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Macron Vowed to Make France a ‘Startup Nation.’ Is It Getting There?

nytimes.com

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Re: Macron Vowed to Make France a ‘Startup Nation.’ Is It Getting There?

#191

Post by pjc50 »

alkonaut wrote: post #114
zenovision wrote: post #17

I doubt that France will be able to do this - they have many disadvantages comparing to USA: - high taxes - a lot of buerocracy - language burden to attract high qualified foreign employees - lower salaries - fragmented political system in the EU - much lower population in France comparing to USA and if you want to cover the entire EU, you have to support many different languages, currencies, etc...

High taxes is both a blessing and a curse. Depending on what the taxes are spent on, they can really help. For example good safety nets for unemployment means you can risk failing your startup without being broke. Second, free higher education means the chance that the right entrepreneur gets the right education is higher. > fragmented political system in the EU To be honest it feels about as fragmented as US state l…

> feels about as fragmented as US state law is.

Under-rated point, this. California is a single giant market, but for lots of services the US has much less of a "single market" than the EU. Especially banking, finance, insurance, healthcare.

Re: Macron Vowed to Make France a ‘Startup Nation.’ Is It Getting There?

#192

Post by jcelerier »

desu_ wrote: post #80
zenovision wrote: post #17

I doubt that France will be able to do this - they have many disadvantages comparing to USA: - high taxes - a lot of buerocracy - language burden to attract high qualified foreign employees - lower salaries - fragmented political system in the EU - much lower population in France comparing to USA and if you want to cover the entire EU, you have to support many different languages, currencies, etc...

As a French, it saddens me a bit to say that but you also missed one point: culture. My background includes some grad school experience at a top French university and then at a top US university. One big difference, which became even more obvious to me after I crossed the Atlantic, is that there is (almost) no hustle culture in France. Make fun of the stupid apps and the copycats but so many undergrads at my American…

> In France, the holy grail is to get a CDI (permanent employee contract) at a big company and that’s often pretty much it.

Well, there are reasons for this. Good luck getting a loan for your next house / car / whatever if you don't have a CDI.

Re: Macron Vowed to Make France a ‘Startup Nation.’ Is It Getting There?

#193

Post by ccozan »

pilooch wrote: post #41

I run a machine learning company in France. Call it a startup or not, doesn't matter. Most of what I read in the comments here is not exactly true nor relies on statistics (sound like my story is...). For companies acting within the science or innovative space, France is a haven. CIR is a tax return that covers 30% of R&D personnel, JEI is a status that halves the taxes on personnel for 8 years, and nullifies gov tax…

"One major pain is interacting with large French corporations, with payment delays unheard of in the US. This slows many startups down when it does not kill them. Once bootstrapped it seems to get better."

I need to second that. I really struggle with working directly with big companies. My own case, a big engineering company in Germany is quite putting my business at risk. Others have paid only after I send them a letter from a lawyer. And so on.

A friend of mine got his whole business busted by the EC itself. The processes are sooo burocratic, so that he got his money after two years. But he closed the company meanwhile. Impossible to sue the EC itself...need another 10years....

Re: Macron Vowed to Make France a ‘Startup Nation.’ Is It Getting There?

#194

Post by oelmekki »

Uberphallus wrote: post #184
oelmekki wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a french developer with a 10+ years career, I second that. I've also been a CTO, so I'm well aware of the employer point of view. I've seen many people worrying about not being able to fire people once hired. But what I've seen in facts are only two people needing firing, and it was done without any problem. What I saw incredibly more often is company getting into panic because their good developers would leave. I…

As a developer in France, and to compare to OP of this thread: I got fired because I created a company without telling my company. So I have both views in this matter. I got fired because there was a clause of "non-concurrence", but the market focus was different, geographic focus was different, all different except for doing tech. I brought it to court, it's ongoing. Why did they do it? Because they were downsizing…

Sorry to hear about your abusive firing, wish you success.

> all startups I've seen quickly moved to London or Berlin in the moment they got VC funding

Are you sure this was related to the cost of employees? As pointed in the article, London is the historical tech hub in europe, so moving to London after funding can have many reasons.

You're right though, having employees is really expansive. I'm afraid it's not just a France problem, though :) It costs you double than what employee gets pre-tax, but all in all it's not more expansive than in other countries. In US, a good dev salary is $100k a year (€85k).

EDIT: for non french people, a good dev salary in France is €45k, so it may cost at most and roughly double than that, but you have a lot of tax cut you can take advantage of to reduce it

Re: Macron Vowed to Make France a ‘Startup Nation.’ Is It Getting There?

#195

Post by kakwa_ »

pilooch wrote: post #41

I run a machine learning company in France. Call it a startup or not, doesn't matter. Most of what I read in the comments here is not exactly true nor relies on statistics (sound like my story is...). For companies acting within the science or innovative space, France is a haven. CIR is a tax return that covers 30% of R&D personnel, JEI is a status that halves the taxes on personnel for 8 years, and nullifies gov tax…

CIR is a huge joke, it doesn't help small companies that much. Big companies are far better at collecting it than start-ups.

On paper, CIR is for research and development efforts, basically it's for efforts that improve the state of the art.

But in practice CIR is a tax break/subvention in disguise for medium to big french companies like Orange, Thales, bnpparibas...

Just to give you an idea, at one of my former job, an email was sent to every employee of the division. This email asked us to provide our CV rewritten with "research terms" (ex: replace implementing by prototyping, debugging by experimenting, etc). We were CIRing projects in pure maintenance, we were CIRing the same thing over and over each years. It was clearly abusive.

I've heard stories that are even worst than that, like banks CIRing an overall of their website.

Re: Macron Vowed to Make France a ‘Startup Nation.’ Is It Getting There?

#196

Post by Uberphallus »

chillidoor wrote: post #31
rdm_blackhole wrote: post #11

Hiring and firing people in France is particularly hard. Most companies do not scale beyond 10 employees as after this threshold the regulatory burden increases dramatically. Taxes on small to medium businesses are downright confiscatory. Most French people still see business owners as exploiters of their workers.

I wonder how big the contractor market is in France. I mean, contractors are easy to hire and fire so it could be a good compromise (at least in the short term).

It's literally the only way my French company can pay to get work done, having employees is too expensive unless you have solid and constant cash flow.

Re: Macron Vowed to Make France a ‘Startup Nation.’ Is It Getting There?

#197

Post by tjr225 »

llcoolv wrote: post #178
llcoolv wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Great. A whole bunch of downvotes and not a single decent argument :D

The level of discourse you're pursuing isn't tolerated on HN. It should come as no surprise to you that no one is engaging with you- that is, of course unless you're being serious...in which case I feel dreadfully sorry for you.

Re: Macron Vowed to Make France a ‘Startup Nation.’ Is It Getting There?

#198

Post by kakwa_ »

Uberphallus wrote: post #184
oelmekki wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a french developer with a 10+ years career, I second that. I've also been a CTO, so I'm well aware of the employer point of view. I've seen many people worrying about not being able to fire people once hired. But what I've seen in facts are only two people needing firing, and it was done without any problem. What I saw incredibly more often is company getting into panic because their good developers would leave. I…

As a developer in France, and to compare to OP of this thread: I got fired because I created a company without telling my company. So I have both views in this matter. I got fired because there was a clause of "non-concurrence", but the market focus was different, geographic focus was different, all different except for doing tech. I brought it to court, it's ongoing. Why did they do it? Because they were downsizing…

> we're talking each month you pay total twice and a half as much as the employee sees BEFORE TAX.

I'm in Paris and here how my salaries break down:

Currently I'm at ~50K a year "Brut" (before taxes on the employee side), which means ~35K a year "Net" ("go home" salary).

I'm costing ~75K per year to my employer in term of salary (before taxes on the employer side).

My other taxes are around 6K per year.

I'm an SRE/software engineer with ~8 years experience.

I'm not sure ~75k is that expensive compared to other European countries, let alone Silicon Valley salaries.

Re: Macron Vowed to Make France a ‘Startup Nation.’ Is It Getting There?

#199

Post by systemtest »

pilooch wrote: post #41

I run a machine learning company in France. Call it a startup or not, doesn't matter. Most of what I read in the comments here is not exactly true nor relies on statistics (sound like my story is...). For companies acting within the science or innovative space, France is a haven. CIR is a tax return that covers 30% of R&D personnel, JEI is a status that halves the taxes on personnel for 8 years, and nullifies gov tax…

The best thing is that you can get away with paying a good software developer only €2500 per month. You can get four French developers for the price of one American.

Re: Macron Vowed to Make France a ‘Startup Nation.’ Is It Getting There?

#200

Post by [deleted] »

kakwa_ wrote: post #198
Uberphallus wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a developer in France, and to compare to OP of this thread: I got fired because I created a company without telling my company. So I have both views in this matter. I got fired because there was a clause of "non-concurrence", but the market focus was different, geographic focus was different, all different except for doing tech. I brought it to court, it's ongoing. Why did they do it? Because they were downsizing…

> we're talking each month you pay total twice and a half as much as the employee sees BEFORE TAX. I'm in Paris and here how my salaries break down: Currently I'm at ~50K a year "Brut" (before taxes on the employee side), which means ~35K a year "Net" ("go home" salary). I'm costing ~75K per year to my employer in term of salary (before taxes on the employer side). My other taxes are around 6K per year. I'm an SRE/so…

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