ParisIsBack – The Paris Tech Guide

The Paris Tech Guide is an understandable piece of boosterism, but I would not recommend Paris or France to people looking for a tech ecosystem to support them.

I'm not going to talk about the food, because it's totally irrelevant to this discussion. If that's the reason why you choose a city for your startup, your startup will probably fail.

I'm also not going to engage in French-bashing. I have many good friends in Paris, and the city itself is a beautiful piece of work. It just isn't great for business...

Paris's poor business environment has many causes, and they run much deeper than the incompetent Socialist government currently in power. That government is just the latest captain steering the ship of state, and the state is very heavy in France. It was heavy under Chirac and Sarkozy. It is heavy for the French themselves. They are constantly confronted with absurd rules governing aspects of their existence that legislators felt obligated to regulate. Imagine how difficult it is for the foreigner to navigate those laws. Very.

As a country, France has crippled its once powerful financial industry and driven a lot of capital and financial services to London. You could argue that this began with Mitterand in the early 1980s, so it's a decades-long trend. And finance is important, because it makes a lot of people silly rich and some of them become investors. Losing finance means that France's expertise has been considerably weakened in the domain of financial technology, which is going to eat banks like it ate publishing.

As a society, France has a technologically conservative, luddite streak that is quite the opposite of Americans' tech liberalism. While France produces many gifted mathematicians and engineers, they usually fail to productize and successfully market their ideas. Props to the minitel, but who uses it now?

Many unFrench people fail to appreciate that France suffers from a rigid, ossified class structure, where people can be pigeon-holed by their accents, much as in Britain. Rigid, ossified class structures are really bad at identifying and cultivating talent. They're very good at creating a few schools (Sciences Po, ENA, the Polytechnique) that produce a small ruling class. Most applicants are not admitted. The institutional structure is well trained at telling people "non, c'est impossible."

So France is a machine that stifles peoples' potential. That's why many of the most ambitious French people leave. The ones that remain are split between the privileged and the frustrated.

If you want to build something, and it has to be in Europe, choose the Anglo-Germanic countries: the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Scandinavia. Several of those economies are bigger and on the whole they tend to move faster. People there learn English well (except in Britain of course ;). The rules of the country will be more understandable and more predictably enforced.

Go to France when you're rich and ready to retire. They'll welcome you with open arms. The country isn't made for builders.

http://www.paris-region.com/sites/default/files/brochuretic....

"With a €4 billion turnover, the French market represents 26% of the European open source market, including software and services (PAC, The Open Source Market in France, 2011). Open source has seen a rapid expansion in the past decade, with an annual growth rate of over 68%."

The part that matters is the one about serious conditions: accidents, cancers, infarctus etc. Paying a few hundreds a months to get a few thousands back when you break a tooth or your glasses isn't a life-changing service, it merely regulates your cash-flow for a fee.

What matters is knowing that if you need a 6- or 7-figures treatment, you'll get it. You won't be bankrupt because of it, your insurance won't weasel out of paying for it, and your employment status at the time you discovered your disease is irrelevant to the way you'll be treated. All of those life-threatening and/or chronic conditions are handled by public insurance, and 100% reimbursed (except for convenience services like individual hospital room with TV, which indeed you have to pay for, directly or through your private insurance).

You're right that the 20% discount claimed by the presentation is probably meant "out of the company's pocket", net salary differences are way beyond 20%. I think a regular developer with a few years of experience but no super-sexy skill will get around €2000-€2500 net of taxes in Paris. That's not a lot if you want to rent a decent flat inside Paris. People know how much they actually cost to their employer, it's written right next to their net salary on their salary sheet every month, and it's regularly reminded to them in public debates.

About education, there's another advantage to its public funding: prices don't get ridiculously inflated as they are in American universities. There's no education bubble in countries supporting public education. Also, it (somewhat) improves meritocratic social mobility, which means a higher rate of smart kids actually becoming skilled professionals. Finally, as a potential employer, schools which don't treat their students as customers tend to force-feed them more of the unpalatable curriculums such as maths, algorithms, etc. You tend to get a better trained workforce.

To sum it up, European prefer lower risk lifestyles, on average. There's more redistribution of wealth, less opportunity to become very rich, and less violence (I count denying a life-saving chemotherapy as violence, although social safety nets also alter crime rates). This appeals more to the kind of people who happily stay salaried than to risk-loving entrepreneurs. But as an entrepreneur, there's value in settling somewhere that appeals to the kind of people who will happily remain your employees: you don't have to pay them the opportunity cost of renouncing to become Mark Zuckerberg.

What this presentation unfairly brushed off war the amount of bureaucracy you have to face in order to get anything done, and how even harder to navigate it is when you aren't a native.

Please, please tell me where they are! My email is hn_handle@my_employee and you can probably infer my_employee from my submissions :)

Nowadays people in Paris are friendly enough and speak english.