The Hidden Costs of a Bad Office Decision: Burnout, Turnover, and Lost Productivity
Bad office decisions rarely fail loudly. The cost shows up later, in slower days, quieter rooms, and teams that feel heavier than they should. Founders often blame workload or hiring. In reality, the environment is quietly working against them.
From Web Designer at 15 to Building Europe's Leading Vacation Rental Platform
At the seventh edition of Gründerszene x The Delta, Dr. Patrick Andrae shared the full story behind HomeToGo: from a 15-year-old redesigning a website nobody asked him to redesign, to a decade-long education at Rocket Internet and home24, to co-founding one of Europe's most ambitious marketplace businesses. It is a founder journey built not on a single breakthrough idea but on compounding curiosity, hard-earned execution instincts, and the willingness to evolve the business even when that was the harder choice.