France has plenty of early stage startups, in fact the increase in size and quality in their ecosystem in just a few years has been very impressive.
What’s missing in France right now is an ecosystem of fast-growing mid-stage startups - series B and above. I think that’s caused by a combination of:
1) mindset (thinking globally from say one is easier said than done when nobody around you has done it before)
2) lack of late-stage funding. The seed money scene is not as bad as it used to be, and is in a virtuous cycle of early exits / successful entrepreneurs who want to give back. That is looking very good. However, the VCs still suck, with a few exceptions. They’re mostlt bankers, they’re risk-averse, ownership-greedy, and intrusive. Good luck growing a world-class business with them on your board and in your cap table.
3) The EU market is just weak conpared to US and China. So every european startup has to start outside their confort zone and attack foreign markets from day one... Which creates friction compared to growing at home for the first few years.
Here are factors that in my opinion are NOT to blame: taxes (comparable to California), salaries (yes they’re lower than in SV; that’s a good thing for startups), bureaucratic red tape (that’s what lawyers and accountabts are for, it’s not rocket science), lack of work ethic (in my experience French employees work very hard and are very loyal - although they do complain a lot), brain drain (sure French people leave the country. Plenty stay, or come back. It’s nothing like what third world countries have to deal with).
What I’m seeing more and more is French founders moving to SV, raising money there and keeping their engineers in France. Other international founders are doing the same. I think it’s the best available move at the moment.
Concerning mindset, I think there's an even bigger cultural trait that's holding back French entrepreneurship: a complete absence of a "culture of failure".
By and large, French culture is one of fixed mindset. Mistakes/errors/failures reveal one's limitations or flaws, and aren't perceived as an opportunity to learn and grow. This starts very early and is very much baked in to the structure of schooling.
On the flip-side, this seems to be slowly changing. At the very least, people are aware that the US does this differently, and there seems to be some interest in effecting change.
I think the biggest challenge for France in regard to startup is that society is hierarchical. I think many of the other concerns stem from that. Hierarchies makes society about ranking, which kills startup since startups are essentially about climbing the class ladder as a company (from small business to fortune 500). Pretty much all startup "hubs" are either "new world" were there weren't necessarily a lot of established players already and/or relatively egalitarian.
>I think the biggest challenge for France in regard to startup is that society is hierarchical
Agreed. At this point, I usually like to point out that hierarchical societies have their advantages. A huge asset for France is it's elite schools -- the "Grandes Écoles".
These schools are outstanding in a way that few Americans can even fathom, and their students are educated to a point that I didn't think possible until moving to Paris.
If you want the best engineers in the world, hire out of those schools. As a bonus, they aren't the sort to hop between jobs.
I have mixed feelings about the grandes ecoles. Brilliant people get there and you don’t get in and out without serious grit, a decent mind and a taste for effort.
But I tink that’s really what it is. The best engineers I have seen didn’t care for ‘burning’ years of their life in half military schools or old institutions, they went directly to CS courses to get a diploma faster and go abroad or start their own project.
Put another way, people who don’t care about prestige and having a super broad education don’t go there, and in our field I tink a ton of super talented people fit that description.
"Put another way, people who don’t care about prestige and having a super broad education don’t go there, and in our field I tink a ton of super talented people fit that description."
But just like Americans go to ranked universities, as a student you learn how to play the game and go to the best (fit) one you can enter.
This is true, although in slight compensation, there is a true culture of dissent. It is common in the US to have to be an all-in cheerleader for whatever the current project is, until it fails, then everyone dusts themself off and hops back on. French people are quite bad at the dusting-off, but they also don't usually let their colleagues attempt to win a horse race while mounted on a pony.
Because French engineers are also more educated on average than US engineers, and French school ratings more predictive of the IQ of their incoming crop than of their "leadership" or whatever the current US proxy for socioeconomic status is, having a minority of French engineers in a team to point out obvious points of failures can be a definite advantage.
Personally I prefer American managers though, I feel the can-do culture is just better for management. Plus French people tend to have a lot of respect for older people or people further up in the hierarchy so in a mixed hierarchy (with the Americans at the top) usually your French guys will move towards becoming self-starters in their bosses' images, whereas the reverse is not necessarily true and American underlings tend to perceive a French boss's nitpicking or challenging of their strategy as micromanagement and undermining.
I think this last part is one of the great remaining challenges of France as a nation of great enterprise. It is very, very difficult for non-French people to feel comfortable in a company born of French senior management and culture. They just don't get some of the tone and French management can be very backwards compared to the commonly accepted leadership forms today. Hopefully, French children today are seeing a very different picture of what it means to be in charge thanks to exchange programs, higher education and a greater involvement from the EU, and they will grow to be leaders who are not afraid of hiring whole teams from other countries and letting them have autonomy and who do not make their teams afraid of them.
Nassim Taleb would agree -- in Black Swan he writes: "American culture encourages the process of failure, unlike the cultures of Europe and Asia where failure is met with stigma and embarrassment. America’s specialty is to take these small risks for the rest of the world, which explains this country’s disproportionate share in innovations."
tldr; he moved to SF because salaries are much, much higher than in France, even considering the social benefits that you get in France.
Other threads on HN have French engineers saying that they love living in France while working remotely for American companies.
I've lived in Paris, Berlin, NYC and California. I'll never understand how European founders can keep saying that 40k euro salaries for engineers is a benefit while they watch so many great engineers leave to American companies.
>I've lived in Paris, Berlin, NYC and California. I'll never understand how European founders can keep saying that 40k euro salaries for engineers is a benefit while they watch so many great engineers leave to American companies.
This. I have tasted the fruit and I'm never going back. The social benefits feel largely like gimmicks compared to the standard of living + social recognition you get working as an engineer in the US or even Canada.
What do you mean by "standard of living" though? I know plenty of Europeans who have access to things even rich Americans barely have access to. Once you want to, or have, kids many benefits that are hard to come by becomes less gimmicky. The main problem in Europe, and in most countries, these days is the housing market. Your position in the housing market has really come to determine your position in society.
For example it is pretty common in the Nordic countries to have a vacation home where you spend summers and holidays with friends and family. And between saved parental leave, standardized vacation periods and public holidays there is time available to do so. There are certainly people who do have that in the US, but once you or your family relocates it gets a lot more tricky.
In general I just think it is a lot easier in, at least some, European countries to set yourself up for a good life. Day to day, year to year, to not endure a long commute or stressful work environment. Having time to spend with your kids while they are young, your parents before they get too old and your friends so you don't lose touch. Not having to worry about the future, managing your kids lives, the financial losses of getting sick or your career.
Once you start wanting to do things that aren't universal or the default in any country, and especially with other people in your life, you can end up paying a large premium to do so.
> For example it is pretty common in the Nordic countries to have a vacation home where you spend summers and holidays with friends and family. And between saved parental leave, standardized vacation periods and public holidays there is time available to do so. There are certainly people who do have that in the US, but once you or your family relocates it gets a lot more tricky.
That's also common in the United States or at least in the Upper Midwest. Just here in Minnesota there are around 124,000 seasonal properties and the average household income for the owners of these properties is $58,000 which is not rich in the United States. It's also a similar story in Wisconsin next door and other Upper Midwest states like Michigan.
I don't think being able to a own vacation home in the Midwest is relevant in this context: the increase in income going from France to the Midwest is almost certainly going to be much lower than the increase going from France to the Bay Area, while the loss of social benefits would still be the same (or worse.)
Why? I make almost twice the average salary of a Software Engineer in Paris here in Minneapolis. I could move to the bay area and make an extra $20-$30K but my rent and cost of living would sky rocket. I pay about $680 a month for rent in an excellent neighborhood of Minneapolis. Getting rent that cheap in the bay area would be impossible. Plus my friends working in Chicago have salaries equivalent to the bay area but their cost of living is almost half of the bay. Even though I make less in the Upper Midwest, the cost of living is so low that I can save more than if I lived in the bay.
Shh don't tell them. ;) In Kansas City I rent a _house_ with a large back yard within walking distance from a lot of neat things. I've built a metal working shop in my basement and a forge out back. My rent is 700$ a month. Work the first day of the month pays that if I take a long lunch.
Every SF salary range I see is significantly below what I made last year. I'm not even taking cost of living into consideration here. Just absolute terms. I interviewed at Amazon a few years ago when they were doing some game design stuff and didn't make the cut. I learned that I'm not ambitious enough to make less.
Because midwest tech, I have no debt. In fact, I can crunch for a month, take the money and go buy a few acres to shoot my .50 caliber anti material rifle. Few SF residents will know how expensive it is to buy match 750 grain ammo, or know the pain and suffering of putting a clean hole through an engine block you tore out of a mercury tracer from 1000m away on a tuesday at 11am. It's terrible.
The central limit theorem corroborates the fact that the 500,000 people in KC basically don't exist and it's just one big cornfield. The 800,000 people in San Francisco are burdened with the knowledge that everything east of them til' the coast is flyover country. I feel for them.
> I've built a metal working shop in my basement and a forge out back. My rent is 700$ a month.
Making major capital investments in the property is actually something I would consider a reason to purchase rather than renting. Can you say more about your thought process there?
Why do you assume that? I spent almost a month camping this year and I'm planning a 2 week snowboarding trip in the Rockies. As well as a climbing slash canoeing trip in the boundary waters area in the spring.
And yet me an American is on track for 40 days of paid vacation time this year, also a coworker of mine just got back from 13 weeks paid paternity leave.
> Not having to worry about the future, managing your kids lives, the financial losses of getting sick or your career.
How does this encourage anything but complacency? Who wants to start anything when everything is a utopia with no consequences? I’m not even being facetious because that is basically what you’re describing. This is why Europe barely innovates: extreme comfort and security. These aren’t bad things. But it’s odd to me that people look for more complicated answers when this is plain as day.
Get back to us the first time you have a medical emergency putting you on the hook for 5 or 6 figures (after insurance); at least you're lucky enough to be able to flee the jurisdiction back to a home country.
> Get back to us the first time you have a medical emergency putting you on the hook for 5 or 6 figures (after insurance)
Is that a thing? Obviously there are lots of people in the USA who don't have any good health insurance options. But as an engineer in San Francisco all the companies I've worked at or interviewed with have had gold-plated health insurance plans with maximum out-of-pocket expenses in the low 4 figures. And of course, most people won't hit those maximums most years, that's just an upper bound.
This is of course limited to my personal experience, but my impression is that good health insurance is table stakes for highly-paid engineering roles.
That's a very unfortunate story. As I mentioned, I recognize that many people in the US don't have any good healthcare options, which is something that we as a society ought to fix.
However, I don't think we can learn much about the health insurance typically provided to engineers in San Francisco from the poor insurance plan available to a teacher in Houston. Those jobs have very different compensation profiles.
The problem is you're not going to have a solid understanding of your engineering role plan until you're employed, and even then, even with "preapproval" from the insurer, it might turn out you don't have the coverage you think you do.
My firm is in financial services. Very nice plan. Even with my "nice plan", we've had the insurer renege on their coverage of services (thousands of dollars in services) after receiving approval and having it in writing prior to obtaining services. YMMV.
They are a benefit... if you pay people above market! That allows you to attract top talent that otherwise would be locked in at Google etc.
The whole point of low salaries, for smart companies, is to be the one increasing them! Obviously that makes it a temporary advantage, as salaries start to increase... But all great advantages are temporary.
The people you are talking to, who like low salaries because they want to enjoy lower costs in perpetuity... that’s just mediocre thinking by mediocre companies.
Exactly. France has extremely strong engineering schools, and almost no software industry. You wouldn’t believe the talent being wasted in banking IT desks and consulting conpanies... Not only can a well-funded startup pay them better, the work is 10x more interesting. And unlike Silicon Valley engineers, French employees won’t ditch you after a year. Once they’re on board, they tend to stick around (sometimes even too long for their own good...)
> French employees won’t ditch you after a year. Once they’re on board, they tend to stick around (sometimes even too long for their own good...)
You forgot to mention that you can‘t fire them at will either... It‘s such laws and excessive taxation that makes many european countries unattractive for startups.
An employee can be laid off if he agrees to it but that's not like firing because it needs an agreement. I am not sure if the OP is talking about that.
It's possible to fire people without justification and the company will be brought to court. There is a new law from Macron that caps the damages the employee can get to pretty much nothing when he only has a few years of tenure or less. You could provision for a few months of salary.
I can confirm that you can fire people in France at a reasonable cost if you know what you’re doing and are focused on paying good money for great people. If you’re looking to build a large-scale sweatshop of low-skill workers with low pay and high turnover... then sure, France is not the place to do that. But if you’re a typical tech company not afraid to pay above market for top talent... cost of severance will not be an issue.
(I’ve hired and run large engineering offices in France and in the US).
That. Definitely that. There is zero software industry in France. The best talents are incredibly easy to hire and retain because they have nowhere else to go.
Low salaries also mean it is hard for normal people(ie people not from rich or well connected families) to save up enough money to self-fund a startup.
I do agree that low salary is an issue, but it's improving. On the other hand, it's very hard to compare everything, when you're young, single and healthy, it's a no brainer that you should take your chance in the US. But if you have a family, suddenly are diagnosed with a costly disease of whatever kind, I bet you wish to be in Europe.
So articles that say "you should go west" just applies to their authors, everybody has their own set of parameters to evaluate, and the answer isn't so obvious. I personally have kids and a wife that earns a lot of money. I've done the maths, it's a no brainer for me financially to stay in Europe...
In Europe, why would an entrepreneur work hard? There is strong safety net provided by the Welfare state, it's simply not worth the risk.
No risk of going homeless if you fail. It's easier to give up.
Remove safety net, remove free healthcare, increase wages, remove payroll taxes, remove immigration restriction, add property rights so that foreigners can buy land and see the startups blossom.
It is as simple as that.
But pretty sure, most European will not be voting for this.
As an independent observer (VC; background in investing both in the US & Europe, currently based out of London) - the French ecosystem has transformed massively over the last few years, it's essentially unrecognizable from what it used to be.
Historically French startups were relatively insular, primarily focusing on the French market while largely ignoring the larger global market.
That's long gone - now you see French startups going after the global market from day one (indeed many run product/eng out of France while running sales from the US to be closer to their American customers).
You can tell the article author hasn't really spent time in the French ecosystem due to the lack of mention of SaaS which is where Paris has found it's sweet spot - SaaStr even ran their first conference outside of SF in Paris.
You can easily see the quality of SaaS startups emerging from the French YC alumni alone: Front, Algolia, Sqreen, Slite - each really building the category defining product in their space.
Yeah, I was very impressed when a little over a year ago the French American Chamber of Commerce came to reach out to startups at Station Houston about working in France.
Also, "YouTube wannabe Dailymotion" was founded just one month after than YouTube. The fact that YouTube won the monopoly instead of Dailymotion is an illustration of the problem, but presenting them as a copycat because they're not as successful is unfair to them.
My opinion : the low salaries of engineers, high taxes and bureaucracy hold back the startup scene. Also, the mentality toward technical positions, in France if you didn't go from engineer to manager by 35 year old people wonder what's wrong with you.
That's an interesting picture. I took those numbers and compared them to Wikipedia's purchasing-power adjusted average wage figures for 2017 at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_w.... Here are the results sorted by ratio of average developer salary to average salary in each country. You get the best bang for your buck in .il and .fr doesn't (quite) get the wooden spoon.
Country Ratio dev:avg
Netherlands 0.851031639465174
France 0.891326705519369
Canada 0.944941413632355
Finland 1.00083791080905
Australia 1.01779098644302
Germany 1.05075128717033
New Zealand 1.07384561596284
UK 1.18906064209275
Sweden 1.29738400207581
Norway 1.3082871202062
Switzerland 1.31657113498065
Denmark 1.34069094159251
USA 1.48617853958189
Israel 1.85359454758035
I'd be interested to see the Canada numbers broken down more locally. I'm quite sure that my current home city of Montreal would look a lot healthier than Vancouver, for example.
What does this table say? I'm not convinced you can just divide real salaries by PP adjusted numbers and get a meaningful result of the kind you are claiming. Isn't this table just sorted by the PP adjustment factor, i.e. an inverse ranking of the highest PP?
"Isn't this table just sorted by the PP adjustment factor"
No, it isn't, but I do think you're right in that I should have used the nominal wages. I found the original article and that does not appear to be purchasing-power adjusted:
Using the nominal wages gives the below, with France now in the middle of the list:
Country Ratio dev:avg
Australia 0.81
Netherlands 0.85
Canada 0.90
New Zealand 0.92
Finland 0.92
France 0.92
Switzerland 0.93
Norway 1.02
Denmark 1.05
Germany 1.12
UK 1.15
Sweden 1.15
USA 1.49
Israel 1.53
Whether or not this is a "meaningful result" is still debatable but I'd like to think it gives us something approaching a "developer appreciation metric".
The real problem for startups is the lack of American style VC funding. European startups need to get profitable much earlier than US startups.
Early funding for startups is OKish. You can grow from 0 to 10-50 million, but after that it's better to sell the business to some big international firm, because you really struggle getting smart money that the ability to take the big risk.
Apple has been very good at buying out European startups. They got bargain prices for sleep monitoring, eye tracking, and computer vision startups in the last year.
>The real problem for startups is the lack of American style VC funding. European startups need to get profitable much earlier than US startups.
This is a common refrain, but the reality is that VC is both out of reach and not the right fit for the vast majority of US ventures. Likewise, knowing the number of firms that get VC but will collapse anyway, I often wonder if it is a benefit that in other countries there is a slower, more profit-driven path that would seem to build legitimate companies for the long run rather than vehicles that border on financial engineering in the name of short-term potential success.
It absolutely should not be. It makes no sense to provide high-risk big dollars to majority of anything.
The name "startup" means different things for different people.
Paul Graham definition for startup means salable hyper-growth. Platform economies like Google, Amazon, FB, Twitter, grow trough network effects. The reason why US leads in this new economy is because they have their eye in winning big.
One big hit justifies losing lots of money in 100 mediocre startups or low growth enterprises.
I understand what you mean about making the move to manager. As a french dev now living and working in UK I don't feel this social/professional pressure any more. It's also a shame that salaries are kept so low, but it kind of reflects the lack of consideration companies there have for devs.
That being said, I know a lot of very good software engineers that will never make the move from France to a foreign country because they are happy at what they are doing and the salary is not their first priority, very good for them and for french companies who'd like to hire them.
Let's start with a labour budget of $300,000 to hire a lead programmer or other critical person.
France: 41.35% of the gross salary is paid to the Government in payroll taxes, leaving $175,938 paid as income to the employee.
After income taxes, $90,167 is left for the employee to spend.
That employee then wants to spend their entire salary on flat-screen TVs? They have an effective spending power of $75,139 after 20% VAT.
Government taxes account for about 75% of this labour budget! As you can imagine, this creates a huge incentive for tax evasion.
The US, for the same original budget:
4.09% is paid as payroll taxes, leaving $287,717 as income.
After (Californian) income taxes, $178,773 is left for the employee to spend. 7.25% sales tax then gives $166,300 finally.
So, an extra $91,161 ends up with the American worker (much more if they are married to a zero-income spouse and move out of California). Sure, you have to pay things like property taxes, 401K contributions, health insurance in the US - but would those account for $91,161?
Europe needs to completely scrap its payroll taxes and replace them with income taxes. Employees should not have to pay anything merely for hiring an employee, as it places a disincentive on using labour. On a global level, it also makes France uncompetitive - American companies hiring globally will be much more attractive.
> much more if they are married to a zero-income spouse
In France it's the same, but here's a major difference once you add kids to the equation:
Each kid of a couple counts the same as "0.5 zero-income spouse", up to 3 kids. After the 3rd kid (or if the kid has handicap), they count the same as "1 full zero-income spouse"
So for a couple with one spouse with a salary of X , one spouse without job, and 2 kids, the taxes would be calculated as if there was 3 persons making X/3 each, instead of 2 people making X/2 in the US.
Given that the tax brackets are even more progressive than in the US, the impact seem huge.
> Given that the tax brackets are even more progressive than in the US, the impact seem huge.
And that's why income taxes revenue pale in comparison with payrol taxes. Presidential candidates can claim to lower those every time they want better polls because they know it is not where the money is coming from.
2017:
- income taxes = 78 billions
- business taxes = 60 billions
- VAT = 203 billions
And it is perfectly illustrated by the fact that they interviewed people form a management school about innovation in the article instead of someone from a technical background.
Low salaries should help the startup scene, not hurt it. Where would you rather create your startup - somewhere where it would cost more to hire or less?
Lots of talented people end up working in another country, especially top talent. Would you rather have a glass ceiling at 40k or start at 100+k in SF?
Not to mention, low salaries garantees that not much international talent will relocate in France
France is full of "service" jobs, those are crap and lower the average. Just ignore those and look at the jobs that matter, if you're the kind of developer who would have the skills to relocate to SF.
If you're senior, in France, you can get a fairly good salary as a developer. There is definitely no glass ceiling at 40k; you can get more than 50k easily, and above 70k if you have can find the right company with a good fit.
Comparison with SF is hard because it's such a weird place in terms of housing, US healthcare etc. So if you compare to Germany or UK, you still make less in France, but the gap is much smaller than 10 years ago and it's still contracting.
That started before Macron actually. You can find jobs in well-funded startups (instead of the starving startups of 10 years ago happy to raise a million), and more and more international companies (US and others) are now recruiting engineers in France.
I don't know about that... Salaries in the UK are crap, much lower than in the EU; and I have the impression that London is only up in the stats because of the quant jobs, which while technically 'software development' jobs, are out of reach for most people that would consider themselves 'software developers'. Now I don't keep quite as close an eye on the UK job market as I used to, but even the job opening and contracts I see on mailing lists I'm on, don't make me want to jump ship...
That's only true if you don't lose capable talent due to the low salaries. If most of the talented French engineers move to Germany to get higher pay, then the low pay will hinder the startup scene.
Bureaucracy is not an issue in my opinion. I've ran a successful business in France and if you have a good accountant (and lawyer for some particular issues), it's not anymore difficult than in the US. As an individual, compare how hard it is to make your tax return in the US and in France...
Is this before or after tax? Because it it's before tax and you take the avg salary and substract taxes you'll end up with a quite different picture with the USA, Israel and Switzerland ending up on top and France at the bottom.
That is true. In Zurich a mid level engineer with 3 years of experience can earn 6600 EUR after taxes. See my blogpost that I wrote after moving here "Nine reasons why I moved to Switzerland to work in IT" (https://bit.ly/2GNlJcA)
A good look at France's startup scene today and what's holding them back from creating the next Uber/Google
“We set up in France around the same time as our rivals were starting in the U.S., but quickly they were raising 100 times more from investors and selling across the country,” Sapet said. “Meanwhile we were stuck translating into 20 European languages.” - Christophe Sapet (French entrepreneur)
> "Meanwhile we were stuck translating into 20 European languages.” - Christophe Sapet (French entrepreneur)"
That's such a bad excuse. There is nothing stopping them from executing in English, or in French in France in the first place. There are five major languages in Europe: English, Spanish, French, German and Italian. No startup starts doing business in >1 market, not even Uber/Google.
Any company interested in multinational growth should build localization into their app architecture to begin with, anyway. Then just contract out the actual act of translating the strings.
Sure, but the idea is that you can pay another service to do the translations. The main difficulty is supporting things like right-to-left text and other specific characteristics, but that shouldn't be a problem in Europe only.
What's holding France and everybody else back from creating the next Google, is that there is only ever one Google.
Looking at the list of largest tech companies globally, there are perhaps four dozen very large tech companies in the West. Based on their ages, one might get founded in the entire West in a given year on average during the modern transistor era.
Simply put, there aren't going to be 27 Ubers or Googles or Microsofts. There is one of each. So for France (or any given country) to produce these types of companies, they have to beat everyone else racing to produce that outcome. The odds are extraordinarily low, no matter what you do, once you start adding in all the hurdles, as time is of the essence since it's always winner take most.
What countries like France can do, is produce a lot of mid-size tech companies that can take advantage of local and regional opportunties better than large foreign firms. The long-tail opportunties, in other words, that require being down in the minutiae.
As an example, you'll never produce larger global retailers than Walmart or Amazon, no matter what you do, if you're a given country in the EU. That doesn't mean you can't occasionally beat them at their game on your turf however (as retailers routinely do around the globe). It heavily depends on the nature of the tech / segment in question. The reason that works that way, is similar to why Google, Microsoft, Apple, Uber, Intel, Cisco, et al. have done so well as global giants, whereas SAP hasn't been vanquished in the European market by the likes of Oracle and Salesforce. Local relationships are immensely important in some areas of tech. If you're Google, it's the ability to dominate the huge US market, derive immense profit from that base, and rather easily perpetually project outward at claiming pieces of market share all over the planet. That concept only fails if the US economy does, there's nothing France can do to compete with it, unless the EU wants to entirely integrate (they don't and never will, national sovereignty is too important). The real local competitive advantage for a France is in tech where there is friction that provides an advantage based on culture or location. They're not going to produce the next Google, ever, and they shouldn't be aiming for that.
I don't get the 2nd part, there is nothing stopping French companies translating into the one other language which they probably speak fluently, English, testing it in the UK as they're roughly the same timezone, then moving onto the big English speaking markets of the US, Canada and Australia, which are all significantly bigger than probably 17 of those 20 languages.
And the finance thing has nothing to do with Macron (or Merkel or May or any other European leader). European VCs don't speculate on potential unicorns like the US ones do. It's a different risk appetite, what are EU leaders supposed to do?
There is no such regulation. We're a B2B French company, based in Paris, and there's only one user interface language (English) that even our French customers have to use. Even for B2C, there are no language regulations.
For public and almost-public organizations, there is a regulation: you can communicate in exactly one language (French) or at least three languages (usually these will be English and German).
On the other hand, trying to sell to the average French person will require a French translation, and the same is probably true for most other EU countries if you wish to improve your chances ("have a translation in that language" is likely in the top 5 of improvement suggestions for a new market). 300 million people sharing the same language is a boon, especially for B2C or B2SMB.
Those 300 people also share similar culture, likely speeding up adoption through word of mouth.
Since I mostly consume english, US-centric media, I wonder how high the marketing effect even outside the US is for services that launch in the US first.
I lived in Paris for a year, and I'm now working for a big tech company in the US. I can't speak from the VC side of the table, but France has incredibly technically strong graduates (people with technical degrees from the top universities there are all very good) and young people have a very global outlook. Further, there are more and more programs that provide start up funding/locations/tax breaks.
What is missing is an ecosystem to sustain and nurture these companies. The capital in Europe is incredibly conservative and very old fashioned.
It takes a generation of entrepreneurs to start and have a success or two despite the conditions. Then unless they pull a lightbank they will reinvest in the next generation of entrepreneurs.
Yes, that's happening already. The founder of the company I work for (Rachel Delacour) got a good exit by selling to Zendesk and now she's a business angel.
Can you expand on pulling a Lightbank? Full disclosure, I’ve worked for two Lightbank-funded companies in Chicago but am just curious what you meant there.
Apart from higher salaries in California Paris is way better for the quality of living. They have public transportation, good food and so far one of the emerging "mega/gigacities" of the future. They even have a "Grand Paris" [1] project which aims to integrate suburbs and surrounding cities in one huge melted conurbation. So opening a business here may be a good strategy in the long term.
From what I can tell the startup ecosystem is even weaker there than in areas like the Midwest in the U.S., which even after expenses related to transportation and healthcare makes a lot more economic sense in my opinion. Cost of living is very low but the salaries are much higher. Regardless of infrastructure, France and Europe in general needs higher salaries to be competitive. Sure some of the quality of living things are nice but ultimately I'm going to choose a job primarily for work I enjoy and how much money I'll have left over expenses.
"quality of living" is all relative, I'm from France and one of the reason I don't want to go back is that I don't want to live in Paris (and outside of Paris the job opportunities aren't really there).
With my family, we are feeling that we're very much better off in a suburb (like Mountain View) with quick access to hike trail and some nature. On top of this, I also have 10min commute by bike. My friends in Paris commonly have 2h commute daily.
There are many cultural issues that will prevent France from ever becoming a startup nation.
One of them is the fact that there's this idea floating around where you have to have higher education (Bac +5, aka 5 years of uni) to do anything even remotely related to IT, as if it was some kind of rocket science (where a degree would actually help). In fact, the first thing many French people will ask me when they learn about my job is how do I do it and whether I went to uni. They are all shocked when I tell them no when everywhere else self-taught developers are a common occurrence.
You simply cannot get any IT job without that; even junior positions require it. This automatically disqualifies a lot of self-taught developers (like me) even if they have actual work experience, and I'm not sure if the ones that are left (those with the required education) are any better considering they never had the chance to work on a real project.
The salaries are also awful. As a senior engineer (with the required education) you're still only looking around at 40k euros. I was already making more than that as a junior in London! (not to mention the Euros vs British Pounds conversion). An engineer is also not that well placed on the social ladder, management (even something relatively simple like running a small shop/restaurant) is deemed much more prestigious than software engineering.
The relationship between employees and management is toxic. There is no concept of teamwork and where the "boss" is actually working with you towards the same goal as you. Instead, the boss is always seen as an enemy. There is no complicity what so ever between employees and management. This was actually a shock for me when I got my first job in the UK and realised that actually bosses are cool (<3 to my former managers, if you're reading this) and are there to support you. A meeting with the boss in France usually means you did something wrong, while everywhere else it's just a routine talk to go over any eventual issues, ask for advice (whether for the current job or about your career in general) and see if anything can be improved.
Finally bureaucracy and taxes are still awful. Even if you can theoretically get tax relief on new companies and so on, the bureaucracy involved is a tax itself, and often not worth it.
>>> I'm not sure if the ones that are left (those with the required education) are any better considering they never had the chance to work on a real project.
Every single French graduate has experience on real world projects. Graduation requires to have done at least 2 half year internships.
In my opinion, compared to UK graduates for example, French are much stronger. Longer studies, more theoretical and more practical experience.
French expat in Australia here. In Australia, it is about what you can do, not about what piece of paper you carry with you that matters when getting a job.
I looked at job boards the other day to see what kind of role somebody like me could get in France: As a senior dev, good luck getting more than 60K gross per year in Paris with the rents starting at 1k per month for a 1 bedroom apartment in a shitty district!
Hypothesis: other countries, when comparing their own startups to America's startup scene, have no idea how many American startups break a lot of laws at the beginning. It's not just Uber; Youtube had a lot of copyrighted content, many ecommerce sites sold into markets without the right export/import licenses, privacy laws were/are widely flouted at first, hate-speech laws are widely disregarded at first, etc. European startups tend to think (perhaps correctly) that they have to be more or less legal from the get-go, American startups tend to think (perhaps correctly) that they won't get much attention until/unless they get big, and they can worry about being legal later.
Just an hypothesis, I don't know if it's true. But if it is true, it might be hard for European leaders to see, because they probably aren't aware of how often American startups break the law at first.
Having lived in and worked in France, I think it has little to do with respect for the law, and more to do with other social/structural factors. In no specific order:
- A much less developed culture of failure
- Few(er) "real" startups. For reasons (see above), many startups in France are startups in name only. They operate under "incubators" that are internally-hosted by industry giants (e.g. AXA). This means it's harder to pivot since whatever you're working on has to serve the interests of your structure. In the AXA example, if you want to pivot from insure-tech to something else, good luck.
- A culture of "I'll work a normal job for 10 years to gain experience. Only then will I be legitimate as an entrepreneur." Again, see point 1. The effect is that most people never really get started.
- A culture that values job stability to an extreme that's difficult to grasp for Americans. In France, the idea that one should work his entire life in the same company is even built into the law in the form of stringent protections against layoffs.
This is slowly changing, but France is not the startup nation Marcon wants it to be.
All the French entrepreneurs (including yours truly, but then again I'm a French/US dual citizen...) are in London.
There is also a big social difference, if not social stigma of being a developer (and other "blue-collar" job in general).
In the US, it's not unusual to be in a startup in your late 30's / 40's, and for founders (especially in the bay area) to have gray hair / beard. In France, if you are still a developer in your late 30's and haven't moved to a management, paper pushing, position, you're pretty much a loser.
To some extend, there is a general disgust in France for being down the food chain, even if you're a rock star.
note: I'm French now living on the west coast, making a figure I'd never do in France.
What’s missing in France right now is an ecosystem of fast-growing mid-stage startups - series B and above. I think that’s caused by a combination of:
1) mindset (thinking globally from say one is easier said than done when nobody around you has done it before)
2) lack of late-stage funding. The seed money scene is not as bad as it used to be, and is in a virtuous cycle of early exits / successful entrepreneurs who want to give back. That is looking very good. However, the VCs still suck, with a few exceptions. They’re mostlt bankers, they’re risk-averse, ownership-greedy, and intrusive. Good luck growing a world-class business with them on your board and in your cap table.
3) The EU market is just weak conpared to US and China. So every european startup has to start outside their confort zone and attack foreign markets from day one... Which creates friction compared to growing at home for the first few years.
Here are factors that in my opinion are NOT to blame: taxes (comparable to California), salaries (yes they’re lower than in SV; that’s a good thing for startups), bureaucratic red tape (that’s what lawyers and accountabts are for, it’s not rocket science), lack of work ethic (in my experience French employees work very hard and are very loyal - although they do complain a lot), brain drain (sure French people leave the country. Plenty stay, or come back. It’s nothing like what third world countries have to deal with).
What I’m seeing more and more is French founders moving to SV, raising money there and keeping their engineers in France. Other international founders are doing the same. I think it’s the best available move at the moment.