 Hello. Hi, everyone. Very nice to see you all here today. This is my second edition of Slush, and I have to say it was even better than last year. Pardon my voice. I might have ended at a party yesterday night, and it kind of did that to my voice. I also got a cold, so I could be more local and fit with helping weather. And since we're going to talk about international expansion and localization, I guess that's actually relevant. So just to give you a bit of background on why I'm talking to you about international expansion today and what as French tech to do is international expansion. So prior to joining French tech, and I'll tell you a bit more about what is French tech and how we go international, I got the chance to work kind of all over the world in different startups, where there was one common theme, was how can we accelerate, go beyond our markets, go international, and make sure that the innovations that you would build in Thailand, in Singapore, in the US, in the UK, or in France can go way beyond their borders. This has been a very strong theme throughout my career, and I hope I can share a few tips and also maybe give you some ideas on how you could expand to France, because this is also what I'm doing today. I'm the director of Mission French Tech, which is an administration of the French government looking at expanding and growing the French tech ecosystem. So all the startups, investors, supporting our tech ecosystem. Some of you might know, France might not have been that central to tech a few years ago, but we now have a very booming, exciting, amazing startup ecosystem, and this had a lot to do with our entrepreneurs, investors, completely understanding that France is a very great market, 60 million people, but if we want to create unicorns, if we want to create big tech companies, we have to take those innovations beyond our borders. So I'll also talk about how French tech companies do that. So what is La French Tech? La French Tech is a bunch of 20,000 startups innovating in B2B, B2C, basically everything tech you can think of, all the stuff you have in your smartphone, but also industrial tech, I'll say biotech, I'll say quantum, AI, cloud, basically all the technologies we can think of. And we try and support those organizations so they can build those innovation for the greatest number of people in the world. Our administration was created almost 10 years ago with this goal to support this ecosystem and help all the startups becoming bigger and bigger and facilitate everything has to do with the state, everything that has to do with attracting talents, attracting investment, and just making sure that entrepreneurs can focus on building those great companies. So the first question I think I was trying to think, why can I teach you on going international? Probably the first question I asked myself when I was responsible for international expansion at a company called List that is based in the UK was when and why should we go international? And I'd start with why I touched on it, but we're very, very fortunate to be born in Europe for most of the European people in this room, for me as an individual, and Europe is a great place to start businesses, but we're all part of pretty small markets, especially when we compare it to markets like the US or some markets in Asia. So the first thing that you're gonna be faced with is that if you're only gonna spend most of your time on your own domestic market, just by simple mathematics, your possibilities to expand are gonna be pretty limited quite rapidly. So this is why it's very important, and I think that's what really made the biggest difference in the last 10 years with French startups, to think that if you go big, if you wanna go big, if you wanna be one of the big tech companies in the world, you have to think international from the get-go. You have to think how do I not build the best product from my French customers or my German customers or my Spanish customers, but how do I build the best product for global customers? Because we're not lucky to be born and to build startups in a country where you have 300 million people who can buy your solution from day one. So this is a bit of a hassle. This is something that we don't have from the get-go, but this is actually a huge opportunity, and I think the Nordics have understood it better than anyone else. When you're coming from a small market, you can build companies with this international mindset from the very get-go. That was probably one of the challenges we saw in France is 60 million market, 60 million people. It's not that small. So a lot of companies in the first years of French tech spend a lot of time building the perfect product for French people. But once you have the perfect product for French people, it doesn't mean it's perfect for everyone else in the world. So this is since our companies understood that, understood that in the first years of their existence, they need to think globally. And very concretely, like it means I'm building the code of my app. I'm not gonna build and embed everything in French. I'm gonna build it with international translation tools, embed it from the get-go, so I don't have to do all this really tedious work going back to my code, changing all the wording and translating all the wording. So really from day one, thinking, okay, France is not big enough, or Germany is not big enough, or Spain is not big enough. So I need to build a product that will be easily translatable, easily adaptable to all my market. I think that has been one of the biggest transformation. It sounds like a small thing, but when you have five, 10 years of existence and you have to rebuild your entire product, it's just such a crazy waste of time. So that's definitely something that I think I've seen in all the experiences I've been in. The earliest you think about those things, the earliest you think about the fact that you have global ambitions, you're gonna embed this international mindset from the get-go. Embed it in your product, I talked about it, embed it in your teams. That I think is probably the biggest barrier we see also in France is when you're building teams with only French people, the first foreigner that is gonna come into this team is honestly not gonna have a very fun time. Because even if you're gonna try and force your company to move to English language at the coffee machine, at lunchtime, when you go out for having drinks with your colleagues, everyone is gonna speak French again because we are not that comfortable with English that space it. So one thing we're really seeing entrepreneurs changing nowadays is from the very beginning, their management teams, they bring on people from all around the world. And we've tried and made this as easy for them as possible and I took a bit more about how we do that in a minute. But I think that's also one very, very important advice because if you bring this international team from the very beginning, it means that you're not gonna be a French company anymore, you're not gonna be a German company anymore, you're not gonna be a Finnish company anymore, you're gonna be an international company and this is gonna be much, much easier for you to think about all the different perspectives, for you to understand that things are not made the same way in all the markets and for you to basically go international much, much, much faster. So we talked a bit about the reason to expand internationally. I think beyond market opportunity, which is probably a reason no one can really challenge, it's also a question of sovereignty. And the prime minister of Finland talked about it yesterday. Why do we all, I think it's 80% of French startups rely on infrastructure tools that come from the US? Because all those companies, not only they had big markets when they started, but they also expanded very, very fast to Europe and to all global markets. So if we wanna build this digital sovereignty, tech sovereignty that everyone is thinking about, it means that we need to support our companies and that's what we try to do is French tech to not only be a great solution, innovations for their local customers, but also brings us innovation abroad. Brings them abroad so they can transform the life of their customers everywhere in the world and not just in their own domestic market. And I think this is becoming extremely important in a world where everyone is realizing that the context is evolving. You are really wondering what are the different types of shortages that are affecting my business? How can we really build our own capabilities? And this is definitely one of the objectives of Mission French Tech is helping companies understand that they have this potential to not only build international client base, but also build international recognizable solutions that will help our sovereignty. So we talked a little bit about good timing. So of course, if everything goes right, you'd have an international team from the get go, you'd have an internationalizable product from the get go, and you'd be thinking international on day two. But I'm sure a lot of you have worked in startups or be founders in this room, and there's already so much to do when you start a company. It's not that easy to spend so much time on maybe new opportunities for revenue, but I'm not gonna materialize tomorrow because it's a lot of work to open international. So I don't think I'm able to say when is a good timing. The good timing is a good timing for your business, but definitely being prepared very early, the earliest on possible, will help you get ready and move faster when the good timing comes for you. So if you have this international mindset, it will help you the days that you're ready to go attack a market, to go after this market, and to not have to completely change your culture, completely change the way you work, completely change your habits, your working language to go after this market. So I think the most important is this preparation phase. Understand that this day will come and by the time it comes, you need to have thought through way, way, way before so you're ready to go after international expansion because otherwise it will be much harder to transform a very local company in a very global company. That being said, I mean, there's opportunities and what we're seeing with French tech companies that we are particularly excited about at the moment is some companies might not have had this very international mindset at first, but there are also opportunities to accelerate internationally in different ways. Opening your own subsidiary, creating your own team is the route that most of the people think of, but you can also catch up and gain a lot of time when you think about international acquisition, especially in this context. So I'm sure a lot of you in the room are thinking, okay, financing is getting more difficult, my investors are pushing me towards profitability, but it also means that a lot of companies are getting cheaper. So if you've always thought about a market, let's say for example, Dr. Lee, which is one of the biggest unicorn in France looking at facilitating appointments with doctors, Dr. Lee probably always wanted to expand internationally. Guess what? Because the context is moving, there are potential acquisition targets in a lot of different markets in the world. So this is also a good timing to do that. Maybe not the traditional route, building your team, localizing your product, basically changing everything, going there on the ground, sending a funder, but looking at all the different companies out there who have their own local journey and looking at which one could be a good target to expand in a market to bring you new capabilities because this will make the route much faster, so much riskier because probably some of you know and have been through it, acquisition and especially integration can be a lot harder, but it is an opportunity that I think we often underestimate in this market context. So it's not only a good market for VCs to make cheap deals, it's also a good markets for companies who want to go international, acquire competitors and go with this route to international expansion. Where to go international? So I'm gonna try not to start by come to France, so that's kind of what I'm paid to do for. So I'm obviously very biased, but I think this has been something that I've worked a lot during my time as an entrepreneur is try and understand where should we go first? Like let's say at least we were a British company very easy for us to expand in the US because it's the same language, but the US is also a very wide, competitive, expensive market when it comes to marketing. So maybe there would be opportunities to go somewhere else, even if the bar to go there would be higher because it would mean translation, it would mean localization, it would mean understanding all the culture. So some of the things I've seen in my previous job that I've worked, but then I also say to the extent of which it has worked is kind of try and understand what are the business opportunities? Where is your product gonna have the best market fit to go international? But with a combination of how much effort is it gonna take me to go international? I take a very concrete example. When I worked at Vestir Collective, Korea was one of the markets we really, really wanted to go after because for some of you who might be interested in fashion, if you make it in Korea as a fashion company, you basically make it everywhere in Asia because Korea is kind of pushing the trend of fashion there. This is where it's the most forward. But Korea is very hard. It's very hard because the very simple stuff, the language, even like the characters of the language are different, so it means completely changing the website infrastructure, the website navigation. It's not just pure translation. And actually someone yesterday told me, oh, I think the biggest mistake founders make when they go international is thinking international equal translation. This would be way too simple. It's not just about translation. It's about adapting your product to the local environment, the local way people navigate the internet in this case for Vestir Collective, but also obviously the local culture, the local consumer habits. And turns out, secondhand in Korea, three, four, five years ago, was still very nascent and still not well regarded. Still a little bit like, am I really gonna wear this secondhand bag? So it would have required us a lot of effort to go there, even though it was so important for us. So what we did is we built this task force internally, bringing people from basically all the dimensions of the company, product people, tech people, local people who know the culture and the market very well, marketing people, and kind of trying to assess beyond the numbers of, oh, Korea is that big for fashion. It's that important from an inspiration perspective towards the rest of the region. How much effort is it gonna take? And we kind of built this simple matrix in like, okay, what are the countries where I'm gonna have the most potential but also the most effort to win? And who are the countries that are maybe not on the extreme of this graph? But in the middle, with potential enough to have learnings, like, is my product gonna really fit in a new market? But maybe not as risky a Korea in this example so that I can start to have quick learnings and quick feedback from market in international expansion. And maybe once I get a little bit more confident looking at other markets, I'll come back to my Korea example. So in the case of Easter Collective, that's exactly what we did. We reopened, relaunched in markets like the US before going after Korea. And I'll totally be more about what we did there to make it successful. And then from this experience, we were much more ready from a tech perspective because we built the infrastructure to localize and make the product much more agile and flexible. And we were much more ready as an organization because we already had this experience of going to an international market that is as difficult as going to the US, but also simply from just all the piece of the company putting together and working together towards a challenge so that they are ready for the next challenge. So that would be probably the way I would encourage you to think about what market you can go in. One part I'm very excited about, I think we often think about, oh, what are the big opportunities to go abroad? Let's go to the US because it's the biggest market. Let's go to Asia. We are very, very fortunate to live in Europe where there are also 300 million-plus people. And this is something that I've seen all the French tech companies thinking more and more is, before thinking about the word, shouldn't we think first about Europe? So this is where first I'm gonna share a bit about in Europe why France is a great place for you to expand, but also why we think Europe has great opportunity and why as a French administration we want to support this movement towards Europe. So first, France. I mean, France is quite a big market, so I think a lot of companies, and I'm seeing this more and more with European companies coming to France, are thinking nowadays, okay, how can I expand to this market? We've tried to make it as easy as possible for everyone with the launch of, for example, a French tech visa for people to come and launch and join tech startups in France to make it easy for talents to come and be on the ground. We've tried to make all the legislation around startups much easier when it comes to stock option taxation, when it comes to facilitating the way of doing business with the administration. So basically making sure that as a French entrepreneur setting a business in France, our foreign company wanted to open an office of subsidiary in France. We can ease everything that you would have to think of so that we make your life easier and you can focus on the stuff I was talking before, that it's much more difficult to crack, how to get the right product to the right customer at the right time. Europe is a great opportunity because first, going to the US is not that easy. It's very expensive because there's a lot of competition. There are companies who raise much more monies than European companies usually that are spending this money on marketing avenues and say to get your product well known in the US is not going to be very cheap. Whereas Europe, you have all those customers, potential customers that are probably also a bit closer from us when it comes to culture and when it comes to product usability. And so the idea that was launched by President Emmanuel Macron now two years ago was to say, why don't we unite as a tech nations, European tech nation globally and think together what can we do to create a movement that will help our scale up, scale up in Europe first. How can we address this European market better? And a few themes came out of those discussion. Fund raising was a big one. How do we make sure that we have the financing capabilities so that the scale up in Europe can finance themselves without always depending on American or Asian funds coming to Europe to help them scale? So there was a big fund of fund launched earlier in the year with 4 billion euro and we raised 10 billion euros to fund those companies so that we can have the capability to move faster in Europe altogether. So there's a lot of work done at European level on talent. How do we build a common talent desk so that when we attract the people we need in our companies and when we have to move them from France to Germany, from Germany to Spain or from Germany to Finland, we have very simple procedures so that we can really adapt and go after all those markets and really build those through European companies. So there's a lot of effort put at local and European level to make this possible and I think it's an amazing opportunity because only together we will create those scale ups and there's so much to do. Going back to what are kind of the steps to expand internationally, so we talked about setting the right team, we talked about choosing the right country. I think one thing I've seen in my last previous life, not as part of the government but more in my entrepreneurial life is that oftentimes we tend to be a bit impatient when it comes to go international so we kind of spend months building this perfect website for Spain customers and it's adapted to the local market, it's in the right language, we have all the infrastructure and we launch it and then we don't really have orders for a while and we think, oh, Spain is not for us. No, I do think that as much as it was hard for us to build our own companies in our local markets, it's not necessarily easier to go after a new market and so in the step to expand what I've seen a lot in my previous life is try and look at how can we build some kind of different steps so that we can try and test a lot of the different aspects of our product. Do we get those first customers? What do we learn from them? Do we need to adapt further our product because it's not only about translation? How do we make sure that, for example, when you go to the US with a French fashion website, you show US brands to the customers? So it's, yeah, the website is gonna be in English but if you're gonna show only French brands, this is not really gonna work so how do you understand what people like? What are the main differences? How do you make sure that the products that your customers are looking for are here and you have a local assortment for your customer in the case of Vista Collective or at least, these are all the steps that we had to really think about carefully because otherwise we kind of went at it with very global picture and not really taking the time to understand those local differences. I'll give you a very concrete example. So when I worked at this French website, most of the American brands, maybe you know them, Coach or Mulberry or this type of brands, we actually thought in French it was not very cool. So what we did is we rejected the products when customers were trying to sell them or if we accepted it, we kind of hide it in like the very, very bottom of the site. Guess what? When you look at Google, what are the most searched fashion brands in the US? Turns out it's Coach, Mulberry and all those guys. So obviously when we launched, relaunched in the US and we didn't even show one single product of those brands to our customers, it didn't turn very well. So it was very important for us to take the time to understand what are the local market specificities. And it means rebuilding a lot because in this case, it means having different boosting algorithm in France, in US, in Japan, in all the different markets we're in, which was not really the way the website was structured before. And that's why the preparation and the earlier you think about this preparation the easier it's gonna be because all those little things will make a difference in the performance. In terms of how you can know those little things, so you can learn by experience, that's probably what I did for most of my career, but you can also take advantage of the systems that are in place in all those countries and that's what I'm discovering now I'm part of the government. So let's say for example, for France, we have amazing teams called Business France or actually our French tech local communities who are helping entrepreneurs navigate everywhere they wanna go and launch a business. You have a community of entrepreneurs, you have a community of business professionals who are gonna be here to first help you understand the market, create those connections, help you attract the first talents because without local people it's pretty hard to crack a market. And this is the time you need to invest in my opinion to really make sure you know what's going on in this market. You're connected to the right people and you have all what you need on your side to make it a success. Because if you just go on your own with your own perception of what the market looks like, oftentimes this perception is very wrong. Maybe it's built by what you saw as a tourist which is not necessarily what it is as a business professional. Maybe it's built about what you heard competitors or friends or other entrepreneurs or investors say about the market. But this little example I shared about coach and Mulberry, no one could ever told me that even American people could not tell me because they would not think of this difference. So I think you need to really take the time to find the right partners, find the right communities that are gonna give you the direct access to those insights. How do you find the right contacts? So if you wanna come to France, you know where to find us. But if you don't wanna come to France and wanna expand to other markets, I think there's a lot more networks we see developing. I talked about the French tech communities all around the world for our communities. But we also obviously see at events like that how people kind of catch up and meet and discuss together and exchange ideas. So yesterday on the French tech booths there were entrepreneurs from Germany, from Spain, all sharing their experiences on what they've seen in Europe at the moment, how they can help each other. And the truth is that most of the time people love to help and I've always encouraged everyone to just reach out and link them to people that they find can be interesting, can be helpful. When I did international expansion I think I probably contacted all the VP of international I could think of in scale ups all around Europe. I wouldn't say 100% of them answered but probably a good 30, 40%. And the amount of insights I got from those contacts was so helpful because they've been through these thinking, they've been through the mistakes, they've been through the successes and they love to share. I think we're very lucky that we're an ecosystem where everyone loves working together, sharing knowledge and we just need to take more and more advantage of it. So to finish on the expansion strategy I think I talked about it. The first thing you can think of is how you go directly international yourself, building the right team, going with the right product, localize your product. I really want to insist because I think it's so important in this context. You can also go abroad looking at acquiring competitors and we're not doing this enough in Europe but there are so many opportunities to consolidate, work together, find the right partners in our respective markets. And I really, really hope that in this context which might be more difficult there's actually a lot of opportunities and we can all take advantage of it. I'm happy to answer questions. After this talk I think there's kind of a Q&A setup in another room over there and if anyone wants to discuss and talk more and share your experience don't hesitate to reach out. Thank you.