ParisIsBack – The Paris Tech Guide
fr.slideshare.net
fr.slideshare.net
You're better off making your startup almost anywhere else.
EDIT: and as other comments said, people don't speak English, the French have some sort of pride of only speaking their native language ...
- tax reduction schemes are a no brainer, you just have to justify once a year that you are doing something in relation with R&D, and there are too lots of ways to get some government grant to help start your business
- french entrepreneurs are from a lot of different origins. Of course you will find and some rich people creating companies, but most of the people creating companies here are taking real risks and don't have large amount of cash to back them if they fail
- seed investment is not difficult at all, and government grants are here too to help save your shares, even better that seed .
I am telling this as a cofounder of Stupeflix, the company behind Replay, app of the year on the Apple App Store, and proudly based in Paris for 6 years now.
EDIT: sorry for my English, it's not my native language, but I am trying hard to learn it...
Can we stop with this? I'm tired of French people always responding to any kind of critics with the "French bashing" strawman. I'm French myself by the way.
> and government grants are here too to help
Most entrepreneurs don't want the government to help, they want the government to stay out of the way. A concept many of my fellow French have a hard time understanding the benefits.
I refuse help from any kind of church, I like to call this Freedom :)
> (I am not from any church, if you're asking)
Except for the government.
Really? Have you spent time filing them? I have, and they were a big time waster for me. There is a way out, of course (i.e. pay some specialized company to file them for you).
Agreed on the other points, though.
As for the other points from the parent, they're not specific to France. The "startups are a rich man's game" problem is universal, and financing is just as hard to raise anywhere. Of course you'll probably raise a much smaller amount in France than SV but that's to be expected.
However, I agree with you that we have a nice perk : anyone with a good plan & a few months of free time to write up the paperwork can get something like 50K in grants, without giving up any equity. That's not very useful for an Internet company but can be a tremendous help for dedicated teams in other fields.
- The form-filling part is better left to your accountant, as part of your annual tax return.
- The R&D specific part is a no-brainer if you actually do R&D and know what it means.
In professional settings, I think you would be hard pressed to find someone you cannot communicate with in english. It has been a requirement for most higher ed degrees for years now.
But come on, blasting a country because the average citizen doesn't speak your language well seems a little entitled in my book. If you're going anywhere to settle down (not for vacation), learning the local language should be high on your list.
Edit: no comment about your other points though. You actually have more experience dealing with them than I do.
I happen to be in Paris in these days in order to have a look at the startup and tech scene there.
So far I am surprised how well most french people speak English. Not perfect, of course, but they do not mind switching to english in a meetup presentation.
I can not say much about the points you mention, though, as I have not been long enough in the city of Paris to get relevant data.
- Apartment prices are usually measure by the room when doing comparisons. In Paris the room count is misleading: I've seen studios smaller than 15 m^2 and 1BR smaller than 25 m^2.
- Apartment quality is really really bad: creaky, cracked hardwood floors that haven't been replaced since Haussmann, humidity and mold are the default.
- The weather is awful, it rains 40% of the days.
- This might sound surprising but the average food quality is abysmal: produce is expensive and tastes like nothing and the random brasserie is an expensive tourist trap.
- Some of the stereotypes about the Parisian being grumpy and pretending not to speak English have a grain of truth. [edit: this is going to get me downvoted to hell]
So if you are really planning to start a business in France, go to another city: e.g. Lille is a thriving city with a very rich cultural life, it's 1h away from Paris by train (if you need to network you can commute) and doesn't suffer from most of the above (except for the climate).
-> According to Wikipedia (http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climat_de_Paris) this is untrue.
"Paris connaît en moyenne 111,1 jours de pluie par an, mais si celles-ci sont fréquentes, elles sont en revanche peu soutenues."
In other words, it rains 30% of the days on average, and these are very light rains, most of the time.
London 42
Paris 46
Rome 23
Boston 32
Buenos Aires 30
San Francisco 18
Lima 21
Beijing 24
Sydney 20
Moscow 31
If you want to try it yourself from the beginning of 2000 to now:
https://www.wolframcloud.com/objects/b432e59c-fa11-497b-8f6a...
http://www.holiday-weather.com/paris/averages/
Paris: 6.75 London: 5.58 NYC: 7.33 SF: 9.67 (nice summers) Nice: 11
According to Wikipedia [1] it’s only 30% (650mm/year, while it’s 980mm/year in Bordeaux or 800mm/year in Nice [2])
> the random brasserie is an expensive tourist trap
To be fair, a lot of “random brasseries” are pretty good, you can eat a good meal for €10 everywhere in the city.
[1]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climat_de_Paris [2]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climat_de_la_France#Donn.C3.A9...
You'd have better luck with a random $3 slice of pizza in NYC IMHO. Don't get me started on the kind of lunch €5 gets you anywhere in Italy.
But you should try a sandwich with a good baguette !
University cafeterias serve fries every day as one of the options and there are a lot of kebab places throughout the city, but mind you not a good pita with lots of salad, but a sandwich with a ton fries.
Moreover I think a slice of pizza with tomato and mozzarella is not junk food. But maybe that's just me.
Are you sure you live in Paris? Cause I see kebab and nutella crepes stands at every corner.
2. I said "decent", not "outstanding". You can get decent pizze in Paris for less than 10€ in any decent pizzeria (there are some bad ones, just don't come back to them).
Please, please tell me where they are! My email is hn_handle@my_employee and you can probably infer my_employee from my submissions :)
There are aternatives though: I worked for a few years in Grenoble (I'm now in Lyon) and there are interesting meetups in Geneva and Lyon which are both about 1 hour from Grenoble by car or train.
- "Apartment quality is really really bad": no always true, like in any other major city (try NYC),
- "The weather is awful, it rains 40% of the days": the same,
- "food quality is abysmal": very true (only applies to restaurants, supermarket food is standard),
- "Parisian being grumpy": fair enough,
- "pretending not to speak English": I don't think that's true (but it's hard to objectively assess).
It's not that they pretend, they really don't speak English ;-)
More precisely they have some notions of English but 1) they won't understand a native and can only pick a few words 2) they're ashamed of their accent so they won't even try to speak 3) due to their poor lifestyle Parisians are (mostly) dicks and do not represent Frenchies in general.
Don't get fooled by the French people you see on HN (like me) they are a rarity.
I had it on the tip of my tongue, but I did not want to sound too offensive; although I dread to say it, it is quite true; however, it's not uncommon to hear people at least trying.
*or however it's written.
Parisians treat everybody badly, it's not specifically directed at foreigners, I'm French and I feel like I'm annoying them too.
Off course I'm generalizing here. If they know you they will treat you humanly. But just try to ask your direction to someone in the street and feel the "love" :-)
Really? Cause that's a pretty dickish thing to say. Also, most people who work/live in Paris are not actually from here, so if you consider Paris to be full of dicks, that would mean most French are too. Just saying.
I see it slowly changing - I blame this on how good American TV has become now (I'm taking about the series of course.)
Coming from NYC I don't see that much of a difference in some of the things you've mentioned from living here.
Nonetheless, it is hard for foreigner to find an apartment to rent, but it's hard for everyone. And since whining about real estate is the national sport it somehow eased their integration and they quickly found colleagues to help them in this task.
France is not the UK, and it's not the US either. If you want to come in Paris make sure you're compatible with locals culture and habits. That means try to talk to some people mentioned in the slideshow, visit coworking space and startup offices. You'll be welcomed.
Don't forget that your employees enjoy perks such as free healthcare or unemployment insurance from the government. Moreover, they had their MSc for free or almost, which means they don't have any student loan to pay back. If they have kids, their school is probably both decent and free. If it isn't, what's meant by "expensive private school" around there is a couple thousand euros a year. Also, 5-7 weeks of paid vacation are included.
Most US workers would be better off getting all of this for a 20% pay cut.
It's not a 20% pay cut, when you get paid €5k here, your employer already gives ~€4k to the government to pay for all those "free social services", and then you still have to pay 30% tax on your income. So the "free" education and healthcare actually costs you something like €6k per month, most people are not aware of this because half of these are paid upfront by your employer, if only French knew how much they were paying for their expensive "free" social services... And they have to pay it for the rest of their lives whereas Americans can pay back their education loans way before that. Last but not least, you should know that healthcare does reimburse less each year, so you are now forced to pay for a private insurance in addition to the high tax you already pay for many healthcare services such as dentists, blood analysis and more. Great free services indeed!
> 5-7 weeks of paid vacation are included.
Yes, tell me about that. Every time I try to get someone at a company, half the time he's either on vacation or on RTT, and I'm asked if I could wait a week until he comes back. This makes doing business here way slower to get things done, very frustrating and hard to compete.
Last month, they announced a new law: Pay slips will be "simplified" by hiding all the contributions paid for by the employer.
When I asked french relatives, they'd tell me "but it's not a part of my salary, it's what my boss pays". You. Stupid.
The part that matters is the one about serious conditions: accidents, cancers, infarctus etc. Paying a few hundreds a months to get a few thousands back when you break a tooth or your glasses isn't a life-changing service, it merely regulates your cash-flow for a fee.
What matters is knowing that if you need a 6- or 7-figures treatment, you'll get it. You won't be bankrupt because of it, your insurance won't weasel out of paying for it, and your employment status at the time you discovered your disease is irrelevant to the way you'll be treated. All of those life-threatening and/or chronic conditions are handled by public insurance, and 100% reimbursed (except for convenience services like individual hospital room with TV, which indeed you have to pay for, directly or through your private insurance).
You're right that the 20% discount claimed by the presentation is probably meant "out of the company's pocket", net salary differences are way beyond 20%. I think a regular developer with a few years of experience but no super-sexy skill will get around €2000-€2500 net of taxes in Paris. That's not a lot if you want to rent a decent flat inside Paris. People know how much they actually cost to their employer, it's written right next to their net salary on their salary sheet every month, and it's regularly reminded to them in public debates.
About education, there's another advantage to its public funding: prices don't get ridiculously inflated as they are in American universities. There's no education bubble in countries supporting public education. Also, it (somewhat) improves meritocratic social mobility, which means a higher rate of smart kids actually becoming skilled professionals. Finally, as a potential employer, schools which don't treat their students as customers tend to force-feed them more of the unpalatable curriculums such as maths, algorithms, etc. You tend to get a better trained workforce.
To sum it up, European prefer lower risk lifestyles, on average. There's more redistribution of wealth, less opportunity to become very rich, and less violence (I count denying a life-saving chemotherapy as violence, although social safety nets also alter crime rates). This appeals more to the kind of people who happily stay salaried than to risk-loving entrepreneurs. But as an entrepreneur, there's value in settling somewhere that appeals to the kind of people who will happily remain your employees: you don't have to pay them the opportunity cost of renouncing to become Mark Zuckerberg.
What this presentation unfairly brushed off war the amount of bureaucracy you have to face in order to get anything done, and how even harder to navigate it is when you aren't a native.
http://www.paris-region.com/sites/default/files/brochuretic.... (PDF, 1MB).
The best thing about the Anglophone world is the language. I wouldn't mind learning a new language, but it takes time.
But in a professional environment, there is absolutely no problem. Ok our accent might be a problem but we can speak and understand english. For example, to become an engineer in France you need a minimal level in english.
A lot of educated people have travelled in a foreign country during their studies, so really for me I don't think it will be a problem.
In general, I've always considered it polite to "show effort" to speak the local language, even if you end up speaking English in the long run. Whenever I travel to a new country, I try to learn enough to read a dinner menu and order a meal. While I'm certainly nowhere near to being fluent in that language, it's at least enough to be able to understand when the waiter is asking for a drink order versus appetizers or whatever, and then to be able to list the things we want with proper pronunciation and the count of each item, though not in a full sentence.
I've left France (I'm french), and now live in Malta, because of the Bad and the Ugly. France has high taxes (and 50% social contributions), very anti-entrepreneur and ultra-bureaucratic mindset, a sinking economy, a vastly anti-libertarian political landscape, and a high cost of living vs. quality of living.
If you're tempted anyway, Good Luck.
I live in Nantes right now (after 7 years in the Netherlands) and the quality of living is great, at a fraction of the price in Paris.
Second, not everybody is a libertarian, so I'm quite OK with what you call "anti-libertarian landscape".
Bureaucratic mindset : Apart from Malta, have you ever lived anywhere else in Europe ? I don't know the bureaucratic mindset of Malta, but I can say that I did not find a great difference between France, the Netherlands and Germany for instance.
When I hear "France has great tax credits systems for startups", I think "if you spend months in paperwork, maybe". That's what I call a bureaucratic hell.
As for being a libertarian, I guess it's the case of a majority of entrepreneurs. If one enjoys government control, he's probably not an entrepreneur...
Who wants a 3500 page labour code like we have in France? Ever changing laws? New regulation and a new tax every month?
I've visited apartments for about two months before finding a place outside of Paris and have been asked all sorts of private questions about my life, for example looking at your tax and salary receipts is considered standard practice.
If you're in France on a visa, you'll have to renew it every year. To do that, take a day off to go through a humiliating process that will have you wait in front of a government building from 12PM for 10 to 15 hours until it opens and then until it's your turn.
Of course, if you dare forget something, you'll just have to lose another 10 hours of your life another day, waiting in front of that same building. People sometimes take pounds and pounds of paper when they do that to be sure they'll have what they're asked for.
One of my friends is in this situation and she dreads it for weeks when the time comes to renew her visa...
http://www.slideshare.net/FrontlineVC/the-irish-tech-startup...
Kudos to people who will post the tech guides for other European cities like Berlin and London as I don't have them.
As every city there are good and bad things. Administration is horrible and the worst experience from anywhere that I have lived. Getting an apartment will be hell. It just will. Paper is still the norm in this country. Your mailbox will never be empty. This part sucks.
The work atmosphere in this country is horrible in comparison to other countries like the UK and US. Remember, this is the country that (legally) has a 35 hour work week. In startups this looks different although they have the reputation of being lazy in comparison to American startups. While I haven't seen it, this is likely the case for some. There's no smoke without fire. And just judging by the way this country works...don't be surprised if they seem lazy.
English. Right, this is probably one of the biggest problems non-French will have. Across the board French people's English have the worst English ever, out of every country in Central Europe. That said Paris is in some way an exception. Parisians' English is still horrible for the kind of city it is trying to become but not as bad as you'll hear it in other cities.
Food - Don't understand why people are saying it's bad. It's really good! Especially compared to a city like London, where it's expensive and quality isn't amazing. There is less of a junk food culture in Paris than in other cities though.
There’s more good and bad things to go into but I’ll leave the bad stuff at this for now.
There are good things going on in Paris. The city is amazing to live in. It’s much cheaper than London. Transport costs are a lot less. Leisure activities are cheaper. A lot of stuff will be cheaper, including apartments. The city is beautful to live in too.
There is a good startup ecosystem in Paris. There are a couple good exits coming out of France. But it all seems like a big circle jerk, which (IMO) a guide like this shows. This may also come from the extreme forms of patriotism the French show(sometimes) and/or from the fact that they don’t speak English and are repulsed by anything English.
A lot of startups start here but quickly try to get the hell out and move to the US or even London. There have been a couple good exits though but not as many as London nor any as big as the ones in Berlin.
I don’t know what the fundraising process goes like in Paris so I’m not going to comment on that. Obviously it will be harder than in the US as there are less VCs here. Judging by the amounts being raised and the amount of “big” VCs in London it’s also weaker than across the channel.
Paris is the most touristic city in the world.
You can be perfectly fine if you don't speak word of french.
You can be perfectly fine on English in almost any large city in the world, but there is more of a friction in Paris when interacting in English than in many other European capitals.
The only really bad experience I've ever had in Paris was with an eastern european cab driver who droned truly horrendous racist screeds about black African prostitutes ruining Paris my entire ride.
Nowadays people in Paris are friendly enough and speak english.
Edit : 10 years ago I tried to live in Paris. After only 2 weeks I ran away to my little French town that nobody on HN ever heard about.
Thalys high-speed trains get you from Paris to Amsterdam in 3h; add another hour to move to/from the train stations, and here are your 4 hours.
And yes, the 4h figure is for travelling by train, not by car.
The Paris Tech Guide is an understandable piece of boosterism, but I would not recommend Paris or France to people looking for a tech ecosystem to support them.
I'm not going to talk about the food, because it's totally irrelevant to this discussion. If that's the reason why you choose a city for your startup, your startup will probably fail.
I'm also not going to engage in French-bashing. I have many good friends in Paris, and the city itself is a beautiful piece of work. It just isn't great for business...
Paris's poor business environment has many causes, and they run much deeper than the incompetent Socialist government currently in power. That government is just the latest captain steering the ship of state, and the state is very heavy in France. It was heavy under Chirac and Sarkozy. It is heavy for the French themselves. They are constantly confronted with absurd rules governing aspects of their existence that legislators felt obligated to regulate. Imagine how difficult it is for the foreigner to navigate those laws. Very.
As a country, France has crippled its once powerful financial industry and driven a lot of capital and financial services to London. You could argue that this began with Mitterand in the early 1980s, so it's a decades-long trend. And finance is important, because it makes a lot of people silly rich and some of them become investors. Losing finance means that France's expertise has been considerably weakened in the domain of financial technology, which is going to eat banks like it ate publishing.
As a society, France has a technologically conservative, luddite streak that is quite the opposite of Americans' tech liberalism. While France produces many gifted mathematicians and engineers, they usually fail to productize and successfully market their ideas. Props to the minitel, but who uses it now?
Many unFrench people fail to appreciate that France suffers from a rigid, ossified class structure, where people can be pigeon-holed by their accents, much as in Britain. Rigid, ossified class structures are really bad at identifying and cultivating talent. They're very good at creating a few schools (Sciences Po, ENA, the Polytechnique) that produce a small ruling class. Most applicants are not admitted. The institutional structure is well trained at telling people "non, c'est impossible."
So France is a machine that stifles peoples' potential. That's why many of the most ambitious French people leave. The ones that remain are split between the privileged and the frustrated.
If you want to build something, and it has to be in Europe, choose the Anglo-Germanic countries: the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Scandinavia. Several of those economies are bigger and on the whole they tend to move faster. People there learn English well (except in Britain of course ;). The rules of the country will be more understandable and more predictably enforced.
Go to France when you're rich and ready to retire. They'll welcome you with open arms. The country isn't made for builders.
http://www.paris-region.com/sites/default/files/brochuretic....
"With a €4 billion turnover, the French market represents 26% of the European open source market, including software and services (PAC, The Open Source Market in France, 2011). Open source has seen a rapid expansion in the past decade, with an annual growth rate of over 68%."
My primary experience of open source software in France is of a French software product manager who worked with a German tech lead. The product manager got the German programmer to open up the API of that product to allow plugins, which a Russian innovator promptly made use of to build some useful addon software. The French manager put the German into unrelated consulting work, then hired a mate, also from France, as a second programmer to duplicate the functionality of the addon and bundle it as part of the product, killing the market for the addon. Having diluted the importance of the German to the product, he stopped using his "tech lead" title and started promoting his own name on the product instead of the two technical workers.
Perhaps the rapid expansion is based on an patriotist old boys network helping each other out rather than innovation and marketing.