In 2008, I moved to Berlin and started looking for a job to gain a foothold in a city that was foreign to me.
I happened to see a job advert from studiVZ and laughed out loud. studiVZ was a German copy of Facebook (which didn’t exist in Germany at the time but was soon to come) and, apart from its high user numbers, was in the newspapers with several embarrassing security holes that allowed script kiddies to read all private profile data.
But I took it with humour and applied for a job there. studiVZ was a monolithic platform at the time and was to be completely rewritten to make it more modular and faster. It was the biggest platform in Germany with over 9 million users and the complete reprogramming was the biggest IT project in Germany at the time. So I went there.
We were 4 front-end developers in a team of about 40 developers and sysops and rewrote the platform in 9-10 months. For me, that was the beginning of the Web 2.0 start-up era with large platforms with user-generated content fighting for a monopoly position. It was also culturally a typical web startup in the style of the series you can watch on Netflix.