- having a French silicon valley (I believe attempts have been done before but failed)
- jump on the wave of smart iot app fad
- leverage the previous thing for (probably super bad) software education
- Macron seems to be in the self-made man (with state support if you're positive minded) so reviving a liberal entrepreneurship model fits his views
ps: also it doesn't seem to have any major factual impact (they may have helped a bunch of people but I didn't hear about anything groundbreaking); annnnd the disrupt startup motto is not well received nowadays, Uber -> Uberization... gig economy .. it didn't catch on really (for good reasons IMO)
'what does "startup nation" even mean?'
It's aspirational happy talk to disguise a bureaucratic log jam reality, calculated to appease the voting public's economic frustration and keep up a posture of being 'business friendly'. In reality the politicians are bought and paid for by big global businesses who don't need any competition...
Israel has so many start-ups and so much VC, solely because of the vast capital investment flows from the US. That's hardly a reasonable example for a large nation like France to work from.
It'd be like pretending Ireland's $70,000 GDP per capita is organic, rather than the result of US corporate giants using it as a tax device.
You are getting downvoted because you didn't answer the question. What are the qualities of being a "startup nation", other than simply having the most startups in the world, which is likely not what Macron meant.