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Comment by tajen | Hacker News Reader

> $12000

France gives you a lumpsum of your unemployment benefits if you start a business. If you were paid an average engineer salary, 2200€ net pm, it makes 42000€, and it's called ACCRE. The condition is to be fired, and not on our heavy fault. Most of my friends negotiate giving cash to their employers to get fired, so they could get ACCRE.

There are other grants (e.g. 6000€ for being a woman) and loans (28000€ for being a woman, and others named CIR if you employ PhDs). For all of that, you don't even need to have a good project, as opposed to applying to YC.

What I mean is, YC isn't targetting France, or is it?

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> Most of my friends negociate giving cash to their employers to get fired, so they could get ACCRE.

Perhaps something got lost in translation, but that sounds unethical at best, and highly illegal at worst.

YC has already funded a couple great teams from France.

And we want people from all over the world to apply to YCF too. As long as you have a good enough internet connection for clear video chats, you don't have to move here either.

YCF offers office hours for 8 weeks, two events with the partners and the alumni network. And the $12k and €42k are not mutually exclusive.

How many €10M+ companies got started with ACCRE money? Probably not even as many as there are $1B+ YC companies.

Do we even have €10M+ startups in France? Besides Gemalto which is 30 years old.

There's just no way we could create an Apple in France. It's too agressive, therefore we would forbid it.

I think algolia might count soon given their last funding round.

Iliad is a €10B telco started about 20 years ago by a twenty-something. There was Business Objects which sold for some billions circa 2000. Criteo started in the 2000s and is worth billions. In tech, there are also DailyMotion, Deezer, BlaBlaCar, Withings and Sigfox in the €100M+ range.

YC certainly fares better in a decade than France in 30 years. But you shouldn't be self-deprecating, or you may start to believe it's impossible to start a startup in France. When there's a will, there's a way.

Anyhow, we're getting off-topic.

Does Criteo count? Yahoo finance says its market cap is 3.3B[1].

[1]http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=CRTO

Money isn't the main motivation to get into YC. The YC network (of businesses, people, and investors) and the credibility it gives you are far more valuable than even their ~$120k seed.

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