taxes, business-registration, venture-capital, e-commerceThe site of La Halle Freyssinet: (in English) http://1000startups.fr/?lang=en
No opinion on the incubator itself, but Xavier Niel is a solid patron and Paris is a wonderful city to live in if you can afford it.
The French startup culture is a bit different than the US/UK ones. Or at least it was ~15 years ago - I can’t imagine it changed that much, but do take all of this with a grain of salt.
Off the bat, it’s more elitist, in that you see plenty of Grande Ecole graduates and - let’s get real - not much else (that succeeds, anyway).
Getting funding was much harder than it was in the US. I take it this improved in recent years, in that the French are reportedly less risk averse, but I still can’t picture a French funding anything with a half baked business plan, and I can still picture the least risk averse of them running away to work in the US/UK/wherever like yours truly did.
The administrative environment is reputedly terrible, but that’s simply not true: having lived in many European and North/Central American countries, I’d suggest France has one of the most efficient and competent administrations out there - it’s much better than the ones that run the US and Canada, and their’s are much better than those of their southern neighbors. As a bonus, there are state-related aids that you can request here and there when you get started.
Employment laws are different. It’s not an “at will” place like it is in most of the US, so it’s more expensive to fire bad employees.
That said, bad employees are not that common in reality: there’s a strong emphasis on maths in the education system, and philosophy is mandatory in high school. Those translate into a general population that is well educated and very sophisticated. And as already pointed out, you’ll find a lot of Grande Ecole graduates in the startup world - the competitive exams these grads went through a pretty good filter. The only minus here is a general preference for vague broad strokes over precise small details when making decisions (try Central Europe if you prefer it the other way), and a strong taste for perfectionism.
Also, French work very hard. Much harder than Brits or Americans, who they typically outperform while working less.
The 35h are a thing of legend, by the way. The type of people who you’d normally hire in a tech startup will happily work 40+h weeks - as will most French if you pay them. They will claim their extra vacation time of course.
One bad aspect in my opinion is that if you’re not from a Grande Ecole or a top university your access to good advice and opportunities is a bit more limited (because of inferior alumni networks, and esprit de corps). The same holds for early stage funding - which isn’t that bad in some sense, in that few weak startups make it through the BS-detector.
Another potential one is cultural: where it’s considered acceptable in the US to throw money at a crazy idea and drive a company into the ground while doing so (and then start over), you’ll find it harder and harder to raise money if your earlier ventures closed shop.
A last point to keep in mind is market size and cultural variety. The typical route for US startups is to grow home in the (massive) US/Canada market, and then struggle somewhat as they try breaking into Europe. The occasional EU startup that makes it to the US finds the US market comparatively easy to enter: they’ve been localizing and addressing pluri-cultural problematics from early on, in order to get into all of Europe at the same time. The difference here being, of course, that by the time a US company enters Europe it has a sizable revenue, whereas by the time an EU one enters the rest of Europe it won’t. (This may be less true nowadays, since you can be 100% online and start in the US anyway, but it used to be like that.)
All this begs the question of whether there might be better places to create a business. There probably are. But do they offer the same quality of life as the one you’ll have in Paris?
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