French President Emmanuel Macron delivers a speech during the Viva Technology conference dedicated to start-ups development, innovation and digital technology in Paris, France, June 15, 2017. REUTERS/Martin Bureau/Pool
PARIS—There was a funny thing about the pep talk France’s new president gave to his economically stagnant nation at a tech conference here: how much of his advocacy for such entrepreneur-friendly policies as lower tax rates, looser labor laws and lighter regulations could have come from a Republican.
You might not expect that from a politician who hassparred so publicly with President Donald Trump on issues like climate change. ButEmmanuel Macron’s speech Thursday afternoon at theViva Technology conference on his ambitions to make France “a startup nation” hit those notes anyway—while also advancing policies to open the country’s doors to immigrants who want to start businesses in France.
And the results included some passages the United States could learn from.
Streamline taxes and regulations
After a tour of the show floor that saw Macron mobbed by selfie-seeking attendees, the president took the center stage to declare, “France is on the way to becoming the nation of startups, and it must be successful.”
Today, those obstacles and others—for instance,weak venture-capital funding—discourage many startups and push others to exile themselves. As Macron put it, too many startups have told him, “It’s great, we’ve launched things, and now to develop our innovation we have to leave the country.”
And France’s economic problems run deeper than a stunted startup ecosystem: GDP increased only.4% GDP in the first quarter, while unemployment remained stuck at9.6%.
Macron’s pledge to “generate a more attractive context for the entrepreneur” did include the kind of state involvement the GOP would not endorse: a €10 billion “fund for innovation.”
Welcome immigrants
Macron delivered most of his speech in French (in which “the startup” is spelled “le startup”), but he switched to English at the end to make a point Trump wouldn’t appreciate: ”At a time when some people think that walls are the solution, we do think that openness is the right path.”
France is backing those words witha new tech-specific visa that’s good for four years, with simplified “administrative possibilities,” resident permits for immediate family members and work permits provided for spouses. Foreign entrepreneurs could begin applying for it Thursday.
The most French part of Macron’s speech may have been his repeated defense of what he called “a right to error.” France has traditionally not looked too kindly on companies failing, while in the States that’s practically a bucket-list item for entrepreneurs.
“I want people to be able to try and sometimes fail,” Macron said.
But he also scolded his countrymen for resenting the entrepreneurs who succeed.
“We like entrepreneurs, on the condition that they don’t succeed too much,” he said. “When an entrepreneur starts to succeed too well, one is jealous, one says there is something suspicious, it is stigmatized and generally it is taxed.”
Changing a country’s mindset—as Macron phrased it in English, making France “a nation that thinks and moves like a startup”—is a lot harder than redoing its tax system or rewriting its regulations. Even if he can install that psychological-firmware upgrade, the European Union’s ownmoves to expand online intellectual-property rights in ways that seem designed mainly to hinder American tech giants like Google (GOOG,GOOGL) may sandbag his efforts.
Green tech over old tech
Macro took another jab at Trump’s agenda in declaring global warming one of France’s “two major transitions” after its need to embrace a startup economy. That, he emphasized, can’t come at the cost of protecting “jobs of the past”—France will not cling to coal.
Trump, obviously, has different thoughts on the subject, most recently voiced when he announced that theU.S. will leave the Paris climate-change agreement (although we can’t actually complete that until November of 2020) by saying he was “elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.”
That leaves climate-change activism in the U.S. to cities and states that have pledged to follow the Paris commitments themselves, as well asbusinesses pursuing their own green-tech goals… which Macron invited in his speech to come to France to work on them.
(Disclosures: I moderated three panels at Viva Tech and had my travel expenses covered.)
