The 5 most surprising figures about entrepreneurs (we got from a 1,000 startups survey)

STATION F has spent a year among big numbers: 1,000 startups, 34,000 sq meters, 3,000 people… For STATION F’s first year of existence (happy birthday to us!), our team decided to set our record straight: what are the actual numbers beyond those big figures?

And what reality does that represent for the entrepreneurial ecosystem?

We conducted several surveys and crunched the data from a number of software providers, including our own Intranet, and came up with a full data report (graph nerds, this will enlighten your day). If you want to read it all, here it is: stationf.co/data

5 numbers stood out from the crowd as the most surprising ones.

#1 country foreign applications came from: the USA

A ton of people expect that entrepreneurs who move to Paris come from a closer geography, but in reality the US are by far the most represented country in the applications.

Then another question arises: why crossing the ocean to join our startup campus? We asked international entrepreneurs the reason for choosing STATION F, and although “Trump, Brexit or any other political situations” represented 6% of the answers, it’s very far down the ranking. Their number one motivation is actually the same as for French entrepreneurs: “being surrounded by thousands of entrepreneurs”.

Hail to the power of community!

If you’re wondering: American entrepreneurs are not the most represented in selected startups. Our top foreign country on campus is China. This figure can be explained by the fact that we have a whole program dedicated to Chineses companies called OuiCrea. You can read more about it on our blog!

A quarter of STATION F residents are parents

Surprise! Entrepreneurs are not all 20-somethings males in a hoodie, who are college drop outs coding away night and day. Actually, the average age at STATION F is 30,9 years old, and yes, there are tons of parents: 26% of residents!

The most surprising in all that is that despite having a family, most of our entrepreneurs don’t have any salaries or compensation, and work pretty long hours (75% of residents declared they work longer than 9am-7pm) So: hats off to them!

STATION F welcomed 70,000+ visitors

We sometimes hear people complaining it’s difficult to visit STATION F. Although we are very closely listening to criticism and consider any feedback a positive one, it has always surprised us considering we organize a ton of group tours and have a pretty efficient guest management system.

So we ran the numbers: through our guest system, residents have invited 63k different persons (some came several times). Through our free public tours, we’ve welcomed 600 visitors per month. And overall 2,5k people have visited French Tech Central.

Total is more than 70,000 people in a year! And this doesn’t even count the VIP tours and visits organized by our partners that we don’t track!

8 startups exited in just 1 year

Considering 50% of our startups are less than 3 years old, and 37% even less than 1 year old, we were already thrilled when we learned that Recast.AI was our first acquisition (see more on our blog).

Little did we know there were 7 whole other acquisitions we didn’t even know about! Often times, acquisitions remained untold about for confidentiality reasons.

The weirdest of the weird

And just because we love surprises, we asked the entrepreneurs what was the weirdest thing to happen on campus. And their answers… did not disappoint!

Don’t forget you can read more data on stationf.co/data and let us know which figures surprised YOU the most in the comments!