7 ms·

ParisIsBack – The Paris Tech Guide

186 points by trueduke 12y ago

s_dev 12y ago
ooo - I've one for Dublin, Ireland. http://www.slideshare.net/FrontlineVC/the-irish-tech-startup-guide http://www.slideshare.net/FrontlineVC/the-irish-tech-startup... Kudos to people who will post the tech guides for other European cities like Berlin and London as I don't have them.
- alandarev 12y ago
  While French slideshow felt more like full of marketing and "we are amazing", this one is talking numbers and facts! Thank you for sharing this amazing presentation.
- disputin 12y ago
  Why are the Irish leaving? http://emn.ie/emn/statistics http://emn.ie/emn/statistics (Question, not argument.)
c2prods 12y ago
Great presentation! Not only Paris is becoming an excellent place for startups, but it's a stupendous city in general :)
nraynaud 12y ago
the real pain is the housing and the subsequent suburb transportation.
- c2prods 12y ago
  If you compare with other major capitals, like SF, NYC or London, housing is quite cheap (around twice as less expensive). And although the transportation system is far from being flawless, it's not worse than any other one.
  - carlob 12y ago
    Only if you compare by the room, not by the surface. If you can consider a 3m x 3m a room go for it!
    - saintmac 12y ago
      Untrue. I've lived in Paris, London and SF and Paris is definitely the cheapest (even by the surface). I'm paying $1100/month in Paris for a 300sq foot appartment (in a nice neighborhood). I was paying $3000/month in SF for a 400sq foot appartment...
      - carlob 12y ago
        I might be wrong, but I found the kind of room that $1000 pays for in NYC to be way nicer and larger than the one you can get for a similar price in Paris (though the usd/eur has increased 20% since I checked).
deleted 12y ago
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bignoz 12y ago
from Paris with love <3
ccsn 12y ago
Awesome Presentation. Shining city, booming ecosystem.
happimess 12y ago
Does anyone have any insight as to how painful it is to relocate to Paris from outside of France, or even from outside of the Schengen zone?
- carlob 12y ago
  Finding an apartment in Paris is a special circle of hell, get help by whomever is hiring you, because it's a very lengthy and humiliating process for foreigners. I've visited apartments for about two months before finding a place outside of Paris and have been asked all sorts of private questions about my life, for example looking at your tax and salary receipts is considered standard practice.
  - jmnicolas 12y ago
    It's standard practice because once you're inside, if you stop paying rent it's really really hard to kick you out (it can take years).
- Jacqued 12y ago
  I'm sad to say, quite painful. A sibling mentioned the housing problem. There's also the immigration problem. If you're in France on a visa, you'll have to renew it every year. To do that, take a day off to go through a humiliating process that will have you wait in front of a government building from 12PM for 10 to 15 hours until it opens and then until it's your turn. Of course, if you dare forget something, you'll just have to lose another 10 hours of your life another day, waiting in front of that same building. People sometimes take pounds and pounds of paper when they do that to be sure they'll have what they're asked for. One of my friends is in this situation and she dreads it for weeks when the time comes to renew her visa...
carlob 12y ago
There are a bunch of nice things to be said about Paris and the tax rebate system they put in place for startups and companies that spend heavily in R&D. However I think that Paris has a very low quality of life in most of the fields that are ignored in metrics: - Apartment prices are usually measure by the room when doing comparisons. In Paris the room count is misleading: I've seen studios smaller than 15 m^2 and 1BR smaller than 25 m^2. - Apartment quality is really really bad: creaky, cracked hardwood floors that haven't been replaced since Haussmann, humidity and mold are the default. - The weather is awful, it rains 40% of the days. - This might sound surprising but the average food quality is abysmal: produce is expensive and tastes like nothing and the random brasserie is an expensive tourist trap. - Some of the stereotypes about the Parisian being grumpy and pretending not to speak English have a grain of truth. [edit: this is going to get me downvoted to hell] So if you are really planning to start a business in France, go to another city: e.g. Lille is a thriving city with a very rich cultural life, it's 1h away from Paris by train (if you need to network you can commute) and doesn't suffer from most of the above (except for the climate).
- fermigier 12y ago
  "The weather is awful, it rains 40% of the days." -> According to Wikipedia (http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climat_de_Paris 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.
  - carlob 12y ago
    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/b432e59c-fa11-497b-8f6a-b86b0c3efaff https://www.wolframcloud.com/objects/b432e59c-fa11-497b-8f6a...
realtalk-paris 12y ago
LOL
fermigier 12y ago
This document ("Open source, a booming market") is more focussed on the open source ecosystem in the Paris Region: http://www.paris-region.com/sites/default/files/brochuretic.pdf http://www.paris-region.com/sites/default/files/brochuretic.... (PDF, 1MB).
pm90 12y ago
Do most Parisians speak English? Or will I be considered an outsider and Immediately ignored if I speak only English? The best thing about the Anglophone world is the language. I wouldn't mind learning a new language, but it takes time.
- VeejayRampay 12y ago
  YMMV. Really depends on who you're talking to. Generally speaking younger generations tend to have a better command of the language than the older generation but there's still a long way to go before we reach Netherlands quality. The influx of American TV shows and movies will help on the long run though. Source: I'm French, born and raised here.
- negrit 12y ago
  Yes, they do speak english.
- Aramsae 12y ago
  Well, to be honest not all the french can speak English. So you just need to know the basics to order your food etc... But in a professional environment, there is absolutely no problem. Ok our accent might be a problem but we can speak and understand english. For example, to become an engineer in France you need a minimal level in english. A lot of educated people have travelled in a foreign country during their studies, so really for me I don't think it will be a problem.
- deleted 12y ago
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- jim_greco 12y ago
  Paris is the most visited city in the world so you can get along easily with only knowing English. And if you know a bit of any romance languages then you can usually pick out enough written words to understand the gist of a menu (if one is not offered in English). The countryside less so, but this is changing rather quickly.
- moron4hire 12y ago
  I don't know about France, but I have heard of such things before, for just about every European country. My wife and I just spent two weeks in Germany where I mostly started conversations in German and then let the other person transition to English when they heard my atrocious accent. Thankfully, my German is just good enough to get me through a full restaurant transaction, so it wasn't too much of a problem if they didn't switch over, but overall it seemed to work out quite well and everyone was very friendly to me. In contrast, we had some traveling companions who did not speak German at all, and some of the very same shop clerks, waiters, and strangers treated them much more coolly when they started with only English. In general, I've always considered it polite to "show effort" to speak the local language, even if you end up speaking English in the long run. Whenever I travel to a new country, I try to learn enough to read a dinner menu and order a meal. While I'm certainly nowhere near to being fluent in that language, it's at least enough to be able to understand when the waiter is asking for a drink order versus appetizers or whatever, and then to be able to list the things we want with proper pronunciation and the count of each item, though not in a full sentence.
maverickilm 12y ago
Social Innovation is very trendy in Paris. The French President, François Hollande, announced last week, during SocialGoodWeek an International Summit on this topic : https://twitter.com/fhollande/status/540498295261782016 https://twitter.com/fhollande/status/540498295261782016
ktzar 12y ago
It's very hard to live in Paris if you are not fluent in French... Or you're doomed to live amongst ex-pats, which defeats the purpose of the experience.
- negrit 12y ago
  No its not. Paris is the most touristic city in the world. You can be perfectly fine if you don't speak word of french.
  - fs111 12y ago
    In touristic areas maybe...
    - negrit 12y ago
      Which is everywhere in Paris...
  - anomalous 12y ago
    Although Paris is the most visited city in the world. It also has a reputation amongst the global cities as being unfriendly. Enough that the Paris Tourist Board and Chamber of Commerce have launched a campaign to educate service workers on treating tourists better. Tourists also do not spend as much money in Paris. It is number 3 in that regard. This is likely due to Paris' centralized position. It may more likely be a stop-through on the way to a visitors' final destination. You can be perfectly fine on English in almost any large city in the world, but there is more of a friction in Paris when interacting in English than in many other European capitals.
    - Shebanator 12y ago
      I know the reputation, but the times I've visited Paris everyone has been extremely helpful and polite. What I do see, occasionally, is American and German tourists who ignore local customs, behave rudely, and then get offended when the Parisians respond rudely to their own boorishness. The only really bad experience I've ever had in Paris was with an eastern european cab driver who droned truly horrendous racist screeds about black African prostitutes ruining Paris my entire ride.
loukan42 12y ago
Wow ! Great guide, another one from TheFamily best place to be in France
sp4ke 12y ago
As 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 hard time given all the immigration laws nonsense. You're better off making your startup almost anywhere else. EDIT: and as other comments said, people don't speak English, the French have some sort of pride of only speaking their native language ...
- madlag 12y ago
  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 entrepreneurs are from a lot of different origins. Of course you will find and some rich people creating companies, but most of the people creating companies here are taking real risks and don't have large amount of cash to back them if they fail - seed investment is not difficult at all, and government grants are here too to help save your shares, even better that seed . I am telling this as a cofounder of Stupeflix, the company behind Replay, app of the year on the Apple App Store, and proudly based in Paris for 6 years now. EDIT: sorry for my English, it's not my native language, but I am trying hard to learn it...
  - patrickaljord 12y ago
    > that's a great deal of french bashing Can we stop with this? I'm tired of French people always responding to any kind of critics with the "French bashing" strawman. I'm French myself by the way. > and government grants are here too to help Most entrepreneurs don't want the government to help, they want the government to stay out of the way. A concept many of my fellow French have a hard time understanding the benefits.
weddpros 12y ago
That's the Good. There's also the Bad, and the Ugly. I've left France (I'm french), and now live in Malta, because of the Bad and the Ugly. France has high taxes (and 50% social contributions), very anti-entrepreneur and ultra-bureaucratic mindset, a sinking economy, a vastly anti-libertarian political landscape, and a high cost of living vs. quality of living. If you're tempted anyway, Good Luck.
- boracay 12y ago
  For most entrepreneurs "regular" startup hubs, despite their burdens, are worth it for everything else they offer.
- Gmo 12y ago
  cost of living vs quality of living : Frankly, this is true almost only for Paris. I live in Nantes right now (after 7 years in the Netherlands) and the quality of living is great, at a fraction of the price in Paris. Second, not everybody is a libertarian, so I'm quite OK with what you call "anti-libertarian landscape". Bureaucratic mindset : Apart from Malta, have you ever lived anywhere else in Europe ? I don't know the bureaucratic mindset of Malta, but I can say that I did not find a great difference between France, the Netherlands and Germany for instance.
  - weddpros 12y ago
    I also lived in Switzerland (5 years), where bureaucracy is definitely less of a problem than in France: it just works (the first time, not after weeks and 2 attempts). When I hear "France has great tax credits systems for startups", I think "if you spend months in paperwork, maybe". That's what I call a bureaucratic hell. As for being a libertarian, I guess it's the case of a majority of entrepreneurs. If one enjoys government control, he's probably not an entrepreneur... Who wants a 3500 page labour code like we have in France? Ever changing laws? New regulation and a new tax every month?
heyts 12y ago
This 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%.
- fab13n 12y ago
  > 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 school" around there is a couple thousand euros a year. Also, 5-7 weeks of paid vacation are included. Most US workers would be better off getting all of this for a 20% pay cut.
  - patrickaljord 12y ago
    > 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.
RollingMoss42 12y ago
GG!
misja 12y ago
The 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 ..
- boracay 12y ago
  It's presumably by train since the estimates are written on train tracks.
- majestic1211 12y ago
  The presentation does not specify by car. It does take pretty much 4h by train.
- fab13n 12y ago
  In Europe, car is rarely the best way to move around. Thalys high-speed trains get you from Paris to Amsterdam in 3h; add another hour to move to/from the train stations, and here are your 4 hours.
- fermigier 12y ago
  The distance is actually 500 km, not 750 (https://www.google.fr/maps/dir/Paris/Amsterdam,+Pays-Bas/@50.5929606,1.35724,7z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m13!4m12!1m5!1m1!1s0x47e66e1f06e2b70f:0x40b82c3688c9460!2m2!1d2.3522219!2d48.856614!1m5!1m1!1s0x47c63fb5949a7755:0x6600fd4cb7c0af8d!2m2!1d4.8951679!2d52.3702157?hl=fr https://www.google.fr/maps/dir/Paris/Amsterdam,+Pays-Bas/@50...). And yes, the 4h figure is for travelling by train, not by car.
tormeh 12y ago
The only names I recognize from the slides are Algolia and DailyMotion. I sure hope Paris is stronger in B2B...
chevreuil 12y ago
I'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.
julienrath 12y ago
I'm currently living in Paris right now. Before that I lived in London, Germany and the US. So this is kind of a view from the outside. As every city there are good and bad things. Administration is horrible and the worst experience from anywhere that I have lived. Getting an apartment will be hell. It just will. Paper is still the norm in this country. Your mailbox will never be empty. This part sucks. The work atmosphere in this country is horrible in comparison to other countries like the UK and US. Remember, this is the country that (legally) has a 35 hour work week. In startups this looks different although they have the reputation of being lazy in comparison to American startups. While I haven't seen it, this is likely the case for some. There's no smoke without fire. And just judging by the way this country works...don't be surprised if they seem lazy. English. Right, this is probably one of the biggest problems non-French will have. Across the board French people's English have the worst English ever, out of every country in Central Europe. That said Paris is in some way an exception. Parisians' English is still horrible for the kind of city it is trying to become but not as bad as you'll hear it in other cities. Food - Don't understand why people are saying it's bad. It's really good! Especially compared to a city like London, where it's expensive and quality isn't amazing. There is less of a junk food culture in Paris than in other cities though. There’s more good and bad things to go into but I’ll leave the bad stuff at this for now. There are good things going on in Paris. The city is amazing to live in. It’s much cheaper than London. Transport costs are a lot less. Leisure activities are cheaper. A lot of stuff will be cheaper, including apartments. The city is beautful to live in too. There is a good startup ecosystem in Paris. There are a couple good exits coming out of France. But it all seems like a big circle jerk, which (IMO) a guide like this shows. This may also come from the extreme forms of patriotism the French show(sometimes) and/or from the fact that they don’t speak English and are repulsed by anything English. A lot of startups start here but quickly try to get the hell out and move to the US or even London. There have been a couple good exits though but not as many as London nor any as big as the ones in Berlin. I don’t know what the fundraising process goes like in Paris so I’m not going to comment on that. Obviously it will be harder than in the US as there are less VCs here. Judging by the amounts being raised and the amount of “big” VCs in London it’s also weaker than across the channel.
vonnik 12y ago
I spent 14 years in Paris, 10 as a journalist covering finance and tech for the NYT and Bloomberg. The Paris Tech Guide is an understandable piece of boosterism, but I would not recommend Paris or France to people looking for a tech ecosystem to support them. I'm not going to talk about the food, because it's totally irrelevant to this discussion. If that's the reason why you choose a city for your startup, your startup will probably fail. I'm also not going to engage in French-bashing. I have many good friends in Paris, and the city itself is a beautiful piece of work. It just isn't great for business... Paris's poor business environment has many causes, and they run much deeper than the incompetent Socialist government currently in power. That government is just the latest captain steering the ship of state, and the state is very heavy in France. It was heavy under Chirac and Sarkozy. It is heavy for the French themselves. They are constantly confronted with absurd rules governing aspects of their existence that legislators felt obligated to regulate. Imagine how difficult it is for the foreigner to navigate those laws. Very. As a country, France has crippled its once powerful financial industry and driven a lot of capital and financial services to London. You could argue that this began with Mitterand in the early 1980s, so it's a decades-long trend. And finance is important, because it makes a lot of people silly rich and some of them become investors. Losing finance means that France's expertise has been considerably weakened in the domain of financial technology, which is going to eat banks like it ate publishing. As a society, France has a technologically conservative, luddite streak that is quite the opposite of Americans' tech liberalism. While France produces many gifted mathematicians and engineers, they usually fail to productize and successfully market their ideas. Props to the minitel, but who uses it now? Many unFrench people fail to appreciate that France suffers from a rigid, ossified class structure, where people can be pigeon-holed by their accents, much as in Britain. Rigid, ossified class structures are really bad at identifying and cultivating talent. They're very good at creating a few schools (Sciences Po, ENA, the Polytechnique) that produce a small ruling class. Most applicants are not admitted. The institutional structure is well trained at telling people "non, c'est impossible." So France is a machine that stifles peoples' potential. That's why many of the most ambitious French people leave. The ones that remain are split between the privileged and the frustrated. If you want to build something, and it has to be in Europe, choose the Anglo-Germanic countries: the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Scandinavia. Several of those economies are bigger and on the whole they tend to move faster. People there learn English well (except in Britain of course ;). The rules of the country will be more understandable and more predictably enforced. Go to France when you're rich and ready to retire. They'll welcome you with open arms. The country isn't made for builders.

186 points by trueduke 12y ago

s_dev 12y ago

ooo - I've one for Dublin, Ireland. http://www.slideshare.net/FrontlineVC/the-irish-tech-startup-guide http://www.slideshare.net/FrontlineVC/the-irish-tech-startup... Kudos to people who will post the tech guides for other European cities like Berlin and London as I don't have them.

alandarev 12y ago
While French slideshow felt more like full of marketing and "we are amazing", this one is talking numbers and facts! Thank you for sharing this amazing presentation.
disputin 12y ago
Why are the Irish leaving? http://emn.ie/emn/statistics http://emn.ie/emn/statistics (Question, not argument.)

c2prods 12y ago

Great presentation! Not only Paris is becoming an excellent place for startups, but it's a stupendous city in general :)

nraynaud 12y ago

the real pain is the housing and the subsequent suburb transportation.

c2prods 12y ago
If you compare with other major capitals, like SF, NYC or London, housing is quite cheap (around twice as less expensive). And although the transportation system is far from being flawless, it's not worse than any other one.
- carlob 12y ago
  Only if you compare by the room, not by the surface. If you can consider a 3m x 3m a room go for it!
  - saintmac 12y ago
    Untrue. I've lived in Paris, London and SF and Paris is definitely the cheapest (even by the surface). I'm paying $1100/month in Paris for a 300sq foot appartment (in a nice neighborhood). I was paying $3000/month in SF for a 400sq foot appartment...
    - carlob 12y ago
      I might be wrong, but I found the kind of room that $1000 pays for in NYC to be way nicer and larger than the one you can get for a similar price in Paris (though the usd/eur has increased 20% since I checked).

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bignoz 12y ago

from Paris with love <3

ccsn 12y ago

Awesome Presentation. Shining city, booming ecosystem.

happimess 12y ago

Does anyone have any insight as to how painful it is to relocate to Paris from outside of France, or even from outside of the Schengen zone?

carlob 12y ago
Finding an apartment in Paris is a special circle of hell, get help by whomever is hiring you, because it's a very lengthy and humiliating process for foreigners. I've visited apartments for about two months before finding a place outside of Paris and have been asked all sorts of private questions about my life, for example looking at your tax and salary receipts is considered standard practice.
- jmnicolas 12y ago
  It's standard practice because once you're inside, if you stop paying rent it's really really hard to kick you out (it can take years).
Jacqued 12y ago
I'm sad to say, quite painful. A sibling mentioned the housing problem. There's also the immigration problem. If you're in France on a visa, you'll have to renew it every year. To do that, take a day off to go through a humiliating process that will have you wait in front of a government building from 12PM for 10 to 15 hours until it opens and then until it's your turn. Of course, if you dare forget something, you'll just have to lose another 10 hours of your life another day, waiting in front of that same building. People sometimes take pounds and pounds of paper when they do that to be sure they'll have what they're asked for. One of my friends is in this situation and she dreads it for weeks when the time comes to renew her visa...

carlob 12y ago

There are a bunch of nice things to be said about Paris and the tax rebate system they put in place for startups and companies that spend heavily in R&D. However I think that Paris has a very low quality of life in most of the fields that are ignored in metrics: - Apartment prices are usually measure by the room when doing comparisons. In Paris the room count is misleading: I've seen studios smaller than 15 m^2 and 1BR smaller than 25 m^2. - Apartment quality is really really bad: creaky, cracked hardwood floors that haven't been replaced since Haussmann, humidity and mold are the default. - The weather is awful, it rains 40% of the days. - This might sound surprising but the average food quality is abysmal: produce is expensive and tastes like nothing and the random brasserie is an expensive tourist trap. - Some of the stereotypes about the Parisian being grumpy and pretending not to speak English have a grain of truth. [edit: this is going to get me downvoted to hell] So if you are really planning to start a business in France, go to another city: e.g. Lille is a thriving city with a very rich cultural life, it's 1h away from Paris by train (if you need to network you can commute) and doesn't suffer from most of the above (except for the climate).

fermigier 12y ago
"The weather is awful, it rains 40% of the days." -> According to Wikipedia (http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climat_de_Paris 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.
- carlob 12y ago
  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/b432e59c-fa11-497b-8f6a-b86b0c3efaff https://www.wolframcloud.com/objects/b432e59c-fa11-497b-8f6a...

realtalk-paris 12y ago

LOL

fermigier 12y ago

This document ("Open source, a booming market") is more focussed on the open source ecosystem in the Paris Region: http://www.paris-region.com/sites/default/files/brochuretic.pdf http://www.paris-region.com/sites/default/files/brochuretic.... (PDF, 1MB).

pm90 12y ago

Do most Parisians speak English? Or will I be considered an outsider and Immediately ignored if I speak only English? The best thing about the Anglophone world is the language. I wouldn't mind learning a new language, but it takes time.

VeejayRampay 12y ago
YMMV. Really depends on who you're talking to. Generally speaking younger generations tend to have a better command of the language than the older generation but there's still a long way to go before we reach Netherlands quality. The influx of American TV shows and movies will help on the long run though. Source: I'm French, born and raised here.
negrit 12y ago
Yes, they do speak english.
Aramsae 12y ago
Well, to be honest not all the french can speak English. So you just need to know the basics to order your food etc... But in a professional environment, there is absolutely no problem. Ok our accent might be a problem but we can speak and understand english. For example, to become an engineer in France you need a minimal level in english. A lot of educated people have travelled in a foreign country during their studies, so really for me I don't think it will be a problem.
deleted 12y ago
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jim_greco 12y ago
Paris is the most visited city in the world so you can get along easily with only knowing English. And if you know a bit of any romance languages then you can usually pick out enough written words to understand the gist of a menu (if one is not offered in English). The countryside less so, but this is changing rather quickly.
moron4hire 12y ago
I don't know about France, but I have heard of such things before, for just about every European country. My wife and I just spent two weeks in Germany where I mostly started conversations in German and then let the other person transition to English when they heard my atrocious accent. Thankfully, my German is just good enough to get me through a full restaurant transaction, so it wasn't too much of a problem if they didn't switch over, but overall it seemed to work out quite well and everyone was very friendly to me. In contrast, we had some traveling companions who did not speak German at all, and some of the very same shop clerks, waiters, and strangers treated them much more coolly when they started with only English. In general, I've always considered it polite to "show effort" to speak the local language, even if you end up speaking English in the long run. Whenever I travel to a new country, I try to learn enough to read a dinner menu and order a meal. While I'm certainly nowhere near to being fluent in that language, it's at least enough to be able to understand when the waiter is asking for a drink order versus appetizers or whatever, and then to be able to list the things we want with proper pronunciation and the count of each item, though not in a full sentence.

maverickilm 12y ago

Social Innovation is very trendy in Paris. The French President, François Hollande, announced last week, during SocialGoodWeek an International Summit on this topic : https://twitter.com/fhollande/status/540498295261782016 https://twitter.com/fhollande/status/540498295261782016

ktzar 12y ago

It's very hard to live in Paris if you are not fluent in French... Or you're doomed to live amongst ex-pats, which defeats the purpose of the experience.

negrit 12y ago
No its not. Paris is the most touristic city in the world. You can be perfectly fine if you don't speak word of french.
- fs111 12y ago
  In touristic areas maybe...
  - negrit 12y ago
    Which is everywhere in Paris...
- anomalous 12y ago
  Although Paris is the most visited city in the world. It also has a reputation amongst the global cities as being unfriendly. Enough that the Paris Tourist Board and Chamber of Commerce have launched a campaign to educate service workers on treating tourists better. Tourists also do not spend as much money in Paris. It is number 3 in that regard. This is likely due to Paris' centralized position. It may more likely be a stop-through on the way to a visitors' final destination. You can be perfectly fine on English in almost any large city in the world, but there is more of a friction in Paris when interacting in English than in many other European capitals.
  - Shebanator 12y ago
    I know the reputation, but the times I've visited Paris everyone has been extremely helpful and polite. What I do see, occasionally, is American and German tourists who ignore local customs, behave rudely, and then get offended when the Parisians respond rudely to their own boorishness. The only really bad experience I've ever had in Paris was with an eastern european cab driver who droned truly horrendous racist screeds about black African prostitutes ruining Paris my entire ride.

loukan42 12y ago

Wow ! Great guide, another one from TheFamily best place to be in France

sp4ke 12y ago

As 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 hard time given all the immigration laws nonsense. You're better off making your startup almost anywhere else. EDIT: and as other comments said, people don't speak English, the French have some sort of pride of only speaking their native language ...

madlag 12y ago
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 entrepreneurs are from a lot of different origins. Of course you will find and some rich people creating companies, but most of the people creating companies here are taking real risks and don't have large amount of cash to back them if they fail - seed investment is not difficult at all, and government grants are here too to help save your shares, even better that seed . I am telling this as a cofounder of Stupeflix, the company behind Replay, app of the year on the Apple App Store, and proudly based in Paris for 6 years now. EDIT: sorry for my English, it's not my native language, but I am trying hard to learn it...
- patrickaljord 12y ago
  > that's a great deal of french bashing Can we stop with this? I'm tired of French people always responding to any kind of critics with the "French bashing" strawman. I'm French myself by the way. > and government grants are here too to help Most entrepreneurs don't want the government to help, they want the government to stay out of the way. A concept many of my fellow French have a hard time understanding the benefits.

weddpros 12y ago

That's the Good. There's also the Bad, and the Ugly. I've left France (I'm french), and now live in Malta, because of the Bad and the Ugly. France has high taxes (and 50% social contributions), very anti-entrepreneur and ultra-bureaucratic mindset, a sinking economy, a vastly anti-libertarian political landscape, and a high cost of living vs. quality of living. If you're tempted anyway, Good Luck.

boracay 12y ago
For most entrepreneurs "regular" startup hubs, despite their burdens, are worth it for everything else they offer.
Gmo 12y ago
cost of living vs quality of living : Frankly, this is true almost only for Paris. I live in Nantes right now (after 7 years in the Netherlands) and the quality of living is great, at a fraction of the price in Paris. Second, not everybody is a libertarian, so I'm quite OK with what you call "anti-libertarian landscape". Bureaucratic mindset : Apart from Malta, have you ever lived anywhere else in Europe ? I don't know the bureaucratic mindset of Malta, but I can say that I did not find a great difference between France, the Netherlands and Germany for instance.
- weddpros 12y ago
  I also lived in Switzerland (5 years), where bureaucracy is definitely less of a problem than in France: it just works (the first time, not after weeks and 2 attempts). When I hear "France has great tax credits systems for startups", I think "if you spend months in paperwork, maybe". That's what I call a bureaucratic hell. As for being a libertarian, I guess it's the case of a majority of entrepreneurs. If one enjoys government control, he's probably not an entrepreneur... Who wants a 3500 page labour code like we have in France? Ever changing laws? New regulation and a new tax every month?

heyts 12y ago

This 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%.

fab13n 12y ago
> 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 school" around there is a couple thousand euros a year. Also, 5-7 weeks of paid vacation are included. Most US workers would be better off getting all of this for a 20% pay cut.
- patrickaljord 12y ago
  > 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.

RollingMoss42 12y ago

GG!

misja 12y ago

The 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 ..

boracay 12y ago
It's presumably by train since the estimates are written on train tracks.
majestic1211 12y ago
The presentation does not specify by car. It does take pretty much 4h by train.
fab13n 12y ago
In Europe, car is rarely the best way to move around. Thalys high-speed trains get you from Paris to Amsterdam in 3h; add another hour to move to/from the train stations, and here are your 4 hours.
fermigier 12y ago
The distance is actually 500 km, not 750 (https://www.google.fr/maps/dir/Paris/Amsterdam,+Pays-Bas/@50.5929606,1.35724,7z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m13!4m12!1m5!1m1!1s0x47e66e1f06e2b70f:0x40b82c3688c9460!2m2!1d2.3522219!2d48.856614!1m5!1m1!1s0x47c63fb5949a7755:0x6600fd4cb7c0af8d!2m2!1d4.8951679!2d52.3702157?hl=fr https://www.google.fr/maps/dir/Paris/Amsterdam,+Pays-Bas/@50...). And yes, the 4h figure is for travelling by train, not by car.

tormeh 12y ago

The only names I recognize from the slides are Algolia and DailyMotion. I sure hope Paris is stronger in B2B...

chevreuil 12y ago

I'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.

julienrath 12y ago

I'm currently living in Paris right now. Before that I lived in London, Germany and the US. So this is kind of a view from the outside. As every city there are good and bad things. Administration is horrible and the worst experience from anywhere that I have lived. Getting an apartment will be hell. It just will. Paper is still the norm in this country. Your mailbox will never be empty. This part sucks. The work atmosphere in this country is horrible in comparison to other countries like the UK and US. Remember, this is the country that (legally) has a 35 hour work week. In startups this looks different although they have the reputation of being lazy in comparison to American startups. While I haven't seen it, this is likely the case for some. There's no smoke without fire. And just judging by the way this country works...don't be surprised if they seem lazy. English. Right, this is probably one of the biggest problems non-French will have. Across the board French people's English have the worst English ever, out of every country in Central Europe. That said Paris is in some way an exception. Parisians' English is still horrible for the kind of city it is trying to become but not as bad as you'll hear it in other cities. Food - Don't understand why people are saying it's bad. It's really good! Especially compared to a city like London, where it's expensive and quality isn't amazing. There is less of a junk food culture in Paris than in other cities though. There’s more good and bad things to go into but I’ll leave the bad stuff at this for now. There are good things going on in Paris. The city is amazing to live in. It’s much cheaper than London. Transport costs are a lot less. Leisure activities are cheaper. A lot of stuff will be cheaper, including apartments. The city is beautful to live in too. There is a good startup ecosystem in Paris. There are a couple good exits coming out of France. But it all seems like a big circle jerk, which (IMO) a guide like this shows. This may also come from the extreme forms of patriotism the French show(sometimes) and/or from the fact that they don’t speak English and are repulsed by anything English. A lot of startups start here but quickly try to get the hell out and move to the US or even London. There have been a couple good exits though but not as many as London nor any as big as the ones in Berlin. I don’t know what the fundraising process goes like in Paris so I’m not going to comment on that. Obviously it will be harder than in the US as there are less VCs here. Judging by the amounts being raised and the amount of “big” VCs in London it’s also weaker than across the channel.

vonnik 12y ago

I spent 14 years in Paris, 10 as a journalist covering finance and tech for the NYT and Bloomberg. The Paris Tech Guide is an understandable piece of boosterism, but I would not recommend Paris or France to people looking for a tech ecosystem to support them. I'm not going to talk about the food, because it's totally irrelevant to this discussion. If that's the reason why you choose a city for your startup, your startup will probably fail. I'm also not going to engage in French-bashing. I have many good friends in Paris, and the city itself is a beautiful piece of work. It just isn't great for business... Paris's poor business environment has many causes, and they run much deeper than the incompetent Socialist government currently in power. That government is just the latest captain steering the ship of state, and the state is very heavy in France. It was heavy under Chirac and Sarkozy. It is heavy for the French themselves. They are constantly confronted with absurd rules governing aspects of their existence that legislators felt obligated to regulate. Imagine how difficult it is for the foreigner to navigate those laws. Very. As a country, France has crippled its once powerful financial industry and driven a lot of capital and financial services to London. You could argue that this began with Mitterand in the early 1980s, so it's a decades-long trend. And finance is important, because it makes a lot of people silly rich and some of them become investors. Losing finance means that France's expertise has been considerably weakened in the domain of financial technology, which is going to eat banks like it ate publishing. As a society, France has a technologically conservative, luddite streak that is quite the opposite of Americans' tech liberalism. While France produces many gifted mathematicians and engineers, they usually fail to productize and successfully market their ideas. Props to the minitel, but who uses it now? Many unFrench people fail to appreciate that France suffers from a rigid, ossified class structure, where people can be pigeon-holed by their accents, much as in Britain. Rigid, ossified class structures are really bad at identifying and cultivating talent. They're very good at creating a few schools (Sciences Po, ENA, the Polytechnique) that produce a small ruling class. Most applicants are not admitted. The institutional structure is well trained at telling people "non, c'est impossible." So France is a machine that stifles peoples' potential. That's why many of the most ambitious French people leave. The ones that remain are split between the privileged and the frustrated. If you want to build something, and it has to be in Europe, choose the Anglo-Germanic countries: the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Scandinavia. Several of those economies are bigger and on the whole they tend to move faster. People there learn English well (except in Britain of course ;). The rules of the country will be more understandable and more predictably enforced. Go to France when you're rich and ready to retire. They'll welcome you with open arms. The country isn't made for builders.