What is it like to be a Surgical Tech?

What is the tech and startup culture in Paris like?

• Silicon Valley gets all the limelight when it comes to tech and startup culture. I was wondering what the tech culture in Paris is like, and if it's viable for a grad from good university to pursue a tech career in Paris, the kind they can pursue in, say, NY.

• Answer:

  Paris has a quite vivid tech and startup culture, thanks to several actors like (mainly) http://thefamily.co, http://numa.paris, http://www.50partners.fr/and many others, who mentor entrepreneurs and build legal & financial infrastructures to back startups.In addition to that, some relevant institutional investors like Partech, Index Ventures and others have offices in Paris, which fosters the development of the ecosystem.However, culturally-speaking, and compared to other places, I’d say there is still a heavy opposing force preventing Paris tech culture to boom, and I’m talking about tech-guys wages.Whereas in San Francisco it’s not uncommon to be paid $150′000 as a developer, the same developer in Paris would barely make €50′000, if he’s lucky enough or have good enough negociating skills. That’s a huge brake put on talent attractivity, and it reinforces the very-Frenchy notion that developers would be some kind of a very-specialized workforce (we say Ouvriers Spécialisés or Exécutants), and under no circumstance a creative and intellectual asset that deserves decision power, company shares, higher pay, etc.A caricatural (but not so much) way of depicting this would be: “A brillant businessman with a great vision but below-zero technical ability hires dumb technical smart-nerds to execute on his vision - of course the businessmen will want 95% of the shares because he came up with the idea (haha)”. This before-last-century vision still persists and pollutes the ecosystem a LOT, because some investors still tend to believe their nonsense and some entire, big companies are still built on those premices (look at me, Viadeo).To summarize, I’d say that Paris tech culture has its strengths (lots of willpower) but will need to overcome its traditional hierarchical mental model, both in decisions and in retribution, to give birth to more Unicorns and in turn attract more investors, who will invest more and allow companies to attract better talents (on Unicorns - it’s true we have a few such as Algolia, BlaBlaCar, LeBonCoin or Criteo, but it’s really nothing compared to SF’s or NYC’s - our Unicorns are barely reasonably-well performing companies on a Silicon Valley scale).Good news is the younger a company is in Paris, the more it tends to act in a more liberated way regarding these notions. So there’s hope in founders disrupting more and more from the ancient model.As Oussama Ammar, a famous actor of the Parisian tech scene and founder of TheFamily, sums it up, “Paris (and Europe in general) is toxic for startups […] that’s why there are lots of opportunities to disrupt”.