French Bashing/Promotion is irrelevant — what we learnt from accelerating 3 asian startups in Paris
Since the beginning of the year we’ve been hosting 3 startups launched by non-french founders. One team comes from Bangladesh, the other from Vietnam and the last from India. They came through our partnership with the French Tech Ticket pilot operation. The second edition has just been announced and this is great news! What we’ve leant so far can be of interest to any startup looking at an international scale (pleonasm?)…
A great opportunity for foreign entrepreneurs
First let’s give you a bit of context with a quick recap of how the pilot edition went: the french government partnered with BPI to help foreign entrepreneurs start their startup in France. In order to do so, they decided to provide the following ressources/services to the selected entrepreneurs:
- A three-year visa to stay in France and start a company — they setup an accelerated procedure
- A 25k€ grant per founder per team — up to 3 founders
- A place in one of the 9 selected partner accelerators and incubators
- Support from the DIRECCTE — a service helping startups with their administrative needs in France
- A series of workshops and educational sessions — in partnership with the accelerators and incubators as well as the “ambassadors” (foreign entrepreneurs who started their company in France and are now role models)
They awarded 49 entrepreneurs, representing 24 teams out of an impressive 700 startup applying! The selection process took place at the end of 2015 and the different accelerators and incubators have been hosting 1 to 3 startups since January.
If you want to discover the 3 startups we host in more details, take a look at this article about our current batch.
Why it’s awesome for Startup42
To Startup42, this is really a game changer. Because we want to set a great example for our startups and because we always thought being location focused was irrelevant to software companies wanting to eat the world, we’ve always communicated in English and looked outside of France.
That lead to a few European, Indian and American companies applying to Startup42. Unfortunately, none were selected. In any cases, because we do not invest cash into our startups (we do not take equity either and are free of charge) I think affording the life in Paris would have been difficult to these early-stage startups. Not to mention the visa problem for the US and Indian ones.
Both issues vanished with the French Tech Ticket program and we can finally support international startups applying to Startup42! We were so excited by the idea and so convinced that it would bring value that we even extend our classic 7-startups batch to 8 startups, making it a 3 out of 8 startups (almost 40%) being led by non-french founders.
Why it’s awesome for the accelerated startups
We always kept our batches small in order to foster help, emulation and peer-learning among it.
To give you a quick example of something that wouldn’t scale well otherwise, every week, all the startups gather and each shares their success and failures for the past week and their goal for the week to come. During these sessions, ideas fire super fast, connections are made and the faster startups push the slower to move faster. A lot of the value comes from the diversity of the founders and since non-french startups are put in the mix, we saw some new interesting remarks come up.
One of the best example was when the Bangladeshi startup guys told the ProcessOut — helping online shops to integrate international payments in a few clicks — that the main reason they decided to come to France was the fact that their previous SaaS business failed because they couldn’t easily sell online in Bangladesh and Malaysia. Not only does it validates the market in that region of the world for ProcessOut but it also showed them their most passionate early-adopters might be in an Asian country.
“Our country is internet, our market is global”
At Startup42 we only take teams with one or more hackers — meaning someone capable of turning any idea into code super fast. This implies most of the products they build can be accessible or downloaded online. Which means distribution can be global at no cost. So if the positioning is country-agnostic, the acquisition doesn’t require physical channels and the initial density doesn’t need to be location related, why even bother about countries?
Also if you fall into these cases, you should still try to think about what will happen to your model once you need to leave your initial location/country. Because if your model is not repeatable outside of France (or any other country, except the US, China or India), don’t even fantasise about raising money. It simply doesn’t make any sense.
I suggest you the awesome SlideShare from our mentor Boris Golden talking about early-stage investing for startups to help you understand why.
The best entrepreneurs are ok with English
Speaking about mentors, since we completely switched to English at Startup42, the 40 or so successful entrepreneurs that come talking to our little group of entrepreneurs have to speak English as well. Guess what, we didn’t need to find new entrepreneurs at all and it is no coincidence!
Firstly, as I explained, great startups are international and their founders too. So if you think you’re a little weak in English, it’s time to give it a push!
Secondly, note that I said “ok” with English. It’s not about being completely fluent, and I’m definitely not fluent myself considering the amount of mistakes nested in that text. It is about being good enough to sell your product and sell your vision to customers and partners. That’s good enough.
The proof we can attract top talents to France… Or not?
The Indian team is made of two top entrepreneurs who already had a previous success. When they decided to hop on a new journey, they chose to leave the Silicon Valley for a less cash intensive place: their home country. That’s where they made their first few customers. Then, because their model is country-agnostic, they directly thought about testing the European market.
They heard about the French Tech Ticket and thought France would be a centred-enough country to reach the rest of Europe. Though France seems a bit slow to react, Spain and Turkey respond positively to their product so their plan seem to roll out pretty well…
Except it now goes so well they would need another engineer. And the tech founder, being the number 5 Google Expert in the world, knows exactly who he wants: his friend whom he worked with in a previous startup and who is Indian as well. Which… is a problem since we don’t know if he can get a visa to come and join them! This is a huge issue and it clearly slows them down…
We are excited to be part of this new season!
All in all this experience shows that we can attract tech talents from around the world. Once they’re here, it brings value to our ecosystem, it makes it less about France and more about being pillar companies in Europe or in the world. But for now the startups are still not sure wether they want to stay after the program or not and our famous french bureaucracy seems to be a friction to them.
I hope this new season will bring even more tech talents to France and that, in return, France will make even more efforts to make their dream of starting and succeeding a business come true.
So if you know a startup that would be interested to come to France to start or develop their business, tell them to apply here. It’s definitely worth a shot!
Recommend this article if you liked it and follow me on Medium to read more awesome stories about entrepreneurship, growth hacking, lean startup and hackers… And of course check out Startup42, the best early-stage tech startups accelerator in Paris
