Finisher photo at Brandenburg Gate, 2014
Techbikers Germany
In 2012, I participated in a charity ride from Paris to London organized out of Google Campus. Tech people on road bikes for three days, raising money along the way. Despite the horrible weather, I loved it. And it struck me that nothing like it existed in Germany.
At the time, Berlin’s startup scene was picking up, but the ways people connected were still pretty narrow: mostly conferences and mixer events. There was no format in which networking happened as a side effect of shared effort rather than as the point.
So I brought in my brother, a friend from university, and a colleague at Google, and we put together a first ride from Prague to Berlin. 460 km over three days, 30 riders, some of whom had never been on a road bike. We partnered with a professional tour operator, which meant we could bring people who’d never done anything like this before and still make it work.
The ride itself was covered by sponsors, and every rider committed to raising a minimum amount for World Bicycle Relief as a condition of participating. That was the harder part to get off the ground. Charity rides weren’t really a thing in Germany at the time, and asking friends, family, and colleagues to fund your bike trip took some explaining. “Wait, you’re doing a cool ride, and I’m paying you to do it?” was a conversation most of us had at some point. A lot of other things went wrong, too: like the bicycle bibs we had designed and gotten manufactured in China, arriving in Chinese sizes, making them tight for even the skinniest of us.
All of this brought us closer as a group. I can still feel the elation of riding those last few kilometers through Berlin and then taking a group finisher photo at Brandenburg Gate. An incredible feeling of accomplishment — and relief that we had all made it in one piece.
I ran Techbikers Germany for a few more years before I moved to San Francisco in 2016, and a different team took over after that. They’ve kept it going ever since. Twelve rides so far through Copenhagen, Hamburg, Poznan, Rügen, always ending in Berlin. Over 450 people have ridden, and close to €1M has been raised for World Bicycle Relief.
What I didn’t expect was how durable the community turned out to be. People kept coming back year after year, friendships and business relationships formed on the road, and at last count, there are two Techbikers babies. I haven’t been involved in running it for a decade now, but I love reconnecting with the community and seeing how much it still means to the people who keep coming back, and what they’ve accomplished for World Bicycle Relief.
