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Comment by theorique | Hacker News Reader

While I applaud any efforts toward entrepreneurship, I can't help but think that these "megaproject" efforts kind of miss the point.

By their very nature, startups tend to originate from grungy, grassroots hackerspaces, undergrad dorms, shared apartments, graduate common rooms, and so forth. Places where weird and innovative ideas get cross pollinated.

I mean, yeah, "let a thousand flowers bloom", and all. But if France continues to be a place where 75% taxes are seen as a sane idea and bureaucracy holds sway over innovation ... well, good luck.

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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.

same here. i was skeptical of Niel as well, but with 42 he really showed that he was honest with his intention to change the country's mentality.

i also saw an interview of fleur pellerin the other day and she seems like a "hands in the dirt" person. that's a real change from previous ministers in her position.

that's really the first time i'm optimistic about a state sponsored big project.

What is that 42.fr website like? I mean there are tones of useful resource online for wannabe developer. So I don't really get what this one has to be so special. Is it because it is all in French?

It's actually a free physical school dedicated to teach programming, open to anyone who is 18 to 30. The website in itself is not very important.

You can read the press release in English here: http://www.42.fr/42-revolutionary-computer-training-free-and...

Well it's a tech school, not just a website.

Cool, thanks for the context.

Don't get me wrong, I think it would be great for France and Europe to have a Silicon Valley-equivalent. So I don't mean to disparage. I've just heard some horror stories about the red tape that startups face in some parts of Europe. Glad to hear there are positive signs.

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.

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"!

That reminds me of when we tried to get some kind of help from a UK University in the mid 1990s - all they could do was offer a lease on a rather large building.

Of course, we said "no thanks" and went off and squatted in a couple of dingy rooms at a friendly company until we (after a couple of years) got VC money and got our own office space.

>> 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?

This tax doesn't even exist, it has been rejected by the constitutional council (the French supreme court)

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.

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