In 2016, Paris to be home to the biggest startup incubator in the world

Just answering one point here:

  > today, they have announced they want to raise a new tax on video games

You are confusing government announcing a decision with two senators from opposition making a proposition (which will not even be subject to vote anytime soon). EDIT: just to clear things up, contrary to some countries, in France opposition parties have very little power to push anything.

Which leads to me suspect you might also be confusing other things, especially regarding:

- online banking - most banks expose most of their services online

- declaring websites you own - maybe you are talking about having to declare informations systems that collect and process identifying information (access logs excluded)

- access logs - six months is not "an insane amount of time"

Among the remaining, some is true, some I don't know.

Regarding the taxes, deal with it. full disclosure: I'm french and I like the healthcare system.

You can fire someone easily. You just have to provide a good reason for it. "Oh well, after all I shouldn't have hired him" or "This guys is not the best I could find, he doensn't give 120%" won't allow you to fire someone, no luck you're in France, labor code is sacred here.

VAT is not painful at all, even an accountant fresh out from school could handle this easily. Protip, hire an accountant. If you're a business, VAT is transparent for you. It only impacts french customers.

You don't have to declare every website to the government, you declare it to the CNIL which is an independent administrative body whose goal is to protect data privacy. I like them too.

Why setting up a business in France if you only see the drawbacks of being here?

Though I agree with you on the bullshit part. This incubator is a total waste of money.

Oddly enough, even though France has this terrible reputation for red tape, the French themselves are quite well represented (possibly even over-represented) in the UK venture capital scene, at least in the area of biotech.

Sadly, as a French entrepreneur, I would love to contradict you. But basically, you're right. It is much more difficult to create a startup in France rather than in the US for instance.

Read PG's http://www.paulgraham.com/america.html in perspective and it still stands 7 years later, especially when considering US vs. France.

Any serious entrepreneur in France can double the company income or raided funds with the help of national and local R&D grants, funds and tax credits (Crédit Impot Recherche). Add to that two years of salary for the founders paid by the agency the help unemployed people. It's super easy to get ramen profitable in France, and you don't really need to get angel funding. This is huge and often undervalued.

Economist has an article this week on French people being unhappy with taxes that may be of interest.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/09/ec...

People reading the parent comment should be aware that labor laws are vastly different in Europe - even within the EU - so if you're from outside Europe, don't be scared to start a company in Europe just because of how things might be in France.

As an example, Denmark (also part of the EU) was named Best Country to Start a Business in a survey published in Wall Street Journal in 2010 (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870385920457552...).

I've spent some time working with Parisian based companies. To add to the above...

- It is VERY expensive to fire people. Something like 2 years of salary?

- The taxes rates can be borderline extortion. People are happy paying them because they see value, but it hurts competitiveness.

- There's more of a feel of us (workers) versus them (management) as opposed to esprit de corps. You see this in employee attitude as well as the government's view of business.

This is all a shame, because outside of work, it's a fascinating country, with great food and culture. The academic system produces a lot of well trained engineers that are very good at Math. (This is why most financial software firms either have a French office, French roots, or lots of French engineers)

What's this mean? I hope the project succeeds, but I don't think it will. It sounds like Malaysia's multimedia corridor of many years back. Unfortunately you can't centrally plan innovation.

Well, I suppose one way to look at it is that, bearing in mind that taxes and bureaucracy are intensely difficult to change in the right direction in France, they should try and make things easier for start-ups in other ways. Subsidised office space, and easier collaboration are both good ideas, and are all the more necessary given France's problems in other areas. It should be noted that France turns out some really good engineers (my opinion, as an Australian in France), and it's just dumb not to benefit more from that.

The government has made some good changes in the red tape department too. For example, you can now kick off a one-person start-up by using the status of "entrepreneur" to start with, allowing you to start making money whilst holding down a steady job - once you've stabilized income at ramen profitability, you can then go and fight the red tape to become a proper business. Obviously this is not a model that works for all start-ups, but at least some are going to be able to get off the ground using this ramp.

There are many things to fix in France to encourage start-ups, indeed. And containing bureaucracy will be harder than tax issues IMO.

However, what's very important in this endeavor this that it's 90% financed by Xavier Niel, a single private entrepreneur who's specialized in blowing up bureaucratic / oligopolistic businesses. He's pioneered minitel services (including sexual content, which got him some flak), then commoditized high-speed ADSL (we've had tens of Mbps for €30 for nearly a decade), more recently cellular phone (no contract, no subsidized phone, unlimited calls, 3GBytes of data for €20), has started messing with education (http://www.42.fr), and now incubation.

I'd have been _very_ skeptical of this without Niel's control over it. With him, I tend to be hopeful.

The university in my local area is trying to do the same thing: they spend all of their time writing funding proposals for a new 3500m2, three-storey, $20m shiny glass incubator building in an area where the startup ecosystem is maybe 2 years old, and has zero angel/VC or mentor networks.

The people behind the project are all academics and have never launched a startup in their lives. They can't even fill a trial "incubator" (that is nothing more than a coworking space) they started two years ago that has a legal maximum of 25 people due to stairwell access. At any given time, there are maybe 6-8 people in there.

Meanwhile the entire startup community is like "WTF mate"!

If you look at the Valley as an example, it's a bit of both. The grungy garages are the most romanticized element, but there was quite a bit of large-scale institutional support. Stanford Industrial Park and the cluster around NASA's Moffett Field served as two anchors that were something like incubators, though focused on somewhat larger, more capital-intensive, engineering-oriented companies than what today's startup incubators tend to focus on.

Just even the media of this will stir up the ecosystem and I imagine inspire would-be entrepreneurs into action.

>> But if France continues to be a place where 75% taxes are seen as a sane idea

Can you put forward a link to some study that argues that 75% taxes, or huge taxations hampers innovation?

Can you give examples of red tape/paperwork you'd like to see removed to help entrepreneurs in France?

In this startup incubator there will be a counter with administrative people to help us with all this paperwork. So less pain with all this formalities, we will just have to pay more as we are in France.

By the way, one more time, thanks Xavier Niel, he's the only one in France who invests so much money on things like this and taking so many initiatives to make things change.

He gave us the cheapest contract for mobile phone in the world, he offered us the 42 school (free school for computer sciences with an innovative learning method), he offers us the most efficient dedicated servers for a decent price (http://www.online.net/fr/serveur-dedie/comparatif-serveur-de...), and so much more.

Thanks Xavier Niel.

I love rien, I am a Parisien ;)

> Every French person enjoys life, wants to work the less they could and they feel entitled for everything. More than half the people there work for the government and are more worried about their rights than what they could do.

I dont think so ,french people are not lazy at all , and it's common for employees in a private business to do extra hours FOR FREE !!! yes for free. And we dont take 3 hour breaks for lunch, we eat at the office. Whatever you heard about french public service is not true in any private business in France, people work very hard.

What a nonsense. Your facts don't even pass the smell test: around 25 % of people in age of working work as a public servant.

As for the working less than possible and the comment regarding Germany: French workers work more than German on average, thought that's likely skewed because 'forced' part time is more prevalent in Germany (http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=ANHRS). The whole idea of # hours as a meaningful metric is not a good one anyway: some of the countries from OECD that work the most ? Mexico, Turkey, Greece, etc...

I agree, the building is beautiful, but it seems that there are no private office, so you are required to pick up all your stuff everyday, you can't have a good chair, or work on something other that a laptop. What do you do of your inevitable paper work, taxes, etc... We have a whole cabinet of these here for a 10 people shop. It's all fashion.

What about the perfect location for startup employees? New York has an astronomically high cost of living, but it's not like people are somehow tricked into paying it. It also has world-class transportation, social scene, arts, etc. etc.

If you want a "low cost of living", you're going to pay the price for it in another way. Your "educated, creative" workforce might not be all that inclined to stay.

In my personal experience, the UK ticks all these boxes, at least outside Greater London. Good state schooling and the NHS go a long way towards lowering the cost of living.

Why do taxes matter for a start-up? They're usually not making much money anyway.

If you want a low cost of living, and low rent, you could always live in Mexico. Good luck with #5 and #6 though.

When you have #5 and #6, usually you have an in-demand area, which leads to #1, #2, #3 and #4 being much higher than they would otherwise be. Supply and demand rears its ugly head again.

Most places that have a low cost of living and low taxes are also high on crime, bureaucracy, and corruption, and have poor infrastructure (roads, Internet access, etc.). It sounds cool to open your business in a country with low costs - right until the local mafia pays you a visit and demands 50% of your income. And you'll need a thousand permits for doing anything business-related, and everyone involved in granting you those permits will need some money under the table.

Mr Niel is also the largest personnal capital investor in France.

It's pretty difficult to immigrate to most "attractive" places without a degree, the US included.

ex Free here, yes Free is cheap (hence the ex).

And people don't understand that 42 is another way to bring cheaper developers in the market.

It will when Niel will be ;)

from english to french i would say a year. but that means you're completely immersed ( 0 english speaking).

now the great advantage with IT is that most people speak english, and most technical words are english.

If you can handle English, French will be a breeze.

German would be harder, and Cantonese would be virtually impossible by comparison.

You know most people outside your country speak a different language than yours?

You know just enough about Latin countries and their laws to be mislead. There are some puzzling rules and laws indeed, but there's this cultural notion that it's OK to flout inconvenient laws, rather than fighting them frontally to repel them. Among others, the laws intended to protect the French language from English (or more accurately Globish) are widely perceived as not-really-meant-to-be-enforced.

I know it's stupid, but that's the way it is, and it sort-of works. And before going all French-bashing about this, go and check the anti-sodomy laws that still exist in some bible-belt US states...

That's in Quebec, the french-speaking Canadian area, not France