In the past 5 years, I haven't regretted leaving France once. I am thankful for having grown up there, but as an entrepreneur/engineer adult it would make no logical sense for me to stay there.
The government complains about "la fuite des cerveaux" (brain drain), but they're not doing much to prevent it (whether it is for entrepreneurs or researchers— I've been in both camps).
The startup scene in France is glacial. During the presidential elections, the only political figure who seem to get it and bound to fix this mess was François Bayrou, while the remainder were focusing on saving what remains of our heavy industries.
I randomly watch news/docs about some French "startup", and the spread mean size seems to be 20 to 100 employees. That's enough to make you think what "bootstrapping" means here.
Even without talking about that side of things, it's extremely hard to find anyone technically truly competent to sidekick with, let alone in technologies compatible with startup rhythms (even Rails and Django are a rarity, the huge flock only knows C# and Java at a very, ahem, academic level). Not exactly helpful if you want to build your MVP quickly.
I'm not even talking about the legal paperworks that would sink a founder's time like your nearby blackhole. I'm contemplating doing this myself since a few years and the amount of crap you have to wade through is astounding. The sanest solution is moving to the UK (but my personal situation prevents that, for now).
The whole ecosystem is heavyweight and not nimble at all.
Excellent point. The idea that the U.S. is an entrepreneurial hotbed outside of a few small areas (in which costs of living are absurd and real estate parasites take most of the benefit) is laughable. "The U.S." is a leader in technology because of Silicon Valley, and in finance because of Wall Street. Take those two locations away and you have an average European country: not terrible, but not something that other countries would go out of their way to emulate.
Those are just two examples where the state of the art is being pushed hard. Less technologically advanced (often disruptive innovations (which mini-mills sort of are due to their feedstocks vs. equipment)) happen all over the place, I could dig up a bunch of examples in firearms, especially accessories (e.g. EOTech in Ann Arbor, Michigan). Or my parents in the early '80s when consumer use of C-band transmissions took off (for people in areas not served by cable companies; this is now down in the K-band by Direct TV and Dish):
They first helped the first company to develop remote control systems that would move your dish from satellite to satellite. One eventual extension of this or spinoff was small (e.g. 4 feet) dishes that would fold down for travel, e.g you could put one on top of your RV.
But the more interesting work was in LNBs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_noise_block-downconverter), which combine a low noise amplifier with down conversion for easy signal transmission to the receiver inside the home. This was fairly advanced stuff for the era, the usual analog stuff, surface mount construction way before it was (widely) used in computers, they'd put them in a freezer and bake them, etc.
All done in the deepest of Red State SW Missouri, in the Joplin area.
There's lots more entrepreneurial stuff my family did from this location, that's just one of the the highest tech examples.
Also look at where US job growth comes from in modern times. Smaller companies that were startups, not big established companies.
I didn't mean to imply that there's no entrepreneurial activity in the rest of the country. Of course there is, just as there's plenty of it in Europe. I'm saying that the edge that "the U.S." seems to have over European social democracies is really due to the prominence of two star locations, and goes to zero (no difference in levels of activity and opportunity, not no activity) if you take those out.
For one thing, US - New York - Silicon Valley has basically none of the social-democratic benefits of living in Europe.
For another thing, America really does make it dirt easy to register some kind of small business with a state or municipal government as existing and doing business in... something. This doesn't mean doing it right is easy, but doing it at all is very easy, and it's also correspondingly easy to go back and reregister your business when someone experienced tells you what to actually do.
For one thing, US - New York - Silicon Valley has basically none of the social-democratic benefits of living in Europe.
Of course. I meant in terms of entrepreneurial energy and opportunity. On everything else (vacation, healthcare, affordable college) Europe is light-years ahead of the U.S. at this point.
The government complains about "la fuite des cerveaux" (brain drain), but they're not doing much to prevent it (whether it is for entrepreneurs or researchers— I've been in both camps).