Welcome to French Tech Updates! Your weekly source of startup, VC, and tech news and insights. I’m James, a startup-obsessed American living in Paris.

If you’re going to San Francisco… 🌸

Here’s a story I’ve been following closely this week. Entrepreneur First, the London-based talent investor frequently likened to Y-Combinator for Europe, has essentially left…Europe?

At least that’s how people are interpreting EF’s decision to move all future demo days to San Francisco—starting like, yesterday with their first demo day in the Bay Area.

The 13-year-old investor has backed hundreds of founders across Europe, including 52 in Paris, and was frequently heralded as a firm believer in the future of Europe’s emerging tech ecosystem.

Maybe the reactions are a tad dramatic since EF already has programs in India, Hong Kong, Singapore (now closed), and Toronto and is continuing to operate its programs in London, Paris, and Berlin. But then there’s this…

So it does appear the focus of EF has shifted toward San Francisco—the black hole of technology. And I do find that discouraging. San Francisco is a tech hub built on double-edged swords. Like an iron throne of startups where every pillar holding it up can cut both ways. The same benefits that make San Francisco an amazing place for startups can do just as much harm as good.

At its best, San Francisco is like a scaled-up version of the café philosophique, where great thinkers and innovators from around the world come together to blend their perspectives into incredible ideas that couldn’t be conceived of any other way. Those great ideas are then nurtured and accelerated by the greatest concentrations of capital and talent anywhere in the world.

At its worst, San Francisco is a self-obsessed mono-culture that kills innovations that don’t fit with the generally accepted wisdom in the valley. No matter how you look at it, having only one centralized tech hub on the entire planet just doesn’t feel like the best approach.

One of the aspects of France’s tech scene that I find the most interesting is how France’s culture shapes the kinds of companies that are built and the business models and practices they adopt. Take a business like Swile as an example. They’ve created a highly enjoyable customer experience around a service (providing employee vouchers for meals, mobility, and more) that doesn’t really exist in the U.S.

If we condense the entire world of startups to one city in one country we will miss out on tremendous amounts of innovation that can only come from supporting diverse experiences.

Anyway. End of rant.

This also happened last week. Stripe, whose co-founder John Collison is an investor in EF, received a well-intention mention from Mairead McGuinness—a person who may also have the honor of holding the longest official title in Europe.

Following a meeting with John Collison, McGuinness, who is the European Commissioner for Financial Stability, Financial Services and the Capital Markets Union, gave Stripe a shoutout as a European success story in payments. Which is a nice sentiment…except it isn’t exactly true. And that tweet set off a rather awkward series of responses.

🤦‍♂️ Here we go…

🥲 Ouch.

I have a lot more to say on this topic, like why we focus on the EU passing regulations instead of the US’s attempts and failures to do so, but I’ll save that for another post.

And with that, let’s jump into this week’s update!

What’s new this week in 🇫🇷

• 🕵️ Every click you make, every scroll you take Meta’s watching you: It turns out the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) isn’t exactly happy with Meta’s reaction to data privacy regulations in Europe

• 📈 Mistral is reportedly raising at a $5B valuation: the news comes shortly after the company set performance records with their newly released Mixtral 8x22B model.

• 🤑 TikTok is paying users in France €0.36 an hour to use the app: users earn coins through activities on TikTok like watching or liking videos.

• 🤝 First announced in December, Lazard and Elaia are moving ahead on their deeptech fund: the total size will be “in the hundreds of millions” with 75% owned by Lazard and 25% by Elaia.

Quiz 🤔

Q1 saw 10 exits in Europe from IPOs, acquisitions, and buyouts at values of €10m or more. How big was the largest deal by exit value?

• A.) €388 million

• B.) €912 million

• C.) €1.37 billion

• D.) €2.1 billion

New Funding 💶

5 companies raised €22.75M in the last week

Events This Month 🗓

• April 23: OVHcloud Startup Showcase Paris

• April 25-26: MixIt Conference in Lyon

• Every Wednesday this month: Startup School: Gen AI with Google

What Else I’m Reading 📚

• French Tech Update, Q1 (dealroom)

• Q1 European Venture Report (PitchBook)

• The riddle of the well-paying, pointless job (More to That)

• How much more innovation before pause? (Robin Hanson) – a lot more questions than answers from this one, but a very interesting topic to think about.

📝 Quiz answer:

B.) €912 million

Lisbon-based CellmAbs Biopharmaceuticals sold antibody rights and ADC technology for one of their pre-clinical candidates to Mainz-HQ’d BioNTech for €912 million in the largest deal of Q1.