French software engineer working at startups in Paris since 2010 here. > What's the startup scene in Paris like? Booming. A bit too much, if you ask me. The

French software engineer working at startups in Paris since 2010 here. > What's the startup scene in Paris like? Booming. A bit too much, if you ask me. The ecosystem started growing fast when I arrived, basically. In 2011, the first real startup accelerator (Le Camping) opened. At that time, there was a very interesting meetup for the Parisian HN community called Paris Hackers, with very interesting people including founders of Docker (then dotCloud), Capitaine Train (acquired by Trainline), etc. Today I would say there are at least 10x more startups and 20x more people working in them, which resulted in the average level of people in the ecosystem going down. There are accelerators and incubators everywhere, as well as very interesting things like eFounders (https://www.efounders.com https://www.efounders.com). Meeetups have grown unwieldy large (e.g. the machine learning meetup is often having a hard time finding rooms large enough to fit its 200 - 300 people per session). As for companies, some startups have become large (Criteo, LeBonCoin, BlaBlaCar, ...); some are obviously growing fast (Algolia, Aircall, Platform.sh, ...); some (like Moodstocks where I used to work) have been acquired by US companies which have set up offices in Paris, among other things to tap into the well known talent at French research labs in CS and AI (Google and Facebook in particular). To accompany all this, more VC funds are opening and rounds become larger and larger. There is a lot of good to all this, but personally I feel like this is kind of a bubble and I miss the time, not so long ago, when we were all a bit more reasonable. > How good does my French need to be? It depends on the company. I would say most tech startups do most of their written work (including chat etc) in English. People might still speak French, but will switch to English when non-French speakers are around if they want to. > Are there any languages/platforms/etc. that are popular there more than in Silicon Valley/Fairfax County (the places I'm used to working)? I would say the obvious one is Python for Web backend. The French (and European in general) tech community has adopted Python a lot more while the US was going with Ruby. Some of the larger and older startups use a lot of Scala as well. Newer companies tend to use Go. There are interesting startups using less popular stacks, especially functional programming. What is propably the largest French startup, Vente Privée, is using some Haskell, and so is https://www.fretlink.com https://www.fretlink.com (whose CTO is a former Capitaine Train CTO). https://margo.com https://margo.com is building a bank from scratch with Elixir and Scala (the CEO is the former CEO of Capitaine Train). There are a lot of Erlang people around too. As you may see I mentioned Capitaine Train a lot because this is how the ecosystem is growing: thanks to disaporas of people from acquired startups (à la Paypal mafia). A few years earlier it was Exalead (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exalead https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exalead). If you need more information feel free to get in touch. My email address is on my home page, which is linked in my HN profile.