Kudos to the team who made it happen. I'm French and happy this comes to life.
I still have the feeling this is more of a stunt to bring attention on Station F than on the startups themselves. Beyond the buzz, there is very little vision. It's a giant intensive farm in a denser, currently-under-redevelopment neighborhood.
In this super dense setting, they're piling up various talent for sort-of-low-cost rents, hoping to raise unicorns thanks to nearby campuses, increased VC flow in Paris and general attention towards startups. This strikes me as a formula thought out by people who have never actually been in a successful startup (Roxanne Varza has been successful at _talking about_ startups, never at actually building things).
One outcome is that all those points successfully connect together. Another, more probable outcome is that it will turn out impossible to keep focus, talent and purpose in a giant, open space (also probably soon to be under-maintained judging by French standards).
If I may add a bit of context: while Station F is indeed a project of Xavier Niel (Free/Illiad/Kima/42...), it is also a project with considerable public support.
Several french regions have their (semi-)publicly funded equivalent of Station F (Lille with Plaine Images & Euratechnologies, Nantes with La Cantine, ...) and while there is a considerable quantity of startups in Paris, there is no local de facto hub. I'd argue that Le Sentier area plays that role, but it's a neighborhood where lots of startup happen to be located. In the early 00s it was dubbed "Silicon Sentier".
Plaine Images & Euratechnologies have been built in former industrial complexes with the aim of redynamizing local ecosystem as a whole. Anne Hidalgo, the Paris mayor, hopes to do the same to the XIII arrondissement.
Thanks for that context man. People like to b*tch about taxes all the time, but the thing is, taxes sent me to school and university, it paid for my stays in the hospital, my mail delivery, our internet infrastructure and awesome projects like Station F.
Most of the time wealth is the by-product of pursuing a talent or passion. I'm not sure high taxes would disincentivize somebody from reaching the height of their ambition.
Presented with the option "improve performance and you'll receive an extra 100k a year although you'll only see 50k of that" would you:
A. plod along with current work-ethic and current salary
B. move to where you'd see 80k of that
C. Continue to perform and be 50k wealthier
France loses the talent of those that choose option B (See: London) but option A seems illogical.
This is actually is a lot more subtle. Sure there are heavy taxes about which that some (ideologically interested) people love to complain about. But there are also a lot of public subsidies that those very same people will never publicly acknowledge benefiting from (again pushing an agenda).
One of the main points of VC funding is that it is easy to get... compared to state funding.
An early stage venture ain't developing anything if they are busy filling government paperwork and optimizing taxes. They should be busy using their resources for growth and creation, not busy trying to protect their resources from the government.
The schemes for tax avoidance in France are very complex, as much as the schemes to get government help [for a company], and they can totally backfire if there is anything misdone or an unexpected change in government.
The economic system is anti-startup and pro-big companies. That's why there are very few SME in France.
You're right about the system being tailored toward Big Co.
Yet I've seen SME managing to get subsidies. There are tricks and shortcut. Networking is key here to find out about them.
I've seen a lot of startups joining up to have access to bigger founds they would have had alone. It also split the bureaucracy burden as it is in everyone interest to succeed so paperwork is mutualised.
The "Wealth Tax" (Impôt sur la fortune) can be cut in half via investment into SMEs.
Pro-tip when you raise capital in France: do it early in the fiscal year, as April is the deadline for this tax avoidance scheme ;)
There are lots of tax optimisations in the french tax code. The weirdest one has to be investment into "sofica" companies, which are shell companies for movie productions. You have to make sure that the movie will fail to maximise your tax credit. So you have to pick wisely: do not invest in the next Asterix or Luc Besson movie, you'd end up loosing money to the IRS. That's one of the reasons hollywood accounting is also a thing in France. The idea is not to massively undercut the author, but to make sure the investors aren't hit with back taxes!
You can still get rich even with high taxes, and even if you didn't, it turns out that most folks care more about putting meaning into their own lives than they do about money.
When I was in Nantes this summer, I kept seeing subtle little details that made me think something interesting was going on. Compagnie La Machine (with its multi-story robotic spiders http://www.lamachine.fr/) seems to be surrounded by a maker scene, and even perfectly ordinary magazine shops carried Open Silicium (http://www.opensilicium.com/) a really nice embedded systems magazine that covers advanced hobbyist and professional concerns. This is a lot harder core and more specialized than the Linux Journal, for example, and when I've shown it off to US booksellers specializing in "maker"-related publications, they just about drooled.
Combine that with the French startups I saw at La French Touch in New York a couple of years ago, and some of the recent legislative changes the government was supposedly working on, and I kinda wanted to hang around and see what was up. I have a sneaking suspicion that the French have all the raw ingredients for an excellent startup scene, but that funding might still be something of a struggle.
It's located in a former textile factory and combines both openspace/co-working spaces, private offices in varying sizes. It also has a strong focus on creative industries (gaming, VR, audio...). Several companies that have started there have an excellent track record and several world-class leaders are in talks with them.
If you mix public subsidies + good space design + integration in the socio-economical fabric + specialization on a vertical, you end up with very high potential and growth. That's exactly what's happening right now at Plaine Images, even though it's not very well known outside of Europe.
Funding is not that much of an issue, tbh. As I stated elsewhere in this thread, I raised little, but had I wanted more, London & Berlin are literally next door and many large european VCs are familiar with the french ecosystem. The business angels I chose have exactly that track record (early 90s-00s, create company in France, raise a few hundreds k€ in France, large rounds in the US, IPO on Nasdaq, get rich and become BA/VCs).
I'm not going to list the usual "french unicorns" such as Blablacar or Criteo, but see Devialet, a hw "startup": they have closed a 100M$ round with a Korean fund two weeks ago so access to capital definitely exist...
By the way, La Cantine unfortunately had a massive fire two weeks ago, so we will have to wait and see if the phenix rise from the literal ashes :'(
That opensilicium magazine seems pretty awesomely cool. Does anybody know anything similar in English or maybe German? I'm afraid my french ain't that good.
VC funding is extreeeeemely hard to acquire in France, basically. So we're probably not going to get startups growing insanely fast, and they're going to be bootstrapping themselves. Which might not be a bad thing really.
I've actually worked for a startup that was formerly at la Cantine (which has actually burned down less than two weeks ago), and I can confirm Nantes is a lovely place to work at.
This neighborhood had many good bits but no center. La pitié, BNF, Bercy, lots of new business buildings. Maybe this will end up as some sort of cultural core.
(Also French)
I have been an intern at a startup that was hosted at a similar incubator in Paris in the late 00's. The legislation around work was more of a problem than neither the rent (which was indeed cheap) or the proximity to other companies -Paris is not that big.
In 2016, hiring is still an issue, and investing is always seen as a risk instead of an opportunity.
Hey, thanks so much for your comments - always love feedback. We've only announced the very beginning, there is a lot more that we have not commented on yet. We're surrounded by lots of brilliant people (not to mention Xavier Niel and I think we can all agree he knows how to build things) - it's not just me (Roxanne), don't worry :) Thanks again for your comments.
I still have the feeling this is more of a stunt to bring attention on Station F than on the startups themselves. Beyond the buzz, there is very little vision. It's a giant intensive farm in a denser, currently-under-redevelopment neighborhood.
In this super dense setting, they're piling up various talent for sort-of-low-cost rents, hoping to raise unicorns thanks to nearby campuses, increased VC flow in Paris and general attention towards startups. This strikes me as a formula thought out by people who have never actually been in a successful startup (Roxanne Varza has been successful at _talking about_ startups, never at actually building things).
One outcome is that all those points successfully connect together. Another, more probable outcome is that it will turn out impossible to keep focus, talent and purpose in a giant, open space (also probably soon to be under-maintained judging by French standards).