🇫🇷What's it like being a Black founder in France?🇫🇷
a weekend dispatch from abroad
💖Motivation Meows💖
I am about to head back to New York to kick off the holiday party season, so that will be exhausting and fun.
I can’t keep thinking about the dinner Ruka Hair held for their U.S. brand launch a few weeks ago in Brooklyn and how it was fun to just be in a room with other Black women talking about our hopes, dreams, and hair. Ruka Hair is a Black British-owned company that sells high-quality synthetic hair to make wigs and weaves. I got my first weave last year and used their bundles. I knew I wanted to use a Black-owned product that offered good transparency and quality. I’m excited to see them start entering the U.S. market more, and I love the new wave of Black-owned hair companies coming in to offer us sustainable, quality products that can keep our hair healthy (especially as we all continue healing from the relaxer epidemic.)
As usual, please feel free to subscribe, send around, email me your reflections, and follow me on Twitter and Instagram at dominicmadori.
This month, I’m reading: Does anybody have good book recommendations?
This weekend I can’t stop listening to: Mad by Solange (feat. Lil Wayne)
💢From the Chatterbox💢
I spent a few weeks this summer working and traveling Europe and found myself chasing one question that’s always sat in the back of my mind: What’s it like being a Black founder in France? I knew much about what it was like being a Black founder and investor in the U.K. and knew all too well what it meant to be one in the States. I had even heard stories from Germany, too. Still, France felt like a mystery to me. That was quite interesting because I spent around five years studying French culture and France; from my college years to even today, I read news in French and travel around the country at least once a year. I read a lot of books and was very familiar with race relations in the country from even my brief time living there as a college student (I’ll tell you about this era of my life at a later time, lol). Years ago, as a young adult, I wrote in a blog about my views on France, “We talk of what the oppressor has done, but never how that made the oppressed feel — never hear from the voices of those impacted, but always read the documents of those who did the impacting.” Like how James Baldwin shaped my views on America, I was forever radicalized by reading Discourse on Colonialism by Aimé Césaire; after that, the City of Lights dimmed for me a bit, and in retroflection, maybe France wasn’t mysterious to me at all.
There was a prolonged darkness that came over me as I covered France that made me very sad, even compared to when I first started covering Black founders in the U.K. I tried hard to parse where that darkness was coming from.
When I went to France this summer, I made time to meet with Black founders and investors and talk to them about what it is like living in that world. My expectations were that France, specifically Paris, was a stratified bubble with a social and class hierarchy that is even more shrouded than that in the U.K. and that Black people are rarely, if ever, able to peel back any layers of that onion. Deep down, though, I was nervous I would get it all wrong and that everything was fine in Paris, and I was just projecting and putting my American nose where it didn’t belong. I just needed the confidence of a white male correspondent who just shows up anywhere and starts taking notes.
The biggest pain point is that it’s illegal to track data in France and Germany (primarily because of WWII), meaning that it’s hard to prove racism actually exists (unlike the data we can easily pull in the U.S. and U.K.), creating the perfect loop to gaslight people into thinking it is them as individuals rather than French society as a whole that is the problem. Data has been so important in proving discrimination in the U.S. and even the U.K.; it was the one thing found to work when social proof was dismissed. Here in France, without concrete data, I felt like I was walking on an unsteady foundation. Still, I trusted my intuition, and I believed my sources. I was determined to make sure my readers did, too. I set off to Paris to get a glimpse behind the curtain, to see what faces racism took when it manifested in L'hexagone. I couldn’t say that every city was like its capital, but as the French would know, common sentiments are what link a society.
First, for my “VC Office Hours” column in TechCrunch, I spoke with investor Fabrice do Rego about leading one of the few Black-led funds in the EU. His fund is called The Blueprint, and it focuses on seed and pre-seed rounds, writing checks ranging from €100,000 to €400,000. It’s based in Belgium but works with founders there and in France. Chatting about what the EU was like was fascinating; it was one of those moments when you realize the entire African diaspora throughout the Western world has yet to know peace from our colonizers and displacers. It was also interesting to see how one navigates an ecosystem with little evidence of one's pain.
Here is part of our conversation:
TechCrunch: Is there really a pipeline problem, or is it just an excuse for investors in the EU not to invest in as many diverse entrepreneurs?
do Rego: As you say, it’s a sentiment. The proportion of founders coming in from outside the traditional founder path is much bigger. As an investor, you need to look for them when other people don’t. Most established investors are simply selecting deals, because they have a lot of incoming deal flow from homogenous types of founders. But our job as investors is to look where the new superstar of startups can be.
Most new founders don’t know how the ecosystem works or what to look out for. They just know how to solve a problem, and at the end of the day, that’s what we are looking to do — we’re just looking for people who know how to solve a problem.
Founders from diverse backgrounds often don’t know the traditional path to raise money. They don’t know what type of deck to build, which kinds of connections to have, or what they need to say. Many don’t know how to do that, so it’s part of our job to look for them, not the other way around. VC firms need to take that effort if they want to have more diverse founders.
Education is also critical. It’s important to let diverse students from business schools know that they can have a professional life in VC. Most of them just don’t think about it because they think it’s not for them.
TechCrunch: France does not track diversity statistics, making it hard to prove that racism is even real in the country. What is a way around this?
do Rego: My thesis is: What you’ve experienced in the U.S. and U.K. — we have the same problems here. But getting that data in Continental Europe is complicated because, in some countries, it’s not even allowed to have ethical statistics.
Some people tell me, ‘Okay, what you’re tracking is a problem specific to the U.S. or U.K., but we don’t have those problems in France.’ I find that stupid because if I just asked a VC here to show me their portfolio companies that have diverse teams, they would struggle to do that.
If you don’t have data, you cannot track, and if you cannot track, you cannot evolve. But it’s touchy in France, and when we say we want to tackle this problem for some people, they take it personally and say, ‘You mean that we are racist?’ That’s not what I’m saying, and we need to change that mindset.
After this, I spent the next week compiling the big piece: What’s it like being a Black founder in France? There was a prolonged darkness that came over me as I covered France that made me very sad, even compared to when I first started covering Black founders in the U.K. It was my own form of Paris syndrome, and I tried hard to parse where that darkness was coming from. I flickered a light and found most of it came from a history of enslavement and colonizing that France has yet to recognize. It came from dealing with racial stereotypes and prejudices that manifest in the form of economic and social discrimination. It comes from a silent society, one that refuses to listen, one whose inability and refusal to talk about the past and present makes it hard to plan for the future. It comes from the fact that France denies Black people their pain. It came from me having to face those demons, too, constantly reminding me of how fathomless and evil the crimes against the diaspora were, what happens when a nation neglects to let those people speak, and what happens when a mass group of people has no hope of a better tomorrow. Next, I had to see exactly how much of these feelings also penetrated France’s tech bubble.
When I started this piece, I thought I would be talking about the mainland, but I soon found myself pulled into researching the région d'outre-mer (the overseas department islands). I had forgotten that the islands France still controlled throughout the world were actually considered to be part of France, not just a territory like Puerto Rico is for the U.S. I didn’t know what to expect of the outre-me-rs relationship with France, but was not surprised to hear what many told me.
Rodolphe-Emmanuel Hospice, founder of a healthcare company Clikodoc, based in Martinique, often has to go to mainland France to fundraise due to a lack of investors on the island. But when he does get to France, he sees many people like him being treated as if they’re complete foreigners. “We are seen as rural people [instead of] urban people. We are not taken seriously,” he said, adding that Islanders like himself are often considered lazy. “Also, we come from small markets, so we have to fight all these stereotypes to prove we can do interesting things.”
Late into the reporting process, I remembered that any story about France would be incomplete without Africa, so I had to go back and make sure I mapped how France still plays a very active role in the lives of many Africans. Africa, of course, is doing well when it comes to investors, and its relationship with French investors is different because the continent is a well-known multi-billion-dollar market. But I still wondered what type of bias would arise from even having solid proof of potential success. I wrote:
Moulaye Tabouré, founder of African e-commerce platform Anka, said … he had his challenges. Though he said he felt discrimination in the ecosystem wasn’t necessarily based on skin color, he believes there is a lack of cultural awareness on the part of the investors. He was often questioned about the size of the African market, or about whether people would actually buy his product. “With clear ignorant undertones,” Tabouré added. “No matter what data points you share with them, because it is so far from most investors’ reality, and they are not curious or risk-prone, you feel perpetually out of place.”
The stories from the mainland were pretty daming, though. It seems like some Black people who actually live in France felt like they were being ignored while resources and opportunities emerged for other groups of people, even others within the diaspora. This made me sad to hear. To me, at least over in America, the face of what it means to be French is not just a white girl with bangs and red lips. The face of France, to me, is more Black and brown than even when Baldwin went there. The more I heard about the dismissal of Black people in the mainland, the more it felt like France had yet to come to terms with who she was becoming in this modern era, that she would try to cut off the Black and brown noses only to spite her own face. Shaila Sahai, the founder of a fintech, told me she faces severe misogynoir in France and that investors there usually treat her with bafflement upon sight.
In fact, she’s had investors end the conversation in the middle of a pitch. I wrote about some of her experiences:
French sociocultural beliefs and actions are contradictory, and when founders from Black backgrounds come into meetings, investors don’t know what to do. When faced with a Black founder, [Sahai] feels most of the French investment community’s thoughts flow something like: “Should we welcome them and give them the same chance and the same place as the others, or should we remain careful?”
“It’s impossible that you can be their equal,” she said.
Naturally, on the topic of equality, I became very interested in classism. Although it’s hard to pinpoint racism, who is most impacted by socioeconomic divides was an easy way to see how opportunities were also cut through racial and ethnic lines in France. I wrote that:
Paris is segregated along class lines which separate the city along ethnic lines, too. Many Black and brown people within the Île-de-France region live in what is known as the “banlieues” or the “outskirts” of Paris. The conditions of these neighborhoods vary, but they nevertheless have negative stereotypes. Raphaël Jabol, the founder of legal services startup Ekie, grew up in one of these neighborhoods. While Jabol didn’t necessarily feel discriminated against when he sought fundraising, he still described the ordeal of learning the social codes of the venture ecosystem as “tough.” “This is the first step of creating inequality,” he said. “Poor education.”
France’s tech bubble was a microcosm of its own larger society, and those negative thoughts that Black people had in everyday society about their surroundings were represented, too, within the tech bubble. Hope was mixed, but they were not alone there; Black hope in most Western places oscillates depending on the year, the hour, and the president. France is just one of those places that I spend hours thinking about because of the nuanced way race, class, religion, and society intersect over there. The solutions to any of these issues seem so simple, and yet it seems like its strides in addressing them lag compared to those in the U.S. and even the U.K., and instead are handled with bitter resentment and dismissal. Are you calling me a racist? I thought most of what Sahai said, ruminating long over the image of tension between the need to finally accept Black people in higher realms of society or keeping them always one step below. History will show you that trying to keep Black people as permanent second-class citizens for long is never a good idea.
I always think about Baldwin saying that as a Black American, I would be treated differently over there because of my Americaness and that I would also come to find that I had more in common with the country that enslaved me than the people who originated from the same continent I once lived on. That is a tricky fact I am always conscious of when I move around in Europe, and it makes me feel like an outsider looking in at my own race. Overall, while traveling, I feel generally, as a Black American, concurrently resented and embraced. France was a society like and unlike my own. As I spoke to people I came across good stories and bad stories, but mostly a distorted face. Maybe that was the tension; maybe this is what a turning point looks like. The voices were muffled, and the image was shattered; it was a morph between what France is and what she wants me, perhaps as an American, to see.
A common theme many in Paris whispered to me of was disregard, the feeling of not being seen or ignored. If you can’t see race, then racism doesn’t exist. But in reality, when you can’t see race, you can’t see the person standing in front of you for who they are, telling you how you are making them feel. I ended up thinking long and hard about demons, about not shying away from talking about them, about facing them, about the importance of telling a story clean, cut, and to the point. When I put my France package together, I wrote down what I was told, tried to draw a string where there appeared thread, and gave credit to where credit was due.
I found there was some good movement happening in the venture ecosystem that Black people pointed me too. There’s Station F, which has become a hail mary for many emerging founders. Though I was told that diversity initiatives don’t last long in France, there are accelerators looking to help people from “underprivileged backgrounds.” (In the European sense, that usually means class.) Networks are growing in the outremer, and there are programs like Afrique Diaspora, Pass Africa, and Francophone Africa to help out Black founders in France and in Africa. Innovation is indeed happening, and aside from tech in general, I can only imagine what cool products would stem from specifically Black-focused French tech, lest the market becomes more acquainted with ethnic trends. I became happy again, and happy that some people were very happy. The American in me was optimistic, though the Black American in me was cautious, distracted almost, by the geyser of race I was standing on in their country.
Someone told me their ecosystem just needs more visible success stories and more people willing to come out in the open and be the face of Black success. But I found that put people at odds, though. Some people wanted to build in quiet because, in a sense, that’s safer in a race-blind society where people just don’t want to deal with talking about race. In that, however, people are denied role models and truth-tellers; they are denied someone or something to give them hope. Some found complete success just not mentioning or focusing too deeply on anything; others accepted their place without further fuss. Others, like Sahai, were mad, like very, very mad. People spoke to me in murmurs, with hope, anger, indifference, and despair. There was no monolith in feelings here, no matter how much I wanted to box in a clear answer.
So I did what always happens when France sends me on a spiral. I read. In the 1920s book Banjo by Claude McKay, a Haitian character, Ray, argues with a French student, who tells him that France has treated “colored” people — Black and Arabs — better than in the U.S. Ray responds, “I don’t know how it would be if you Europeans had a large colored population to handle in Europe. I hope to God you won’t ever face that.” When I think of the rising racial tensions in France right now, I think of this line because this is what is happening: a cultural and racial clash caused by an influx of Black and brown people they can no longer ignore, a friction that, depending on how it’s handled, will come to define France for the next century. That is the tension. That is the time. That is the distorted face. That is the good and the bad, the breaks, the shatters, the broken glass. There is more than enough social proof to see that this is a turning point. At the same time, I am optimistic and hopeful for all the Black French techies out there as the ecosystem continues to build. Maybe their ecosystem will build the perfect tech bubble, and the founders within will lie unaffected by the outside steam, and in the end, it will all be alright for them, as it soon will for us all.
I let the curtain drop and boarded a train down south to see what the sun felt like in Nice.
🔥Please, Mind My Business🔥
Other stories I’ve written you might find interesting:
“There’s a growing desire in the UK for more Black specialty venture funds”
“The US could learn a lot from how the UK is crafting DEI policy for venture capital”
“California passes law mandating VC firms to release investments’ diversity information”
Please consider subscribing to my work at TechCrunch (just click on one of my articles and subscribe on them, please!) and signing up to listen to the podcast I co-host called Found, where me and my colleague Becca talk to entrepreneurs about their startup journeys.
💫Kitty Talk💫
Here are some interesting articles I’ve read since we last met:
Teen Vogue, “A Night At The All That Glitters Diwali Ball in New York”
New York Magazine, “Plaza Regret”
New York Times, “Everybody Knows Flo From Progressive. Who Is Stephanie Courtney?"