- Quang Hoang, a French entrepreneur, had to reinvent his startup while trying to attract American investors.
- He had to change his startup's goals and hire new developers after some setbacks.
- Birdly was renamed Plato and changed its focus to accommodate both its French background and its American aspirations.
Many entrepreneurs from all over the world have decided to settle in the San Francisco area near Facebook, Google, and others to be inspired and develop their startups.
Quang Hoang, 29, has chosen the city for the headquarters of Plato (formerly known as "Birdly"), a startup that connects engineers and developers with mentors working for Amazon, Facebook, Slack, and Lyft via Slack.
Last July, Plato raised $3.3 million from Slack, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan, Fundersclub, and Jason Lemkin of SaaStr.
Quang Hoang told Business Insider France how he managed — as a Frenchman in San Francisco — to gain credibility in the eyes of the American entrepreneurial world.
Finding foreign friendly champions
In September 2014, Quang Hoang and his cofounders spent a week in Silicon Valley, punctuated by visits from investment funds and companies such as TaskRabbit.
A meeting with Michael Seibel, partner at Y Combinator, ended up being key. It changed their perspective.
"I pitched Birdly for 30 seconds or a minute. Michael Seibel asked the questions that hurt — but in a smart and caring way, and gave us advice," Hoang told Business Insider France about the meeting.
Hoang recalled that Seibel didn't worry about the fact that they were French or that their English wasn't perfect.
Hoang later learned that Seibel is "foreign friendly." He travels abroad frequently and was one of the first to have spotted the Franco-American startup Algolia, which raised last 53 million dollars last June.
"After this meeting, we only wanted to go back to Silicon Valley," Hoang said.
Ten months later, Birdly was selected to join YC for three months.
"People like Michael Seibel are so well known that in front of other American investors, you're being put on the same level as other American entrepreneurs," Hoang said.
No wonder Jason Lemkin, one of Algolia's first American investors, spotted the young French team and decided to invest $1 million to accelerate Birdly's transformation into Plato.
Finding the right balance between confident, ambitious and realistic
But being supported by big names in Silicon Valley is not the only thing a French entrepreneur needs to get started in the United States.
According to Hoang, France and the United States can be seen — by caricatured — as two extremes in terms of "confidence" and ambition:
"Here, an American will say 'everything is great, anything is possible'. And on the other hand, we have the Frenchman who doesn't trust, doesn't have too much ambition, and who takes refuge behind his technology. An investor will not want to invest in either."
The challenge is to find the right balance between displaying enough confidence so that investors want to help you, but not so much that they feel like you're lying to them, Hoang said.
And this quality is also essential for recruiting Americans, which can be difficult.
"It's very hard to attract Americans, because if they're good, why would they come to you?" Hoang said.
Barbra Gago, an American who was formerly marketing manager at Greenhouse, recently joined Plato's team as chief revenue officer.
Coincidentally, Hoang later discovered that Gago's husband is French.
For Hoang, the first American employee — just like the first American investor — is crucial.
He hopes to "create an American and French bi-culture," to develop better in the United States, and to attract other American investors.
"There is a different way of thinking, a specific wording to attract American investors," Hoang said.
Plato currently employs five people and plans to double its workforce by the end of the year, recruiting two or three sales staff in the United States and engineers in Paris. It hopes to make a series A in 2018.