Guillaume Santacruz, an aspiring French entrepreneur, brushed the rain
from his black sweater and skinny jeans and headed down to a cavernous
basement inside Campus London, a seven-story hive run by Google in the city’s East End.
Thus writes
Liz Alderman in the New York Times.
A
year earlier, Mr. Santacruz, who has two degrees in finance, was living
in Paris near the Place de la Madeleine, working in a boutique finance
firm. He had taken that job after his attempt to start a business in
Marseille foundered under a pile of government regulations and a
seemingly endless parade of taxes. The episode left him wary of starting
any new projects in
France. Yet he still hungered to be his own boss.
He decided that he would try again. Just not in his own country.
“A lot of people are like, ‘Why would you ever leave France?’ ” Mr.
Santacruz said. “I’ll tell you. France has a lot of problems. There’s a
feeling of gloom that seems to be growing deeper. The economy is not
going well, and if you want to get ahead or run your own business, the
environment is not good.”
… From
80 to 90 percent of all start-ups fail, “but that’s O.K.,” said Eze
Vidra, the head of Google for Entrepreneurs Europe and of Campus London,
a free work space in the city’s booming technology hub. In Britain and
the United States, “it’s not considered bad if you have failed,” Mr.
Vidra said. “You learn from failure in order to maximize success.”
That
is the kind of thinking that drew Mr. Santacruz to London. “Things are
different in France,” he said. “There is a fear of failure. If you fail,
it’s like the ultimate shame. In London, there’s this can-do attitude,
and a sense that anything’s possible. If you make an error, you can get
up again.”
Mr.
Santacruz had a hard time explaining to his parents his decision to
leave France. “They think I’m crazy, maybe sick, taking all those
risks,” he said. “But I don’t want to wait until I’m 60 to live my
life.”
France
has been losing talented citizens to other countries for decades, but
the current exodus of entrepreneurs and young people is happening at a
moment when France can ill afford it.
… Some wealthy businesspeople have also been packing their bags. While
entrepreneurs fret about the difficulties of getting a business off the
ground, those who have succeeded in doing so say that society
stigmatizes financial success. The election of President François Hollande, a member of the Socialist Party who once declared, “I don’t like the rich,” did little to contradict that impression.
… Today,
around 1.6 million of France’s 63 million citizens live outside the
country. That is not a huge share, but it is up 60 percent from 2000,
according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Thousands are heading to
Hong Kong, Mexico City, New York, Shanghai and other cities. About
50,000 French nationals live in Silicon Valley alone.
But
for the most part, they have fled across the English Channel, just a
two-hour Eurostar ride from Paris. Around 350,000 French nationals are
now rooted in Britain, about the same population as Nice, France’s
fifth-largest city. So many French citizens are in London that locals
have taken to calling it “Paris on the Thames.” …
Taxes, Frustration, More Taxes
… “Making
it” is almost never easy, but Mr. Santacruz found the French
bureaucracy to be an unbridgeable moat around his ambitions. Having
received his master’s in finance at the University of Nottingham
in England, he returned to France to work with a friend’s father to
open dental clinics in Marseille. “But the French administration turned
it into a herculean effort,” he said.
A
one-month wait for a license turned into three months, then six. They
tried simplifying the corporate structure but were stymied by regulatory
hurdles. Hiring was delayed, partly because of social taxes that
companies pay on salaries. In France, the share of nonwage costs for
employers to fund unemployment benefits, education, health care and
pensions is more than 33 percent. In Britain, it is around 20 percent.
“Every week, more tax letters would come,” Mr. Santacruz recalled.
… Diane Segalen, an executive recruiter for many of France’s biggest companies who recently moved most of her practice,
Segalen & Associés,
to London from Paris, says
the competitiveness gap is easy to see just
by reading the newspapers. “In Britain, you read about all the deals
going on here,” Ms. Segalen said. “In the French papers, you read about
taxes, more taxes, economic problems and the state’s involvement in
everything.”
… Mr.
Hollande’s government is now trying to re-brand itself as
business-friendly, especially for start-ups. … These
changes were welcomed by business, but the more than 20 French
expatriates I interviewed said their country was marked by a deeper
antipathy toward the wealthy than could be addressed with a few new
policies.
“Generally, if you are self-made man and earn money, you are looked at with suspicion,” said
Erick Rinner, a French executive at
Milestone Capital Partners, a British-French private equity firm, who has lived in London for 20 years.
Mr.
Hollande’s election, and especially his proposal — since ruled
unconstitutional — to impose a 75 percent tax on the portion of income
above one million euros (about $1.4 million) a year, have only
reinforced that perception.
“It
is a French cultural characteristic that goes back to almost the
revolution and Robespierre, where there’s a deep-rooted feeling that you
don’t show that you make money,” Ms. Segalen, the recruiter, said.
“There is this sense that ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’ means that
what’s yours should be mine. It’s more like, if someone has something I
can’t have, I’d rather deprive this person from having it than trying to
work hard to get it myself. That’s a very French state of mind. But
it’s a race to the bottom.”
Sharing Space, Waiting Tables
“In London, every day is a fight,” [said Emilie Bellet, 30, who in less than a year raised a half-million pounds to finance her venture, SeedRecruit, which finds talent for other start-ups]. “But then you get rewarded. I don’t think this would have been possible in France.”
… Back
in France, Mr. Santacruz’s parents were still trying to grasp their
son’s decision. Having spent her career at the state telecom company,
his mother, like many others in her generation, assumed that her
children’s main aspiration would also be lifelong job security. …
France? Maybe for Retirement
… Guillaume
Santacruz was grateful for the benefits that his country gave him. But
he wanted something else — to innovate. By September, his project was
not where he wanted it to be. Yet he maintained that he was better off
pursuing it outside France.
… Even
if [the company that Mr. Santacruz was trying to build (
Zipcube)] fell apart, he told me one chilly weekend at his Kensington
flat, where paint was peeling off the walls, “I would not change my mind
and head back to France; I see only cons to doing that, no pros.” He
was skeptical that the government’s recent offensive to spur France’s
entrepreneurial environment would quickly bear fruit.
Several
of his French friends in London felt the same way. “I asked them, if
things don’t work out, will they go back? Not one of them would,” Mr.
Santacruz said. “Maybe for retirement. But not for work — we’d rather go
to the United States or Asia before returning.” France seemed to have
lost another citizen in the prime of his productive working years.
… And while the bar to succeed was high, “I’m confident I’m going to make it,” he declared.
