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.

🇫🇷/acc #6 event recap 🗓️

This Tuesday ≈100 people packed into a meeting space at Google Paris to hear Formance CEO Anne-Sybille Pradelles and .txt CEO Rémi Louf speak.

The room was filled wall-to-wall with founders, investors, and students attending the latest 🇫🇷/acc event— short for France/accelerate. The name borrows from the Effective Accelerationism movement, a call to push technological progress forward.

For this event series, the hosts at Entrepreneurs First had some fun with the naming, replacing regulate with accelerate—a nod to the growing movement of founders who want to see Europe do more of the latter and less of the former.

The two founders are each refreshingly contrarian. Anne-Sybille builds deeply technical products as a non-technical founder while Rémi avoids the Parisian startup scene entirely to work from the forests of Fontainebleau.

The topics covered included:

• 🇺🇸 Why French startups need to have a US presence.

• 🥷 How to use open source as a competitive advantage

• 🤷‍♂️ What happens when you accidentally become a CEO

In this special edition of French Tech Updates, I’m sharing all the notes I took during the event. Whether you’re a founder (open source or not) considering US expansion or an investor looking for your next big bet, I think you’ll find some interesting insights from the evening.

Without further delay, let’s jump in!

👋 Meet the founders

Using open source as a wedge 🧀

Both Anne-Sybille and Remi are leading open source companies, and both are confident that without that open source approach they would not have been able to gain the impressive traction they have achieved.

While it isn’t for everyone (more on that later) open source can unlock massive advantages at the early stage, especially in two key areas:

1. 🛍️ Recruiting customers

2. 🤩 And recruiting talent

On the customer side, an open source approach guarantees longevity and access. Most established companies are reluctant to take a bet on an early-stage partner, especially when that partner is providing critical infrastructure like payment processing. What if the startup maintaining that infrastructure goes out of business? Very few companies are willing to risk that scenario.

But! With open source there’s always the open source option to keep those payments running. In this way, the open source approach brings peace of mind to customers, allowing both Formance and .txt to sell to large companies much earlier.

And that has other advantages beyond the revenue these large customers bring. As Rémi said, “When you’re fundraising you always ask, what am I going to put on that second slide, the logo slide? For us, it was a huge advantage to have so many prominent users so early on.”

Then, on the hiring side an open source approach also lends credibility to young companies—enabling them to attract the kind of high quality talent many startups are fighting over.

To open source or not? 🤔

If you read that first section and are thinking “big customers and top talent, what’s not to love?” make sure you finish this section before sprinting off to start your own open source library. This approach is not without its dangers, and it’s definitely not for everyone.

Anne-Sybille and Rémi identified these three risks to consider when deciding to go open source:

1. 🔀 Splitting focus: community vs. product

An open source roadmap and a commercial product roadmap are rarely the same thing. Trying to build both at once splits your company’s focus from day one, which is especially hard for a young company. Your community wants features that may not move the business forward while your paying customers need time and support. Trying to please both can burn your team out fast and dilute your core mission. Be ready to manage this tension all of the time.

2. 💸 Winning adoption but losing revenue

Open source is a powerful growth engine, but not a business model. If you go all-in on distribution without a clear value capture plan you might end up with thousands of users but no ways to monetize your code library.

3. 🗺️ Giving competitors your blueprint

When you open source your code, you’re not just giving it to the community but also to your competitors. Knowing what to make public and what to keep in your paid product is a delicate balance. The way Rémi approaches this issue is with a simple question: Is this going to add more benefits for my community or a competitor? If the later, don’t take the risk.

How to build a big open source company 🚀

You’ve now seen the benefits and the risks. Let’s say you decide to go ahead and build an open source company. Here are Anne-Sybille and Rémi’s tips for building that business as big as possible.

🎯 Pick your sales motion and commit to it

.txt has taken a developer community focused approach to growth, a decision that even extended to letting community members vote on the roadmap. This path has helped them become the go-to tool for developers and opened many doors for future sales conversations.

On the other hand, Formance focused on building out a more traditional B2B sales process. While their early users mostly came from the open source community, they knew the mission-critical nature of their product meant they would need to close deals with high-level decision makers to effectively monetize.

Community and sales aren’t mutually exclusive, but you do need t know which one is driving your business.

📖 Build in the open

The “open” in open source can extend to more than just your repo. For .txt, that means letting the community see how the business is being created, and even voting on roadmap decisions. As Rémi said, “people love to know about the process. How to build an open source library. What does into the design, etc.” When you’re building a new category of company like .txt this kind of transparency helps show customers how you’re solving their problems—going from open code to open storytelling.

Going to the US 🇺🇸

More and more French startups are following this playbook: keep your engineering talent in France, and build your go-to-market team in the U.S.

That’s exactly what Formance is doing. With 40% of their ARR already coming from North America, Anne-Sybille is moving to the U.S. to lead GTM from the front lines while her cofounder continues running the tech org from Paris. It’s a model she knows well after following this same blueprint post–Series A at Alsid, her first company.

.txt is taking a similar path. The founders, two of them Americans, are all based in France—but half the team is already in the U.S. While Rémi has no plans to move himself he’s still clear that presence matters. “San Francisco is where we found our first users, our first employee, and our first momentum. In France, the ecosystem is more of a club. When you need help here you will find it. But in SF, people will try what you’re building just because it’s interesting.”

He then added a twist to this point: presence ≠ primary residence.

As he said, “it’s very important to exist [in the US], but you don’t have to live there to exist there.” Rémi has even chosen to live outside of Paris in Fontainebleau—a town I also lived in and can confidently say is not a tech hub. Since .txt is selling to a global audience, Rémi actually spend more time in San Francisco than in Paris and can comfortably do so while bucking the trend of all French tech centering itself around the capital.

Podcast Recommendation 🫶

Venture Lab (With Luis) 🔬

Why you’ll like it: In a world where capital has become a commodity, the question emerges: How can investors provide value beyond funding and help founders build exceptional businesses?

The Venture Lab podcast explores this challenge through conversations with the most disruptive minds in entrepreneurship, venture capital, and media, capturing the fundamental shift occurring in today’s venture landscape. Click below to check out a recent episode with Seedcamp founder and prolific investor Saul Klein.

Additional Reading (and watching) 📚

• 1 Rachat à 100 Millions de Dollars avec Anne-Sybille Pradelles (Structure for Scale)

• With $11.9 million in funding, Dottxt tells AI models how to answer (TechCrunch)

• No more bad outputs with structured generation: Remi Louf (AI Engineer)

• Formance raises $21M to build the AWS for fintech infrastructure (TechCrunch)