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Facebook to Open Startup Garage at Station F in Paris
- irmbrady 10y agoNice timing for the French Tech Visa: http://visa.lafrenchtech.com http://visa.lafrenchtech.com Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13410510 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13410510
- beebeebush 10y agoI would not support any kind of way facebook's business. Im very worryed of they pages content, censorship, fakenews and specially how facebook is not taking any responsibility of they secret cia leaded investigations of peoples life/personality/health. Personally, I'm very worryed Facebook's position in our society.
- pokemon-trainer 10y ago"startup garage" looks at photos of spacious, high end, neomodern office architecture we've come a long way since hp
- paganel 10y ago> https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/photo-jan-17-8-45-31-am.jpg https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/photo-j... Those containers look like worse than prison cells. A prison cell at least has got an window.
- BoorishBears 10y agoOf course the difference here is you can just leave your "prison cell" and go home whenever you want.
- karmacoda 10y agoBattery chickens.
- Shengbo 10y agoIt looks like one of the walls is a sheet of glass.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- ieRei6ae 10y agoYou mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon ?
- grp 10y ago
- julio83 10y agoThank you X.Niel for 42 and station F.
- matt4077 10y agoI just learned from some protest flyers that google is opening a similar campus literally a stone's throw from my apartment (in Berlin, Germany). It'll feel kinda strange. Like your parents coming to visit you at college.
- lostboys67 10y agoProtest flyers what are they protesting about?
- hocuspocus 10y agoLiving in Berlin I'd guess that people are protesting about the gentrification.
- bogomipz 10y agoAnd this is part of what makes Berlin and specifically Kreuzberg charming and unique. Google already has an office in Mitte where it is not out of place. I really don't like the ideas of these giants co-opting start-up spaces. Once companies have reached the FB and Google size they are kind of the antithesis of start ups. This just feel like they are building "right of first refusal acquisition" spaces. I realize this sounds curmudgeonly but I feel like their money and influence in these spaces encourages building acquisition targets rather than encouraging people to build their own Google and Facebooks.
- atroyn 10y agoBerliners are in general not fans of big corporate developments. The city's fabric revolves around local holes-in-the-wall and mixed residential neighbourhoods.
- hocuspocus 10y agoInteresting, where in Berlin ? I think Google Ventures has some kind of presence at the Factory already.
- 10y ago
- welanes 10y agoWhile considering a move to France, one of most interesting organisations I stumbled across was The Family (https://www.thefamily.co https://www.thefamily.co). They exude a really good ethos - or have really good copywriters, at least - and show self-awareness of some of the reservations that come up on HN when somebody mentions Startup and France in the same sentence. Their 'Toxicity' post damn well near seduced me (pesky Frenchies!) and is worth a read: > France is full of incubators, there’s news coverage, there’s this startup out of Bulgaria that just raised 2 million, everybody’s a software engineer, hell, in some countries, everybody’s a CEO! But that’s the difference between hype, which is useless, and hope, which is useful... > ...If you rely on TechCrunch and Medium to give you hints on how to be an entrepreneur, you risk three things: the first is that you believe it’s all true. The job of any good entrepreneur is to sell a good story. Nobody sells you the horrible things going on with the company (at least not until after the company is well on its way to being dead). The second is that you miss critical information filters ...The third risk is that you start to think it’s easy...that growth is just a matter of deciding when it’s the right time. > Money and people are needed to make any project work, but they are replaceable: there’s always someone willing to write another check, and there’s always someone who you can find to take over a particular job. But you can’t get back time. A bunch of people sitting around, saying that they’re working, talking about new projects every two months, focusing on getting a grant rather than getting a sale, those are people in a toxic ecosystem who are just wasting time. > Learn to recognize fake work — anything that doesn’t bring you closer to more customers, that doesn’t bring you closer to a better product, that doesn’t put people in contact with your solutions. Applying for public money, going to conferences, taking meetings, this is fake work that doesn’t help you with your business model, doesn’t identify problems and solutions, doesn’t show you the actual goals that you have to achieve in order to have success. Real work does all of those things. > If you can make money, you’ll have time to figure out the right business model. You won’t have to rely on investors who don’t understand your goals. Finding bad investors can be worse than having none at all. https://www.thefamily.co/toxicity https://www.thefamily.co/toxicity Anyone have any experience with these guys? Algolia and Crisp.im passed through their doors, and they seem to be doing well.
- realusername 10y agoI know some close friends who have spent a long time with them and they are only saying good things about them.
- muse900 10y agoI don't know why, it might just be me, am thinking of startups as a bad thing. If I ever decide to build my own app or solution or something I wouldn't go for a startup setup. I'd set it up as an actual business, make profit and expand, I wouldn't wait for some investors coming in throwing money at me, I don't get why people in tech cant see that. Just because people that built uber etc became rich out of that doesn't mean that the percentage of the startups that actually make it and their creators become comfortable enough is more than lets say 5%. Chances are you'd win the lottery easier than starting a startup. So dear fb and google and whoever, build business garages where people go with an idea and they've been given a cheaper way to expand their business on their own and see if they can actually make it, rather than trying to find the best ideas to invest for yourselves, that would help.
- oakesm9 10y agoI think you're ready to read this: https://m.signalvnoise.com/reconsider-41adf356857f#.zbmt4tp77 https://m.signalvnoise.com/reconsider-41adf356857f#.zbmt4tp7... ;-)
- riprowan 10y agoThank you very much for sharing that. What ever happened to "small is beautiful" and "less is more?" These used to be core "hacker" values. Had Twitter followed such a strategy it might still be sustainable. Edit: as an aside, consider the parallel in the music business. It is now possible, thanks to technology, to self-produce and market one's own music without "VC funding" from a record label. However, it's almost impossible to gain meaningful exposure, without which it is impossible to earn a sustainable income. It turns out that few people want to listen to unknown artists. What most people want to listen to is whatever is most popular. And to be the most popular requires massive marketing, which requires a record label. No surprise then that the big labels - which were supposedly destroyed by the internet - are actually stronger than ever before. We seem to be an a race for hypercentralization - a race empowered by the internet that was supposed to decentralize things. I'll also add that the rise to stardom and "riches" in the music business comes with similar creative and ethical compromises discussed in the article.
- tom_mellior 10y ago"And anyone will be able to rent some office space [at Station F] for €195/desk/month in the huge 366,000ft² (34,000m²) building." Interesting. The last time I looked at this a few months ago their web site seemed to suggest that they were looking for startups to rent space, but not individuals. Details are lacking, but a quick comparison with other coworking spaces in Paris suggests that this is 100-200 EUR cheaper per month.
- chinathrow 10y agoLooking at the pictures of Station F, all I see is noise. How will they tackle the noise problem when having so many people working in one big hall?
- danyfs 10y agoThanks Facebook for this good offering! WE will certainly apply to be part of it.
- d_theorist 10y ago"Thirty students will meet with Facebook every week to make the world a better place (or that’s how I think about it)." Fantastic neutral reporting here from TechCrunch. Not at all just a recycled press release.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Jordrok 10y ago"But most importantly we're making the world a better place. Through constructing elegant hierarchies for maximum code reuse and extensibility."[1] Which one is the parody? Sometimes it's hard to tell. [1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3222784/quotes?item=qt2896998 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3222784/quotes?item=qt2896998
- sbt 10y agothis is political theatre
- cracker_jacks 10y agoAre startups also required to provide 5 weeks of paid vacation + public holidays? Also, are there limits on the number of hours worked per week? I'm all for workers benefits, but I don't see how a startup with limited funding could afford those benefits to their employees.
- SamReidHughes 10y agoI'd compare the costs of vacation, short work days, to the cost of a Bay Area salary.
- cracker_jacks 10y agoBut the salaries for Bay Area startups are usually much lower than the standard tech companies like FB and Google. Startups make up for the difference by distributing equity (which could potentially be worth more in the long run, but could also be worthless).
- hocuspocus 10y agoEven assuming worthless equity, for the cost of one employee in SF you can hire two in Paris. Startups in France get several kinds of tax breaks. Also, many founders get started while on unemployment benefits.
- cracker_jacks 10y agoWhat are you thinking the salary of early stage startups are in the Bay Area? I really doubt the ratio is 2:1 compared to Paris.
- hocuspocus 10y agoGross salary would be more like 3:1. Real cost to the employer at least 2:1. I just opened AngelList to search for junior developer positions at seed-stage startups and it confirms the ratio. SF: 80-120k Paris: 30-45k
- hn_news 10y agoIf start up becomes successful, Will Facebook own part of the equity in this start up? As a founder, why would i want to give up equity to Facebook? Why would i need to be in this "garage"?
- trhway 10y agogiven the history of creativity in Paris shouldn't it be a mansard instead of garage?