Ask HN: How's the Paris startup scene? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How's the Paris startup scene?

#11

Post by nrjames » Fri, Aug 10, 2018, 2:43 PM UTC

cassandrajam wrote: post #4

Hi, French here but I don't know much about the Paris scene, more the Lyon scene but they're probably close. Regarding the French language: you don't need to be good at it. Just learn enough of it so you can show the locals you tried, and soon they'll be ok speaking to you in English. All coding languages are English-based so everybody knows enough to work efficiently with non French-speaking people. Like the other u…

I know this is unrelated, but I thought you might be interested. It's an Arabic programming language, by Ramsey Nasser: http://nas.sr/%D9%82%D9%84%D8%A8/

Re: Ask HN: How's the Paris startup scene?

#12

Post by aeorgnoieang » Fri, Aug 10, 2018, 2:46 PM UTC

pandascore wrote: post #10

Hi French founder here. Imho: French start-up ecosystem is booming. Still immature in some aspects. Really good tech companies, less aggressive in sales than german for example. Cash is coming really hard from french VCs but also UK and some US. I consider France a tax heaven for start-up with multiple leverage: - JEI (Jeune Entreprise Innovante) status: basically you pay low employer's contribution - CIR (Crédit Imp…

> great community but a bit too nice

Too nice? Care to elaborate?

Re: Ask HN: How's the Paris startup scene?

#13

Post by kjullien » Fri, Aug 10, 2018, 2:48 PM UTC

I live in Paris, am french, and have been working at the same startup for more than a year and some months now.

The scene is very active, any new company these days will always brand themselves as a "startup" no matter how they function behind the scenes. So alot of "false advertising" when you postulate, "we're cool and all, we SOMETIMES allow a day of remote work a week" and typical bs like that.

Your french will need to be good, because it has been proven time and time again that we are bad as flip at learning languages and if you watch statistics online you'll see we're worst ranked in the entirety of Europe in languages.

Used to be that there were some "startup heavy" districts inside Paris, still is the case, but now we also have the brand new "Station F" that sells itself (or rather Macron sells as) the next Silicon Valley of Europe.... Never heard that anywhere...

My SO is currently in internship at station F and she told me the turnover is pretty crazy, it's more of an incubator that helps new startups get on their feet, so they'll probably stay around 6 months and then move far away to get cheap offices. Also apparently their selection process is run by old investors that have no idea what they are doing and if you simply sell your sh#t product/service well enough you'll get in. From what my SO told me about 50% of the startups over there are your typical "marketing" based "services" that sell you vaporware and invest 99% of their revenue in better "packaging" and what not, if you know what type of "company" I'm talking about...

Last thing, you'll probably get a good pay since your resume mentions the words "worked at Silicon Valley", but from my experience, every single HR will try to f#ck you over when you are being hired, so you better be a tough negotiator. For reference I currently earn 30k eur (about 21k after tax) a year as a junior (2 year xp) full-stack dev (mainly node, php and alot of sysops)

I'd resume by saying that overall, startups in Paris are more akin to those in SF than the Silicon Valley if you know what I mean. That might be your sort of thing, but I'm more of a "I want to build the future with my new js framework" type of guy... So have been considering moving out of France.

Re: Ask HN: How's the Paris startup scene?

#14

Post by catwell » Fri, Aug 10, 2018, 2:52 PM UTC

French software engineer working at startups in Paris since 2010 here.

> What's the startup scene in Paris like?

Booming. A bit too much, if you ask me.

The ecosystem started growing fast when I arrived, basically. In 2011, the first real startup accelerator (Le Camping) opened. At that time, there was a very interesting meetup for the Parisian HN community called Paris Hackers, with very interesting people including founders of Docker (then dotCloud), Capitaine Train (acquired by Trainline), etc.

Today I would say there are at least 10x more startups and 20x more people working in them, which resulted in the average level of people in the ecosystem going down. There are accelerators and incubators everywhere, as well as very interesting things like eFounders (https://www.efounders.com). Meeetups have grown unwieldy large (e.g. the machine learning meetup is often having a hard time finding rooms large enough to fit its 200 - 300 people per session).

As for companies, some startups have become large (Criteo, LeBonCoin, BlaBlaCar, ...); some are obviously growing fast (Algolia, Aircall, Platform.sh, ...); some (like Moodstocks where I used to work) have been acquired by US companies which have set up offices in Paris, among other things to tap into the well known talent at French research labs in CS and AI (Google and Facebook in particular). To accompany all this, more VC funds are opening and rounds become larger and larger.

There is a lot of good to all this, but personally I feel like this is kind of a bubble and I miss the time, not so long ago, when we were all a bit more reasonable.

> How good does my French need to be?

It depends on the company. I would say most tech startups do most of their written work (including chat etc) in English. People might still speak French, but will switch to English when non-French speakers are around if they want to.

> Are there any languages/platforms/etc. that are popular there more than in Silicon Valley/Fairfax County (the places I'm used to working)?

I would say the obvious one is Python for Web backend. The French (and European in general) tech community has adopted Python a lot more while the US was going with Ruby. Some of the larger and older startups use a lot of Scala as well. Newer companies tend to use Go.

There are interesting startups using less popular stacks, especially functional programming. What is propably the largest French startup, Vente Privée, is using some Haskell, and so is https://www.fretlink.com (whose CTO is a former Capitaine Train CTO). https://margo.com is building a bank from scratch with Elixir and Scala (the CEO is the former CEO of Capitaine Train). There are a lot of Erlang people around too.

As you may see I mentioned Capitaine Train a lot because this is how the ecosystem is growing: thanks to disaporas of people from acquired startups (à la Paypal mafia). A few years earlier it was Exalead (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exalead).

If you need more information feel free to get in touch. My email address is on my home page, which is linked in my HN profile.

Re: Ask HN: How's the Paris startup scene?

#15

Post by rb808 » Fri, Aug 10, 2018, 2:54 PM UTC

You should also investigate living in Paris and working in London. There are a lot more start ups and financial tech jobs there with salaries much higher. Its only a 2-3 hr train ride and you might be able to work one week on one week off, or short term blips of 6m at a time.

Re: Ask HN: How's the Paris startup scene?

#16

Post by catwell » Fri, Aug 10, 2018, 2:57 PM UTC

KeitIG wrote: post #8

> What's the startup scene in Paris like? The start-up scene is currently definitely at an interesting point: really young and active (people already shared links to Startup studios, you should have a look at them). The meetup scene is great too. The salary is still a pity though (compared to the States, Switzerland or Baltic countries). For a middle developer position, you may be around 40K euros, which is "nice in…

> For a middle developer position, you may be around 40K euros

I won't get into details here but 40k€ before taxes ("brut") for a developer between junior and senior is not considered that good in Paris anymore. It would have been decent 8 years ago but wages went up with the increase in demand. Of course it depends on skills, position, stack, etc...

That being said, you will almost always make more money working as a freelancer, and you will definitely make more working remotely for a California-based startup (which may be difficult because of French employment laws but is still definitely possible).

Re: Ask HN: How's the Paris startup scene?

#17

Post by sametmax » Fri, Aug 10, 2018, 2:59 PM UTC

Ok, so a lot of people here are comparing the french Startup scene to what it was before. I understand why, but it's misleading.

Yes, compared to what it was before, it's booming. But it was ridiculously bad before.

However compared to what's happening in the US, it's still lagging.

Innovation is alright, however investment and risk taking are nowhere close to the American standard. It's still very meh.

The culture of flexibility is starting to sink in, but again, you will face the french "lutte des classes" legacy, with old style hierarchies and management structures.

And of course, even including social benefits, the salary is 2 to 3 times less than in the valley. But they will publish crazy requirements in job offers.

On the other hand, working in France is sweet. Paris is great city, and the life style is super nice. And while French people can have a pretty negative attitude, they won't tell you everything is ok or doable before even checking they can, or be artificially friendly to the point it's weird. All in all, it's a lot less pressure.

Best bet is to actually live in France, but remotely work for an American company.

Plus you can buy actual tomatoes and not red plastic balls.

Re: Ask HN: How's the Paris startup scene?

#18

Post by arendtio » Fri, Aug 10, 2018, 3:01 PM UTC

baud147258 wrote: post #9

cassandrajam wrote: post #4

Hi, French here but I don't know much about the Paris scene, more the Lyon scene but they're probably close. Regarding the French language: you don't need to be good at it. Just learn enough of it so you can show the locals you tried, and soon they'll be ok speaking to you in English. All coding languages are English-based so everybody knows enough to work efficiently with non French-speaking people. Like the other u…

French here too; regarding language, it's rather annoying when there's one only person who don't speak French at work, forcing everyone else to switch. But if the co-workers are young enough, there shouldn't have too much difficulty for them to speak English. And regarding code, all the variable + comment are usually in English.

Yes and it is kinda annoying if there's only one country which doesn't want to adopt English, forcing everyone to learn their language ;-)

So it is just a matter of perspective. I wonder how the chinese see that picture.

Re: Ask HN: How's the Paris startup scene?

#19

Post by Dannymetconan » Fri, Aug 10, 2018, 3:01 PM UTC

kjullien wrote: post #13

I live in Paris, am french, and have been working at the same startup for more than a year and some months now. The scene is very active, any new company these days will always brand themselves as a "startup" no matter how they function behind the scenes. So alot of "false advertising" when you postulate, "we're cool and all, we SOMETIMES allow a day of remote work a week" and typical bs like that. Your french will n…

Just a comment but 30k for 2 years full experience seems low. I'm working in another European capital and I'm at 40k for a similar full-stack dev role.

Re: Ask HN: How's the Paris startup scene?

#20

Post by kjullien » Fri, Aug 10, 2018, 3:03 PM UTC

Dannymetconan wrote: post #19

kjullien wrote: post #13

I live in Paris, am french, and have been working at the same startup for more than a year and some months now. The scene is very active, any new company these days will always brand themselves as a "startup" no matter how they function behind the scenes. So alot of "false advertising" when you postulate, "we're cool and all, we SOMETIMES allow a day of remote work a week" and typical bs like that. Your french will n…

Just a comment but 30k for 2 years full experience seems low. I'm working in another European capital and I'm at 40k for a similar full-stack dev role.

I know it's low and am currently looking for a better job somewhere else (which I am pretty confident I could get) but these things take time and I have alot of other stuff to deal with in my life atm. Don't really like my job right now at all, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do...