By continuing to use this site you consent to the use of cookies on your device as described in our cookie policy unless you have disabled them. You can change your cookie settings at any time but parts of our site will not function correctly without them. HOME WORLD US COMPANIES MARKETS OPINION WORK & CAREERS LIFE & ARTS Portfolio My Account Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2017. All rights reserved. Print this page Send this article COMMENTS Harriet Agnew in Paris 12 HOURS AGO More in this series John Gapper: Europe gains second chance on innovation Emilia Romagna leads Italy back from the brink As Europe’s economy recovers, companies and investors across the continent are gearing up for new opportunities, taking advantage of its hidden strengths: education, skills and innovative people. Here we look at why talent is being lured back to France. For US scientist and inventor Professor Newton Howard the decision to base his latest neuroscience project in Paris was a “no brainer”. “In France you have this tremendous talent pool and then you have the incentives offered by the French government,” says Prof Howard, the chief scientist at ni20, which is working on the next generation of brain prosthetics. This compares with the current situation in the US, where there is “rhetoric against foreigners”, and the UK, which is “surrounded by uncertainty” because of Brexit, he adds. In October, Prof Howard met Mounir Mahjoubi, France’s minister for the digital economy, to celebrate ni20’s decision to move its headquarters from Washington DC to Paris, where it plans to make its next 15 hires. “We had a wonderful welcome by the minister and his staff,” recalls Prof Howard, who considered the US and the UK before settling on Paris. Prof Howard is typical of a growing number of scientists, entrepreneurs, engineers and financiers who are moving or returning to France in response to some combination of the push of President Donald Trump in the US and of Brexit in the UK, and the simultaneous pull of France under President Emmanuel Macron. Some of them are French nationals living abroad, while others are foreigners. Collectively, they represent tentative signs that a multiyear brain drain from France may have reached a turning point. “It’s no longer a one-way trip out of France,” says Reza Malekzadeh, a general partner at venture capital fund Partech in Silicon Valley. “That’s the big difference.” Professor Newton Howard, left, with France's minister for the digital economy, Mounir Mahjoubi While there is a lack of reliable data, the French national statistics bureau estimated in 2016 that about 3m people who were born in France now live abroad. Under Socialist president François Hollande, entrepreneurs who faced punitive taxes and stiff regulations called themselves Les Pigeons, slang for suckers. They fled France for London or Silicon Valley, drawn to a “can-do” mindset and a large pool of potential investors and customers. For many, returning home was unthinkable. However, dozens of interviews with entrepreneurs and investors suggest that opinions of France are changing. A special fast-track tech visa, introduced by Mr Macron, has already received 1,000 applications and there have been “several hundred” more from scientists who want to move to France, says Mr Mahjoubi. So far in 2017, France is, for the first time, raising more venture capital than the UK. After the first eight months of the year, France had raised €2.7bn of venture capital, compared with €2.3bn for the UK and €1.1bn in Germany, according to Dealroom, a European venture capital database. Share this graphic More than one in two US investors plan to recruit new employees in France in the next few years, compared with one in five in 2016, according to a recent report by consultants Bain and the American Chamber of Commerce in France. The Family, a platform for entrepreneurs that is at the heart of the French start-up scene, says that since Mr Macron was elected, it has received weekly requests about job opportunities in France. Tony Fadell, one of the fathers of the iPod and founder of Nest Labs, moved to France last year after about 25 years or so in the US and is running a venture capital firm from Paris. He says he wanted “to get fresh inspiring ideas and great technologies from places outside Silicon Valley”. Other senior executives moving from London to Paris include Pascal Cagni, who ran Apple’s operations in Europe from 2000-12 and is now France’s business ambassador, and Johannes Huth, who runs private equity firm KKR in Europe. “I am fascinated with what’s happening in France; I think Mr Macron is a very positive influence,” says Mr Huth. For some, the election of Mr Macron was the catalyst they needed to return. “The way that Macron created [his political movement] En Marche is very entrepreneurial,” says Michael Amar, a serial entrepreneur and investor, who decided the day after the French election to leave Silicon Valley for Aix-en- Provence, one of several regional cities that have become technology hubs. “He’s a role model for entrepreneurs.” Mr Macron’s pro-business and tech-friendly government is crystallising momentum that has been quietly building up in France for years, businesspeople say. As well as a €10bn fund to foster technology innovation and the launch of the French tech visa, Mr Macron has pushed through plans to scrap the wealth tax on everything except property assets and introduced a flat 30 per cent tax rate on capital gains — measures long demanded by entrepreneurs and wealthy investors. This momentum had been established before the election of Mr Macron, some say, thanks in part to changes introduced by Mr Hollande. These include tax credits for research that built upon the country’s strong engineering schools. “French tech was already gaining ground before the macro situation changed,” says Rand Hindi, whose start-up Snips runs an artificial intelligence-powered voice assistant that can be added to different devices. He cites the 2012 creation of Bpifrance, a public investment bank that has poured money into French start-ups, as well as Station F, a giant campus for new companies funded by billionaire entrepreneur Xavier Niel. “The image of the French tech scene from abroad has changed,” says Olivier Bonnet, a Frenchman who returned to Paris this summer to join ride-sharing platform BlaBlaCar as vice-president of engineering, after 13 years at Apple in California. “There is a first generation of successful tech companies that is giving self confidence to France as a start-up nation.” Other factors, such as the clampdown on immigration in the US — a key source of tech talent — and the vote for Brexit, have also made France more attractive. Jean Meyer launched Once, a dating app, in London in 2015. Staying in France then would have been “inconceivable”, he said. The UK was far more appealing in terms of its ability to lure international talent, access to capital and more flexible labour market. But after the vote for Brexit, it became almost impossible to hire such staff in London, so Mr Meyer moved back. “The lack of visibility following Brexit was a huge problem,” says Mr Meyer, explaining that non-UK citizens were reluctant to commit to a future in London. He adds: “We were trying to hire a chief marketing officer but we got rejected by four or five amazing candidates just because we were in London.” Snips, which originally planned to hire 20 people in New York and 30 in Paris, has hired 46 in the French capital and only three in the US. “Once Trump and then Macron got elected, it changed the opportunity for us,” says Mr Hindi. “It made it very difficult to hire anyone in America who isn’t American. We have cut back on our plan to build up in the US and decided to double down on recruitment in France.” Sofiane Ammar, a serial entrepreneur, left London for Aix-en-Provence this summer to run “thecamp”, a futuristic campus that hopes to generate new approaches to universal issues. “I didn’t feel comfortable with the idea that the UK would be outside Europe,” he says. “And I felt that the election of Macron opened the door for entrepreneurs and the start-up nation. What is happening now in France is extraordinary.” The changing attitude to entrepreneurs is striking. Solomon Hykes has first- hand experience of this. He set up an IT infrastructure business, now called Docker, in 2008 from his mother’s basement in Paris. He spent two years trying — unsuccessfully — to find investors in France, and became increasingly demoralised. “Everyone and everything were bringing me down, telling me one thousand ways I was going to fail,” he recalls, a marked contrast to the atmosphere he found when he visited California. “In California people assume you’re going to succeed, they’re interested in discussing how. The second someone in California was willing to write me a cheque, I was gone.” After securing an investment from YCombinator, a prominent Silicon Valley seed investor, Mr Hykes moved to San Francisco at the end of 2010 and built up the company into a unicorn (a privately held company worth over a billion dollars). But a year ago Mr Hykes changed his mind on France, partly because of its strong engineering talent. “It would be extremely hard to grow Docker only by hiring engineers out of Silicon Valley. They’re just not affordable. In France there’s an expertise that is hard to find at any cost in Silicon Valley,” he says. Emmanuel Macron at the Viva Technology event, dedicated to start-ups and digital technology, in Paris this June © Reuters But while the mood has changed since Mr Macron was elected, not everyone is convinced. Some argue that the French government’s labour market and fiscal reforms are still in their early days and that France needs to do more to prove it is a pro-business environment. Alain Thibault, the French entrepreneur behind the SeaBubbles electric transport pods that “fly” on the water, announced in October that they would sail first on Swiss waters, because of the administrative and regulatory burden that had held development back in France. He says that despite“the strong momentum of Emmanuel Macron and Anne Hidalgo [mayor of Paris], this start-up nation” is in name only. Audrey Richard-Laurent has moved back and forth between California and Paris since 2012. Now she is choosing to launch her wellbeing and productivity platform, Awakeful, in San Francisco or Los Angeles rather than Paris. “Creating a company in the US is super simple compared to France,” she says. “And France is a small market compared to the US.” Persuading French expats to return home — or expand their businesses in France — is one thing. But France is also attracting a younger generation of tech-savvy Americans put off by the high cost of living in Silicon Valley. Rob Zyskowski, a software engineer, settled on Paris over London and New York. He joined Alan, an insurance tech start-up whose French co-founder also returned from Silicon Valley to help set up the business. “There was a lot of fear and anxious energy in San Francisco,” says Mr Zyskowski. “It felt like it had got to the point where the only way is down. In Paris the feeling is of a burgeoning scene.” His sentiment is shared by Jorie Koster-Hale, an American from New Mexico who now works as a data scientist at tech company Dataiku in Paris. “France is becoming more and more on the radar as a place with innovation and opportunities,” she says, “even if you’re not French.” Upcoming articles in our series on Europe’s innovation comeback will look at how Switzerland leads on training and why Brussels is pinning its hopes on the ‘internet of things’ 27 Latest on Innovation Emilia Romagna leads Italy back from the brink Europe gains second chance on innovation The dawning of Pax Technica Personal Technology Review: Apple Watch v Fitbit Ionic Inside Business Sarah Gordon Brexit and outdated education risk UK tech ambitions Latest on Innovation Add to myFT Analysis Innovation Emilia Romagna leads Italy back from the brink John Gapper Europe gains second chance on innovation John Thornhill The dawning of Pax Technica Promoted Content Promoted content paid for by Prodigy Finance An MBA or an EMBA? What’s right for you? An EMBA provides roughly the same education as an MBA. But there are critical differences in the delivery of information and the students each programme desires. There’s also, usually, differences in price – and who foots that bill. Latest in Europe Add to myFT fastFT European Parliament failed to pass ‘kebab ban’ bill 4 HOURS AGO Brussels Briefing Tusk’s migration paper exposes old EU divisions Interview Europe Italy’s Gentiloni warns European integration at risk Follow the topics mentioned in this article Follow the authors of this article France competitiveness Add to myFT France Add to myFT Emmanuel Macron Add to myFT World Add to myFT Europe Add to myFT Harriet Agnew Add to myFT Take a tour of myFT Markets data delayed by at least 15 minutes. © THE FINANCIAL TIMES LTD 2017. FT and ‘Financial Times’ are trademarks of The Financial Times Ltd. The Financial Times and its journalism are subject to a self-regulation regime under the FT Editorial Code of Practice . Support View Site Tips Feedback Help Centre About Us Accessibility Legal & Privacy Terms & Conditions Privacy Cookies Copyright Slavery Statement & Policies Services FT Live Share News Tips Securely Individual Subscriptions Group Subscriptions Republishing Contracts & Tenders Analysts Research Executive Job Search Advertise with the FT Follow the FT on Twitter FT Transact UK Secondary Schools Tools Portfolio Today's Newspaper (ePaper) Alerts Hub Lexicon MBA Rankings Economic Calendar News feed Newsletters Currency Converter More from the FT Group Innovation Add to myFT Europe’s innovation comeback: Macron sparks return of ‘Les Pigeons’ Entrepreneurs and financiers drawn to France as brain drain goes into reverse S S S S E Save
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HOME WORLD US COMPANIES MARKETS OPINION WORK & CAREERS LIFE & ARTS Portfolio My Account
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2017. All rights reserved. Print this page Send this article
COMMENTS
Harriet Agnew in Paris
12 HOURS AGO
More in this series
John Gapper: Europe gains second chanceon innovation
Emilia Romagna leads Italy back from thebrink
As Europe’s economy recovers, companies and investors across the continentare gearing up for new opportunities, taking advantage of its hiddenstrengths: education, skills and innovative people. Here we look at why talentis being lured back to France.
For US scientist and inventor Professor Newton Howard the decision to basehis latest neuroscience project in Paris was a “no brainer”.
“In France you have this tremendous talent pool and then you have theincentives offered by the French government,” says Prof Howard, the chiefscientist at ni20, which is working on the next generation of brain prosthetics.This compares with the current situation in the US, where there is “rhetoricagainst foreigners”, and the UK, which is “surrounded by uncertainty” becauseof Brexit, he adds.
In October, Prof Howard met Mounir Mahjoubi, France’s minister for thedigital economy, to celebrate ni20’s decision to move its headquarters fromWashington DC to Paris, where it plans to make its next 15 hires.
“We had a wonderful welcome by the minister and his staff,” recalls ProfHoward, who considered the US and the UK before settling on Paris.
Prof Howard is typical of a growing number of scientists, entrepreneurs,engineers and financiers who are moving or returning to France in response tosome combination of the push of President Donald Trump in the US and ofBrexit in the UK, and the simultaneous pull of France under PresidentEmmanuel Macron.
Some of them are French nationals living abroad, while others are foreigners.Collectively, they represent tentative signs that a multiyear brain drain fromFrance may have reached a turning point. “It’s no longer a one-way trip out ofFrance,” says Reza Malekzadeh, a general partner at venture capital fundPartech in Silicon Valley. “That’s the big difference.”
Professor Newton Howard, left, with France's minister for the digital economy, Mounir Mahjoubi
While there is a lack of reliable data, the French national statistics bureauestimated in 2016 that about 3m people who were born in France now liveabroad. Under Socialist president François Hollande, entrepreneurs who facedpunitive taxes and stiff regulations called themselves Les Pigeons, slang forsuckers. They fled France for London or Silicon Valley, drawn to a “can-do”mindset and a large pool of potential investors and customers. For many,returning home was unthinkable.
However, dozens of interviews with entrepreneurs and investors suggest thatopinions of France are changing. A special fast-track tech visa, introduced byMr Macron, has already received 1,000 applications and there have been“several hundred” more from scientists who want to move to France, says MrMahjoubi.
So far in 2017, France is, for the first time, raising more venture capital thanthe UK. After the first eight months of the year, France had raised €2.7bn ofventure capital, compared with €2.3bn for the UK and €1.1bn in Germany,according to Dealroom, a European venture capital database.
Share this graphic
More than one in two US investors plan to recruit new employees in France inthe next few years, compared with one in five in 2016, according to a recentreport by consultants Bain and the American Chamber of Commerce in France.
The Family, a platform for entrepreneurs that is at the heart of the Frenchstart-up scene, says that since Mr Macron was elected, it has received weeklyrequests about job opportunities in France.
Tony Fadell, one of the fathers of the iPod and founder of Nest Labs, moved toFrance last year after about 25 years or so in the US and is running a venturecapital firm from Paris. He says he wanted “to get fresh inspiring ideas andgreat technologies from places outside Silicon Valley”.
Other senior executives moving from London to Paris include Pascal Cagni,who ran Apple’s operations in Europe from 2000-12 and is now France’sbusiness ambassador, and Johannes Huth, who runs private equity firm KKRin Europe. “I am fascinated with what’s happening in France; I think MrMacron is a very positive influence,” says Mr Huth.
For some, the election of Mr Macron was the catalyst they needed to return.“The way that Macron created [his political movement] En Marche is veryentrepreneurial,” says Michael Amar, a serial entrepreneur and investor, whodecided the day after the French election to leave Silicon Valley for Aix-en-Provence, one of several regional cities that have become technology hubs.“He’s a role model for entrepreneurs.”
Mr Macron’s pro-business and tech-friendly government is crystallisingmomentum that has been quietly building up in France for years,businesspeople say.
As well as a €10bn fund to foster technology innovation and the launch of theFrench tech visa, Mr Macron has pushed through plans to scrap the wealth taxon everything except property assets and introduced a flat 30 per cent tax rateon capital gains — measures long demanded by entrepreneurs and wealthyinvestors.
This momentum had been establishedbefore the election of Mr Macron, somesay, thanks in part to changes introducedby Mr Hollande. These include tax creditsfor research that built upon the country’sstrong engineering schools. “French tech
was already gaining ground before the macro situation changed,” says RandHindi, whose start-up Snips runs an artificial intelligence-powered voiceassistant that can be added to different devices.
He cites the 2012 creation of Bpifrance, a public investment bank that haspoured money into French start-ups, as well as Station F, a giant campus fornew companies funded by billionaire entrepreneur Xavier Niel.
“The image of the French tech scene from abroad has changed,” says OlivierBonnet, a Frenchman who returned to Paris this summer to join ride-sharingplatform BlaBlaCar as vice-president of engineering, after 13 years at Apple inCalifornia. “There is a first generation of successful tech companies that isgiving self confidence to France as a start-up nation.”
Other factors, such as the clampdown on immigration in the US — a key sourceof tech talent — and the vote for Brexit, have also made France more attractive.
Jean Meyer launched Once, a dating app, in London in 2015. Staying in Francethen would have been “inconceivable”, he said. The UK was far more appealingin terms of its ability to lure international talent, access to capital and moreflexible labour market. But after the vote for Brexit, it became almostimpossible to hire such staff in London, so Mr Meyer moved back.
“The lack of visibility following Brexit was a huge problem,” says Mr Meyer,explaining that non-UK citizens were reluctant to commit to a future inLondon. He adds: “We were trying to hire a chief marketing officer but we gotrejected by four or five amazing candidates just because we were in London.”
Snips, which originally planned to hire 20 people in New York and 30 in Paris,has hired 46 in the French capital and only three in the US. “Once Trump andthen Macron got elected, it changed the opportunity for us,” says Mr Hindi. “Itmade it very difficult to hire anyone in America who isn’t American. We havecut back on our plan to build up in the US and decided to double down onrecruitment in France.”
Sofiane Ammar, a serial entrepreneur, left London for Aix-en-Provence thissummer to run “thecamp”, a futuristic campus that hopes to generate newapproaches to universal issues.
“I didn’t feel comfortable with the idea that the UK would be outside Europe,”he says. “And I felt that the election of Macron opened the door forentrepreneurs and the start-up nation. What is happening now in France isextraordinary.”
The changing attitude to entrepreneurs is striking. Solomon Hykes has first-hand experience of this. He set up an IT infrastructure business, now calledDocker, in 2008 from his mother’s basement in Paris. He spent two yearstrying — unsuccessfully — to find investors in France, and became increasinglydemoralised. “Everyone and everything were bringing me down, telling me onethousand ways I was going to fail,” he recalls, a marked contrast to theatmosphere he found when he visited California.
“In California people assume you’re going to succeed, they’re interested indiscussing how. The second someone in California was willing to write me acheque, I was gone.” After securing an investment from YCombinator, aprominent Silicon Valley seed investor, Mr Hykes moved to San Francisco atthe end of 2010 and built up the company into a unicorn (a privately heldcompany worth over a billion dollars).
But a year ago Mr Hykes changed his mind on France, partly because of itsstrong engineering talent. “It would be extremely hard to grow Docker only byhiring engineers out of Silicon Valley. They’re just not affordable. In Francethere’s an expertise that is hard to find at any cost in Silicon Valley,” he says.
Emmanuel Macron at the Viva Technology event, dedicated to start-ups and digital technology, in Paris this June © Reuters
But while the mood has changed since Mr Macron was elected, not everyone isconvinced. Some argue that the French government’s labour market and fiscalreforms are still in their early days and that France needs to do more to prove itis a pro-business environment.
Alain Thibault, the French entrepreneur behind the SeaBubbles electrictransport pods that “fly” on the water, announced in October that they wouldsail first on Swiss waters, because of the administrative and regulatory burdenthat had held development back in France. He says that despite“the strongmomentum of Emmanuel Macron and Anne Hidalgo [mayor of Paris], thisstart-up nation” is in name only.
Audrey Richard-Laurent has moved back and forth between California andParis since 2012. Now she is choosing to launch her wellbeing and productivityplatform, Awakeful, in San Francisco or Los Angeles rather than Paris.“Creating a company in the US is super simple compared to France,” she says.“And France is a small market compared to the US.”
Persuading French expats to return home — or expand their businesses inFrance — is one thing. But France is also attracting a younger generation oftech-savvy Americans put off by the high cost of living in Silicon Valley.
Rob Zyskowski, a software engineer, settled on Paris over London and NewYork. He joined Alan, an insurance tech start-up whose French co-founder alsoreturned from Silicon Valley to help set up the business. “There was a lot of fearand anxious energy in San Francisco,” says Mr Zyskowski. “It felt like it had gotto the point where the only way is down. In Paris the feeling is of a burgeoningscene.”
His sentiment is shared by Jorie Koster-Hale, an American from New Mexicowho now works as a data scientist at tech company Dataiku in Paris. “France isbecoming more and more on the radar as a place with innovation andopportunities,” she says, “even if you’re not French.”
Upcoming articles in our series on Europe’s innovation comeback will look athow Switzerland leads on training and why Brussels is pinning its hopes onthe ‘internet of things’
27
Latest on Innovation
Emilia Romagna leads Italy back fromthe brink
Europe gains second chance oninnovation
The dawning of Pax Technica
Personal Technology
Review: Apple Watch v Fitbit Ionic
Inside Business Sarah Gordon
Brexit and outdated education risk UKtech ambitions
Latest on Innovation Add to myFT
Analysis Innovation
Emilia Romagna leads Italyback from the brink
John Gapper
Europe gains second chance on innovation
John Thornhill
The dawning of Pax Technica
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An MBA or an EMBA? What’s right for you?
An EMBA provides roughly the same education as an MBA. But there are critical differences in the deliveryof information and the students each programme desires. There’s also, usually, differences in price – andwho foots that bill.
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