29
April
2014
|
07:56 AM
America/Los_Angeles

French Entrepreneurs Meet At Le Bastille

20140428 DSC02993

It's good to see the French bringing back "entrepreneur" -- a word that the rest of the world has embraced more readily than the French themselves. It's not "très cool" to be an entrepreneur in France because the social norms frown on too much personal ambition, and corporate jobs have a higher social status.

Monday evening at San Francisco's Le Bastille restaurant I met some French founders and spoke with a couple of French business students about their impressions of Silicon Valley.

PriceMatch has US investors attracted to its room pricing service, which it claims uses scientific algorithms to boost room revenues by 5 to 15%. It is aimed at hotel managers. I spoke with Charles Falanga, the manager for the US operations. I was more impressed with the ability of PriceMatch to interface with the multitude of travel sites and update room pricing and scan competitor's pricing.

A 5% to 15% improvement won't get much urgent attention, it might be better to charge for the management services and throw in the pricing algorithm for free.

Pixowl is a game developer with about 1 million users of its Sandbox game, which lets kids create their own game worlds and share them. Sebastien Borget, co-founder,  says that the company decided from the beginning to focus on the US market because France and the rest of Europe are too small and fragmented. 

Twelve Monkey Company's  Rémy Koné (above) has a great Kickstarter project: a unique battery for iPhones. It's only $49 and it has several nice features, including a multi-colored glowing surface.

Please see:

Paris Diary: Putting "French" Back Into Entrepreneur -SVW

Paris Diary: Cultural Barriers To French Startups... -SVW

Paris Diary: The Joie de Vivre of French Entrepreneurs... -SVW