Vive la France long live the US

It’s tempting to oppose France and the United States. But it’s exhausting, a lazy thinking disguised as cultural insight. Every dinner table in Paris eventually ends with someone explaining to you why the US is too expensive, too capitalist, too chaotic, too far from our values. Then, across the Atlantic, you find the same caricature inverted: the French founders who land in San Francisco and suddenly discover religion… “Oh, now I get it. France is hopeless. Bureaucratic. Socialist. Lazy. Impossible to fire. Everyone wants vacations.” Two groups screaming at mirrors, mistaking reflection for truth.

France and the U.S. are both extreme countries. That’s why they fascinate. America is the land of full-risk and full-reward. It’s the amplifier of ambition. Everything there is built to make you dream bigger, spend bigger, fall harder. You get chewed and celebrated at the same time. The air smells like competition, caffeine, and litigation. When you’re there, you dream big because the country itself is big. From day one, they told you America rules the world, and you believed it. You’re supposed to believe it. It’s not arrogance; it’s fuel.

And France? France is different. France is romantic. It’s poetic. It’s revolutionary. It’s meticulous. It’s the land where the word craft still means something. We don’t dream big; we perfect small. We don’t scale; we sculpt. We don’t pitch; we argue. The first quality of a French entrepreneur has always been craftsmanship. We don’t create to conquer. We create to master. There are no better artisans in the world… Look around: restaurants, fashion houses, perfumes, wines, software, architecture, even mathematical elegance. Craftsmanship isn’t a niche here; it’s the baseline. It’s a national religion.

Its not a war. America and France are two extremes of the same entrepreneurial DNA. One builds with adrenaline. The other builds with obsession. One measures in billions. The other measures in precision. And that’s fine. You don’t need to pick a side. You can breathe with both lungs.

I meet founders who dream of conquering the U.S. but have never set foot there. I tell them: go. You have to go. Not because the U.S. is better, but because it’s a rite of passage. You need to understand what big looks like. You need to feel that friction between what you thought was impossible and what they call Tuesday. You need to see ambition in its natural habitat. When you go there, you realize how far the frontier actually is. Then, you choose your fight. But at least you’ll be choosing it consciously.

This morning, I was with a founder from the north of France building a social consumer app. First market? The U.S. Never been there. I told him: buy a ticket. Go walk a campus. Meet users. Eat the culture. You’ll come back changed. Maybe you’ll move there. Maybe you won’t. But either way, you’ll have grown ten years in ten days (Ok I am maybe exaggerating). That’s what happens when you expose yourself to scale. You start understanding the physics of ambition. It’s not a place, it’s a mindset.

When I tell founders to go to the U.S., it’s not because I fetishize it. It’s because it calibrates you. It reveals how small your fears are and how big your excuses have become. YC does that too. It’s a washing machine. It strips you down to your raw material and spins you until you either break or harden. And if you come out alive, you can build anywhere… Paris, San Francisco, whatever. You’ve internalized the tempo.

I love the founders who stay in France and build here anyway. The ones who look at the system and say: I’ll make it work. Because that’s courage. That’s rebellion of the most French kind. You think Americans are risk-takers? Try starting a company in France without being crushed by paperwork, taxes, or cynicism. It’s gladiator school with croissants. But those who survive, they build with a depth Americans envy. They build companies that mean something. They don’t just chase valuations. They chase mastery. And when it clicks, when a French team finally cracks something global, it’s magnificent.

So yes, if you’re French and your first market is the U.S., go. Don’t think twice. You’ll find capital, talent, density. You’ll see what it means to be surrounded by people who talk in outcomes, not opinions. But don’t go there to escape France. Go there to understand yourself. To stretch. To accelerate. And when you come back, bring that ambition home. Inject it into the culture. Build bridges, not walls.

Because the truth is, it’s easy to criticize what you don’t understand. The French love to hate success. The Americans love to celebrate it until you fail. Both sides are hypocritical in their own way. But if you’ve walked both streets, you learn to laugh at it. You learn tolerance. You learn that “French rigor + American scale” is not a contradiction. It’s a formula.

And you learn that entrepreneurship is not a career. It’s a crisis, a continuous existential crisis where every decision is a bet on who you’re becoming. You don’t build to win. You build to progress. Success is just a side effect of that progress. The satisfaction of your customers is the real metric. The byproduct is your bank account. That’s it.

So stop choosing sides. Love the U.S. for its speed, its hunger, its lack of shame. Love France for its craft, its thoughtfulness, its refusal to settle. Love both, learn from both, and build something worthy of both.

Because at the end of the day, the point isn’t to be French or American.
The point is to build something that makes you proud to be alive.