“Can you teach someone to be an entrepreneur?” – France responds

http://www.rudebaguette.com/2014/02/06/frances-startup-scene-tackles-question-can-teach-someone-entrepreneur/

by liam_boogar • 12 years ago

28 24 12 years ago

6cxs2hd62• 12 years ago

Individually in one thing. But usually people care about the aggregate: "How can our city/region/country have moar entrepreneurs?"

Just like America today has a STEM deficit because being good at math or science isn't as cool as it was back in the send-a-man-to-moon 60s, some places have an entrepreneur deficit because starting a company isn't a positive social signifier.

Although government programs aren't always a total waste, I suspect the main point of leverage is a critical mass of "rock star" examples that people want to be like.

liam_boogar• 12 years ago

Interestingly enough, these initiatives are all private

6cxs2hd62• 12 years ago

I see. Well actually I didn't mean to sound like I was arguing on the public vs. private axis. In fact my put-a-man-on-the-moon example was, of course, hugely about government.

What I mean is I'm skeptical of the impact of efforts (public or private) to "teach entrepreneurship". Yes you can teach that, one by one. But if the desired outcome is to have many more entrepreneurs, you don't get there one by one. You get there by changing the culture to elevate the social status of entrepreneurs. Any efforts -- whether public or public -- need to focus on that, first and foremost.

seancoleman2• 12 years ago

I'm a faculty member at Arizona State University and teach an entrepreneurship course. I don't believe you can teach someone to be an entrepreneur. Business, management and leadership skills are teachable (all of which certainly contribute to the success of a startup).

I believe being an entrepreneur is a combination of certain personality traits and temperaments. It's a maker's passion and drive that defines an entrepreneur.

So why do I teach entrepreneurship? Simply to show 40 young adults a worldview which most have not yet been exposed, with the hope that those innate entrepreneurs will choose this different path in life, a path which most parents, professors and friends discredit. I would be fulfilled if just one of my students took the entrepreneurship route and made a large impact on the world over the typical route of accepting a corporate job.

sentientmachine• 12 years ago

The maker's passion and drive can be re-ignited in some extreme circumstances. For example, drop the critter down on a deserted island where their only way off is building a boat. Will the boat get built or will they call for help until they die of thirst?

seancoleman2• 12 years ago

In that case there will certainly be a drive to build a boat, but just in order to survive. It's the innate drive to build that boat without the survival instinct that makes the entrepreneur IMO.

rikacomet2• 12 years ago

I have to disagree with you. You said it yourself, being an entrepreneur requires certain traits and temperaments.

we all start blank, and based on our circumstances, we learn entrepreneurship. we are never born with it. Being born with it, is just a saying, its not true.. as seen in the history very few successful people had even more successful kids.

Entrepreneurship, for me is more like a balance of the things we all possess.

GuiA• 12 years ago

France really wants to be the next big place in tech startups (like any country really). It's a noble initiative, but speaking as a French citizen who moved to SV roughly 3 years ago (and to the US 5 years ago), I don't believe it has any chance of doing so.

Between the backwards government (cf. the dumb stuff that Fleur Pellerin regularly does/say) and the structures that are impossible to work with (a friend of mine, still in Paris, has been fighting for weeks to just get a ~bank account opened~ for his startup), France will not have its Google or Facebook (a catchphrase often used by the politicians) anytime soon.

It's a shame, because there is real engineering talent in France (you can thank Napoleon for that), and those who don't want to move abroad (typically England/Germany) end up working for shitty consulting/outsourcing companies ("SSII"), or work in small local web dev agencies. There are programmers from my small French university that I would hire over Stanford students any day of the week for a startup. (this is not a jab at Stanford or anything- I've tutored Stanford undergrads, and many of them are brilliant, but surprisingly not crazily moreso than the top students from my small no-name public university.)

People at the top just don't get it, and they come from old school élitiste backgrounds (HEC, Sciences Po Paris, ENA, etc.) that are at the complete opposite of what building an entrepreneur friendly environment would require.

c2prods• 12 years ago

No offence, that's a somewhat classical rant of a French who left 5 years ago ;) Actually France is changing. Regulation is becoming easier to deal with, people are more and more entrepreneurs-friendly, etc. This very article proves it. I agree with you concerning the waste of talent in SSII but that too is evolving. Give France some time!

marcosdumay2• 12 years ago

Sorry, but an official program for creating entrepeuners isn't evidence of anything. Entrepeuner friendly governments normaly have less official programs, of any kind.

What's too bad, because Brazil is in exactly that same boat. We also won't have a thriving high-tech industry any time soon.

fidotron• 12 years ago

To some extent the problems you describe cover many places outside SV, though French bureaucracy is notorious.

It doesn't strike me as obvious that SV is going to remain any better for gestating startups into the future, largely thanks to the cost of living, but simultaneously I don't see excessively bureaucratic countries pulling it off either. Balancing government services that can help small business (and I put state health care in there) with a low tax and admin burden is the magic combination that would foster true growth. France can only do that if it can convince the piles of public servants it is in their interests to do it - but they're not stupid, and it isn't.

Basically any country where a significant proportion of the population aspires to being a civil servant is just going to enter a sort of slow decline.

mathattack• 12 years ago

My 2 cents... The French system is great at producing mathematicians, and by extension computer scientists. The problem is there is a cultural aversion to risk taking and working for small companies, and the government is increasingly taxing away the upside. So why wouldn't people go abroad if they don't want to work for large boring firms? It's a shame, because the system produces some very smart people.

jotm2• 12 years ago

Seriously, what is up with opening a bank account in Europe? They will soon require cavity searches just to let you into the damn building. Just give me a checking account without overdraft and other risky options so I can start working. It's amazing how disinterested they are in new (business!) customers...

marcosdumay2• 12 years ago

From the way they act, looks like modern banks get no marginal return from a client that just puts money in them. Instead, they are botlenecked by the amount of people they can lend to.

I have no idea if that's the real case, or just a bad case of the right hand not knowing what the left one is doing. If it real, I don't understand how it's even possible, since governments are all eager to get loans from anybody... But they do act as if it was true.

mercer• 12 years ago

Europe isn't a country.

In Holland, I registered my business and then went and got a business bank account plus working (temporary) bank card in about four hours total...

a3voices• 12 years ago

I believe you can teach anyone with an IQ over 100 to be proficient at anything, if they have enough time and interest.

rikacomet2• 12 years ago

Teach someone who wants to be a entrepreneur - Yes

Make someone to take up entrepreneurship - Maybe

Yes inception is possible, parents do it all the time.. kids don't realize it many a times. But it doesn't work that way for entrepreneurship. One has to be able to think for himself, everyday.. its not a end to means like other things to be exact, it is creating means with ends everyday.

One of the key attitude towards it is the situation where you can't see yourself as anything, except for, as an entrepreneur.

Lastly, the method of the teacher should be not to put someone on the track only, but to prepare them to stay there. Its not one night of inspiration, like in writing a song, but multiple nights of cycles of struggle and success.

kendalk• 12 years ago

"Can you teach someone to be an entrepreneur?"

Can a government? No.

Can an impersonal bureaucracy? No.

Can a major corporation? No.

Can a committee? No.

Can you? Yes.

People can do wonderful things. Inspire others. Open eyes. Light fires. Imagine. Dream. Leave them alone and they can do great things.

Grue3• 12 years ago

Who would want to be an entrepreneur in a country with 75% tax? If I lived there, I'd rather live on welfare and code some open-sourced stuff all day.

crazyfrenchy• 12 years ago

As a Frenchman, I registered on hackernews just to reply to this comment. I'm tired of this BS propagated by conservatives politicians.

There's no 75% tax in France. It never existed, and I don't think it will exist any day soon.

There's a 75% tax for income over 1 million euros per year. This means that if I earn 1,000,001 €, I pay the normal rate on 1,000,000 € (I don't know what it is, it might be around 30%, so let's say 30k) plus 75% (meaning 0.75 eurocents), the total being 30,000.75 cents. For 2 million euros, you'll pay 30,000 € + 75% × 1,000,000 = 105,000 €. It's the concept of tax brackets, and I know you have this in the US. Are the US a socialist country?

Moreover, France has a lot of billionaires, and the richest woman in the world – at the time I type this comment – is French. <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Liliane_Bettencour...

In addition, there's a job in France called “tax optimizer”, I can't find a link, but in 2011, Liliane Bettencourt paid as much tax as a single Frenchwoman on minimum wage.

So I don't think tax is a problem in France for those who wants to be entrepreneurs. And do entrepreneurs really deserve to make that kind of money? Do they really work 300 times harder than their workers?

My 2 cents on it, the problem in France – and this is why Germany and the US are succeeding where France is failing – is the lack of support from the government towards small companies. Any labour law, tax law is made for giant groups like Dassault, Orange, Dannon, and so on...

c_plus_minus• 12 years ago

300k on the first million...

return0• 12 years ago

As always, the answer is No. However, teaching people to become entrepreneurs is a moderately bad startup idea.

“Can you teach someone to be an entrepreneur?” – France responds

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