> i don’t think any european citizen will understand why we prefer to start a judiciary war against the US just so that we can help a muslim theocracy broaden its influence in the middle east.
European citizens don’t seem to care that much about the EU’s tight relationship with Saudi Arabia... Why should they feel differently about Iran?
France has plenty of early stage startups, in fact the increase in size and quality in their ecosystem in just a few years has been very impressive.
What’s missing in France right now is an ecosystem of fast-growing mid-stage startups - series B and above. I think that’s caused by a combination of:
1) mindset (thinking globally from say one is easier said than done when nobody around you has done it before)
2) lack of late-stage funding. The seed money scene is not as bad as it used to be, and is in a virtuous cycle of early exits / successful entrepreneurs who want to give back. That is looking very good. However, the VCs still suck, with a few exceptions. They’re mostlt bankers, they’re risk-averse, ownership-greedy, and intrusive. Good luck growing a world-class business with them on your board and in your cap table.
3) The EU market is just weak conpared to US and China. So every european startup has to start outside their confort zone and attack foreign markets from day one... Which creates friction compared to growing at home for the first few years.
Here are factors that in my opinion are NOT to blame: taxes (comparable to California), salaries (yes they’re lower than in SV; that’s a good thing for startups), bureaucratic red tape (that’s what lawyers and accountabts are for, it’s not rocket science), lack of work ethic (in my experience French employees work very hard and are very loyal - although they do complain a lot), brain drain (sure French people leave the country. Plenty stay, or come back. It’s nothing like what third world countries have to deal with).
What I’m seeing more and more is French founders moving to SV, raising money there and keeping their engineers in France. Other international founders are doing the same. I think it’s the best available move at the moment.
Concerning mindset, I think there's an even bigger cultural trait that's holding back French entrepreneurship: a complete absence of a "culture of failure".
By and large, French culture is one of fixed mindset. Mistakes/errors/failures reveal one's limitations or flaws, and aren't perceived as an opportunity to learn and grow. This starts very early and is very much baked in to the structure of schooling.
On the flip-side, this seems to be slowly changing. At the very least, people are aware that the US does this differently, and there seems to be some interest in effecting change.
I think the biggest challenge for France in regard to startup is that society is hierarchical. I think many of the other concerns stem from that. Hierarchies makes society about ranking, which kills startup since startups are essentially about climbing the class ladder as a company (from small business to fortune 500). Pretty much all startup "hubs" are either "new world" were there weren't necessarily a lot of established players already and/or relatively egalitarian.
>I think the biggest challenge for France in regard to startup is that society is hierarchical
Agreed. At this point, I usually like to point out that hierarchical societies have their advantages. A huge asset for France is it's elite schools -- the "Grandes Écoles".
These schools are outstanding in a way that few Americans can even fathom, and their students are educated to a point that I didn't think possible until moving to Paris.
If you want the best engineers in the world, hire out of those schools. As a bonus, they aren't the sort to hop between jobs.
I have mixed feelings about the grandes ecoles. Brilliant people get there and you don’t get in and out without serious grit, a decent mind and a taste for effort.
But I tink that’s really what it is. The best engineers I have seen didn’t care for ‘burning’ years of their life in half military schools or old institutions, they went directly to CS courses to get a diploma faster and go abroad or start their own project.
Put another way, people who don’t care about prestige and having a super broad education don’t go there, and in our field I tink a ton of super talented people fit that description.
"Put another way, people who don’t care about prestige and having a super broad education don’t go there, and in our field I tink a ton of super talented people fit that description."
But just like Americans go to ranked universities, as a student you learn how to play the game and go to the best (fit) one you can enter.
This is true, although in slight compensation, there is a true culture of dissent. It is common in the US to have to be an all-in cheerleader for whatever the current project is, until it fails, then everyone dusts themself off and hops back on. French people are quite bad at the dusting-off, but they also don't usually let their colleagues attempt to win a horse race while mounted on a pony.
Because French engineers are also more educated on average than US engineers, and French school ratings more predictive of the IQ of their incoming crop than of their "leadership" or whatever the current US proxy for socioeconomic status is, having a minority of French engineers in a team to point out obvious points of failures can be a definite advantage.
Personally I prefer American managers though, I feel the can-do culture is just better for management. Plus French people tend to have a lot of respect for older people or people further up in the hierarchy so in a mixed hierarchy (with the Americans at the top) usually your French guys will move towards becoming self-starters in their bosses' images, whereas the reverse is not necessarily true and American underlings tend to perceive a French boss's nitpicking or challenging of their strategy as micromanagement and undermining.
I think this last part is one of the great remaining challenges of France as a nation of great enterprise. It is very, very difficult for non-French people to feel comfortable in a company born of French senior management and culture. They just don't get some of the tone and French management can be very backwards compared to the commonly accepted leadership forms today. Hopefully, French children today are seeing a very different picture of what it means to be in charge thanks to exchange programs, higher education and a greater involvement from the EU, and they will grow to be leaders who are not afraid of hiring whole teams from other countries and letting them have autonomy and who do not make their teams afraid of them.
Nassim Taleb would agree -- in Black Swan he writes: "American culture encourages the process of failure, unlike the cultures of Europe and Asia where failure is met with stigma and embarrassment. America’s specialty is to take these small risks for the rest of the world, which explains this country’s disproportionate share in innovations."
tldr; he moved to SF because salaries are much, much higher than in France, even considering the social benefits that you get in France.
Other threads on HN have French engineers saying that they love living in France while working remotely for American companies.
I've lived in Paris, Berlin, NYC and California. I'll never understand how European founders can keep saying that 40k euro salaries for engineers is a benefit while they watch so many great engineers leave to American companies.
>I've lived in Paris, Berlin, NYC and California. I'll never understand how European founders can keep saying that 40k euro salaries for engineers is a benefit while they watch so many great engineers leave to American companies.
This. I have tasted the fruit and I'm never going back. The social benefits feel largely like gimmicks compared to the standard of living + social recognition you get working as an engineer in the US or even Canada.
What do you mean by "standard of living" though? I know plenty of Europeans who have access to things even rich Americans barely have access to. Once you want to, or have, kids many benefits that are hard to come by becomes less gimmicky. The main problem in Europe, and in most countries, these days is the housing market. Your position in the housing market has really come to determine your position in society.
For example it is pretty common in the Nordic countries to have a vacation home where you spend summers and holidays with friends and family. And between saved parental leave, standardized vacation periods and public holidays there is time available to do so. There are certainly people who do have that in the US, but once you or your family relocates it gets a lot more tricky.
In general I just think it is a lot easier in, at least some, European countries to set yourself up for a good life. Day to day, year to year, to not endure a long commute or stressful work environment. Having time to spend with your kids while they are young, your parents before they get too old and your friends so you don't lose touch. Not having to worry about the future, managing your kids lives, the financial losses of getting sick or your career.
Once you start wanting to do things that aren't universal or the default in any country, and especially with other people in your life, you can end up paying a large premium to do so.
> For example it is pretty common in the Nordic countries to have a vacation home where you spend summers and holidays with friends and family. And between saved parental leave, standardized vacation periods and public holidays there is time available to do so. There are certainly people who do have that in the US, but once you or your family relocates it gets a lot more tricky.
That's also common in the United States or at least in the Upper Midwest. Just here in Minnesota there are around 124,000 seasonal properties and the average household income for the owners of these properties is $58,000 which is not rich in the United States. It's also a similar story in Wisconsin next door and other Upper Midwest states like Michigan.
I don't think being able to a own vacation home in the Midwest is relevant in this context: the increase in income going from France to the Midwest is almost certainly going to be much lower than the increase going from France to the Bay Area, while the loss of social benefits would still be the same (or worse.)
Why? I make almost twice the average salary of a Software Engineer in Paris here in Minneapolis. I could move to the bay area and make an extra $20-$30K but my rent and cost of living would sky rocket. I pay about $680 a month for rent in an excellent neighborhood of Minneapolis. Getting rent that cheap in the bay area would be impossible. Plus my friends working in Chicago have salaries equivalent to the bay area but their cost of living is almost half of the bay. Even though I make less in the Upper Midwest, the cost of living is so low that I can save more than if I lived in the bay.
Shh don't tell them. ;) In Kansas City I rent a _house_ with a large back yard within walking distance from a lot of neat things. I've built a metal working shop in my basement and a forge out back. My rent is 700$ a month. Work the first day of the month pays that if I take a long lunch.
Every SF salary range I see is significantly below what I made last year. I'm not even taking cost of living into consideration here. Just absolute terms. I interviewed at Amazon a few years ago when they were doing some game design stuff and didn't make the cut. I learned that I'm not ambitious enough to make less.
Because midwest tech, I have no debt. In fact, I can crunch for a month, take the money and go buy a few acres to shoot my .50 caliber anti material rifle. Few SF residents will know how expensive it is to buy match 750 grain ammo, or know the pain and suffering of putting a clean hole through an engine block you tore out of a mercury tracer from 1000m away on a tuesday at 11am. It's terrible.
The central limit theorem corroborates the fact that the 500,000 people in KC basically don't exist and it's just one big cornfield. The 800,000 people in San Francisco are burdened with the knowledge that everything east of them til' the coast is flyover country. I feel for them.
> I've built a metal working shop in my basement and a forge out back. My rent is 700$ a month.
Making major capital investments in the property is actually something I would consider a reason to purchase rather than renting. Can you say more about your thought process there?
Why do you assume that? I spent almost a month camping this year and I'm planning a 2 week snowboarding trip in the Rockies. As well as a climbing slash canoeing trip in the boundary waters area in the spring.
And yet me an American is on track for 40 days of paid vacation time this year, also a coworker of mine just got back from 13 weeks paid paternity leave.
> Not having to worry about the future, managing your kids lives, the financial losses of getting sick or your career.
How does this encourage anything but complacency? Who wants to start anything when everything is a utopia with no consequences? I’m not even being facetious because that is basically what you’re describing. This is why Europe barely innovates: extreme comfort and security. These aren’t bad things. But it’s odd to me that people look for more complicated answers when this is plain as day.
Get back to us the first time you have a medical emergency putting you on the hook for 5 or 6 figures (after insurance); at least you're lucky enough to be able to flee the jurisdiction back to a home country.
> Get back to us the first time you have a medical emergency putting you on the hook for 5 or 6 figures (after insurance)
Is that a thing? Obviously there are lots of people in the USA who don't have any good health insurance options. But as an engineer in San Francisco all the companies I've worked at or interviewed with have had gold-plated health insurance plans with maximum out-of-pocket expenses in the low 4 figures. And of course, most people won't hit those maximums most years, that's just an upper bound.
This is of course limited to my personal experience, but my impression is that good health insurance is table stakes for highly-paid engineering roles.
That's a very unfortunate story. As I mentioned, I recognize that many people in the US don't have any good healthcare options, which is something that we as a society ought to fix.
However, I don't think we can learn much about the health insurance typically provided to engineers in San Francisco from the poor insurance plan available to a teacher in Houston. Those jobs have very different compensation profiles.
The problem is you're not going to have a solid understanding of your engineering role plan until you're employed, and even then, even with "preapproval" from the insurer, it might turn out you don't have the coverage you think you do.
My firm is in financial services. Very nice plan. Even with my "nice plan", we've had the insurer renege on their coverage of services (thousands of dollars in services) after receiving approval and having it in writing prior to obtaining services. YMMV.
They are a benefit... if you pay people above market! That allows you to attract top talent that otherwise would be locked in at Google etc.
The whole point of low salaries, for smart companies, is to be the one increasing them! Obviously that makes it a temporary advantage, as salaries start to increase... But all great advantages are temporary.
The people you are talking to, who like low salaries because they want to enjoy lower costs in perpetuity... that’s just mediocre thinking by mediocre companies.
Exactly. France has extremely strong engineering schools, and almost no software industry. You wouldn’t believe the talent being wasted in banking IT desks and consulting conpanies... Not only can a well-funded startup pay them better, the work is 10x more interesting. And unlike Silicon Valley engineers, French employees won’t ditch you after a year. Once they’re on board, they tend to stick around (sometimes even too long for their own good...)
> French employees won’t ditch you after a year. Once they’re on board, they tend to stick around (sometimes even too long for their own good...)
You forgot to mention that you can‘t fire them at will either... It‘s such laws and excessive taxation that makes many european countries unattractive for startups.
An employee can be laid off if he agrees to it but that's not like firing because it needs an agreement. I am not sure if the OP is talking about that.
It's possible to fire people without justification and the company will be brought to court. There is a new law from Macron that caps the damages the employee can get to pretty much nothing when he only has a few years of tenure or less. You could provision for a few months of salary.
I can confirm that you can fire people in France at a reasonable cost if you know what you’re doing and are focused on paying good money for great people. If you’re looking to build a large-scale sweatshop of low-skill workers with low pay and high turnover... then sure, France is not the place to do that. But if you’re a typical tech company not afraid to pay above market for top talent... cost of severance will not be an issue.
(I’ve hired and run large engineering offices in France and in the US).
That. Definitely that. There is zero software industry in France. The best talents are incredibly easy to hire and retain because they have nowhere else to go.
Low salaries also mean it is hard for normal people(ie people not from rich or well connected families) to save up enough money to self-fund a startup.
I do agree that low salary is an issue, but it's improving. On the other hand, it's very hard to compare everything, when you're young, single and healthy, it's a no brainer that you should take your chance in the US. But if you have a family, suddenly are diagnosed with a costly disease of whatever kind, I bet you wish to be in Europe.
So articles that say "you should go west" just applies to their authors, everybody has their own set of parameters to evaluate, and the answer isn't so obvious. I personally have kids and a wife that earns a lot of money. I've done the maths, it's a no brainer for me financially to stay in Europe...
In Europe, why would an entrepreneur work hard? There is strong safety net provided by the Welfare state, it's simply not worth the risk.
No risk of going homeless if you fail. It's easier to give up.
Remove safety net, remove free healthcare, increase wages, remove payroll taxes, remove immigration restriction, add property rights so that foreigners can buy land and see the startups blossom.
It is as simple as that.
But pretty sure, most European will not be voting for this.
it certainly would be very nice. I explored this a little bit but on the end had to focus on stability of the core components. It wouldn't be anything too hard, but quite a lot of work to implement all the syntax quirks, keeping up with new commands, etc. So right now at least I personally don't have concrete plans to implement it. What you can do right now is use images from a local docker installation:
European citizens don’t seem to care that much about the EU’s tight relationship with Saudi Arabia... Why should they feel differently about Iran?