The only names I recognize from the slides are Algolia and DailyMotion. I sure hope Paris is stronger in B2B...
ParisIsBack – The Paris Tech Guide
71–80 of 119 posts
Re: ParisIsBack – The Paris Tech Guide
#72This makes me cringe a bit. What this document says seems to be that France is a great country to start a company in mostly because you can get cheap labor. It is stated that a mid-level dev is $50-80K in France, however the cost of living in Paris is comparable to living in New York, so it means that you ultimately should come to Paris because you can cut your payroll by 20%.
Salaries are very depressed. Experienced engineers outside of Paris make 45K top, when you live in Paris you get a 30% salary increase for the cost of living. Payroll wise: take what you pay someone, multiply by two, that's what you actually have to front: half goes to the worker (who will be heavily taxed) and the rest is tax. Taxation is pure confiscation here.
Re: ParisIsBack – The Paris Tech Guide
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
"The weather is awful, it rains 40% of the days." -> According to Wikipedia ( http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climat_de_Paris ) this is untrue. "Paris connaît en moyenne 111,1 jours de pluie par an, mais si celles-ci sont fréquentes, elles sont en revanche peu soutenues." In other words, it rains 30% of the days on average, and these are very light rains, most of the time.
I did the computation myself I think in the span 2000-2013, using data from Wolfram|Alpha and I was surprised to find that Paris had 46% of days with at least one shower. Here are the cities I had checked: London 42 Paris 46 Rome 23 Boston 32 Buenos Aires 30 San Francisco 18 Lima 21 Beijing 24 Sydney 20 Moscow 31 If you want to try it yourself from the beginning of 2000 to now: https://www.wolframcloud.com/objects/b4…
Average sunny hours per day is probably a better measure of what it feels like to be there:
http://www.holiday-weather.com/paris/averages/
Paris: 6.75 London: 5.58 NYC: 7.33 SF: 9.67 (nice summers) Nice: 11
Re: ParisIsBack – The Paris Tech Guide
#74This makes me cringe a bit. What this document says seems to be that France is a great country to start a company in mostly because you can get cheap labor. It is stated that a mid-level dev is $50-80K in France, however the cost of living in Paris is comparable to living in New York, so it means that you ultimately should come to Paris because you can cut your payroll by 20%.
> you ultimately should come to Paris because you can cut your payroll by 20%. Don't forget that your employees enjoy perks such as free healthcare or unemployment insurance from the government. Moreover, they had their MSc for free or almost, which means they don't have any student loan to pay back. If they have kids, their school is probably both decent and free. If it isn't, what's meant by "expensive private scho…
> Most US workers would be better off getting all of this for a 20% pay cut.
It's not a 20% pay cut, when you get paid €5k here, your employer already gives ~€4k to the government to pay for all those "free social services", and then you still have to pay 30% tax on your income. So the "free" education and healthcare actually costs you something like €6k per month, most people are not aware of this because half of these are paid upfront by your employer, if only French knew how much they were paying for their expensive "free" social services... And they have to pay it for the rest of their lives whereas Americans can pay back their education loans way before that. Last but not least, you should know that healthcare does reimburse less each year, so you are now forced to pay for a private insurance in addition to the high tax you already pay for many healthcare services such as dentists, blood analysis and more. Great free services indeed!
> 5-7 weeks of paid vacation are included.
Yes, tell me about that. Every time I try to get someone at a company, half the time he's either on vacation or on RTT, and I'm asked if I could wait a week until he comes back. This makes doing business here way slower to get things done, very frustrating and hard to compete.
Re: ParisIsBack – The Paris Tech Guide
#75The presentation claims that it takes 4 hours to travel from Paris to Amsterdam by car. Well, the distance is 750 km so you need a pretty fast car for that and a big wallet to pay for the speeding tickets ..
The distance is actually 500 km, not 750 (https://www.google.fr/maps/dir/Paris/Amsterdam,+Pays-Bas/@50...).
And yes, the 4h figure is for travelling by train, not by car.
Re: ParisIsBack – The Paris Tech Guide
#76As 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 for R&D (JEI and CIR) are indeed a no-brainer for most people that are serious about it, given that:
- The form-filling part is better left to your accountant, as part of your annual tax return.
- The R&D specific part is a no-brainer if you actually do R&D and know what it means.
Re: ParisIsBack – The Paris Tech Guide
#77As 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…
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Re: ParisIsBack – The Paris Tech Guide
#78I'm french and I worked with two foreigners (US & Canada) in a parisian startup. One of them didn't bother learning french, and it was ok. He was mostly hanging out with other expats, and seemed to enjoy it.
Nonetheless, it is hard for foreigner to find an apartment to rent, but it's hard for everyone. And since whining about real estate is the national sport it somehow eased their integration and they quickly found colleagues to help them in this task.
France is not the UK, and it's not the US either. If you want to come in Paris make sure you're compatible with locals culture and habits. That means try to talk to some people mentioned in the slideshow, visit coworking space and startup offices. You'll be welcomed.
Re: ParisIsBack – The Paris Tech Guide
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
"The weather is awful, it rains 40% of the days." -> According to Wikipedia ( http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climat_de_Paris ) this is untrue. "Paris connaît en moyenne 111,1 jours de pluie par an, mais si celles-ci sont fréquentes, elles sont en revanche peu soutenues." In other words, it rains 30% of the days on average, and these are very light rains, most of the time.
I did the computation myself I think in the span 2000-2013, using data from Wolfram|Alpha and I was surprised to find that Paris had 46% of days with at least one shower. Here are the cities I had checked: London 42 Paris 46 Rome 23 Boston 32 Buenos Aires 30 San Francisco 18 Lima 21 Beijing 24 Sydney 20 Moscow 31 If you want to try it yourself from the beginning of 2000 to now: https://www.wolframcloud.com/objects/b4…
amazing
Re: ParisIsBack – The Paris Tech Guide
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow, that's a great deal of french bashing in such a short comment. I agree that the immigration laws must be a real pain for some people. But for the rest, you must have been out of luck : - 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 ent…
Tax reductions schemes are mostly abused AFAIK. Very few startups do anything resembling actual R&D, but they still use the tax schemes, which could be risky in case of tax audit. Anyway, most early startups won't benefit from that as they have no profit to show so it is mostly a moot point. As for the other points from the parent, they're not specific to France. The "startups are a rich man's game" problem is univer…
You don't have to make some profit to benefit it, as you get employer taxes back for R&D employees, which can be very important, something like 40% of employee cost. It lowers a lot cost per employee.