Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Richard Fielding, co-founder of PrepMyFuture. Richard holds a Master’s Degree in Mathematics and taught GMAT for 5 years.
Say the word “startup”, and people think of Silicon Valley. Say “innovation in education”, and people think of New York or London or (more recently) India.
Paris, on the other hand, has a reputation for very limited opportunities for startups and very limited innovation in education. There are certainly reasons for this : put bluntly, most banks in France would reject Jacques-Antoine Granjon for a car loan, and most French classrooms would function quite happily without electricity.
At least that is the image of Paris up until now, but there are some signs of change. First, there are the superb efforts of Le Camping and Silicon Sentier to create opportunities for young entrepreneurs. Based on the famous Y-Combinator in Silicon Valley, Le Camping is the first startup incubator of its kind in France, and the fact that it has received a good amount of media attention and some public funding is a promising sign. Le Camping is now in its second “season”, and will soon have helped 24 young companies find their way in the jungle of European business.
There are other hints of progress as well : the “leweb” conference held every year in Paris has become one of the largest internet events in Europe, and the number of startups in Paris has increased dramatically (in proportion to before) in the last year or so. We are now starting to see startup “hackathons” all over the place, as well as some older French startups, such as criteo.com, which have made the leap from “startup” into “big, serious company”.
And now… for the banks. Although the French banking sector doesn’t seem to be interested in loaning anything to startups, and the French early stage investment possibilities are rather… limited, this may not last for long. Tyler Crowley, an American entrepreneur and co-host of This Week in Startups, told me in a recent visit to Paris:
“I think you’ll start seeing more and more American investors investing in companies in France. I’ve come out here quite a few times now and I’ve been shocked to see how talented the people and the companies are. And there is great value for investment here. What might get you a 1% share in an early stage American company, and maybe not a great one, for that same investment you could get a 5% or even higher share in a really good early stage French company with lots of potential. The fact that there is so little local investment is just making this market more attractive for foreign investors.”
On the education side, there are also some rays of hope. The meteoric rise of international business and management degrees has brought some important possibilities for the French educational system, but it has also put it under increasing pressure to modernize.
The challenge to keep the best and brightest French entrepreneurs of the future in France has forced the system to compete with prestigious schools in the United States and elsewhere. And, as we all know, competition demands innovation – which is beginning to open the ears and budgets of some school directors to new ideas on how to make their programs more attractive.
So, all of these factors, while still quite recent and unstable, are beginning to make startup possibilities more viable in France, and particularly for companies working in postgraduate education. And this is, for the moment, exactly the domain of my company, PrepMyFuture: we provide an online, adaptive learning platform to help students prepare for standardized tests, like the GMAT.
For all the many people who have asked me “why would you start a test prep company in Paris ?”, I hope I have done something to answer the question. But bear in mind, I never said it was, is, or ever will be easy to make an internet startup work in Paris.
