
Inside a fundraising in France: a CEO point of view - cocoflunchy
https://medium.com/@flavienguillocheau/blitzkrieg-fundraising-7836e7d6c40c
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jacquesm
Congratulations, raising money in France is harsh. This is in part due to the
fact that start-ups in France have a much harder time getting off the ground
than in the rest of Europe because of various government regulations, and in
part because the 'home market' does not make for an easy jump abroad. The
latter also somewhat affects German start-ups but they have Austria and
Switzerland as relatively low hanging fruit after the home market.

Out of all the deals I've looked at (and I consider Europe my working
territory) only a very tiny minority were in France.

One sentence from the article jumped out at me:

> When you want to control all the information that filters out of the company
> during such an intense and important moment as a fundraising that’s
> definitely not a good idea: never let your team alone with investors.

I've yet to see any company where the CEO wasn't comfortable with having the
team talk with investors unsupervised, and trying to control the message to
this extent might look like you have something to hide which could cause
investors to drop you. Keep in mind that as the party that is emitting shares
you have a fiduciary duty to disclose and anything that you hold back (or that
you tell your employees to hold back) but that you do know about can come to
bite you later on.

Another note: disclosing what went on between yourself and VCs that invested
in your company or gave you terms sheets is pretty bad form and I would advise
against it. Any communications you've had in the process of your fundraising
are between you and the VCs and should not be disclosed, even in blog posts
about fundraising.

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pandascore
Hi! Thanks for your feedback, we didn't had anything to hide hopefully, it's
just during this momentum, I've became slightly paranoid about loosing it and
you never know how it can change, not sur it's the good way, that's just how I
thought about it :)

For publishing this post, I discussed with our investors, and my idea was
simply to share something I found so few testimony about. And if it can help
other entrepreneurs or even investors understand what happens in CEOs head I
think it's worth! Our investors are nice and comprehensive <3

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tmp234589
On a side note looking at the job offers on the company site i can't
understand why people that want to build a solid company would offer such a
low salary. They offer 40k-55k for a senior engineer, 40k is like 2600 euros a
month.

I think the french tech sector is shooting itself on the foot by not adapting
salaries faster to the job market. Even floor managers in retail stores make
more money in Paris. They will lose a lot of talented people to other
countries like this. Plus salaries are rising anyways so yo hire some people
at those salaries and then when you want to hire more people you need to pay
the new ones a lot more so that generates tensions inside the teams because
new hires are better payed.

And its a cycle, because software engineers in France are considered not
worthy of big salaries, so they pay peanuts. Talented engineers just move to
other countries and whats worse the number of new graduate engineers stagnates
compared to the demand because people don't regard this profession as
something desirable. in 5 to 10 years when demand for labor increases France
wont be prepared.

Very short sighted thinking from ceos in france.

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pandascore
Hi! Interesting thought here, But people we have in recrutement process ask
those kind of salary we didn't made those up. And probably the salary in
France are undervalued, probably talents will seek US salaries, but I don't
feel that we are losing talents when I see the peiole we've hired, but I don't
have the answer here and you might be right. On the salary range it's often
wide because we are not looking specifically for senior persons: yes 40k for a
senior dev doesn't make sense. Though The last idea doesn't make sense,
salaries evolve during the life of a startup and they mostly increase so this
scenario wont happen and probably short sighted thinking from you to think
salaries are managed in such a simplistic way ;)

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tmp234589
Yes i know its not just you i was thinking more of the dilemmas of the
developing software sector in Paris, congratulations by the way. What i see is
that engineers are seriously underpaid in Paris at least. This is also the
fault of french engineers, i think a lot of them think of money as dirty and
are afraid to negotiate what their work is worth. And eventually that will
generate a serious shortage of talented workforce for french companies. That
situation could lead to the french tech sector not being able to be
competitive with some other European countries like Germany.

[edit] I'm not even talking about silicon valley salaries. I compare the
salaries to what skilled workforce in France earns which is minimum 4000 after
tax per month, that is the lowest salary for highly prepared professionals
where there is a lot of demand for workers. You have a lot of software devs
working for half of that in France. For me when the reality of the workforce
shortage hits the companies its going to be too late.

~~~
pandascore
And we are only talking about French salaries in Paris, in other smaller
cities they are even less.. i agree and I already see at my scale a salary
increase in average, probably in the right direction.

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neom
Pretty near exactly how I did mine also, and we've raised almost the exact
same amount. Surprisingly good post.

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contingencies
The segmentation of VCs by the author seems to occur on a few axes: attitude,
interest levels in early startups, response time, interest in exit strategies,
partner quality as board member, fund phase/timeline, network quality.

The book _Venture Deals_ is a good resource.

