41–50 of 119 posts
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> To be fair, a lot of “random brasseries” are pretty good, you can eat a good meal for €10 everywhere in the city. 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.
Well, in France we don't have the culture of junk food and fast-food... If you want to eat that way you need to prepare it yourself, if not yeah you're right it's more expensive than NYC. 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.
It's very hard to live in Paris if you are not fluent in French... Or you're doomed to live amongst ex-pats, which defeats the purpose of the experience.
No its not. Paris is the most touristic city in the world. You can be perfectly fine if you don't speak word of french.
There are a bunch of nice things to be said about Paris and the tax rebate system they put in place for startups and companies that spend heavily in R&D. However I think that Paris has a very low quality of life in most of the fields that are ignored in metrics: - 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 1…
A city like Lille (or Strasbourg, Nantes, etc.) offers a much better quality of life but looks like to a small village regarding tech, in comparison to Paris. The business activity outside Paris in very weak. Few startups, few engineers, few meetups ... I don't regret my former "provincial" life, even if I live now in a small apartment in a decrepit building in a noisy neighborhood.
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.
That's the Good. There's also the Bad, and the Ugly. 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.
As a previous foreign entrepreneur who lived in Paris for 8 years here's my experience and my advice: In paris entrepreneurship is a VIP club for rich people who will rarely take real risk. Seed investment is next to impossible. The tax reduction schemes requires months of procedures and administrative paperwork. Real estate is almost as expensive as London. And the worst, if you're a foreigner you'll have a real har…
- 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...
It's very hard to live in Paris if you are not fluent in French... Or you're doomed to live amongst ex-pats, which defeats the purpose of the experience.
No its not. 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.
It's very hard to live in Paris if you are not fluent in French... Or you're doomed to live amongst ex-pats, which defeats the purpose of the experience.