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 boosteris

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.