
Startups Founded by French Entrepreneurs - liam_boogar
http://www.rudebaguette.com/2014/01/20/10-startups-didnt-know-founded-french-entrepreneurs/
======
ozh
Earlier a HN front page post about a startup entrepreneur who's a woman, and
now a post about entrepreneur who are French. Can't wait for the posts about
entrepreneurs who are blonde, or muslims, or wearing green shirts.

Bottom line: I don't get why "I am xxxxx and I'm an entrepreneur" is relevant
at all.

~~~
Gmo
I think, for this particular exemple, this is due to the recent rise in French
bashing in a lot of British and American medias.

That included some nuggets such as “The best thinkers in France have left the
country. What is now left is mediocrity.”

So I guess, we, French, have decided to fight back all of this and prove them
wrong.

Granted, this article is about expatriates, so one could think it is proving
the quote right, but I still think this goes in the general direction of
fighting back the partiality of all those articles.

~~~
liam_boogar
Great response, Gmo!

Indeed, while it doesn't entirely combat the 'bashing' \- some of the bashing
is due, so we can't expect to entirely reject all criticism - it does put a
stick in the bicycle wheel of the "France doesn't have a word for
entrepreneur" banter.

~~~
vvvVVVvvv
Origin of Entrepreneur : French, from Old French, from entreprendre; to
undertake.

I guess the irony is lost on them.

~~~
aragot
Just a question: Doesn't "entrepreneur" totally sound French? I'm French so
it's obvious to me, but I'm surprised you fetched a dictionnary to back you
up. Do English speakers need to be scholar to guess it's a French word?

~~~
vvvVVVvvv
French as well, so I'm only backing my point with the dictionary definition ;)

Given how weirdly they tend to pronounce french word and sometimes transform
them -see rouge (but it's only fair since we do the same sometimes) I guess it
doesn't hurt to reiterate it.

~~~
philbarr
The "the French don't have a word for entrepreneur" is supposedly a quote from
George Bush [1], and he's ridiculed for it _because_ we all know
"entrepreneur" is French.

[1]
[http://www.snopes.com/quotes/bush.asp](http://www.snopes.com/quotes/bush.asp)

~~~
vvvVVVvvv
That would explain a lot indeed.

And don't take any offence with what's been said above, it's funny to see a
word / idiom / expression being taken over by the english language, as much as
the opposite; ie : The Hangover being translated Very Bad Trip.

~~~
lmm
Does the phrase you're translating as "Very Bad Trip" have the same druggie
double meaning in French?

~~~
vvvVVVvvv
Kinda but it's mostly bad drug experience, whereas The Hangover encompass any
substance (especially alcohol).

It's an unimaginative 'translation', making it sound more fancy than the
literal french equivalent ("La cuite").

------
beagle3
Lots of respect to jbk - though it's kind of weird that the author listed
jbk's "VLC" (non startup) in the subtitle.

And ... how can this list not mention Fabrice Bellard, without whom neither
QEMU (essential to KVM and VirtualBox), nor FFMPEG (very significantly behind
the scenes in VLC, Handbrake, YouTube, Chrome and just about any other media
related software) would have been. If you have used the internet for 60
minutes today, it is quite likely you've used a Bellard derived product.

~~~
shrikant
Bellard: Prolific hacker? Yes. Entrepreneur? Not so much...

(As an aside: a former French entreprenuer that immediately comes to mind is
Jean-Louis Gassée who founded Be Inc.)

------
eitally
My old boss and a partner, both French (one living in the US, the other in
Germany), founded [http://snapengage.com/](http://snapengage.com/). They're
doing quite well competing with OLark, Zopim, etc.

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jotm
This is a peculiar article - maybe it should be written in French to show
French people that they can do it?

'Cause there's a ton of great companies with French founders: Dassault,
Parrot, Genostar, Mandriva, Digimind, and more...

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margaretblue
CritSend was started in France.

This article strikes on one of my pet peeves, though. Calling non-startups
startups. Ebay hasn't been in a startup in over 10 years. They are simply a
'company' now.

~~~
liam_boogar
Totally true (author here); however, when they started, they were a startup.
And when they were a startup, they were founded by someone French.

Most of the list are current startups; VLC is also only somewhat a startup
(VideoLab is more of a startup; VLC being the project).

------
Mikeb85
There's also various languages and technology many people use and may or may
not realise are developed by French developers - OCaml, Coq, Haxe (my personal
fave), Pharo...

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Aloisius
Well personally, I'd love to move to Paris to do a tech startup with a French
cofounder. Partly because it would give me a non-SVP insight into building
products for a non-American user base (I'm a 4th generation SV native). And
partly to prove the rumors that you can't build startup teams in Paris are
false.

~~~
pyduan
Interested in getting in touch, although I may not be able to give you exactly
what you're looking for. I grew up in Paris and am currently looking to start
a company in SV, so I'm curious about what prompts you to do the opposite
journey.

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psuter
To add to the anecdotal evidence, the winners of the Coursera/Stanford startup
challenge were French: [http://www.goopil.co/](http://www.goopil.co/).

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jbb555
So that's ebay and 9 projects I never heard of :)

~~~
radio4fan
You've really never heard of VLC (admittedly hardly a startup, but certainly a
project) or Feedly?

~~~
dopamean
Or Docker...?

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tbassetto
What about Renaud Visage, co-founder of Eventbrite?

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mxfh
I would add _qobuz_ [1], for innovating in hifi, lossless streaming and
_dailymotion_ , the only video hosting platform (other than vimeo) that
survided against the youtube[2] behemoth I'm aware of. Also netvibes still
exists.

[1] [http://www.qobuz.com/](http://www.qobuz.com/)

[2]
[http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=dailymotion](http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=dailymotion)

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lotux
Any french speaker who can tell me what is meaning of Khodabakchian or omidyar
in french?

~~~
plus-
It means nothing in french

~~~
lotux
yes, because none of them are french!! they are iranian :D, if you want I can
tell you the meaning of both ;)

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lotux
2 of your french Entrepreneurs are actually iranian! Pierre Omidyar , Edwin
Khodabakchian

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seeingfurther
Don't forget Dashlane.

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m1117
No that not truth. I didn't know 9 of them, and I know eBay

