Macron wooing the tech world, pledges French ‘startup nation’
French President Emmanuel Macron is inviting the world’s innovators, engineers and business-builders to come to France as he tries to transform this country from a land resting on the laurels of its past into a “startup nation.” In a first step, the French government on Thursday launched a “French Tech Visa,” a fast-track fouryear residence permit for entrepreneurs and their families if they meet certain criteria.
Echoing his call for US climate scientists to come to France after President Donald Trump pulled out of the Paris climate agreement, Macron said Thursday - in English: “At a time when some people think that walls are a solution, we do think that openness is the right path, because the challenges we face are global. “We want the pioneers, the innovators, the entrepreneurs of the whole world to come to France and work with us on green technologies, food technologies, artificial intelligence, on all the possible innovation.”
It may be a hard sell. Tech entrepreneurs say France notably needs easier financing for startups and more flexibility in labor laws. Macron agrees - and is making those changes a pillar of his vision for reinvigorating the world’s sixthlargest economy. “I want France to be . a nation that works with and for startups, and a nation that thinks and moves like a startup,” he said at a Paris gadget show called Vivatech, where he chatted with a robot in English and studied French startups that measure pollution neighborhood-by-neighborhood or use artificial intelligence to predict which buses or subway trains have available seats. — AP