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"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 the
by 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 agoI 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.