France was an unlikely choice of location for Mark Heath’s new start-up, given that the American’s mastery of the French language is, by his own cheerful admission, “atrocious.”
However, the fast-talking New Yorker is among a growing crowd of British and US entrepreneurs drawn to France by an optimistic mood under French President Emmanuel Macron and political worries at home.
“Every man has two countries — his own and France,” Heath said, quoting his favorite old expression.
“That saying has new wind in it these days, especially with the way things are going geopolitically,” he added.
Heath is set to launch his company Talaria at Station F, the cavernous Parisian train depot that has been transformed into the world’s biggest start-up hub.
The 35-year-old fell in love with France while serving a NATO stint with the US Air Force. He enrolled in a French business school last year, and is now developing a telecoms cable for financial markets.
Aside from wanting to learn French, he picked Paris over Silicon Valley because of a tech scene fast becoming one of the most exciting in Europe.
Anglophone entrepreneurs have long regarded France with trepidation, not least because other European countries were seen as happier to do business in English.
Yet, Station F took more applications from US and UK start-ups last year than any other countries, surprising even its director Roxanne Varza.
“What we’re starting to realize is that it might also be the political climate that is making these start-ups look for a new place,” said Varza, herself an American.
US President Donald Trump’s tirades against immigration have rattled start-ups reliant on international talent, she said, while some British firms are grasping for a European foothold as Brexit looms.
A vast glass and concrete structure filled with modern art and MacBooks, Station F is emblematic of Macron’s vision for a dynamic new France.
Funded by telecoms billionaire Xavier Niel, the 3,000-desk “campus” opened in June last year shortly after Macron’s election, with Facebook and Microsoft among companies nurturing its start-ups.
Macron said he wants France itself to “think and move like a start-up,” swiftly moving to reform its complex labor regulations.
That has already tempted to return some French entrepreneurs who previously turned their backs on home.
In a blog post titled So long and thanks for all the fish and chips, Frenchman Jean Meyer said Macron’s reforms had prompted him to move his dating app Once from London back home to France.
“I have lost track of the number of developers, marketing managers or data scientists who refused to join us following the Brexit vote,” he added, saying that the labor reforms were the icing on the cake.
Much of what is drawing tech firms to Paris predates Macron.
State investment bank Bpifrance, set up in 2013, has played a leading role in developing the sector, and it was Macron’s predecessor Francois Hollande who set up new visas for start-up entrepreneurs.
In addition, tech firms say it is long-term factors — such as universities that produce talented engineers — that really make France attractive.
Yet, investment firm Atomico credited Macron with fueling higher optimism in France than anywhere else in its State of European Tech report last year, thanks not least to his planned tax cuts.
Britain remained the biggest recipient of venture capital funding at US$5.4 billion with France behind on US$2.1 billion, but France closed the most deals, the report said.
“The amount of support given to entrepreneurs is certainly in my perception much stronger than we could possibly get in the UK,” said Tom Pullen, a 41-year-old Londoner who launched his consultancy Innovinco in Paris last year.
“Here we’re sure to remain inside the single market,” Pullen said. “For a start-up business like mine which is targeting large corporations — it will necessarily make things easier.”
However, for Zahir Bouchaala, another Brit who has moved into Station F, it would be an overstatement to say that doing business in France has changed overnight.
“It was a lot simpler to open and maintain a company in the UK,” said the 35-year-old software developer, although he too is positive about the mood under Macron.
Station F has a large office connecting entrepreneurs with officials to explain complex regulations, from patents to social security, he said.
Even so, Bouchaala is grappling with a bewildering stream of paperwork on everything from pensions to healthcare, now that his firm Bevolta has grown into a team of 10.
“France is still a country that is employee-focused more than boss-focused,” he said. “Even in the start-up world.”
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the