Inside a fundraising in France: a CEO point of view | Hacker News Reader

Inside a fundraising in France: a CEO point of view

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111 pointscocoflunchy8 comments

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.

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

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.

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 ;)

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.

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.

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

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.

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