French founders and 18-hour workdays: not really their vibe. And that’s a problem, say some people on the internet.
Founders at Paris startup hub Station F don’t work hard enough was the gist of a complaint that went viral on social media site X recently, from tech workers who claimed that few startups are at their desks in the evenings or on weekends.
“Hustle dies at 6pm. After 6pm or on weekends [Station F’s] a ghost town. A handful of motivated entrepreneurs show up, but the rest?” founder Thibaut Mélen wrote, which sparked a debate over whether French tech folk needed to make bigger personal sacrifices to achieve success.
“The reality is that after 8pm, the occupancy rate falls below 10%,” agreed Jonathan Izcovich, senior associate at company builder Entrepreneur First. “For a place meant to represent the heart of Paris’ startup grind that’s kind of sad.” Both Mélen and Izcovich are self-described accelerationists, which means they are very pro-tech and believe emerging technologies should be allowed to move as fast as possible, with few (or no) guardrails.
Their comments touched a nerve in Paris at a time when general VC fundraising has dipped — without AI investments last year, the French tech scene would have declined by 11% year-over-year, according to figures from 20VC.
In the online brouhaha that followed, some even suggested that a lack of grit and long hours was Europe’s problem writ-large — and the main reason why the region risks becoming a distant third (after the US and China) in the global AI race. It’s a sensitive time in Europe, with growing concern over the declining competitiveness of the EU economy, just as President Donald Trump seeks to turbocharge his country with huge AI investment.
Others thought it was a social media storm in a tea cup. Station F’s head Roxanne Varza told Sifted: “We actually do have thousands of people on campus on nights and weekends if you look at our entire building. They’re just not sitting at their desks all the time.”
And fundraising by Station F startups speaks for itself, she added. “Last year our founders raised over €1bn for the third consecutive year — that’s 15% of the French ecosystem — so somebody had to be working.”
Do French founders lack le grindset?
Jérémy Mathon, a software engineer who divides his time between Paris and San Francisco, carried the debate over to LinkedIn.
“The contrast [between Paris and Silicon Valley] is striking,” he wrote. “In the Bay Area, there’s [this] density of ambitious people willing to put in the extra hours, the spontaneous late-night debugging sessions, the weekend AI hackathons.” Paris has talent, he added, but needs to “rebuild this culture of resilience and obsession with problem-solving.”
If you don’t keep an air mattress under your desk, do you even care about building a unicorn? “Grindset” adherents believe in a total immersion in work.
A few (mainly Silicon Valley-based) work obsessives have helped perpetuate the narrative that tech requires great sacrifice. Billionaire Elon Musk, who has talked about sleeping on the factory floor at his carmaker company Tesla, is the archetypal grinder; the 120-hour week workaholic. When Musk took over Twitter, he ordered workers to adapt to an “extremely hardcore” working culture or quit.
He’s not the only founder to preach for longer hours. Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced former CEO of cryptocurrency platform FTX, would sleep on an office bean bag. Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates has talked about learning car licence plates to ensure staff were clocking enough hours in the office.
Tech’s glorification of long hours has faded beyond the extreme examples — but not completely. See this recent job post from Stockholm startup Lovable, which shows four guys on their laptops (normal) in their bathrobes at a spa (less normal). In the job ad, cofounder Anton Osika says “those seeking comfortable work need not apply”: a line that will probably discourage applications from 30-somethings with young families. He also says a job at Lovable apparently requires “unflinching intellectual honesty”, which might be a bridge too far for almost all of us.
Equally, there are many — particularly younger workers — who disapprove of punishing office cultures (or disapprove of the office full stop, with its microwaved lunchtime fish and loud colleagues speaking on headsets). Critics of the grind call out performative workaholism and argue that you don’t have to log 18-hour days to be effective. Post-pandemic home-working played a big part in diluting the “always in, always on” trend, as employees gained greater control over their routines.
The notion that Europeans spend too little time at their desks has gone into the meme-culture blender: a picture of the late chef and traveller Anthony Bourdain sitting outside a Paris cafe is a popular way to skewer the European work ethic.
“It is ridiculous to judge the grit to solve problems by the number of people staying after 5pm,” says Xavier Vital, a French programme manager at Microsoft, who joined the debate on LinkedIn. “You usually carry these problems home anyway and there is nothing better than sleeping on a problem to solve it in the am.”
“The real question,” says Varza, “is, do people all need to be at their desks at 10pm to make their companies successful? Our founders could be doing many other things that are beneficial for their businesses: meeting customers, going to investor dinners, meeting candidates [or] participating in some of the events we organise.”
Several Station F alumni got in touch with Sifted to defend its work culture. Thomas Wolf, cofounder of French unicorn Hugging Face, called the hub an “amazing place that I’m pushing to see replicated in other cities in the world.”
Yuting Jiang is a founder based at Station F who says she mainly goes there to network. “The rest of the time, I prefer to work in PJs.”
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/hustle-dies-at-6pm-do-french-founders-work-hard-enough/
