Startups Founded by French Entrepreneurs

http://www.rudebaguette.com/2014/01/20/10-startups-didnt-know-founded-french-entrepreneurs/

by liam_boogar • 13 years ago

62 49 13 years ago

ozh• 13 years ago

Earlier a HN front page post about a startup entrepreneur who's a woman, and now a post about entrepreneur who are French. Can't wait for the posts about entrepreneurs who are blonde, or muslims, or wearing green shirts.

Bottom line: I don't get why "I am xxxxx and I'm an entrepreneur" is relevant at all.

Gmo2• 13 years ago

I think, for this particular exemple, this is due to the recent rise in French bashing in a lot of British and American medias.

That included some nuggets such as “The best thinkers in France have left the country. What is now left is mediocrity.”

So I guess, we, French, have decided to fight back all of this and prove them wrong.

Granted, this article is about expatriates, so one could think it is proving the quote right, but I still think this goes in the general direction of fighting back the partiality of all those articles.

liam_boogar5• 13 years ago

Great response, Gmo!

Indeed, while it doesn't entirely combat the 'bashing' - some of the bashing is due, so we can't expect to entirely reject all criticism - it does put a stick in the bicycle wheel of the "France doesn't have a word for entrepreneur" banter.

liam_boogar5• 13 years ago

I can't speak to the other posts, but as the author of this post, the intrigue for me is that the common thread, their country of Origin, makes a big statement about France's ability to educate and product entrepreneurs.

There is also a subtle undertone (I chose not to dive into it in the article, as it's been discussed in depth elsewhere) about the fact that many of France's most successful citizens found their success outside of France, suggesting that, while the French system produces a consistent flow of intelligent entrepreneurs (a keystone of a healthy startup ecosystem), it fails to create an environment in which those entrepreneurs feel they can succeed.

maigret• 13 years ago

Right. And for me that is positive, because creating the economical environment is easier than improving greatly the education and fostering creativity and self thinking. Basically France needs to reduce taxes on employment, and provide for better ways for investment to happen. That seems doable.

aragot4• 13 years ago

Let's dig (Granted: It's a kind of Godwin point for a French entrepreneur post):

- 71% tax above 31k€ per year: VAT 20%, Revenue tax 15%, Taxe Pro/Education 1%, [health, retirement, elderly, unemployment and similar] social mandatory fees 46%, mandatory fees and tax agent 2200€, the total is around 71%.

- Research incentives "CIR" can pay up to 90% of your PhD employees,

- ACCRE, women incentives and some I'm-a-victim incentives can get you 10-80k€ loans that you don't have to reimburse in case of failure.

It looks to me like we're selecting our best start-ups on how well they do at smuggling benefits.

It also looks like we weigh on those who could grow. Make your calculation: Without 71% of tax, how many people do our competitors hire?

Last thing, there is a heavy hate for "those who make money" in France. I'm constantly at fear of talking about money and being bashed on the spot. Not like I try to improve on that anyway, I've seen how rich is the rest of the world and I think we should have a little talk here. Also, we don't incentive successful ones to come back. The retirement and health systems welcome you like someone who is intensely rich, which, in France, isn't good. And intensely rich starts at the programmer wage.

We like to say "Fuite des cerveaux" when talking about our engineers going to [insert any place in the rest of the world]. But we're getting into the range of "Fuite des mains": Two blue collar of my friends have left to Canada. We need to have a little talk in France about money.

That said... I came back from Australia to France to start my company. The competent doctors was a big one for me, as well as a cheaper cost of living.

NB: Thanks heaps to Liam for doing this little research. Looking forward to the list of local startups, e.g. Xavier Niel.

rtpg• 13 years ago

Women entrepreneurs are relevant because there is (at least in general media) a recognition that there are a lot of negative stimuli towards women (especially when young) aiming to be entrepreneurs. Everyone needs role models.

French entrepeneurs are relevant maybe to counter the idea that France doesn't know how to innovate. I'm not sure how relevant ebay's guy is as an example. As someone who did something similar (Born in France, went to US for elementary school and middle school, back in france for HS Uni) I feel more american than french.

liam_boogar5• 13 years ago

Definitely agree that the eBay example is a stretch (i wrote the article); however, I grew up in the Bay Area around French families (mostly engineers), and there was a certain French culture retained - not sure how you feel with respect to that.

The greater idea was that there is something inherently 'French' that produces great entrepreneurs - not that these particular ones owe France anything, but that it's worth reflecting on.

watwut• 13 years ago

To counter the general conviction of some Americans that only American males innovate and start startups?

Now, we need some examples of "I innovate but I do not run startup" to counter the idea that starting startup is the only way to innovate.

sentenza• 13 years ago

Done. Here are the videos of the 30C3:

http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2013/

Lots of hacking. Startups, not so much.

Udo• 13 years ago

I agree with your point, but I'd like to say that the woman-founder article was a personal blog entry that got 104 upvotes, is 8 hours old and currently ranks at #90 on HN at the very bottom of the third page - compared to this piece of meaningless top-ten writing which got 39 upvotes, is 6 hours old, and still going strong on the front page.

beagle3• 13 years ago

Lots of respect to jbk - though it's kind of weird that the author listed jbk's "VLC" (non startup) in the subtitle.

And ... how can this list not mention Fabrice Bellard, without whom neither QEMU (essential to KVM and VirtualBox), nor FFMPEG (very significantly behind the scenes in VLC, Handbrake, YouTube, Chrome and just about any other media related software) would have been. If you have used the internet for 60 minutes today, it is quite likely you've used a Bellard derived product.

shrikant• 13 years ago

Bellard: Prolific hacker? Yes. Entrepreneur? Not so much...

(As an aside: a former French entreprenuer that immediately comes to mind is Jean-Louis Gassée who founded Be Inc.)

liam_boogar5• 13 years ago

You're definitely right - I chose to mention the "VLC" project instead of Videolabs in the subtitle, as I felt people would recognize it more. Hence the explanation in the text.

The list is in no way complete, nor indicative of any 'ranking' - I think I could write a similar list once a week for the next year and not give everyone their due respect.

margaretblue• 13 years ago

CritSend was started in France.

This article strikes on one of my pet peeves, though. Calling non-startups startups. Ebay hasn't been in a startup in over 10 years. They are simply a 'company' now.

liam_boogar5• 13 years ago

Totally true (author here); however, when they started, they were a startup. And when they were a startup, they were founded by someone French.

Most of the list are current startups; VLC is also only somewhat a startup (VideoLab is more of a startup; VLC being the project).

eitally• 13 years ago

My old boss and a partner, both French (one living in the US, the other in Germany), founded http://snapengage.com/. They're doing quite well competing with OLark, Zopim, etc.

jbb555• 13 years ago

So that's ebay and 9 projects I never heard of :)

radio4fan• 13 years ago

You've really never heard of VLC (admittedly hardly a startup, but certainly a project) or Feedly?

dopamean• 13 years ago

Or Docker...?

tbassetto• 13 years ago

What about Renaud Visage, co-founder of Eventbrite?

psuter• 13 years ago

To add to the anecdotal evidence, the winners of the Coursera/Stanford startup challenge were French: http://www.goopil.co/.

jotm• 13 years ago

This is a peculiar article - maybe it should be written in French to show French people that they can do it?

'Cause there's a ton of great companies with French founders: Dassault, Parrot, Genostar, Mandriva, Digimind, and more...

Mikeb852• 13 years ago

There's also various languages and technology many people use and may or may not realise are developed by French developers - OCaml, Coq, Haxe (my personal fave), Pharo...

seeingfurther• 13 years ago

Don't forget Dashlane.

Aloisius• 13 years ago

Well personally, I'd love to move to Paris to do a tech startup with a French cofounder. Partly because it would give me a non-SVP insight into building products for a non-American user base (I'm a 4th generation SV native). And partly to prove the rumors that you can't build startup teams in Paris are false.

pyduan• 13 years ago

Interested in getting in touch, although I may not be able to give you exactly what you're looking for. I grew up in Paris and am currently looking to start a company in SV, so I'm curious about what prompts you to do the opposite journey.

Gmo2• 13 years ago

There also other towns in France where it might be easier you know, especially regarding cost of living :) (For instance, Nantes, where I am living right now)

lotux3• 13 years ago

2 of your french Entrepreneurs are actually iranian! Pierre Omidyar , Edwin Khodabakchian

mxfh• 13 years ago

I would add qobuz[1], for innovating in hifi, lossless streaming and dailymotion, the only video hosting platform (other than vimeo) that survided against the youtube[2] behemoth I'm aware of. Also netvibes still exists.

[1] http://www.qobuz.com/

[2] http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=dailymotion

lotux3• 13 years ago

Any french speaker who can tell me what is meaning of Khodabakchian or omidyar in french?

plus-• 13 years ago

It means nothing in french

lotux3• 13 years ago

yes, because none of them are french!! they are iranian :D, if you want I can tell you the meaning of both ;)

m1117• 13 years ago

No that not truth. I didn't know 9 of them, and I know eBay

Startups Founded by French Entrepreneurs

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