Macron Secures €5B Investment to Boost French Tech Startups

I worked in both French and US startups, and the french startup ecosystem felt like cargo cult.<p>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.<p>It&#x27;s a cultural problem, and throwing money at it won&#x27;t solve it.

People taking money from French state related funds should be very careful with the small print and study the case of DailyMotion with great attention to detail. Lest you too end up being deprived of a well deserved exit.

The French model of innovation is very much that it is a thing that happens in a lab buried deep in the bowels of a giant state-backed enterprise, by salaried workers with absolute job security but no equity participation.<p>The entrepreneurial French all leave for London or Berlin.

SeedTable sent out a newsletter last Friday about this but with additional insights on the French tech scene. Also worth a read: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;us8.campaign-archive.com&#x2F;?u=32b602d9ab9d238ceb45e3f05&amp;id=3522e9805f" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;us8.campaign-archive.com&#x2F;?u=32b602d9ab9d238ceb45e3f0...</a>

This is just a gimmick. France is not America. That does not mean it doesn&#x27;t work; it&#x27;s just a different model. The focus should be on improving the current system rather than trying to import a model that is too culturally incompatible. The current system is essentially a technocracy, with the government and a few large companies working together (but in a different and much better way than they &quot;work together&quot; in America). So far, it has remained mostly meritocratic, with a few exceptions, naturally. This has produced amazing stuff; the Minitel (first nationwide computer network in the world, as far as I can tell), focus on nuclear power, high-speed trains, Airbus, an entirely indigenous launcher and defense program and so on. And a generous welfare system that used to work.<p>Him mentioning &quot;unicorns&quot; 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.

No money for small companies, only for scale-ups.

Startups need a fertile market to thrive

Not sure how smart it is for insurance and pensions companies to invest their endowment and policy funds in startups.

Getting funding in EU right now typically involves miles of red tape and&#x2F;or friends in the right places. Hopefully they address these issues. Would not hold my breath though.

I have hard time seeing why state needs involve itself in private market financing.<p>&gt; “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.<p>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 &quot;smart startupers,&quot; and then it hit him &quot;Americans have startups, lets make some too!&quot;<p>Second to it, why such fixation on the most egregious forms of &quot;tech craze?&quot; France has strong position in materials, chemicals, which strike not less hard economically, and are not less &quot;tech&quot; than cat video websites valued at $1B+<p>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.