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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.

Sure, That's just my experience, I may have some facts wrong.

> 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).

In fact, this structure I've exposed already exists. The new tax will just double the budget they got. Regarding the new tax, I won't be surprised if it come in application in a form or another.

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

By online banking, I mean full online banking. You can't do that if you are a business.

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

Even if it's a simple blog without comments, you have declared it to the C.N.I.L.

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

From the LCEN law, it's 1 year including user data, password hashes, raw passwords (you can demonstrate that you don't have them) and session data. Sure, everything is doable but that's an hassle.

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.

Thanks for linking to this, I hadn't seen it before. Excerpt:

  Ironically, of all rich countries the US has lost the most civil liberties
  recently.  But I'm not too worried yet. I'm hoping once the present
  administration is out, the natural openness of American culture will reassert
  itself.

I would love to see pg revisit this topic, as this was written in 2006.

Why do you even try? It doesn't make any sense to me. Moving to the UK or Scandinavia would be trivially easy, and you'd instantly find yourself in a super business friendly environment compared to France. Is it the food?

If you're in London, Paris is but a Eurostar away...

Generally, yes. The quality of life in France is very high. If you are employed by a big company or the state, you can have a perfect life.

But from the day you create a company, you discover problems one by one. My first startup was French and I still love living in Paris. But I'm pretty sure, unless things change, that I'll move out as most of my friends did.

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.

"This guys is not the best I could find, he doensn't give 120%" is a perfectly good reason to fire someone. What other reason could there be? that he or she stole the coffee machine ?

That could be a reason. You could also agree on clear goals with the employee and fire him if goals are not met. No problem. Just take the time to agree on clear, written, and official goals with him. You can fire him if you're in a difficult situation financialy speaking. But you have to prove this.

Not being an overachiever is by no mean a reason to be fired, not in France.

Things are changing slowly though, new types of contracts are being voted. They should bring "Flexibility". Give France a few years and you will be able to fire someone just because he's wearing a yellow shirt.

Given the mindset of french workers and unions, this new type of contract should actualy lower the overall productivity.

What maz-dev does not tell is that even if an employee steals the coffee machine, you will have a very hard time firing him. I will cost you a lot upfront and the employee will most probably win in court so you will have to pay him even more.

This is by far France's biggest problem. I had the "privilege" to tell that to our president Hollande, and he just confirmed he does not even understand what's wrong with that.

If someone steals a coffee machine, first get a proof. Then you need to set up two meetings before firing the employee. Once this step is done, you send him or her a letter and he/she's officialy fired.

The employee can then request a reexamination in front of a court (prud'hommes). If you have any proof it will cost you 0€, you don't need a lawyer when going on prud'hommes and this will take you max 1 hour of your time. You can then ask some money to the employee to cover the damage caused and the time lost.

If you don't have any proof, then yep, you're fucked, and for a reason "presumption of innocence".

Cool for you to meet M. Hollande, but I'm afraid his role is not to vote laws or change the labor code, other instances less centralized are already dealing with this.

That will be great.

I don't think it's easy to demonstrate a steal. Even if you saw the guy, it will be your word against his, and court rule 8 of 10 against employer.

Pretty sure you get burned at the stake if you fire someone for not working extra hard in France.

"This guys is not the best I could find"

Entirely your fault, deal with it. The guy you hired is not responsible.

"He doesn't give 120%" Illegal. You don't force someone to work for free.

A good reason would be that he gives only 50%, not that he stole the damn coffee machine... Wrong mentality here imho.

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

Sure.. How long will it last?

> 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.

It's a myth. Companies pay VAT, you pay 19,60% of the value added by your company.

> 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.

They haven't stop PRISM. Nothing is independent, the CNIL gets its money from state taxes, it's government.

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

I am from france.

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

We agree on something! :)

Sorry, you don't understand how VAT works.

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.

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.

If you start just out of college your don't get unemployment.

Tax Credits comes with a lot conditions that a lot of startup can't afford. For example, you have to hired university PHDs to do mainly abstract research, startups don't have this kind of money.

You don't need to hire PHD at all. Engineers are fine, and not even mandatory. You can do a lot of tasks on tax credits, even graphic design or testing.

From the CIR (The structure in charge of this tax credit), you can only do: applied science, pure research and experimental development. Sounds more PHD tasks than regular designer or regular engineer tasks.

Nope, it's totally ok. Tested for 4 years with a control from a government agent lately with 2 engineers and a 3D artist without any engineering degree. CIR is way broader than what people think, and it has been made even broader this year (you can now include tasks from pilot programs). This is really super undervalued, CIR and other grants is totally a game changer in assessing if France is a good country to start a tech business.

Totally agree, I've been leading our R&D program for 4 years. No PhD at all, a product owner, 4 engineers (some with an engineering degree, some without) and a UX designer. Design and testing are eligible as far as it is related to R&D operations. Some of the support costs, such as accounting, technology watch or hardware requirements, are eligible.

We also obtain the JEI status that allows huge tax discounts.

The fact you can't innovate in France is a myth.

Interesting. So you can get unemployed benefit and run a company at the sametime?

Absolutely. It's not a trick, it's an official system to help entrepreneurship. You need to have worked at least 2 years to have unemployment right though. So as hartator said, you don't get it straight after college.

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.

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...).

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...