- Station F is providing a space for a thousand start-ups under one roof
You know the old joke – France doesn’t have a word for ‘entrepreneur’. The country is traditionally associated with red tape and heavy state intervention.
But Station F in Paris is trying to change that by providing a space for a thousand start-ups under one roof – with all the support they need to thrive.
Station F was founded by tycoon Xavier Niel, best known this side of the English Channel for his shareholding in Vodafone and attempt to buy its Italian interests.
It is housed in a former freight train depot, hidden by trees and residential buildings, in the south-eastern 13th arrondissement close to the Gare d’Austerlitz. Outside is a huge sculpture, 36ft high, called L’Arc.
This symbolises the bridge between art and entrepreneurship, says Niel, who is married to Delphine Arnault, the daughter of Bernard Arnault, the founder of LVMH and the world’s fifth richest man.
Inside, the building is so long that the Eiffel Tower lying flat would fit inside.
This vast space is divided into three zones: a ‘share’ zone for networking, a ‘creative’ zone for working and a ‘chill’ zone for eating and socialising. The latter is open to the public.
As soon as you enter, there is a palpable sense of excitement.
The share zone hosts more than 600 events a year. When I arrive, a huge conference on business-to-business marketing is taking place and a group of start-ups has set up stalls to ‘speed date’ a queue of potential investors from venture capital firms.
There are organisations with a permanent base in this shared area, such as Tik Tok For Business and La French Tech, which helps start-ups cut through the notorious red tape. More than 30 public bodies can be accessed here, helping with issues such as employment law and taxes.
Here I meet my first French entrepreneur. Alexandre Duval is co-founder of Entalpic, a start-up that uses artificial intelligence to dream up new materials to improve industrial design.
He’s hoping to follow in the footsteps of other successful AI-companies that have already graduated from Station F, including Mistral, which raised a record €105million (£87.5million) in a seed round.
‘Start-ups here have different areas of expertise,’ he says, ‘so you are not isolated, you benefit from this eco-system. We also get help with admin, recruitment – all the things that are difficult when you are a start-up.’
Next is the creative zone, the middle terminal in the complex, dubbed ‘the concrete cathedral’. Thin, reinforced concrete vaults helped to secure Station F its listed building status.
The name Station F comes from the original depot, built in the 1920s, called La Halle Freyssinet, after the engineer who built it, Eugene Freyssinet.
The superstructure was abandoned in 2010, and only occasionally used for gritty urban fashion shoots after that. But in 2017 its 365,000 sq ft were reimagined by billionaire Niel, the owner of the mobile and ISP provider Free, and co-owner of Le Monde newspaper.
Known as the ‘Richard Branson of France’, he invested €250million in the project with the aim of inspiring a new generation of entrepreneurs.
These are people such as Station F member Anais Garnier, who is behind an online publishing platform for fiction authors called WeInk.
She loves chance encounters in Station F, due to 3,000 entrepreneurs rubbing shoulders. It helps her solve problems ‘I didn’t even know I had’ she says.
‘I’m recruiting for the first time,’ she adds, ‘and just this morning I met someone who told me about insurance I need, which I did not know about, so he put me in contact with the person he uses.’
She also learnt about an EU grant for registering her brand, which she didn’t know about either.
This middle creative zone is surprisingly tranquil, like a library. Here, start-up teams are hard at work. Huge companies such as LVMH, beauty firm L’Oreal, Facebook owner Meta and Microsoft have ‘incubators’ here, supporting start-ups they have hand-picked.
Business schools including EDHEC also have campuses here, where they support both students and entrepreneurs.
All these institutions pay to be close to the action. An interesting feature of Station F is that it is in itself a kind of start-up and not a charity or state institution.
The idea is that if you bring lots of start-ups together in one place at this dramatic scale, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
Big companies with deep pockets will pay to access this creativity and energy brought together under one roof. Station F also supports its own cohorts of start-ups.
There is a ‘fighters’ group, for aspiring entrepreneurs from under-represented backgrounds.
Another area is for ‘graduates’ – firms that ‘graduated’ from Station F. None of the core group of start-ups is allowed to stay for longer than two years (and some will stay for just three- or sixmonth rotations).
The chill zone is filled with disused train carriages, decorated in colourful graffiti. Here there are a variety of restaurants, also open to the public. No French waiters though. You sit at your table and order direct from a QR code.
Nikolai Fomm is a German entrepreneur who works for a start-up called Corma, which helps businesses manage their software applications.
‘Being in Station F gave us a quality stamp,’ he says. ‘Its reputation makes it easier to win your first clients, persuade your first hires and find your early investors.’
London shouldn’t have too much to fear – for now. The influential Global Startup Ecosystem Report has consistently put Britain’s capital in joint-second place with New York behind Silicon Valley when it comes to vibrant, well-funded start-up ecosystems.
But the latest report shows Paris is rapidly rising up the ranks.
Paris, however, is only a short trip and you don’t have to be a start-up registered in France to work here.
You don’t even need to have a French national on your team to qualify. The place is full of Americans thanks to the incubators run by Meta and Microsoft.
Fancy a commute on the Eurostar, anyone?
Dougal Shaw is senior correspondent at Business Leader businessleader.co.uk
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