
Startup Nation? Entrepreneurs Still Toil in Macron's France - atlasunshrugged
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-25/startup-nation-entrepreneurs-still-struggle-in-macron-s-france
======
axtn
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.

~~~
johnomarkid
Low salaries are not a good thing for the startups!

Here's an article from a French engineer that is currently on the front page
of HN:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20180925150228/https://florentcr...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180925150228/https://florentcrivello.com/index.php/2018/09/25/go-
west-young-man/)

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.

~~~
relyio
>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.

~~~
mhjas
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.

~~~
oh_sigh
What things are you specifically talking about that 'even rich Americans
barely have access to'?

~~~
mhjas
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.

~~~
2trill2spill
> 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.

[1]: [https://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2017/05/29/good-question-
cabi...](https://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2017/05/29/good-question-cabins/)

~~~
TomVDB
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.)

~~~
2trill2spill
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.

~~~
MrLeap
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.

If you're in tech move west, definitely.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> 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?

> If you're in tech move west, definitely.

...west? Did you mean east?

~~~
paulddraper
Probably depends where you start.

~~~
thaumasiotes
But the comment contrasts Kansas City (favorably) with San Francisco.

------
ig1
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.

~~~
stephenhuey
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.

~~~
stephenhuey
Not sure what the downvotes were for...?

------
eloisant
It's getting better.

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.

~~~
ghostbrainalpha
Both Youtube and Dailymotion grew in a pretty uncool way by not pulling down
copyrighted content.

But Dailymotion was basically 5 years behind Youtube in removing that stuff. I
was watching full movies and tv shows on Dailymotion even last year.

------
EZ-E
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.

[https://imgur.com/a/MOlau0V](https://imgur.com/a/MOlau0V)

~~~
zwp
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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_wage).
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

~~~
roel_v
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?

~~~
zwp
"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:

[https://www.daxx.com/article/it-salaries-software-
developer-...](https://www.daxx.com/article/it-salaries-software-developer-
trends-2018)

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".

------
atlasunshrugged
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)

~~~
dgut
> "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.

~~~
Apocryphon
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.

~~~
dgut
Big difference between building localization into the app architecture and
translating the app to 20 languages as a starting point, though.

~~~
Apocryphon
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.

------
Fede_V
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.

~~~
godzillabrennus
Sounds a lot like Chicago 10 years ago.

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.

~~~
eloisant
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.

------
xvilka
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.

[1] [http://www.grand-paris.jll.fr/en/paris/](http://www.grand-
paris.jll.fr/en/paris/)

~~~
jrs95
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.

------
Rjevski
I am French, moved to the UK a few years ago.

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.

This comment thread (on an earlier post about this) sums it up pretty well:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17169504](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17169504)

~~~
alacombe
French expat on the west coast here, I totally agree with you on the social
stigma of being a "rank-and-file" developer.

~~~
rdm_blackhole
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!

------
rossdavidh
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.

~~~
presscast
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.

------
baud147258
It's not limited to Startup, all small scale business in France have problems.

~~~
ttoinou
Exactly. Startup is just a buzzword

------
rezeroed
Macron recently referred to the French as "change-resistant Gauls", which
wouldn't be a useful characteristic for technology or entrepreneurship.

~~~
nodefourtytwo
He is also a president with a very low popularity blaming the population for
not being happy with his terrible reforms.

------
alacombe
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.

