Emmanuel Macron presidency prompts French startup boom
independent.co.uk
Emmanuel Macron presidency prompts French startup boom
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Re: Emmanuel Macron presidency prompts French startup boom
#2Paradoxically, while Trump has accomplished very little but make speeches, the damage his presidency has done to our image, and perception of how welcoming America is, will be felt for years.
It's bringing back memories of our dismal global perception around 2006-2008. (Although this wasn't for "America is unwelcoming" reasons)
Re: Emmanuel Macron presidency prompts French startup boom
#3Paradoxically, while Trump has accomplished very little but make speeches, the damage his presidency has done to our image, and perception of how welcoming America is, will be felt for years. It's bringing back memories of our dismal global perception around 2006-2008. (Although this wasn't for "America is unwelcoming" reasons)
It's been great for my 401k, though. The best months in the past ten years were November 2016 and January 2017.
Re: Emmanuel Macron presidency prompts French startup boom
#4The endowment of that venture fund (Viva Technology) will be around 10 billion euros. It has just been announced so the news hasn't come out in English media yet.
Here is a reputable source in French: https://www.lesechos.fr/tech-medias/hightech/030386245787-en...
Re: Emmanuel Macron presidency prompts French startup boom
#5Paradoxically, while Trump has accomplished very little but make speeches, the damage his presidency has done to our image, and perception of how welcoming America is, will be felt for years. It's bringing back memories of our dismal global perception around 2006-2008. (Although this wasn't for "America is unwelcoming" reasons)
It's going to be devastating over the long term.
Those of us even in Australia are wary now of travelling to the US because of (a) fear they maybe mistakenly detained, (b) having to turn over social media information and (c) visa problems at the arrival gate.
Places like Berlin, Amsterdam etc are looking far more interesting for startups because of the access to the European market and the sensible policies that seem to be enacted e.g. roaming.
Re: Emmanuel Macron presidency prompts French startup boom
#6Paradoxically, while Trump has accomplished very little but make speeches, the damage his presidency has done to our image, and perception of how welcoming America is, will be felt for years. It's bringing back memories of our dismal global perception around 2006-2008. (Although this wasn't for "America is unwelcoming" reasons)
It's been great for my 401k, though. The best months in the past ten years were November 2016 and January 2017.
Those gains were most likely based on the anticipation of tax cuts (increasing consumer spending and the supply of investable capital), deregulation (allowing higher profits, most notably by banks), and repatriation (allowing share buy backs).
So far, none of those has happened and it remains to be seen if they will. If they don't, I don't expect a market decline, but just a smaller total cumulative growth since November that has nothing to do with Trump's election or the general agenda I outlined above.
Re: Emmanuel Macron presidency prompts French startup boom
#7I can see those cuts in corporate tax being good to increase startup competition. Some of the other big remaining issues to see highly successful startups are salaries and lack of tech talent.
We could argue that startup salaries aren't the highest anyways, so if salary isn't too big of an issue if French startup can provide equity easily. It seems that when you exercise stock options in France, you don't need to pay tax on it until the options are actually sold[1][2], so that's a good thing for employee, no need to scratch your head with 83b elections and whatnot.
Regarding the lack of tech talent, there's still a lot to be done. France has incredible engineers, but those engineering schools are not focused enough on Computer Science, instead they excel in "old-school" engineering like Aerospace, Civil, Nuclear, ... . On the other hand, Free universities have Computer Science degrees, but they don't prepare the future graduates as much as the Engineering "Grandes Écoles" would in regard to core engineering knowledge. There are some attempts at schools focused more on Software Engineering, but I feel that they're more similar to longer bootcamps with a focus on projects, I think those who graduate such schools are trained to be good "monkey coders" (pardon the expression) but lack a growth-mindset.
[1] (in French) https://www.impots.gouv.fr/portail/particulier/questions/jai...
[2] (in French) https://www.impots.gouv.fr/portail/particulier/lactionnariat...
Re: Emmanuel Macron presidency prompts French startup boom
#8Paradoxically, while Trump has accomplished very little but make speeches, the damage his presidency has done to our image, and perception of how welcoming America is, will be felt for years. It's bringing back memories of our dismal global perception around 2006-2008. (Although this wasn't for "America is unwelcoming" reasons)
Nah, people have short attention spans.
You cite the dismal perception from 2006-2008, but what changed? In 2008 Obama was elected and everything is new again and he won the Nobel. Did the country completely change in 2 years? Has it changed that much in 8?
Not really, that's why getting so riled up over singular negative events isn't worth your time. Things change fast, and countries have long histories. Germany and Japan were ruled by jingoist elites for centuries and just 80 years ago they were culling populations. Today they are examples of doing it right. Do we really believe 4 years of a bad leader is gonna flip centuries of progress?
It's an issue, yeah, but let's not overstate it because that' s not being honest with ourselves.
Re: Emmanuel Macron presidency prompts French startup boom
#9I can see those cuts in corporate tax being good to increase startup competition. Some of the other big remaining issues to see highly successful startups are salaries and lack of tech talent. We could argue that startup salaries aren't the highest anyways, so if salary isn't too big of an issue if French startup can provide equity easily. It seems that when you exercise stock options in France, you don't need to pay…
Tax cuts and being able to fire people is far more important to startup formation than government directed investment.
The mindset comes from opportunity and belief that you can own what you build. Schooling is almost irrelevant, especially today.
Re: Emmanuel Macron presidency prompts French startup boom
#10I can see those cuts in corporate tax being good to increase startup competition. Some of the other big remaining issues to see highly successful startups are salaries and lack of tech talent. We could argue that startup salaries aren't the highest anyways, so if salary isn't too big of an issue if French startup can provide equity easily. It seems that when you exercise stock options in France, you don't need to pay…
I agree with you on most parts.
However I come from a private "engineering" school focused on computer sciences (named Supinfo) and there's some others (Epitech / Epita ) that though they don't deliver a engineer diploma (as per the law-regulated definition of engineer) but rather a master diploma (but that you can name "engineer in computer science" or somekind of trick like that and the schools play on that to attract student), actually have to my opinion, provide a decent education.
I learned assembly, C, logical gates and how to build a 1 bits processor.
I then learned HTML, and SQL, and then PHP, and some basic of algorithm (though no data structure courses, I learned only years after being graduated what was a quick-sort/merge-sort)
But I also learned management (how to hold a meeting, how to manage conflict) and project management (Gantt-diagram, Agile and Scrum) and some basis of ITIL
And even more related to the entrepreneur-ship world I had lessons about copyrights law, labor laws, patent laws , as well as finance course (what is an asset active/passive, what is the difference between giving yourself a salary and giving you shares etc.)
However I have to admit 10 years ago, I wanted to be a monkey-coder and thought the management and finance lessons were bullshit for people who were not good enough to code and still needed a job.
So I have to say the school totally prepared me for the "startup world" (and with 30 campuses in France and ~5000 graduated student a year, quite some others were prepared, though they were maybe with the same mindset as me).