[olivermarks]

French innovation is quirky but brilliant IMO - minitel was years ahead pre internet.

For some reason French innovation doesn't spread much beyond France. Concorde (I love that plane so much) was an Anglo French project. A lot of my friends parents in the UK midlands were involved with at massive project, but it never scaled to fleets and eventually withered away after an astonishing amount was spent developing it in the '60s ($2.8 billion in that era's valuations).

Not denegrating French innovation here at all, I just don't think the rigid ENA/Ecole Polytechnique elites are practical or competent in understanding how to exploit and build on great ideas by their countrymen.

[artwr]

> Not denegrating French innovation here at all, I just don't think the rigid ENA/Ecole Polytechnique elites are practical or competent in understanding how to exploit and build on great ideas by their countrymen. I don't disagree that these schools still need to evolve a bit, but you'd be surprised at how much they've already moved in that area. I know multiple people from Polytechnique are heavily involved in entrepreneurship and/or AI.

[olivermarks]

I think my point is that ENA / Ecole Polytechnique people are arguably harming French innovative abilities. Many US entrepreneurs are grass roots college dropout types...

[hef19898]

Which is better because of, reasons? US culture is different from European one, and France always has been peculiar.

[TacticalCoder]

Well... We're talking tech unicorns here. France ain't exactly know for it's tech companies. There's what, eight EU (not french, but entire EU) tech companies in the top 100 tech companies worldwide?

The biggest EU one is german (not french), it's SAP. At least two french ones are basically french militaro-industrial complex / fake-private actually state-owned ones, being "big" by virtue of sucking french taxpayers money.

I don't know what France's culture is (although I'm a native french speaker and typing this from France) but "producing tech unicorns" certainly ain't part of it.

[hef19898]

Tech unicorns are those start-ups with valuations above 1 billion, not the top 100 (top by what what measure, revenue, profit, market cap, number of employees?).

Also, a nations economy doesn't depend on the number of VC backrd tech unicorns. That France economy has quite some issues ain't news, the perceived lack of tech unicorns (if there ever was a pseudo-SV centric view of things, that's a front runner), is none of them.

[olivermarks]

@hef19898 Not 'better' just different culturally. The US installs ivy league types at well funded startups just as the french install their ENA/Ecole Polytechnique elites in their state funded 'startups' but somehow the French dynamic doesn't work nearly as well as the US one.

[hef19898]

Airbus, Dassault, just from top of my head.

Also, the US Navy is buying a French/Italian frigate design to replace, sorry, I meant support the littoral combat ships that don't work. The only reason Australia cancelled the contract for French is that, all of a sudden, they got nuclear ones.