8 ms·

I run a machine learning company in France. Call it a startup or not, doesn't matter. Most of what I read in the comments here is not exactly true nor relies on

I run a machine learning company in France. Call it a startup or not, doesn't matter. Most of what I read in the comments here is not exactly true nor relies on statistics (sound like my story is...). For companies acting within the science or innovative space, France is a haven. CIR is a tax return that covers 30% of R&D personnel, JEI is a status that halves the taxes on personnel for 8 years, and nullifies gov taxes the first year, halving them the second year. Add to this the region and gov backed projects that match 50% of your investment in a project. The truth is it is much much cheaper than in the US, and probably unmatched in Western Europe. Now, all this preexisted Macron. Some hurdles remain investment, low margins for companies around 20 employees and 2M yearly, they get stuck at that stage and lack of transparency. One major pain is interacting with large French corporations, with payment delays unheard of in the US. This slows many startups down when it does not kill them. Once bootstrapped it seems to get better. I'm not sure what a startup nation is not whether I'd like to live in it, but France is certainly in good position to fuel early small innovative & scientific companies, not more but not less :)

JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> The truth is it is much much cheaper than in the US, and probably unmatched in Western Europe Business formation (i.e. forming a legal entity, getting a bank account, hiring your first employee and getting paid for your first service) in France is much more expensive than in Britain, Luxembourg or Poland. And the U.S. is faster and cheaper still. That said, if you have the right connections, it can be a haven. There is a lot of inefficiency in the French economy. And it contains an incredibly well-educated and commercially-reasonable population.
- pjc50 8y ago
  Can you form the company in e.g. Luxembourg and then operate in France? I feel that this is the sort of thing the Single Market was supposed to make easy.
  - Uberphallus 8y ago
    France will force the hell out of you to open a branch in France. I have a company in Estonia and France is the only country that asks me to do such thing in the EU. Luckily I live in France, you'll need an address here, and have fun opening a business bank account with papers in, say, Estonian, or even English for that matter. Spent thousands in translations, whereas creating the company in Estonia was over the Internet and under 300 EUR. France will do all it can to drag you into its bureaucratic hell.
- jimnotgym 8y ago
  I costs £12 to register a company in the UK. Is the US cheaper than that? If you pay £100 you can get a same day registration, is the US quicker than that? https://www.gov.uk/limited-company-formation/register-your-company https://www.gov.uk/limited-company-formation/register-your-c...
  - tigershark 8y ago
    You don’t need to pay 100£ for a fast turnout, my company was registered in 3-4 hours paying 12£..
  - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
    I am mistaken—the UK is faster and cheaper than Delaware. Thank you for the information.
  - yawz 8y ago
    $10 in Colorado. I'm pretty sure every state has their own price for it.
rdm_blackhole 8y ago
> Most of what I read in the comments here is not exactly true nor relies on statistics (sound like my story is...). Neither does your comment...
baybal2 8y ago
>The truth is it is much much cheaper than in the US, and probably unmatched in Western Europe. Now, all this preexisted Macron. Not only Europe, but much of China as well. Besides the basic "no tax for a new company below $N annual revenue for 5 years," there are megatons of all kinds of obscure, but very generous state grants. If stars align well for the company, it can effectively live off grants while having 0 revenue. This was most extreme during "The Solar Bubble" when companies were collecting from $3m to $6m for just having word "solar" in company name. The oversight has since improved a little little bit, and you are less likely to get money with 0 revenue company.
- baybal2 8y ago
  The point I want to convey however is this: a functioning business is not supposed to be a vessel for collecting grants/tax credits/funding rounds from sucker investors, but producing something useful. Another one: China is a high tax country. Scoring one or another double digit tax credit may be a matter of life and death for a company. The party nominally wants to enable the new business formation, preferably in high tech sectors, but on another hand makes it near impossible by demanding that each company wanting to do so to have more lawyers and "government relationship" staff than coders and engineers, shuttling centimetre thick stacks of legal papers to offices of MofCom every week.
woah 8y ago
It sounds like you have to spend a lot of time proving that what you are doing qualifies for these bonuses. Seems mostly like a haven for those who have the connections and know-how to get through the approval process.
- nikanj 8y ago
  In Scandinavia, there's a thriving cottage industry of "government grant consultants". They'll fix up all the paperwork for these bonuses, for a low % success fee. No bonus, no fee. I'd be very surprised if France didn't have the same. Writing the applications is really easy, when you have already written a few dozen and have the templates ready.
  - tluyben2 8y ago
    They have this in most EU countries. They work fine and it is worth the no cure no pay fee as they usually score while small companies on their own usually do not.
  - yaantc 8y ago
    Yes, there' the same in France. It's the most efficient way to get started really, otherwise you'd waste too much time learning the process. And as you say, once you've done it a few times it can be done internally.
  - wodenokoto 8y ago
    Never heard of that, what keywords should I search for, if I want to get in contact with someone who can assess if my company is eligible for a government grant and help me write one?
- rhodysurf 8y ago
  The same thing happens in the US. Management at my company spends time maximizing deals with government to get bonuses and tax breaks etc. I would be shocked if this isn’t the norm
jacquesm 8y ago
The main problem with France is the employment laws. Start-ups in other countries don't have this problem to the same extent. The secondary problem is that there is a lot of capital floating around in France with 'strings attached', great to get you going, but a huge problem later on.
- dnomad 8y ago
  People like to make a big deal of France's employment laws like there are some extraordinary overwhelming problem that businesses must struggle to overcome. This is silly. France is the 5th largest economy in the world. Finding highly educated, hard-working engineers is straightforwards thanks to the coordination between the government employment agencies and the excellent universities. Just like in America or anywhere else if you're engaged in high-tech work you're going to vet your potential employees to make sure there's culture and skills fit. And in the worst case scenario you need to fire somebody there are several agencies who will help you "transition" people out of the company. In the end the employment laws are not a big issue for most companies and certainly not an issue for most startups and small businesses under 10 people.
  - mantas 8y ago
    > And in the worst case scenario you need to fire somebody there are several agencies who will help you "transition" people out of the company Whaaa? As a fellow european, this sounds too bizarre to be true.
  - oelmekki 8y ago
    As a french developer with a 10+ years career, I second that. I've also been a CTO, so I'm well aware of the employer point of view. I've seen many people worrying about not being able to fire people once hired. But what I've seen in facts are only two people needing firing, and it was done without any problem. What I saw incredibly more often is company getting into panic because their good developers would leave. It's not firing that is hard, it's retaining.
    - Uberphallus 8y ago
ccozan 8y ago
"One major pain is interacting with large French corporations, with payment delays unheard of in the US. This slows many startups down when it does not kill them. Once bootstrapped it seems to get better." I need to second that. I really struggle with working directly with big companies. My own case, a big engineering company in Germany is quite putting my business at risk. Others have paid only after I send them a letter from a lawyer. And so on. A friend of mine got his whole business busted by the EC itself. The processes are sooo burocratic, so that he got his money after two years. But he closed the company meanwhile. Impossible to sue the EC itself...need another 10years....
- kakwa_ 8y ago
  I don't think it's a French or German, or even European specificity. I've seen payments delay happens with French companies (one of my last jobs, we were blacklisted from buying servers from Dell directly, the company was a bit short on money, so this late payment was in fact an internal unsaid policy to reduce the need for working capital). But I've also seen it with a big US company, professional phone subscriptions of all employees were suspended for a day because of late bills, and we were afraid at one point to have some of our racks cut-off because unpaid datacenter bills. I don't know in that case if it was because of an internal policy or plain old bureaucracy and internal delays in this company.
kakwa_ 8y ago
CIR is a huge joke, it doesn't help small companies that much. Big companies are far better at collecting it than start-ups. On paper, CIR is for research and development efforts, basically it's for efforts that improve the state of the art. But in practice CIR is a tax break/subvention in disguise for medium to big french companies like Orange, Thales, bnpparibas... Just to give you an idea, at one of my former job, an email was sent to every employee of the division. This email asked us to provide our CV rewritten with "research terms" (ex: replace implementing by prototyping, debugging by experimenting, etc). We were CIRing projects in pure maintenance, we were CIRing the same thing over and over each years. It was clearly abusive. I've heard stories that are even worst than that, like banks CIRing an overall of their website.
- p0nce 8y ago
  It's even worse than that because CIR is correlated to having people with the highest degree, which creates a perverse incentive to have over-qualified staff. It subsidizes long studies implicitely and distort the job market.
- reacweb 8y ago
  The fact that big companies are using CIR as a mean to get money from the government does not imply that it does not work for real research companies.
- baud147258 8y ago
  Regarding the CIR abuse, in my first internship at Bull, my colleagues had to log a part of their time as "research", whatever they were doing (usually maintenance or development), in order to claim for CIR.
systemtest 8y ago
The best thing is that you can get away with paying a good software developer only €2500 per month. You can get four French developers for the price of one American.
- IMTDb 8y ago
  This is below France median salary. If you think you can get away with that, you either : - Have developers that are actually not that good - Have good developers that will realise that you are vastly underpaying them and will jump ship Salaries in France are lower than in the US, but if you think good developers are settling for remunerations below the median salary of the country they live in, you will get a wake up call sooner or later. Corollary: If you are a good developer in France, working for 2500 EUR / month & is looking for a raise, send me a message ;-)
  - mandor 8y ago
    This is the "net" of a senior researcher (very competitve position, people are about 35-40 year old, about 10-15 years after a good PhD) in public institutions (see http://www.emploitheque.org/grille-indiciaire-etat-Directeurs-de-recherche-84 http://www.emploitheque.org/grille-indiciaire-etat-Directeur...) and more than most "researchers" in public institutions (http://www.emploitheque.org/grille-indiciaire-etat-Charges-de-recherche-85 http://www.emploitheque.org/grille-indiciaire-etat-Charges-d... -- 5-10 years after a PhD). This includes researches in CS and AI.
    - pyrale 8y ago
      Nope,these prices for researchers are meant for academia jobs. Researchers in companies, especially in AI fetch between 60% and 100% more.
  - p0nce 8y ago
    > This is below France median salary. No.
  - noir_lord 8y ago
p0nce 8y ago
And programmer salary can be rock-bottom too, it's not unheard of to hear people earning 20k€/year (at a cost of ~28k€ top for the employer thanks to CIR). In US dollar that is $33k. (that said, retaining developers is very very hard)
- Kurtz79 8y ago
  At these salary levels? What do you expect? Higher salaries do exists, so people will move away as soon as something better shows up. What companies paying 20K€ end up doing is provide "free" training and experience, to the benefit of the companies that ultimately will end up signing the employees, paying what they are actually worth.

JumpCrisscross 8y ago

> The truth is it is much much cheaper than in the US, and probably unmatched in Western Europe Business formation (i.e. forming a legal entity, getting a bank account, hiring your first employee and getting paid for your first service) in France is much more expensive than in Britain, Luxembourg or Poland. And the U.S. is faster and cheaper still. That said, if you have the right connections, it can be a haven. There is a lot of inefficiency in the French economy. And it contains an incredibly well-educated and commercially-reasonable population.

pjc50 8y ago
Can you form the company in e.g. Luxembourg and then operate in France? I feel that this is the sort of thing the Single Market was supposed to make easy.
- Uberphallus 8y ago
  France will force the hell out of you to open a branch in France. I have a company in Estonia and France is the only country that asks me to do such thing in the EU. Luckily I live in France, you'll need an address here, and have fun opening a business bank account with papers in, say, Estonian, or even English for that matter. Spent thousands in translations, whereas creating the company in Estonia was over the Internet and under 300 EUR. France will do all it can to drag you into its bureaucratic hell.
jimnotgym 8y ago
I costs £12 to register a company in the UK. Is the US cheaper than that? If you pay £100 you can get a same day registration, is the US quicker than that? https://www.gov.uk/limited-company-formation/register-your-company https://www.gov.uk/limited-company-formation/register-your-c...
- tigershark 8y ago
  You don’t need to pay 100£ for a fast turnout, my company was registered in 3-4 hours paying 12£..
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  I am mistaken—the UK is faster and cheaper than Delaware. Thank you for the information.
- yawz 8y ago
  $10 in Colorado. I'm pretty sure every state has their own price for it.

rdm_blackhole 8y ago

> Most of what I read in the comments here is not exactly true nor relies on statistics (sound like my story is...). Neither does your comment...

baybal2 8y ago

>The truth is it is much much cheaper than in the US, and probably unmatched in Western Europe. Now, all this preexisted Macron. Not only Europe, but much of China as well. Besides the basic "no tax for a new company below $N annual revenue for 5 years," there are megatons of all kinds of obscure, but very generous state grants. If stars align well for the company, it can effectively live off grants while having 0 revenue. This was most extreme during "The Solar Bubble" when companies were collecting from $3m to $6m for just having word "solar" in company name. The oversight has since improved a little little bit, and you are less likely to get money with 0 revenue company.

baybal2 8y ago
The point I want to convey however is this: a functioning business is not supposed to be a vessel for collecting grants/tax credits/funding rounds from sucker investors, but producing something useful. Another one: China is a high tax country. Scoring one or another double digit tax credit may be a matter of life and death for a company. The party nominally wants to enable the new business formation, preferably in high tech sectors, but on another hand makes it near impossible by demanding that each company wanting to do so to have more lawyers and "government relationship" staff than coders and engineers, shuttling centimetre thick stacks of legal papers to offices of MofCom every week.

woah 8y ago

It sounds like you have to spend a lot of time proving that what you are doing qualifies for these bonuses. Seems mostly like a haven for those who have the connections and know-how to get through the approval process.

nikanj 8y ago
In Scandinavia, there's a thriving cottage industry of "government grant consultants". They'll fix up all the paperwork for these bonuses, for a low % success fee. No bonus, no fee. I'd be very surprised if France didn't have the same. Writing the applications is really easy, when you have already written a few dozen and have the templates ready.
- tluyben2 8y ago
  They have this in most EU countries. They work fine and it is worth the no cure no pay fee as they usually score while small companies on their own usually do not.
- yaantc 8y ago
  Yes, there' the same in France. It's the most efficient way to get started really, otherwise you'd waste too much time learning the process. And as you say, once you've done it a few times it can be done internally.
- wodenokoto 8y ago
  Never heard of that, what keywords should I search for, if I want to get in contact with someone who can assess if my company is eligible for a government grant and help me write one?
rhodysurf 8y ago
The same thing happens in the US. Management at my company spends time maximizing deals with government to get bonuses and tax breaks etc. I would be shocked if this isn’t the norm

jacquesm 8y ago

The main problem with France is the employment laws. Start-ups in other countries don't have this problem to the same extent. The secondary problem is that there is a lot of capital floating around in France with 'strings attached', great to get you going, but a huge problem later on.

dnomad 8y ago
People like to make a big deal of France's employment laws like there are some extraordinary overwhelming problem that businesses must struggle to overcome. This is silly. France is the 5th largest economy in the world. Finding highly educated, hard-working engineers is straightforwards thanks to the coordination between the government employment agencies and the excellent universities. Just like in America or anywhere else if you're engaged in high-tech work you're going to vet your potential employees to make sure there's culture and skills fit. And in the worst case scenario you need to fire somebody there are several agencies who will help you "transition" people out of the company. In the end the employment laws are not a big issue for most companies and certainly not an issue for most startups and small businesses under 10 people.
- mantas 8y ago
  > And in the worst case scenario you need to fire somebody there are several agencies who will help you "transition" people out of the company Whaaa? As a fellow european, this sounds too bizarre to be true.
- oelmekki 8y ago
  As a french developer with a 10+ years career, I second that. I've also been a CTO, so I'm well aware of the employer point of view. I've seen many people worrying about not being able to fire people once hired. But what I've seen in facts are only two people needing firing, and it was done without any problem. What I saw incredibly more often is company getting into panic because their good developers would leave. It's not firing that is hard, it's retaining.
  - Uberphallus 8y ago

ccozan 8y ago

"One major pain is interacting with large French corporations, with payment delays unheard of in the US. This slows many startups down when it does not kill them. Once bootstrapped it seems to get better." I need to second that. I really struggle with working directly with big companies. My own case, a big engineering company in Germany is quite putting my business at risk. Others have paid only after I send them a letter from a lawyer. And so on. A friend of mine got his whole business busted by the EC itself. The processes are sooo burocratic, so that he got his money after two years. But he closed the company meanwhile. Impossible to sue the EC itself...need another 10years....

kakwa_ 8y ago
I don't think it's a French or German, or even European specificity. I've seen payments delay happens with French companies (one of my last jobs, we were blacklisted from buying servers from Dell directly, the company was a bit short on money, so this late payment was in fact an internal unsaid policy to reduce the need for working capital). But I've also seen it with a big US company, professional phone subscriptions of all employees were suspended for a day because of late bills, and we were afraid at one point to have some of our racks cut-off because unpaid datacenter bills. I don't know in that case if it was because of an internal policy or plain old bureaucracy and internal delays in this company.

kakwa_ 8y ago

CIR is a huge joke, it doesn't help small companies that much. Big companies are far better at collecting it than start-ups. On paper, CIR is for research and development efforts, basically it's for efforts that improve the state of the art. But in practice CIR is a tax break/subvention in disguise for medium to big french companies like Orange, Thales, bnpparibas... Just to give you an idea, at one of my former job, an email was sent to every employee of the division. This email asked us to provide our CV rewritten with "research terms" (ex: replace implementing by prototyping, debugging by experimenting, etc). We were CIRing projects in pure maintenance, we were CIRing the same thing over and over each years. It was clearly abusive. I've heard stories that are even worst than that, like banks CIRing an overall of their website.

p0nce 8y ago
It's even worse than that because CIR is correlated to having people with the highest degree, which creates a perverse incentive to have over-qualified staff. It subsidizes long studies implicitely and distort the job market.
reacweb 8y ago
The fact that big companies are using CIR as a mean to get money from the government does not imply that it does not work for real research companies.
baud147258 8y ago
Regarding the CIR abuse, in my first internship at Bull, my colleagues had to log a part of their time as "research", whatever they were doing (usually maintenance or development), in order to claim for CIR.

systemtest 8y ago

The best thing is that you can get away with paying a good software developer only €2500 per month. You can get four French developers for the price of one American.

IMTDb 8y ago
This is below France median salary. If you think you can get away with that, you either : - Have developers that are actually not that good - Have good developers that will realise that you are vastly underpaying them and will jump ship Salaries in France are lower than in the US, but if you think good developers are settling for remunerations below the median salary of the country they live in, you will get a wake up call sooner or later. Corollary: If you are a good developer in France, working for 2500 EUR / month & is looking for a raise, send me a message ;-)
- mandor 8y ago
  This is the "net" of a senior researcher (very competitve position, people are about 35-40 year old, about 10-15 years after a good PhD) in public institutions (see http://www.emploitheque.org/grille-indiciaire-etat-Directeurs-de-recherche-84 http://www.emploitheque.org/grille-indiciaire-etat-Directeur...) and more than most "researchers" in public institutions (http://www.emploitheque.org/grille-indiciaire-etat-Charges-de-recherche-85 http://www.emploitheque.org/grille-indiciaire-etat-Charges-d... -- 5-10 years after a PhD). This includes researches in CS and AI.
  - pyrale 8y ago
    Nope,these prices for researchers are meant for academia jobs. Researchers in companies, especially in AI fetch between 60% and 100% more.
- p0nce 8y ago
  > This is below France median salary. No.
- noir_lord 8y ago

p0nce 8y ago

And programmer salary can be rock-bottom too, it's not unheard of to hear people earning 20k€/year (at a cost of ~28k€ top for the employer thanks to CIR). In US dollar that is $33k. (that said, retaining developers is very very hard)

Kurtz79 8y ago
At these salary levels? What do you expect? Higher salaries do exists, so people will move away as soon as something better shows up. What companies paying 20K€ end up doing is provide "free" training and experience, to the benefit of the companies that ultimately will end up signing the employees, paying what they are actually worth.