
ParisIsBack – The Paris Tech Guide - trueduke
http://fr.slideshare.net/_TheFamily/paris-isback-indextf
======
sp4ke
As a previous foreign entrepreneur who lived in Paris for 8 years here's my
experience and my advice: In paris entrepreneurship is a VIP club for rich
people who will rarely take real risk. Seed investment is next to impossible.
The tax reduction schemes requires months of procedures and administrative
paperwork. Real estate is almost as expensive as London. And the worst, if
you're a foreigner you'll have a real hard time given all the immigration laws
nonsense.

You're better off making your startup almost anywhere else.

EDIT: and as other comments said, people don't speak English, the French have
some sort of pride of only speaking their native language ...

~~~
madlag
Wow, that's a great deal of french bashing in such a short comment. I agree
that the immigration laws must be a real pain for some people. But for the
rest, you must have been out of luck :

\- tax reduction schemes are a no brainer, you just have to justify once a
year that you are doing something in relation with R&D, and there are too lots
of ways to get some government grant to help start your business

\- french entrepreneurs are from a lot of different origins. Of course you
will find and some rich people creating companies, but most of the people
creating companies here are taking real risks and don't have large amount of
cash to back them if they fail

\- seed investment is not difficult at all, and government grants are here too
to help save your shares, even better that seed .

I am telling this as a cofounder of Stupeflix, the company behind Replay, app
of the year on the Apple App Store, and proudly based in Paris for 6 years
now.

EDIT: sorry for my English, it's not my native language, but I am trying hard
to learn it...

~~~
patrickaljord
> that's a great deal of french bashing

Can we stop with this? I'm tired of French people always responding to any
kind of critics with the "French bashing" strawman. I'm French myself by the
way.

> and government grants are here too to help

Most entrepreneurs don't want the government to _help_ , they want the
government to stay out of the way. A concept many of my fellow French have a
hard time understanding the benefits.

~~~
madlag
I can assure you that you will want the government to help, especially when
you don't have any money to start your business. You should ask a few
entrepreneurs about this.

~~~
patrickaljord
I am an entrepreneur and I don't want the government's help. The government is
the new Church here and I want out.

~~~
madlag
So you choose to suffer the bad sides of the government without taking any
advantage from it ? You are free to do so, but is it really the wisest
solution when you are just looking for a solution to survive ? And isn't it a
form of church too, to refuse anything coming from the government ? (I am not
from any church, if you're asking)

~~~
patrickaljord
> And isn't it a form of church too, to refuse anything coming from the
> government ?

I refuse help from any kind of church, I like to call this Freedom :)

> (I am not from any church, if you're asking)

Except for the government.

------
carlob
There are a bunch of nice things to be said about Paris and the tax rebate
system they put in place for startups and companies that spend heavily in R&D.
However I think that Paris has a very low quality of life in most of the
fields that are ignored in metrics:

\- Apartment prices are usually measure by the room when doing comparisons. In
Paris the room count is misleading: I've seen studios smaller than 15 m^2 and
1BR smaller than 25 m^2.

\- Apartment quality is really really bad: creaky, cracked hardwood floors
that haven't been replaced since Haussmann, humidity and mold are the default.

\- The weather is awful, it rains 40% of the days.

\- This might sound surprising but the average food quality is abysmal:
produce is expensive and tastes like nothing and the random brasserie is an
expensive tourist trap.

\- Some of the stereotypes about the Parisian being grumpy and pretending not
to speak English have a grain of truth. [edit: this is going to get me
downvoted to hell]

So if you are really planning to start a business in France, go to another
city: e.g. Lille is a thriving city with a very rich cultural life, it's 1h
away from Paris by train (if you need to network you can commute) and doesn't
suffer from most of the above (except for the climate).

~~~
hk__2
> The weather is awful, it rains 40% of the days.

According to Wikipedia [1] it’s only 30% (650mm/year, while it’s 980mm/year in
Bordeaux or 800mm/year in Nice [2])

> the random brasserie is an expensive tourist trap

To be fair, a lot of “random brasseries” are pretty good, you can eat a good
meal for €10 everywhere in the city.

[1]:
[https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climat_de_Paris](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climat_de_Paris)
[2]:
[https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climat_de_la_France#Donn.C3.A9...](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climat_de_la_France#Donn.C3.A9es_climatiques_de_quelques_villes)

~~~
maximem
10€ meal in Paris! First Price in Brasseries start at 12 / 13€ for a decent
main course.

~~~
fermigier
You can have a nice pizza for 8-9€ these days in Paris, a really good crepe
for 5-7€, tasty bo buns (vietnamese noodle dish) are usually less than 10€ in
the asian neigbourhoods, etc.

~~~
carlob
No, believe me. If you think that the pizza you get for 8-9€ is decent, take
the time, once in your lifetime, to visit Naples. There are a couple of good
pizza places in Paris, but prices hover around 15€ per pizza.

~~~
fermigier
1\. What makes you think I have never been to Naples? I've actually been
there, and many places in Italy, over the years. There are amazing places, and
crappy tourist places, just like everywhere in the world.

2\. I said "decent", not "outstanding". You can get decent pizze in Paris for
less than 10€ in any decent pizzeria (there are some bad ones, just don't come
back to them).

~~~
carlob
> 2.

Please, please tell me where they are! My email is hn_handle@my_employee and
you can probably infer my_employee from my submissions :)

------
chevreuil
I'm french and I worked with two foreigners (US & Canada) in a parisian
startup. One of them didn't bother learning french, and it was ok. He was
mostly hanging out with other expats, and seemed to enjoy it.

Nonetheless, it is hard for foreigner to find an apartment to rent, but it's
hard for everyone. And since whining about real estate is the national sport
it somehow eased their integration and they quickly found colleagues to help
them in this task.

France is not the UK, and it's not the US either. If you want to come in Paris
make sure you're compatible with locals culture and habits. That means try to
talk to some people mentioned in the slideshow, visit coworking space and
startup offices. You'll be welcomed.

------
heyts
This makes me cringe a bit. What this document says seems to be that France is
a great country to start a company in mostly because you can get cheap labor.
It is stated that a mid-level dev is $50-80K in France, however the cost of
living in Paris is comparable to living in New York, so it means that you
ultimately should come to Paris because you can cut your payroll by 20%.

~~~
fab13n
> you ultimately should come to Paris because you can cut your payroll by 20%.

Don't forget that your employees enjoy perks such as free healthcare or
unemployment insurance from the government. Moreover, they had their MSc for
free or almost, which means they don't have any student loan to pay back. If
they have kids, their school is probably both decent and free. If it isn't,
what's meant by "expensive private school" around there is a couple thousand
euros a year. Also, 5-7 weeks of paid vacation are included.

Most US workers would be better off getting all of this for a 20% pay cut.

~~~
patrickaljord
> Most US workers would be better off getting all of this for a 20% pay cut.

It's not a 20% pay cut, when you get paid €5k here, your employer already
gives ~€4k to the government to pay for all those "free social services", and
then you still have to pay 30% tax on your income. So the "free" education and
healthcare actually costs you something like €6k per month, most people are
not aware of this because half of these are paid upfront by your employer, if
only French knew how much they were paying for their expensive "free" social
services... And they have to pay it for the rest of their lives whereas
Americans can pay back their education loans way before that. Last but not
least, you should know that healthcare does reimburse less each year, so you
are now forced to pay for a private insurance in addition to the high tax you
already pay for many healthcare services such as dentists, blood analysis and
more. Great free services indeed!

> 5-7 weeks of paid vacation are included.

Yes, tell me about that. Every time I try to get someone at a company, half
the time he's either on vacation or on RTT, and I'm asked if I could wait a
week until he comes back. This makes doing business here way slower to get
things done, very frustrating and hard to compete.

~~~
weddpros
So true.

Last month, they announced a new law: Pay slips will be "simplified" by hiding
all the contributions paid for by the employer.

When I asked french relatives, they'd tell me "but it's not a part of my
salary, it's what my boss pays". You. Stupid.

------
fermigier
This document ("Open source, a booming market") is more focussed on the open
source ecosystem in the Paris Region:

[http://www.paris-
region.com/sites/default/files/brochuretic....](http://www.paris-
region.com/sites/default/files/brochuretic.pdf) (PDF, 1MB).

------
pm90
Do most Parisians speak English? Or will I be considered an outsider and
Immediately ignored if I speak only English?

The best thing about the Anglophone world is the language. I wouldn't mind
learning a new language, but it takes time.

~~~
moron4hire
I don't know about France, but I have heard of such things before, for just
about every European country. My wife and I just spent two weeks in Germany
where I mostly started conversations in German and then let the other person
transition to English when they heard my atrocious accent. Thankfully, my
German is just good enough to get me through a full restaurant transaction, so
it wasn't too much of a problem if they didn't switch over, but overall it
seemed to work out quite well and everyone was very friendly to me. In
contrast, we had some traveling companions who did not speak German at all,
and some of the very same shop clerks, waiters, and strangers treated them
much more coolly when they started with only English.

In general, I've always considered it polite to "show effort" to speak the
local language, even if you end up speaking English in the long run. Whenever
I travel to a new country, I try to learn enough to read a dinner menu and
order a meal. While I'm certainly nowhere near to being fluent in that
language, it's at least enough to be able to understand when the waiter is
asking for a drink order versus appetizers or whatever, and then to be able to
list the things we want with proper pronunciation and the count of each item,
though not in a full sentence.

------
weddpros
That's the Good. There's also the Bad, and the Ugly.

I've left France (I'm french), and now live in Malta, because of the Bad and
the Ugly. France has high taxes (and 50% social contributions), very anti-
entrepreneur and ultra-bureaucratic mindset, a sinking economy, a vastly anti-
libertarian political landscape, and a high cost of living vs. quality of
living.

If you're tempted anyway, Good Luck.

~~~
Gmo
cost of living vs quality of living : Frankly, this is true almost only for
Paris.

I live in Nantes right now (after 7 years in the Netherlands) and the quality
of living is great, at a fraction of the price in Paris.

Second, not everybody is a libertarian, so I'm quite OK with what you call
"anti-libertarian landscape".

Bureaucratic mindset : Apart from Malta, have you ever lived anywhere else in
Europe ? I don't know the bureaucratic mindset of Malta, but I can say that I
did not find a great difference between France, the Netherlands and Germany
for instance.

~~~
weddpros
I also lived in Switzerland (5 years), where bureaucracy is definitely less of
a problem than in France: it just works (the first time, not after weeks and 2
attempts).

When I hear "France has great tax credits systems for startups", I think "if
you spend months in paperwork, maybe". That's what I call a bureaucratic hell.

As for being a libertarian, I guess it's the case of a majority of
entrepreneurs. If one enjoys government control, he's probably not an
entrepreneur...

Who wants a 3500 page labour code like we have in France? Ever changing laws?
New regulation and a new tax every month?

------
happimess
Does anyone have any insight as to how painful it is to relocate to Paris from
outside of France, or even from outside of the Schengen zone?

~~~
carlob
Finding an apartment in Paris is a special circle of hell, get help by
whomever is hiring you, because it's a very lengthy and humiliating process
for foreigners.

I've visited apartments for about two months before finding a place outside of
Paris and have been asked all sorts of private questions about my life, for
example looking at your tax and salary receipts is considered standard
practice.

~~~
jmnicolas
It's standard practice because once you're inside, if you stop paying rent
it's really really hard to kick you out (it can take years).

------
maverickilm
Social Innovation is very trendy in Paris. The French President, François
Hollande, announced last week, during SocialGoodWeek an International Summit
on this topic :
[https://twitter.com/fhollande/status/540498295261782016](https://twitter.com/fhollande/status/540498295261782016)

------
s_dev
ooo - I've one for Dublin, Ireland.

[http://www.slideshare.net/FrontlineVC/the-irish-tech-
startup...](http://www.slideshare.net/FrontlineVC/the-irish-tech-startup-
guide)

Kudos to people who will post the tech guides for other European cities like
Berlin and London as I don't have them.

~~~
alandarev
While French slideshow felt more like full of marketing and "we are amazing",
this one is talking numbers and facts! Thank you for sharing this amazing
presentation.

------
julienrath
I'm currently living in Paris right now. Before that I lived in London,
Germany and the US. So this is kind of a view from the outside.

As every city there are good and bad things. Administration is horrible and
the worst experience from anywhere that I have lived. Getting an apartment
will be hell. It just will. Paper is still the norm in this country. Your
mailbox will never be empty. This part sucks.

The work atmosphere in this country is horrible in comparison to other
countries like the UK and US. Remember, this is the country that (legally) has
a 35 hour work week. In startups this looks different although they have the
reputation of being lazy in comparison to American startups. While I haven't
seen it, this is likely the case for some. There's no smoke without fire. And
just judging by the way this country works...don't be surprised if they seem
lazy.

English. Right, this is probably one of the biggest problems non-French will
have. Across the board French people's English have the worst English ever,
out of every country in Central Europe. That said Paris is in some way an
exception. Parisians' English is still horrible for the kind of city it is
trying to become but not as bad as you'll hear it in other cities.

Food - Don't understand why people are saying it's bad. It's really good!
Especially compared to a city like London, where it's expensive and quality
isn't amazing. There is less of a junk food culture in Paris than in other
cities though.

There’s more good and bad things to go into but I’ll leave the bad stuff at
this for now.

There are good things going on in Paris. The city is amazing to live in. It’s
much cheaper than London. Transport costs are a lot less. Leisure activities
are cheaper. A lot of stuff will be cheaper, including apartments. The city is
beautful to live in too.

There is a good startup ecosystem in Paris. There are a couple good exits
coming out of France. But it all seems like a big circle jerk, which (IMO) a
guide like this shows. This may also come from the extreme forms of patriotism
the French show(sometimes) and/or from the fact that they don’t speak English
and are repulsed by anything English.

A lot of startups start here but quickly try to get the hell out and move to
the US or even London. There have been a couple good exits though but not as
many as London nor any as big as the ones in Berlin.

I don’t know what the fundraising process goes like in Paris so I’m not going
to comment on that. Obviously it will be harder than in the US as there are
less VCs here. Judging by the amounts being raised and the amount of “big” VCs
in London it’s also weaker than across the channel.

------
ktzar
It's very hard to live in Paris if you are not fluent in French... Or you're
doomed to live amongst ex-pats, which defeats the purpose of the experience.

~~~
negrit
No its not.

Paris is the most touristic city in the world.

You can be perfectly fine if you don't speak word of french.

~~~
anomalous
Although Paris is the most visited city in the world. It also has a reputation
amongst the global cities as being unfriendly. Enough that the Paris Tourist
Board and Chamber of Commerce have launched a campaign to educate service
workers on treating tourists better. Tourists also do not spend as much money
in Paris. It is number 3 in that regard. This is likely due to Paris'
centralized position. It may more likely be a stop-through on the way to a
visitors' final destination.

You can be perfectly fine on English in almost any large city in the world,
but there is more of a friction in Paris when interacting in English than in
many other European capitals.

~~~
Shebanator
I know the reputation, but the times I've visited Paris everyone has been
extremely helpful and polite. What I do see, occasionally, is American and
German tourists who ignore local customs, behave rudely, and then get offended
when the Parisians respond rudely to their own boorishness.

The only really bad experience I've ever had in Paris was with an eastern
european cab driver who droned truly horrendous racist screeds about black
African prostitutes ruining Paris my entire ride.

------
tormeh
The only names I recognize from the slides are Algolia and DailyMotion. I sure
hope Paris is stronger in B2B...

------
misja
The presentation claims that it takes 4 hours to travel from Paris to
Amsterdam by car. Well, the distance is 750 km so you need a pretty fast car
for that and a big wallet to pay for the speeding tickets ..

~~~
fab13n
In Europe, car is rarely the best way to move around.

Thalys high-speed trains get you from Paris to Amsterdam in 3h; add another
hour to move to/from the train stations, and here are your 4 hours.

------
c2prods
Great presentation! Not only Paris is becoming an excellent place for
startups, but it's a stupendous city in general :)

------
vonnik
I spent 14 years in Paris, 10 as a journalist covering finance and tech for
the NYT and Bloomberg.

The Paris Tech Guide is an understandable piece of boosterism, but I would not
recommend Paris or France to people looking for a tech ecosystem to support
them.

I'm not going to talk about the food, because it's __totally irrelevant __to
this discussion. If that 's the reason why you choose a city for your startup,
your startup will probably fail.

I'm also not going to engage in French-bashing. I have many good friends in
Paris, and the city itself is a beautiful piece of work. It just isn't great
for business...

Paris's poor business environment has many causes, and they run much deeper
than the incompetent Socialist government currently in power. That government
is just the latest captain steering the ship of state, and the state is very
heavy in France. It was heavy under Chirac and Sarkozy. It is heavy for the
French themselves. They are constantly confronted with absurd rules governing
aspects of their existence that legislators felt obligated to regulate.
Imagine how difficult it is for the foreigner to navigate those laws. Very.

As a country, France has crippled its once powerful financial industry and
driven a lot of capital and financial services to London. You could argue that
this began with Mitterand in the early 1980s, so it's a decades-long trend.
And finance is important, because it makes a lot of people silly rich and some
of them become investors. Losing finance means that France's expertise has
been considerably weakened in the domain of financial technology, which is
going to eat banks like it ate publishing.

As a society, France has a technologically conservative, luddite streak that
is quite the opposite of Americans' tech liberalism. While France produces
many gifted mathematicians and engineers, they usually fail to productize and
successfully market their ideas. Props to the minitel, but who uses it now?

Many unFrench people fail to appreciate that France suffers from a rigid,
ossified class structure, where people can be pigeon-holed by their accents,
much as in Britain. Rigid, ossified class structures are really bad at
identifying and cultivating talent. They're very good at creating a few
schools (Sciences Po, ENA, the Polytechnique) that produce a small ruling
class. Most applicants are not admitted. The institutional structure is well
trained at telling people "non, c'est impossible."

So France is a machine that stifles peoples' potential. That's why many of the
most ambitious French people leave. The ones that remain are split between the
privileged and the frustrated.

If you want to build something, and it has to be in Europe, choose the Anglo-
Germanic countries: the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Scandinavia. Several of
those economies are bigger and on the whole they tend to move faster. People
there learn English well (except in Britain of course ;). The rules of the
country will be more understandable and more predictably enforced.

Go to France when you're rich and ready to retire. They'll welcome you with
open arms. The country isn't made for builders.

~~~
fermigier
OTOH, Paris is the open source capital of the World :)

[http://www.paris-
region.com/sites/default/files/brochuretic....](http://www.paris-
region.com/sites/default/files/brochuretic.pdf)

"With a €4 billion turnover, the French market represents 26% of the European
open source market, including software and services (PAC, The Open Source
Market in France, 2011). Open source has seen a rapid expansion in the past
decade, with an annual growth rate of over 68%."

~~~
vonnik
I guess the question would be: Do you need to live in France to sell to that
market? RedHat's doing fine, and they're based in Raleigh. Many of the
companies listed in that report -- Mozilla, for example -- are not French or
based in France...

~~~
fermigier
[http://www.journaldunet.com/solutions/emploi-rh/siege-de-
moz...](http://www.journaldunet.com/solutions/emploi-rh/siege-de-mozilla-
europe-a-paris/)

~~~
vonnik
A branch office. The headquarters is in Mountain View.

------
nraynaud
the real pain is the housing and the subsequent suburb transportation.

~~~
c2prods
If you compare with other major capitals, like SF, NYC or London, housing is
quite cheap (around twice as less expensive). And although the transportation
system is far from being flawless, it's not worse than any other one.

~~~
carlob
Only if you compare by the room, not by the surface. If you can consider a 3m
x 3m a room go for it!

~~~
saintmac
Untrue. I've lived in Paris, London and SF and Paris is definitely the
cheapest (even by the surface). I'm paying $1100/month in Paris for a 300sq
foot appartment (in a nice neighborhood). I was paying $3000/month in SF for a
400sq foot appartment...

~~~
carlob
I might be wrong, but I found the kind of room that $1000 pays for in NYC to
be way nicer and larger than the one you can get for a similar price in Paris
(though the usd/eur has increased 20% since I checked).

------
loukan42
Wow ! Great guide, another one from TheFamily best place to be in France

------
RollingMoss42
GG!

------
ccsn
Awesome Presentation. Shining city, booming ecosystem.

------
bignoz
from Paris with love <3

------
realtalk-paris
LOL

