Facebook to Open Startup Garage at Station F in Paris
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
So dear fb and google and whoever, build business garages where people go with an idea and they've been given a cheaper way to expand their business on their own and see if they can actually make it, rather than trying to find the best ideas to invest for yourselves, that would help.
What ever happened to "small is beautiful" and "less is more?"
These used to be core "hacker" values.
Had Twitter followed such a strategy it might still be sustainable.
Edit: as an aside, consider the parallel in the music business. It is now possible, thanks to technology, to self-produce and market one's own music without "VC funding" from a record label. However, it's almost impossible to gain meaningful exposure, without which it is impossible to earn a sustainable income.
It turns out that few people want to listen to unknown artists. What most people want to listen to is whatever is most popular. And to be the most popular requires massive marketing, which requires a record label. No surprise then that the big labels - which were supposedly destroyed by the internet - are actually stronger than ever before.
We seem to be an a race for hypercentralization - a race empowered by the internet that was supposed to decentralize things.
I'll also add that the rise to stardom and "riches" in the music business comes with similar creative and ethical compromises discussed in the article.
They still are. YCombinator shouldn't be confused for the hacker world.
It's fine to reject the idea that the VC funding path is the best way to build a sustainable company though.
The former forces you to squeeze every penny into gaining traction in the market, as becoming profitable is hard, and your cash reserves limit your ability to advertise.
The latter gives you the means to grow very fast and to gain experience from people who have played the game countless times, but it encourages reaching an exit (either by selling the company or through an IPO).
It sounds like you favor bootstrapping.
> build business garages where people go with an idea and they've been given a cheaper way to expand their business on their own and see if they can actually make it
That was the idea behind Kima15 [0], which was co-created by Xavier Niel, who is also behind Station F. It provided 150 K$ within 15 days in exchange for 15% of the company's shares at a post-money valuation of 1 M$.
[0]: https://medium.com/kima-ventures/kima15-lessons-learnt-and-w...
Otherwise it's just a regular small business (most countries and stats institutes would have a specific name for these >10 employees companies, like "very small" business or whatever).
There's confusion, imho, when we call any new company a startup just because it's operating in the tech industry (you can totally be a startup in any industry, so long as it has the potential to scale up dramatically). You can be a regular small business even in tech, you can be a startup-er in food. This is a 2x2 matrix.
Also, funding can take many forms, e.g. some startups being groomed by corporations (I know HP did that sometimes, with former employees). You still get the big money and obligations, and you already have one major future client; but nowhere near the same level of nonsensical buzzing.
Quick exits, early retirements
By building a better product? By standing by your own convictions?
Your question sounds like a line a VC would feed entrepreneur in trying to convince them to part with equity.
There are also creative endeavors (film, games) that require an initial investment, although creating those is usually more reasonable than say, the advertising and acquisition budget needed to replace AirBnB. Promoting a movie of a game can double that initial investment, though -- that’s why you have companies specialised in that second step.
Having been through this runaround and the exits a few times, I don't think you find too many people genuinely recommending you go for substantial VC outside of the sponsors of this site, and even they have a pretty concrete value proposition and have the good form to tell most folks "no" if they don't need it. And I think we can all agree Clinkle and Color are cautionary takes about taking too much VC and the badwill and excessive expectations it creates around your brand.
If the scope of your project and your resources is such that you can build an MVP without taking money and then begin to sell it (in a reasonable timeframe) then you should never take venture capital. If you need money for some servers, you might even consider using a local credit union to finance it if you can demonstrate the product is working; business loans exist for a reason and their terms are much more favorable than VC for the most part. It is not 2001, it's entirely possible to get business loans for tech ventures.
You get VC (the "startup setup" I think you're referring to) when the scope of your project is such that it's not possible to really do more than fake the service.
And even then, most successful founders I talked to (and this includes my co-founder and I) faked our product before we developed it. There are famous stories of how food delivery startups, ridesharing startups, and even financial aggregation products faked it until they could afford to build it. For Level Money's part, I and the talented Danilo Campos wrote a mockup in Haskell and iOS to simulate users and the data we were interested in and model the kinds of things we wanted to demonstrate to investors.
We then took that functional mock to early investors as part of the pitch.
So no matter what, you should be building the instant you're committed to a venture.
(Aside, I should see if I can open source those mocks; nothing there is secret now and it'd be fun to share what we shared to get funding).
There are many ways to structure a business! Not every structure is a fit for every business concept. Not everything is best suited to a bootstrapping methodology as you describe. Conversely, not everything is suited to unspeakable amounts of VC funding to hyperscale.
It's a set of individual decisions for individual needs in individual circumstances. No options on the menu are universally good or universally bad. Each is a tool suited to a purpose. Would you call a wrench "bad" because it's not good for creating holes for screws?
Discussion:
looks at photos of spacious, high end, neomodern office architecture
we've come a long way since hp
Those containers look like worse than prison cells. A prison cell at least has got an window.
Did you read Discipline and punish, I learned what is a panopticon in that book.
Interesting. The last time I looked at this a few months ago their web site seemed to suggest that they were looking for startups to rent space, but not individuals. Details are lacking, but a quick comparison with other coworking spaces in Paris suggests that this is 100-200 EUR cheaper per month.
It'll feel kinda strange. Like your parents coming to visit you at college.
I really don't like the ideas of these giants co-opting start-up spaces. Once companies have reached the FB and Google size they are kind of the antithesis of start ups. This just feel like they are building "right of first refusal acquisition" spaces.
I realize this sounds curmudgeonly but I feel like their money and influence in these spaces encourages building acquisition targets rather than encouraging people to build their own Google and Facebooks.
http://theheureka.com/google-announces-official-campus-in-be...
They exude a really good ethos - or have really good copywriters, at least - and show self-awareness of some of the reservations that come up on HN when somebody mentions Startup and France in the same sentence.
Their 'Toxicity' post damn well near seduced me (pesky Frenchies!) and is worth a read:
> France is full of incubators, there’s news coverage, there’s this startup out of Bulgaria that just raised 2 million, everybody’s a software engineer, hell, in some countries, everybody’s a CEO! But that’s the difference between hype, which is useless, and hope, which is useful...
> ...If you rely on TechCrunch and Medium to give you hints on how to be an entrepreneur, you risk three things: the first is that you believe it’s all true. The job of any good entrepreneur is to sell a good story. Nobody sells you the horrible things going on with the company (at least not until after the company is well on its way to being dead). The second is that you miss critical information filters ...The third risk is that you start to think it’s easy...that growth is just a matter of deciding when it’s the right time.
> Money and people are needed to make any project work, but they are replaceable: there’s always someone willing to write another check, and there’s always someone who you can find to take over a particular job. But you can’t get back time. A bunch of people sitting around, saying that they’re working, talking about new projects every two months, focusing on getting a grant rather than getting a sale, those are people in a toxic ecosystem who are just wasting time.
> Learn to recognize fake work — anything that doesn’t bring you closer to more customers, that doesn’t bring you closer to a better product, that doesn’t put people in contact with your solutions. Applying for public money, going to conferences, taking meetings, this is fake work that doesn’t help you with your business model, doesn’t identify problems and solutions, doesn’t show you the actual goals that you have to achieve in order to have success. Real work does all of those things.
> If you can make money, you’ll have time to figure out the right business model. You won’t have to rely on investors who don’t understand your goals. Finding bad investors can be worse than having none at all.
https://www.thefamily.co/toxicity
Anyone have any experience with these guys? Algolia and Crisp.im passed through their doors, and they seem to be doing well.
Also, to my knowledge, the only successfull startup they have was "save", which is a fantastic company lead by very nice people, but it unfortunately filed for bankruptcy a few months ago, after having had a too intense growth.
At the moment, i'd say the biggest problem with every single incubator i know is the lack of unicorns coming out of them. Most people giving advices haven't created anything big themselves, and the few people who created really big companies ( criteo and blablacar for the last 10 years) don't go in those ecosystems to mentor newcomers.
I'm all for workers benefits, but I don't see how a startup with limited funding could afford those benefits to their employees.
Startups in France get several kinds of tax breaks. Also, many founders get started while on unemployment benefits.
I just opened AngelList to search for junior developer positions at seed-stage startups and it confirms the ratio.
SF: 80-120k
Paris: 30-45k
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2013/02/25/french-workers/
As a founder, why would i want to give up equity to Facebook? Why would i need to be in this "garage"?
Fantastic neutral reporting here from TechCrunch. Not at all just a recycled press release.
Which one is the parody? Sometimes it's hard to tell.
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3222784/quotes?item=qt2896998