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The seeds are students or the startups, the water is billions of dollars or euros. That's what you need for Silicon Valley. Seasoned capitalists with money to burn. Government grants can not make up for the shark VCs that know what they are doing, or trying to do.

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You also need a culture of entrepreneurship that bootlegs itself. The previous generation of companies helping the new generation - this is what is truly unusual about SV.

The more bureaucracy you build in to your culture to try and "facilitate entrepreneurship" the more you undermine this type of culture.

French culture is very much reliant upon the centralized government to do/provide everything. You can see it in their attempts at a government-sanctioned google competitor, now a government-sanctioned silicon valley. And it will fail over and over until they change the basic French outlook on jobs. In France it's impossible to fire. Every job requires a ton of red tape. Anything like a 1099 (hire/fire easily) employee is completely foreign to french thinking. To them, companies can only exploit, and employees must be protected by the government. They exhibit deep cynicism of capitalism, which is mutually exclusive with silicon valley. France is an old money country, new opportunities are almost impossible to find. France will never create a silicon valley under these conditions.

They also need to allow H1Bs for companies to exploit.

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