[SXSW] “Paris, A Thriving Ecosystem Despite itself”

The following was originally sent as an email to our email newsletter subscribers yesterday afternoon. 

Since its launch in 2011, the Rude Baguette has worked not to be a cheerleader of the French tech market – you know I’m the loudest screamer when it comes to providing critical feedback – but just to be an educated, English voice of what’s going on inside of France.

I hadn’t planned on attending SXSW next year – it didn’t seem like a relevant conference for us to cover – until one entrepreneur came to me and explained that France had virtually no presence at SXSW 2013, and that UKTI, London’s initiative, had gone all out to make London look sexy.

The Rude Baguette grabs the attention of almost anyone who’s considering doing business in the French Tech Market; however, they have to make the decision to do so in order for us to be useful to them, and that starts at home.
I began crafting a talk that I’ve had all over the world with different entrepreneurs, and I call it “Paris: A thriving ecosystem despite itself.”

Paris: A thriving ecosystem despite itself.

Sitting down with accomplished & on-the-rise entrepreneurs, the talk is meant to face some hard truths about the French Tech Market – the problems we have, but more important, the problems we don’t. We have tentatively chosen to include Cookening’s Cedric Giorgi & Deezer’s Daniel Marhely to the mix, but I imagine we’ll be adding a few extra people as well (are you listening, Xavier?)

France creates more successful tech companies than any other country, whether its entrepreneurs stay in France or not. While Berlin & London are struggling to attract talent from around the world, France is building its own talent in-house, and those entrepreneurs continue to build multiple successful companies.

The Rude Baguette is committed to spreading information about the French Tech Market wherever it needs to go, and I strongly believe that this talk will be yet another nail in the coffin that is misinformation about France’s Tech Market.

———

Since the voting went live, we’ve gotten quite a great response from the start up community, here in France & abroad. I did a quick search on twitter for other popular panels and I didn’t find many with more social activity than ours. It’d be really great if you could do just two things for me:

1. Click through to our panel and give us a nice big thumbs up! (yes, there’s registration required, but it takes just 30 seconds – I counted.)
2. Just below the voting, there are a few social buttons. Pick your favorite and share your heart out – tell people why they should care.

If you’ve got suggestions for how the talk can be improved (other than spelling corrections – sorry, I can’t fix those), leave a comment below. Think you should be on the talk? Let me know and I’ll see what we can do.