Our business school culture is so prevalent, techies are always ignored. Engineers are poorly paid, if not at all. And the rare VCs have zero tech knowledge too, resulting in poor investment choices.
It's a cultural problem, and throwing money at it won't solve it.
Some of those copy/pasted companies (Criteo, Blabla car, Vente Privée...) actually managed to be quite successful.
As somebody who prefers to work at a lower level my main problem is that we've lost (or are rapidly losing) most of our savoir faire when it comes to the hardware side of things. Could we even make a competitive CPU from scratch in Europe anymore or are we doomed to integrate American and Chinese IPs and ICs? What are the security risks if we just run "black box" foreign-made chips? Can we really trust Intel and AMD all the way for our critical infrastructures?
There's a culture of risk aversion in France, and it pushes a lot of people toward big corps as they're seen as safer. But they can also be a trap: be comfortable costing for most of your career, safely ticked inside the borg. But if you go through a big restructuring past your 50s you'll be toast, and have a real hard time recovering (if you can). Personally I prefer environment that force you to keep in shape and fit. I fear I would let me cost in a big company...
For the copy/paste business school driven start-ups, I'm sure there are a lot of them (not in my field, but it's hard core tech and capital intensive, not a good match for "pipo" people) but the issue there maybe the relative lack of start-ups founded by techies?
my brain dies on copy pasting
but you cannot always land a position where you actually think
Could you elaborate on that? How true is the statement above?
You can't fire someone at will like in the US, you need to justify the decision. Which takes some time and paperwork. Also, it used to be risky as the fired employee could sue and ask for damage, with no legal cap. The later has changed. So you can fire people, I've seen it done a few times, if you have a competent HR it's perfectly doable. You will need to document why and have some justification, and be ready to present your case if challenged.
Also, it's possible to let someone go my mutual agreement, with the employee keeping their unemployment benefit (there are limits to prevent abuse). It also eases things when both sides agree there's a mismatch, which often happen.
So it's definitely not as fluid as in the US, but not stuck as some people would let you know. You tend to be more cautious about the hiring for sure.
I generally in favor of the French model (over, say, the American one) but I do think that in this case it's probably a bit overprotective for certain more privileged jobs. A software developer these days shouldn't have too much trouble finding a new job if they get fired, I wouldn't mind trading some of that social security for higher pay for instance.
The issue in France is that you basically have tons of small companies that can have exemptions on things like that, taxes, etc. and a few very large companies that can deal with that, but almost nothing in between. Running a 500-employee company in France is basically hell, you get crap from everywhere.
Still, most startups rely on armies of unpaid interns as a workaround.
For poorly paid engineers, it's true that French engineers salaries are far from the Silicon Valley standard --- which is true for a great part of the US too. Here too grumbling won't help much. To get salaries to increase we need more local demand for techies, and not from inflexible big corporations that will prefer to stall rather than change their salary tables.
Well for the VCs, you're the tech expert not them. And if they invest in duds, not your problem right? The issue would be if a good tech idea couldn't find funding, and in the current context I don't think it's the main issue anywhere ;)
As for the cultural problem: yes! Having been in SV and in France, I agree that France issue is primarily cultural. Too many people looking for safety first before opportunity. Lots of grumbling but much less moving. And not even getting safety in the end, as big corps are not very nice for old engineer and not the best environment to learn IMHO. There is a lack of luck there: close to the end of the first Internet bubble a lot of engineers, after a delay, had left heir big corps to joint start-ups. Just in time for the big Internet crash... A bad experience that made some very cautious during the next wave. Hopefully this memory will fade. Having a sustainable start-up ecosystem lasting over time, with motivating successes, will help. This requires funding over time.
> On 25 January 2011, Orange acquired a 49% stake in Dailymotion for €62 million, valuing the company at €120 million. On 10 January 2013 Orange bought the remaining 51% for €61 million. (source: Wikipedia)
So, the Dailymotion founders, investors and (hopefully) employees got a $123 million exit. (edited to fix the sum)
That said, in my experience government-based funds and grants usually do contain clauses that limit what you can do for a set period of years, in attempts to be able to reap the fruits of the investments (not neccessarily profits, but also employment, more activity and visibility to local IT sector, etc).
As with all funding, there are always at least some strings attached.
The SIF invested in 2009, they could have blocked any kind of exit involving a foreign (likely American) party after that point.
> As with all funding, there are always at least some strings attached.
Yes, but usually those are to make sure that minority shareholders also play ball if/when the bulk of the shares can be sold, not to stop a deal from going through based on Nationalistic grounds.
From my point of view it was just a crappier Youtube clone that managed to remain mildly successful because it tolerated NSFW and pirated content. I saw nothing particularly innovative about it.
For example, in the Netherlands, there's many "provincial development funds" (eg BOM, OostNL, InnovationQuarter), who generally have a pretty good, though somewhat slowish/bureaucreatic, reputation. But in the end they're all government owned one way or another.
If you stifle the ability for such deals to be consummated you remove the oxygen from a lot of the lower levels as well.
That being said, in general, the state is a passive investor. What happened with Dailymotion is way different.
First, the issue came from Arnaud Montebourg, a powerful Minister of the Economy with statist views in the former Socialist government. The current government is very different. (By the way, Montebourg was replaced by Emmanuel Macron, the current President of France, as Minister of the Economy under Hollande.)
Second and most important, by the time this happened Dailymotion had already been sold. It was a wholly owned subsidiary of France Télécom, the largest telecommunications operator in France (commercially known as Orange). That operator was state-owned until 2004, and even today the State is its largest shareholder.
In other words, the State prevented a former public company it basically still controlled from selling a wholly-owned subsidiary which happened to be a startup it bought before. I disagreed with the decision then, and I still disagree today, but it didn't prevent an exit. Rather, the actual exit of Dailymotion was to a company owned in part by the State...
EDITS:
- Looks like I was too slow to post and senko beat me to it.
- The "FSI" articles linked by others talk about, which invested in Dailymotion, is now part of the "BPI" I mentioned (it was merged with other vehicles that invested at different stages).
- Some French people regret Montebourg style, for instance a journalist recently tweeted his disagreement about the governmental OK to the sale of Photonis, a night vision company, to a foreign group (https://twitter.com/VincentLamigeon/status/11742379454543708...).
Anybody that wants to argue that the Dailymotion is a strategic asset to France or the EU is welcome to do so but I fear that it will be a stretch.
I see lots of them (50+) every year.
There was a case of a prime minister announcing a similar initiative and his wife incidentally (and later, unofficially) being involved in founding a large "accelerator" and office rental startup.
The entrepreneurial French all leave for London or Berlin.
That entrepreneur leave France is almost a meme, and I know it happens and have some friends among them, but not everyone leave either. I have the chance to regularly meet French entrepreneurs staying in France. It's certainly harder than in the US but definitely possible. The thing is, most are not in areas that can massively scale. It can be very high tech, with international exposure, but it will never become a Google or Amazon. It tends to be specialized tech that can sustain a small to mid company, but not a massive one. And as a result, it tend to stay under the radar when discussing start-ups and everyone having the GAFA in mind.
Him mentioning "unicorns" is just silly in a country where almost no one cares about the stock market. It would be more sensible to focus on SMEs and catch up with Germany and Italy, that have a more robust network of middle-sized industrial companies.
> “We need to create our champions,” Mr. Macron said, adding that his goal was to have at least 25 French tech unicorns by 2025, referring to companies with valuations exceeding €1 billion.
I see this as a rather futile endeavour, and a little bit of a personal insecurity manifestation. Just like as when Xi Jinping vent to California, been dined with all those "smart startupers," and then it hit him "Americans have startups, lets make some too!"
Second to it, why such fixation on the most egregious forms of "tech craze?" France has strong position in materials, chemicals, which strike not less hard economically, and are not less "tech" than cat video websites valued at $1B+
It is a foregone conclusion to me that $1B+ webdev weekend projects have no true economic backing behind them, and they are just artefacts of speculative expectations runaway.
