As a previous foreign entrepreneur who lived in Paris for 8 years here's my experience and my advice: In paris entrepreneurship is a VIP club for rich people who will rarely take real risk. Seed investment is next to impossible. The tax reduction schemes requires months of procedures and administrative paperwork. Real estate is almost as expensive as London. And the worst, if you're a foreigner you'll have a real hard time given all the immigration laws nonsense.
You're better off making your startup almost anywhere else.
EDIT: and as other comments said, people don't speak English, the French have some sort of pride of only speaking their native language ...
Wow, that's a great deal of french bashing in such a short comment. I agree that the immigration laws must be a real pain for some people. But for the rest, you must have been out of luck :
- tax reduction schemes are a no brainer, you just have to justify once a year that you are doing something in relation with R&D, and there are too lots of ways to get some government grant to help start your business
- french entrepreneurs are from a lot of different origins. Of course you will find and some rich people creating companies, but most of the people creating companies here are taking real risks and don't have large amount of cash to back them if they fail
- seed investment is not difficult at all, and government grants are here too to help save your shares, even better that seed .
I am telling this as a cofounder of Stupeflix, the company behind Replay, app of the year on the Apple App Store, and proudly based in Paris for 6 years now.
EDIT: sorry for my English, it's not my native language, but I am trying hard to learn it...
Can we stop with this? I'm tired of French people always responding to any kind of critics with the "French bashing" strawman. I'm French myself by the way.
> and government grants are here too to help
Most entrepreneurs don't want the government to help, they want the government to stay out of the way. A concept many of my fellow French have a hard time understanding the benefits.
I can assure you that you will want the government to help, especially when you don't have any money to start your business. You should ask a few entrepreneurs about this.
So you choose to suffer the bad sides of the government without taking any advantage from it ? You are free to do so, but is it really the wisest solution when you are just looking for a solution to survive ? And isn't it a form of church too, to refuse anything coming from the government ?
(I am not from any church, if you're asking)
Tax reductions schemes are mostly abused AFAIK. Very few startups do anything resembling actual R&D, but they still use the tax schemes, which could be risky in case of tax audit. Anyway, most early startups won't benefit from that as they have no profit to show so it is mostly a moot point.
As for the other points from the parent, they're not specific to France. The "startups are a rich man's game" problem is universal, and financing is just as hard to raise anywhere. Of course you'll probably raise a much smaller amount in France than SV but that's to be expected.
However, I agree with you that we have a nice perk : anyone with a good plan & a few months of free time to write up the paperwork can get something like 50K in grants, without giving up any equity. That's not very useful for an Internet company but can be a tremendous help for dedicated teams in other fields.
You don't have to make some profit to benefit it, as you get employer taxes back for R&D employees, which can be very important, something like 40% of employee cost. It lowers a lot cost per employee.
> - tax reduction schemes are a no brainer, you just have to justify once a year that you are doing something in relation with R&D, and there are too lots of ways to get some government grant to help start your business
Really? Have you spent time filing them? I have, and they were a big time waster for me. There is a way out, of course (i.e. pay some specialized company to file them for you).
Yes, of course, no paperwork at all would be perfect, you don't want to waste your time on anything but your job, but the benefits are really worth it.
And to answer you, I had to do some reporting, yes.
Most French people don't speak english. Younger generations do, but not very well. Hopefully, the average will rise to netherlands/scandinavian levels with time.
In professional settings, I think you would be hard pressed to find someone you cannot communicate with in english. It has been a requirement for most higher ed degrees for years now.
But come on, blasting a country because the average citizen doesn't speak your language well seems a little entitled in my book. If you're going anywhere to settle down (not for vacation), learning the local language should be high on your list.
Edit: no comment about your other points though. You actually have more experience dealing with them than I do.
English is not a native language there, it should be obvious that most people can't/won't speak English and English can be used only when you can't speak the local language. It's not unique to France but also the case of Spain, Italy and most non-English speaking countries to be fair, the world is not only made of English speaking countries.
I happen to be in Paris in these days in order to have a look at the startup and tech scene there.
So far I am surprised how well most french people speak English. Not perfect, of course, but they do not mind switching to english in a meetup presentation.
I can not say much about the points you mention, though, as I have not been long enough in the city of Paris to get relevant data.
I don't know if it's pride or lack of mastery of the English language. Even though it's the most taught one after French, it's still not well imprinted in people's mind.
There are a bunch of nice things to be said about Paris and the tax rebate system they put in place for startups and companies that spend heavily in R&D. However I think that Paris has a very low quality of life in most of the fields that are ignored in metrics:
- Apartment prices are usually measure by the room when doing comparisons. In Paris the room count is misleading: I've seen studios smaller than 15 m^2 and 1BR smaller than 25 m^2.
- Apartment quality is really really bad: creaky, cracked hardwood floors that haven't been replaced since Haussmann, humidity and mold are the default.
- The weather is awful, it rains 40% of the days.
- This might sound surprising but the average food quality is abysmal: produce is expensive and tastes like nothing and the random brasserie is an expensive tourist trap.
- Some of the stereotypes about the Parisian being grumpy and pretending not to speak English have a grain of truth. [edit: this is going to get me downvoted to hell]
So if you are really planning to start a business in France, go to another city: e.g. Lille is a thriving city with a very rich cultural life, it's 1h away from Paris by train (if you need to network you can commute) and doesn't suffer from most of the above (except for the climate).
A city like Lille (or Strasbourg, Nantes, etc.) offers a much better quality of life but looks like to a small village regarding tech, in comparison to Paris. The business activity outside Paris in very weak. Few startups, few engineers, few meetups ... I don't regret my former "provincial" life, even if I live now in a small apartment in a decrepit building in a noisy neighborhood.
That's a problem in France, everything is centralized in Paris.
There are aternatives though: I worked for a few years in Grenoble (I'm now in Lyon) and there are interesting meetups in Geneva and Lyon which are both about 1 hour from Grenoble by car or train.
Wow, rare to see people from the Rhône-Alpes area on HN :) I'm a student in engineering and I live in Lyon too, can you tell more about these events/meetups ? I'd be really interested !
Well, in France we don't have the culture of junk food and fast-food... If you want to eat that way you need to prepare it yourself, if not yeah you're right it's more expensive than NYC.
But you should try a sandwich with a good baguette !
I lived four years in Paris and the fact that junk food culture is absent in France is a myth!
University cafeterias serve fries every day as one of the options and there are a lot of kebab places throughout the city, but mind you not a good pita with lots of salad, but a sandwich with a ton fries.
Moreover I think a slice of pizza with tomato and mozzarella is not junk food. But maybe that's just me.
You can have a nice pizza for 8-9€ these days in Paris, a really good crepe for 5-7€, tasty bo buns (vietnamese noodle dish) are usually less than 10€ in the asian neigbourhoods, etc.
No, believe me. If you think that the pizza you get for 8-9€ is decent, take the time, once in your lifetime, to visit Naples. There are a couple of good pizza places in Paris, but prices hover around 15€ per pizza.
1. What makes you think I have never been to Naples? I've actually been there, and many places in Italy, over the years. There are amazing places, and crappy tourist places, just like everywhere in the world.
2. I said "decent", not "outstanding". You can get decent pizze in Paris for less than 10€ in any decent pizzeria (there are some bad ones, just don't come back to them).
I did the computation myself I think in the span 2000-2013, using data from Wolfram|Alpha and I was surprised to find that Paris had 46% of days with at least one shower.
Here are the cities I had checked:
London 42
Paris 46
Rome 23
Boston 32
Buenos Aires 30
San Francisco 18
Lima 21
Beijing 24
Sydney 20
Moscow 31
If you want to try it yourself from the beginning of 2000 to now:
It's not that they pretend, they really don't speak English ;-)
More precisely they have some notions of English but 1) they won't understand a native and can only pick a few words 2) they're ashamed of their accent so they won't even try to speak 3) due to their poor lifestyle Parisians are (mostly) dicks and do not represent Frenchies in general.
Don't get fooled by the French people you see on HN (like me) they are a rarity.
> due to their poor lifestyle Parisians are (mostly) dicks and do not represent Frenchies in general.
Really? Cause that's a pretty dickish thing to say. Also, most people who work/live in Paris are not actually from here, so if you consider Paris to be full of dicks, that would mean most French are too. Just saying.
I had it on the tip of my tongue, but I did not want to sound too offensive; although I dread to say it, it is quite true; however, it's not uncommon to hear people at least trying.
Have you lived in Paris? Everyone I talk to tell me parisians* are dicks. I don't get how an entire city can be full of only arrogant bastards. Is that really the case?
Yes I tried to live in Paris and I ran away after just 2 weeks (crappy job didn't help). I go there about once a year, and it's enough.
Parisians treat everybody badly, it's not specifically directed at foreigners, I'm French and I feel like I'm annoying them too.
Off course I'm generalizing here. If they know you they will treat you humanly. But just try to ask your direction to someone in the street and feel the "love" :-)
I'm curious to know where your comparison is coming from? You obviously had some experience with Paris but I'd like to know where you were living before you went to Paris.
Coming from NYC I don't see that much of a difference in some of the things you've mentioned from living here.
From your description, Paris sounds like a cheaper London, minus the English - I wouldn't recommend moving there to create your company if you don't speak French, administrative tasks will be too much of a pain, and many people in France don't speak English.
I'm french and I worked with two foreigners (US & Canada) in a parisian startup. One of them didn't bother learning french, and it was ok. He was mostly hanging out with other expats, and seemed to enjoy it.
Nonetheless, it is hard for foreigner to find an apartment to rent, but it's hard for everyone. And since whining about real estate is the national sport it somehow eased their integration and they quickly found colleagues to help them in this task.
France is not the UK, and it's not the US either. If you want to come in Paris make sure you're compatible with locals culture and habits. That means try to talk to some people mentioned in the slideshow, visit coworking space and startup offices. You'll be welcomed.
This makes me cringe a bit. What this document says seems to be that France is a great country to start a company in mostly because you can get cheap labor. It is stated that a mid-level dev is $50-80K in France, however the cost of living in Paris is comparable to living in New York, so it means that you ultimately should come to Paris because you can cut your payroll by 20%.
> you ultimately should come to Paris because you can cut your payroll by 20%.
Don't forget that your employees enjoy perks such as free healthcare or unemployment insurance from the government. Moreover, they had their MSc for free or almost, which means they don't have any student loan to pay back. If they have kids, their school is probably both decent and free. If it isn't, what's meant by "expensive private school" around there is a couple thousand euros a year. Also, 5-7 weeks of paid vacation are included.
Most US workers would be better off getting all of this for a 20% pay cut.
> Most US workers would be better off getting all of this for a 20% pay cut.
It's not a 20% pay cut, when you get paid €5k here, your employer already gives ~€4k to the government to pay for all those "free social services", and then you still have to pay 30% tax on your income. So the "free" education and healthcare actually costs you something like €6k per month, most people are not aware of this because half of these are paid upfront by your employer, if only French knew how much they were paying for their expensive "free" social services... And they have to pay it for the rest of their lives whereas Americans can pay back their education loans way before that. Last but not least, you should know that healthcare does reimburse less each year, so you are now forced to pay for a private insurance in addition to the high tax you already pay for many healthcare services such as dentists, blood analysis and more. Great free services indeed!
> 5-7 weeks of paid vacation are included.
Yes, tell me about that. Every time I try to get someone at a company, half the time he's either on vacation or on RTT, and I'm asked if I could wait a week until he comes back. This makes doing business here way slower to get things done, very frustrating and hard to compete.
The part that matters is the one about serious conditions: accidents, cancers, infarctus etc. Paying a few hundreds a months to get a few thousands back when you break a tooth or your glasses isn't a life-changing service, it merely regulates your cash-flow for a fee.
What matters is knowing that if you need a 6- or 7-figures treatment, you'll get it. You won't be bankrupt because of it, your insurance won't weasel out of paying for it, and your employment status at the time you discovered your disease is irrelevant to the way you'll be treated. All of those life-threatening and/or chronic conditions are handled by public insurance, and 100% reimbursed (except for convenience services like individual hospital room with TV, which indeed you have to pay for, directly or through your private insurance).
You're right that the 20% discount claimed by the presentation is probably meant "out of the company's pocket", net salary differences are way beyond 20%. I think a regular developer with a few years of experience but no super-sexy skill will get around €2000-€2500 net of taxes in Paris. That's not a lot if you want to rent a decent flat inside Paris. People know how much they actually cost to their employer, it's written right next to their net salary on their salary sheet every month, and it's regularly reminded to them in public debates.
About education, there's another advantage to its public funding: prices don't get ridiculously inflated as they are in American universities. There's no education bubble in countries supporting public education. Also, it (somewhat) improves meritocratic social mobility, which means a higher rate of smart kids actually becoming skilled professionals. Finally, as a potential employer, schools which don't treat their students as customers tend to force-feed them more of the unpalatable curriculums such as maths, algorithms, etc. You tend to get a better trained workforce.
To sum it up, European prefer lower risk lifestyles, on average. There's more redistribution of wealth, less opportunity to become very rich, and less violence (I count denying a life-saving chemotherapy as violence, although social safety nets also alter crime rates). This appeals more to the kind of people who happily stay salaried than to risk-loving entrepreneurs. But as an entrepreneur, there's value in settling somewhere that appeals to the kind of people who will happily remain your employees: you don't have to pay them the opportunity cost of renouncing to become Mark Zuckerberg.
What this presentation unfairly brushed off war the amount of bureaucracy you have to face in order to get anything done, and how even harder to navigate it is when you aren't a native.
Salaries are very depressed. Experienced engineers outside of Paris make 45K top, when you live in Paris you get a 30% salary increase for the cost of living. Payroll wise: take what you pay someone, multiply by two, that's what you actually have to front: half goes to the worker (who will be heavily taxed) and the rest is tax. Taxation is pure confiscation here.
I don't know about France, but I have heard of such things before, for just about every European country. My wife and I just spent two weeks in Germany where I mostly started conversations in German and then let the other person transition to English when they heard my atrocious accent. Thankfully, my German is just good enough to get me through a full restaurant transaction, so it wasn't too much of a problem if they didn't switch over, but overall it seemed to work out quite well and everyone was very friendly to me. In contrast, we had some traveling companions who did not speak German at all, and some of the very same shop clerks, waiters, and strangers treated them much more coolly when they started with only English.
In general, I've always considered it polite to "show effort" to speak the local language, even if you end up speaking English in the long run. Whenever I travel to a new country, I try to learn enough to read a dinner menu and order a meal. While I'm certainly nowhere near to being fluent in that language, it's at least enough to be able to understand when the waiter is asking for a drink order versus appetizers or whatever, and then to be able to list the things we want with proper pronunciation and the count of each item, though not in a full sentence.
YMMV. Really depends on who you're talking to. Generally speaking younger generations tend to have a better command of the language than the older generation but there's still a long way to go before we reach Netherlands quality. The influx of American TV shows and movies will help on the long run though. Source: I'm French, born and raised here.
Paris is the most visited city in the world so you can get along easily with only knowing English. And if you know a bit of any romance languages then you can usually pick out enough written words to understand the gist of a menu (if one is not offered in English). The countryside less so, but this is changing rather quickly.
Well, to be honest not all the french can speak English. So you just need to know the basics to order your food etc...
But in a professional environment, there is absolutely no problem. Ok our accent might be a problem but we can speak and understand english. For example, to become an engineer in France you need a minimal level in english.
A lot of educated people have travelled in a foreign country during their studies, so really for me I don't think it will be a problem.
Younger generation does, although not as good as the Dutch or Germens who are pretty much fluent speakers. It is true that they dislike speaking English though as they feel French is the superior language.
That's the Good. There's also the Bad, and the Ugly.
I've left France (I'm french), and now live in Malta, because of the Bad and the Ugly. France has high taxes (and 50% social contributions), very anti-entrepreneur and ultra-bureaucratic mindset, a sinking economy, a vastly anti-libertarian political landscape, and a high cost of living vs. quality of living.
cost of living vs quality of living : Frankly, this is true almost only for Paris.
I live in Nantes right now (after 7 years in the Netherlands) and the quality of living is great, at a fraction of the price in Paris.
Second, not everybody is a libertarian, so I'm quite OK with what you call "anti-libertarian landscape".
Bureaucratic mindset : Apart from Malta, have you ever lived anywhere else in Europe ? I don't know the bureaucratic mindset of Malta, but I can say that I did not find a great difference between France, the Netherlands and Germany for instance.
I also lived in Switzerland (5 years), where bureaucracy is definitely less of a problem than in France: it just works (the first time, not after weeks and 2 attempts).
When I hear "France has great tax credits systems for startups", I think "if you spend months in paperwork, maybe". That's what I call a bureaucratic hell.
As for being a libertarian, I guess it's the case of a majority of entrepreneurs. If one enjoys government control, he's probably not an entrepreneur...
Who wants a 3500 page labour code like we have in France? Ever changing laws? New regulation and a new tax every month?
Finding an apartment in Paris is a special circle of hell, get help by whomever is hiring you, because it's a very lengthy and humiliating process for foreigners.
I've visited apartments for about two months before finding a place outside of Paris and have been asked all sorts of private questions about my life, for example looking at your tax and salary receipts is considered standard practice.
I'm sad to say, quite painful. A sibling mentioned the housing problem. There's also the immigration problem.
If you're in France on a visa, you'll have to renew it every year. To do that, take a day off to go through a humiliating process that will have you wait in front of a government building from 12PM for 10 to 15 hours until it opens and then until it's your turn.
Of course, if you dare forget something, you'll just have to lose another 10 hours of your life another day, waiting in front of that same building. People sometimes take pounds and pounds of paper when they do that to be sure they'll have what they're asked for.
One of my friends is in this situation and she dreads it for weeks when the time comes to renew her visa...
Social Innovation is very trendy in Paris. The French President, François Hollande, announced last week, during SocialGoodWeek an International Summit on this topic : https://twitter.com/fhollande/status/540498295261782016
While French slideshow felt more like full of marketing and "we are amazing", this one is talking numbers and facts! Thank you for sharing this amazing presentation.
I'm currently living in Paris right now. Before that I lived in London, Germany and the US. So this is kind of a view from the outside.
As every city there are good and bad things. Administration is horrible and the worst experience from anywhere that I have lived. Getting an apartment will be hell. It just will. Paper is still the norm in this country. Your mailbox will never be empty. This part sucks.
The work atmosphere in this country is horrible in comparison to other countries like the UK and US. Remember, this is the country that (legally) has a 35 hour work week. In startups this looks different although they have the reputation of being lazy in comparison to American startups. While I haven't seen it, this is likely the case for some. There's no smoke without fire. And just judging by the way this country works...don't be surprised if they seem lazy.
English. Right, this is probably one of the biggest problems non-French will have. Across the board French people's English have the worst English ever, out of every country in Central Europe. That said Paris is in some way an exception. Parisians' English is still horrible for the kind of city it is trying to become but not as bad as you'll hear it in other cities.
Food - Don't understand why people are saying it's bad. It's really good! Especially compared to a city like London, where it's expensive and quality isn't amazing. There is less of a junk food culture in Paris than in other cities though.
There’s more good and bad things to go into but I’ll leave the bad stuff at this for now.
There are good things going on in Paris. The city is amazing to live in. It’s much cheaper than London. Transport costs are a lot less. Leisure activities are cheaper. A lot of stuff will be cheaper, including apartments. The city is beautful to live in too.
There is a good startup ecosystem in Paris. There are a couple good exits coming out of France. But it all seems like a big circle jerk, which (IMO) a guide like this shows. This may also come from the extreme forms of patriotism the French show(sometimes) and/or from the fact that they don’t speak English and are repulsed by anything English.
A lot of startups start here but quickly try to get the hell out and move to the US or even London. There have been a couple good exits though but not as many as London nor any as big as the ones in Berlin.
I don’t know what the fundraising process goes like in Paris so I’m not going to comment on that. Obviously it will be harder than in the US as there are less VCs here. Judging by the amounts being raised and the amount of “big” VCs in London it’s also weaker than across the channel.
It's very hard to live in Paris if you are not fluent in French... Or you're doomed to live amongst ex-pats, which defeats the purpose of the experience.
Although Paris is the most visited city in the world. It also has a reputation amongst the global cities as being unfriendly. Enough that the Paris Tourist Board and Chamber of Commerce have launched a campaign to educate service workers on treating tourists better. Tourists also do not spend as much money in Paris. It is number 3 in that regard. This is likely due to Paris' centralized position. It may more likely be a stop-through on the way to a visitors' final destination.
You can be perfectly fine on English in almost any large city in the world, but there is more of a friction in Paris when interacting in English than in many other European capitals.
I know the reputation, but the times I've visited Paris everyone has been extremely helpful and polite. What I do see, occasionally, is American and German tourists who ignore local customs, behave rudely, and then get offended when the Parisians respond rudely to their own boorishness.
The only really bad experience I've ever had in Paris was with an eastern european cab driver who droned truly horrendous racist screeds about black African prostitutes ruining Paris my entire ride.
The presentation claims that it takes 4 hours to travel from Paris to Amsterdam by car. Well, the distance is 750 km so you need a pretty fast car for that and a big wallet to pay for the speeding tickets ..
I spent 14 years in Paris, 10 as a journalist covering finance and tech for the NYT and Bloomberg.
The Paris Tech Guide is an understandable piece of boosterism, but I would not recommend Paris or France to people looking for a tech ecosystem to support them.
I'm not going to talk about the food, because it's totally irrelevant to this discussion. If that's the reason why you choose a city for your startup, your startup will probably fail.
I'm also not going to engage in French-bashing. I have many good friends in Paris, and the city itself is a beautiful piece of work. It just isn't great for business...
Paris's poor business environment has many causes, and they run much deeper than the incompetent Socialist government currently in power. That government is just the latest captain steering the ship of state, and the state is very heavy in France. It was heavy under Chirac and Sarkozy. It is heavy for the French themselves. They are constantly confronted with absurd rules governing aspects of their existence that legislators felt obligated to regulate. Imagine how difficult it is for the foreigner to navigate those laws. Very.
As a country, France has crippled its once powerful financial industry and driven a lot of capital and financial services to London. You could argue that this began with Mitterand in the early 1980s, so it's a decades-long trend. And finance is important, because it makes a lot of people silly rich and some of them become investors. Losing finance means that France's expertise has been considerably weakened in the domain of financial technology, which is going to eat banks like it ate publishing.
As a society, France has a technologically conservative, luddite streak that is quite the opposite of Americans' tech liberalism. While France produces many gifted mathematicians and engineers, they usually fail to productize and successfully market their ideas. Props to the minitel, but who uses it now?
Many unFrench people fail to appreciate that France suffers from a rigid, ossified class structure, where people can be pigeon-holed by their accents, much as in Britain. Rigid, ossified class structures are really bad at identifying and cultivating talent. They're very good at creating a few schools (Sciences Po, ENA, the Polytechnique) that produce a small ruling class. Most applicants are not admitted. The institutional structure is well trained at telling people "non, c'est impossible."
So France is a machine that stifles peoples' potential. That's why many of the most ambitious French people leave. The ones that remain are split between the privileged and the frustrated.
If you want to build something, and it has to be in Europe, choose the Anglo-Germanic countries: the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Scandinavia. Several of those economies are bigger and on the whole they tend to move faster. People there learn English well (except in Britain of course ;). The rules of the country will be more understandable and more predictably enforced.
Go to France when you're rich and ready to retire. They'll welcome you with open arms. The country isn't made for builders.
"With a €4 billion turnover, the French market represents 26% of the European open source market, including software and services (PAC, The Open Source Market in France, 2011). Open source has seen a rapid expansion in the past decade, with an annual growth rate of over 68%."
> Open source has seen a rapid expansion in the past decade
My primary experience of open source software in France is of a French software product manager who worked with a German tech lead. The product manager got the German programmer to open up the API of that product to allow plugins, which a Russian innovator promptly made use of to build some useful addon software. The French manager put the German into unrelated consulting work, then hired a mate, also from France, as a second programmer to duplicate the functionality of the addon and bundle it as part of the product, killing the market for the addon. Having diluted the importance of the German to the product, he stopped using his "tech lead" title and started promoting his own name on the product instead of the two technical workers.
Perhaps the rapid expansion is based on an patriotist old boys network helping each other out rather than innovation and marketing.
I guess the question would be: Do you need to live in France to sell to that market? RedHat's doing fine, and they're based in Raleigh. Many of the companies listed in that report -- Mozilla, for example -- are not French or based in France...
If you compare with other major capitals, like SF, NYC or London, housing is quite cheap (around twice as less expensive). And although the transportation system is far from being flawless, it's not worse than any other one.
Untrue.
I've lived in Paris, London and SF and Paris is definitely the cheapest (even by the surface).
I'm paying $1100/month in Paris for a 300sq foot appartment (in a nice neighborhood). I was paying $3000/month in SF for a 400sq foot appartment...
I might be wrong, but I found the kind of room that $1000 pays for in NYC to be way nicer and larger than the one you can get for a similar price in Paris (though the usd/eur has increased 20% since I checked).
You're better off making your startup almost anywhere else.
EDIT: and as other comments said, people don't speak English, the French have some sort of pride of only speaking their native language ...