The Startup President: Part I
In which a young presidential wannabee melts hearts at a tech conference and a wayward journalist renews a fraught relationship with Paris.
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The following is an excerpt from a book project about life in modern France that I’ve since abandoned. This week, I’m going to publish in 5 parts a chapter I had written about my encounters with Emmanuel Macron and his 2017 campaign for president. Most of this is based on stories I wrote for VentureBeat and the Los Angeles Times. Some of the writing has been recycled elsewhere, so you may recognize snippets. But with the first round of the French elections approaching this Sunday, it felt like a good time to look back at the last campaign that transformed Macron from an obscure figure to an unlikely president who continues to confound the French.
The second time I visited Paris came in December 2014 and only served to deepen my antipathy toward a city that every other human on the planet loved unconditionally. I had been invited to attend LeWeb, a tech conference that had been influential for many years but was now about to draw its last breath. Unfortunately, Paris in early December turned out to be an intolerable combination of freezing rain and early sunsets that created a sensation of perpetual darkness and frustrated mobs of people elbowing their way along the sidewalk.
The Metro offered no respite. Even after 8 years in France, there is nothing I have come to dread as much as descending into the byzantine bowels of this monstrosity. At least once on each trip to Paris from our home in Toulouse, I still got lost in the Metro, following endless sortie signs only to find myself exasperated, trying to escape a mall six stories underground. The footsteps the city has painted in some of the more tortuous Metro stations were often little help. It is such a labyrinth that I wouldn’t be the least surprised if one day I turned a corner and found a minotaur blocking my way. I might briefly weigh the benefits of a quick death by bestial clubbing versus the pain of turning madly in circles underground.
Admittedly, I also made a series of rookie errors when planning this trip. The conference was being held at Les Docks, a venue just north of the périphérique, the highway that encircles Paris like a sphincter. Everything outside this demarcation feels so different and distant from what one actually thinks of as Paris that it might as well be in London. Not knowing this, I booked an Airbnb to the north of Les Docks after carefully consulting Google Maps which led me to believe that it didn’t seem far from the venue. It was far. In the age of Google Maps and smartphones, it amazes me that I’m still able to so often misjudge geography by such a large margin. It turned out I was staying in the less-than-reputable town of Saint-Denis, outside of the City of Lights. When I met my host, I told him this was my first visit to Paris in many years. “Ah,” he said. “But here, you are not in Paris. You are in Saint-Denis.” The time I spent trudging through dodgy neighborhoods at night and in the early mornings would drive home this distinction in the coming days.
It would take a long time for me to come around to grudgingly acknowledging the occasional charms of this capital city. Each visit seemed designed to offer up some form of torture, typically in the form of ceaseless rain. Paris averages as many days of rain as Seattle but seems to suffer none of the latter’s grey reputation. Judging from Instagram, Paris is a perpetually sunny paradise populated exclusively by people eating pastries on a hotel terrace overlooking the Eiffel Tower. Certainly, none of this gloom ever seemed to make it into all those hagiographic films about Paris. In the Woody Allen film “Midnight in Paris,” Wilson Owen plays a frustrated writer bursting with love for Paris: “Can you picture how drop-dead gorgeous this city is in the rain?” I have longed nursed a grudge against Owen for this bit of dialogue and yearn to stumble across him one day in the middle of this capital city during a torrential downpour and punch him in the face. Paris has that effect on me.
Most of this trip, however, was dedicated to work and the conference. And to that end, it was successful. Silicon Valley didn’t think much of France, but I watched for years as entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and corporate chieftains debarked in early December to Paris for LeWeb. Those glory days were behind the conference the year I attended. But it was still meaningful enough that I was able to conduct some lively interviews on stage and connect with a number of people that week who would remain essential parts of my personal and professional life in the years to come. In terms of the conference’s content, it was interesting though largely devoid of any big news moments. With one notable exception.
The conference organizers had scored a minor coup by booking the country’s new Minister of the Economy, a young and energetic fellow named Emmanuel Macron.
Being just off the boat in France, I hadn’t really had time to begin following the country’s political scene yet. I knew the president was François Hollande of the Socialist Party who had defeated conservative incumbent Nicholas Sarkozy of Les Republicans in 2012. For all of Americans’ notions of France being a rabid hive of left-wing radicals, the country has tended to elect presidents from the conservative party. Hollande was the first Socialist Party candidate to win since François Mitterrand in the mid-90s. His vow to raise taxes on the rich, spend generously on social benefits, and put the banks in their place had temporarily galvanized just enough people on the left to win the election.
From what I could see from a distance, Hollande seemed like an amiable, bespectacled fellow. When my wife and I visited Toulouse in July 2014 to look for an apartment, Hollande was primarily making headlines for his love life, thanks to a tabloid catching him sneaking out of the presidential palace for a rendezvous with a beautiful actress. A scandal, as it seemed Hollande was cheating on the beautiful journalist he had been dating. Both seemed improbable to me because whenever I saw the bespectacled Hollande speak on TV, the word that most often came to mind was “doughy.” As it turned out, that word could also describe his politics.
Two years into his term, Hollande was suffering from the traditional gutter-scraping approval ratings that the French inflict on their presidents. Unemployment hadn’t budged. A sense of malaise still hung in the air. Hollande had announced earlier in 2014 that he was going to rethink his economic policies and tack toward the center, but he was still surrounded by Social Party cabinet members who took to squabbling about this course correction. So, Hollande reshuffled his cabinet, including naming Digital Minister and French Tech founder Fleur Pellerin to be Minister of Culture and Communications and picking Axelle Lemaire to replace here. In August 2014, Hollande selected Macron, 36, to be his new Economy Minister.
All most people at the time seemed to know about Macron was the shorthand by which the press used to summarize his life: “former investment banker.” In France, “investment banker” is a loaded phrase, saying all that needs to be said about a person and their values in the same way that one could whisper “Voldemort”, and everyone would know you were referencing evil incarnate. Macron had actually been in various government positions for about four years, before taking a gig at Rothschild & Co bank where he stayed for four years. About two years into that stint, he began advising Hollande on economic matters and then joined his government to play a similar role as deputy secretary-general of the Élysée and press the case for a more pro-business posture. A money-grubbing, pro-business, investment banker who spoke English but was in a Social Party government were just the beginning of the things that confounded people about Macron.
Now here he was on stage four months later at LeWeb, essentially his coming out party to the international tech world. Looking eager and wearing the red rooster pin that symbolizes La French Tech, Macron was being interviewed by Loïc Le Meur, a Frenchmen who had co-founded the conference with his wife, Geraldine. Like any good French entrepreneur, Le Meur had left France years ago for Silicon Valley where some investments had made him a tidy sum. Nobody badmouths France or the French quite like a French ex-pat, and Le Meur’s view of his homeland’s attitude toward business and entrepreneurs was dim at best.
To emphasize that point, Le Meur opened the interview by showing a quote from Macron’s predecessor, leftist economy minister Arnaud Montebourg. Poor Montebourg had achieved a special kind of notoriety in Silicon Valley circles for his role in blocking a deal for Yahoo (or, as it was officially called, Yahoo!) to acquire a controlling stake in DailyMotion, the YouTube of France, for $300 million. The deal involved buying DailyMotion shares from the partially state-owned France Telecom. Montebourg reportedly resisted the idea of an American poacher taking control of a “rare French Internet success story” and blocked DailyMotion’s executives from selling in April 2013. Whatever the actual details of the episode, it sent Silicon Valley into a French-bashing tizzy, appalled that anyone would possibly think that government should play a role in technology and innovation.
Later that year, appearing at LeWeb, Montebourg also faced off against Le Meur and two other French ex-pats to defend what he saw as a balanced approach to disruption, and a need to proceed with “caution” when an upstart could potentially overthrow an existing business. Naturally, his words were bastardized by the good users of Twitter who decided that what he really said was: “We need to slow innovation to protect the old businesses.” It not being accurate was no defense in the age of social media, and particularly not when it feeds into the stereotype of France as a future-hating, protectionist island in a sea of globalization. By the time of Macron’s appearance, Le Meur had at the ready the fictionalized Montebourg quote which had passed into legend, emblematic of all that free-market-loving-government-fearing Silicon Valley knew was wrong about France and its regulatory zeal.
In response, Macron smiled at the plate of red meat he had just been handed. “To be clear about the French momentum, we are accelerating,” Macron said. “The key question for us is how to accelerate, and how to help create new businesses…My job is to be sure that in the coming years we create thousands of new businesses to replace the old ones…My job is to protect people and allow them to be innovative and take risks. France is a lot more innovative than people think. Even many French people.”
He made clear that it was not his role to tell executives how to run their businesses or stand in the way of exits that could eventually create more jobs and returns for those who had invested in the acquired startup. “Everywhere in this country, I see young people very happy but so willing to innovate, to create. The key is to help them,” he said. “We have to speak more highly of success. And I want to stop with the French bashing, it’s stupid.”
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Beyond reforming laws, he wanted to celebrate successful entrepreneurs, put them on pedestals as models, and get government ministers and big CEOs to pay more attention to “start-uppers.” One could see Le Meur wanting to believe, but he was still caught short when Macron asked what it would take to get him to move back to France. “I love my country,” Le Meur said. “My passport is French. I am very proud of it. But I think there are a lot of things that need to change to make that happen…Apart from promises, I don’t really see things changing,” he said, no matter which government was running the country.
Curiously, after briefly noting that San Francisco still felt like the center of the tech world, Le Meur spent about as much time explaining the miserable side of life there. Taxes are still high. The cost of living is insane. “I won’t even get into the health care system,” he said. And then he lamented that with three boys, he was looking at a bill for college on average of about $65,000 per year for each kid: “It’s extremely high.” As a former Bay Area resident, I could have added run-away housing prices, woefully underfunded public schools, and an increasingly creaky public transportation system.
Undeterred, Macron went for the hard sell. “My purpose is to have these entrepreneurs, these people, to become the majority in this country. I don’t want to see them as a silent minority…They don’t want to be helped by the government; they want to succeed by themselves…We have to change the country now. We want to create a cultural revolution.”
As mission statements go, the message was unmistakable. Having spent 15 years in Silicon Valley, listening to this youthful minister talk about innovation and entrepreneurship seemed wholly unremarkable. But in hindsight, that’s what made the appearance so remarkable. And it turned out the country’s tech community and entrepreneurs were hearing this message and lapping it up.
By the time Macron was almost done, the spell was cast. Le Meur, smiling said, “I will help you, if you want me to help, I will be happy to help you. But for me as a French citizen, how I can help?”
Email me your ideas, Macron responded, giving out his personal email: emmanuelmacron3@gmail.com
Before he could get off stage, one audience member grabbed a microphone, insisting he wanted to hear Macron extol the virtues of succeeding and wealth. “I would like you to say, ‘Frenchmen, get rich.’”
Macron was happy to oblige: “Frenchmen, succeed and get rich.”
PS: Here’s me interviewing Naren Sham, founder of GoEuro, on stage at LeWeb. I had just bought my first pair of obligatory red EuroDude pants. Sham subsequently changed the name of the company to Omio and it’s now valued at $1.2 billion. I still have the pants. Photo courtesy of LeWeb.
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