“Can you teach someone to be an entrepreneur?” – France responds
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Between the backwards government (cf. the dumb stuff that Fleur Pellerin regularly does/say) and the structures that are impossible to work with (a friend of mine, still in Paris, has been fighting for weeks to just get a ~bank account opened~ for his startup), France will not have its Google or Facebook (a catchphrase often used by the politicians) anytime soon.
It's a shame, because there is real engineering talent in France (you can thank Napoleon for that), and those who don't want to move abroad (typically England/Germany) end up working for shitty consulting/outsourcing companies ("SSII"), or work in small local web dev agencies. There are programmers from my small French university that I would hire over Stanford students any day of the week for a startup. (this is not a jab at Stanford or anything- I've tutored Stanford undergrads, and many of them are brilliant, but surprisingly not crazily moreso than the top students from my small no-name public university.)
People at the top just don't get it, and they come from old school élitiste backgrounds (HEC, Sciences Po Paris, ENA, etc.) that are at the complete opposite of what building an entrepreneur friendly environment would require.
What's too bad, because Brazil is in exactly that same boat. We also won't have a thriving high-tech industry any time soon.
It doesn't strike me as obvious that SV is going to remain any better for gestating startups into the future, largely thanks to the cost of living, but simultaneously I don't see excessively bureaucratic countries pulling it off either. Balancing government services that can help small business (and I put state health care in there) with a low tax and admin burden is the magic combination that would foster true growth. France can only do that if it can convince the piles of public servants it is in their interests to do it - but they're not stupid, and it isn't.
Basically any country where a significant proportion of the population aspires to being a civil servant is just going to enter a sort of slow decline.
I have no idea if that's the real case, or just a bad case of the right hand not knowing what the left one is doing. If it real, I don't understand how it's even possible, since governments are all eager to get loans from anybody... But they do act as if it was true.
In Holland, I registered my business and then went and got a business bank account plus working (temporary) bank card in about four hours total...
I believe being an entrepreneur is a combination of certain personality traits and temperaments. It's a maker's passion and drive that defines an entrepreneur.
So why do I teach entrepreneurship? Simply to show 40 young adults a worldview which most have not yet been exposed, with the hope that those innate entrepreneurs will choose this different path in life, a path which most parents, professors and friends discredit. I would be fulfilled if just one of my students took the entrepreneurship route and made a large impact on the world over the typical route of accepting a corporate job.
we all start blank, and based on our circumstances, we learn entrepreneurship. we are never born with it. Being born with it, is just a saying, its not true.. as seen in the history very few successful people had even more successful kids.
Entrepreneurship, for me is more like a balance of the things we all possess.
There's no 75% tax in France. It never existed, and I don't think it will exist any day soon.
There's a 75% tax for income over 1 million euros per year. This means that if I earn 1,000,001 €, I pay the normal rate on 1,000,000 € (I don't know what it is, it might be around 30%, so let's say 30k) plus 75% (meaning 0.75 eurocents), the total being 30,000.75 cents. For 2 million euros, you'll pay 30,000 € + 75% × 1,000,000 = 105,000 €. It's the concept of tax brackets, and I know you have this in the US. Are the US a socialist country?
Moreover, France has a lot of billionaires, and the richest woman in the world – at the time I type this comment – is French. <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Liliane_Bettencour...
In addition, there's a job in France called “tax optimizer”, I can't find a link, but in 2011, Liliane Bettencourt paid as much tax as a single Frenchwoman on minimum wage.
So I don't think tax is a problem in France for those who wants to be entrepreneurs. And do entrepreneurs really deserve to make that kind of money? Do they really work 300 times harder than their workers?
My 2 cents on it, the problem in France – and this is why Germany and the US are succeeding where France is failing – is the lack of support from the government towards small companies. Any labour law, tax law is made for giant groups like Dassault, Orange, Dannon, and so on...
Make someone to take up entrepreneurship - Maybe
Yes inception is possible, parents do it all the time.. kids don't realize it many a times. But it doesn't work that way for entrepreneurship. One has to be able to think for himself, everyday.. its not a end to means like other things to be exact, it is creating means with ends everyday.
One of the key attitude towards it is the situation where you can't see yourself as anything, except for, as an entrepreneur.
Lastly, the method of the teacher should be not to put someone on the track only, but to prepare them to stay there. Its not one night of inspiration, like in writing a song, but multiple nights of cycles of struggle and success.
Just like America today has a STEM deficit because being good at math or science isn't as cool as it was back in the send-a-man-to-moon 60s, some places have an entrepreneur deficit because starting a company isn't a positive social signifier.
Although government programs aren't always a total waste, I suspect the main point of leverage is a critical mass of "rock star" examples that people want to be like.
What I mean is I'm skeptical of the impact of efforts (public or private) to "teach entrepreneurship". Yes you can teach that, one by one. But if the desired outcome is to have many more entrepreneurs, you don't get there one by one. You get there by changing the culture to elevate the social status of entrepreneurs. Any efforts -- whether public or public -- need to focus on that, first and foremost.
Can a government? No.
Can an impersonal bureaucracy? No.
Can a major corporation? No.
Can a committee? No.
Can you? Yes.
People can do wonderful things. Inspire others. Open eyes. Light fires. Imagine. Dream. Leave them alone and they can do great things.