"Lafayette, We Are Here Again": What We Owe Our French Friends And They Owe Us
Stop targeting American entrepreneurs and invest alongside us for all our sakes.
We are at our best when we are together. Indeed those of us who are venture capitalists owe much to France. The industry itself owes much to French-born brigadier general Georges Doriot — he the son of a Peugeot engineer — who provided the initial capital and direction to scores of American entrepreneurs, among them George H. W. Bush’s Zapata Off-Shore. Free from the constraints of the mobbed up land American oil production has never looked back.
America itself owes much to that immortal Frenchman Lafayette who, though buried in France, is buried in American soil. It’s hard not to feel a sense of amity when you think of how America has repaid that debt. Standing in front of the tomb, Colonel Charles Stanton famously declared, “Lafayette, we are here!” on July 2, 1917. Stanton — nephew to Lincoln’s Secretary of War Edwin Stanton — had come to fulfill the promise that all liberty loving people could be united in a shared mission. It’s that spirit that motivated Ben Franklin — that first American — to serve as an ambassador to the French court or the DuPont family, who hailing from France, provided the capital to win the wars and to advance their Delaware neighbor, President Joe Biden.
And I noticed when President Emmanuel Macron said, rightly, on the eve of the January 6th hearings, that for many years the republic had protected la France but today France had come to protect the republic. Thank you.
Nations don’t have friends; they have interests. But people do and the French are great friends. They are certainly good friends when they want to be.
Which makes what I am going to say all that much harder for France to take. We need you joining us in the fight, building the technology, and promoting liberté, fraternité, égalité.
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Still I feel about France the same way I do all the women who rejected me — with reveries about what might have been and with the knowledge that, well, c’est la vie.
The French look upon me — an American who speaks French fluently and without accent — like a curiosity. “Comment ça se fait que tu parle français?” “How do you come to speak French?” they ask inquisitively. Ma mére, I tell them with a wink. As a boy I was a part of a French government program that my well traveled mother in her infinite wisdom elected to enroll me in. The rest, as they say, is history.
Fortunately I take to languages the way a burglar takes to criming — smuggling one idea from one culture to another and seeing what can be made useful. As with all great first loves there would be others but I have never forgotten the excitement of Edith Piaf, or Beatrice, or Tin Tin, or Le petit prince. Je vois la vie en rose avec mes lunettes française. I see life through my French rose colored glasses.
In another life I would have fallen head first into la Francophonie. It was not to be but it should have been. Oui, j’adore la France et non, je ne regrette rien. She has, like all women of a certain age, fallen on hard times but she is still beautiful. She still has so much to offer the world — if only she would get out of her own way.
Ooh là là!
Of course that such a report targeted Clearview when the very French company — Idemia — was up for sale for $6 billion. By Goldman Sachs no less! The French don’t really do the whole ethics thing but that’s alright. We love them anyway. How could we not?
Naturally all my praising of belle France — daguerrotype! Alphonse Bertillon! — didn’t make the cut. Domage! Nor did my concerns about France’s antiquated views on DNA and genetics which — alas! — harmed France’s ability to get a handle on the coronavirus. If there were a problem of Chinese penetration of the at home genetic tests it was time to make a French or American equivalent.
I warned my French friends that biometrics were once again needed to get a handle on the problems that mass migration might pose. It gives me no pleasure to see Paris burning thanks to malefactors backed by Russian intrigue. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Whether it’s spying on our satellite technology — looking at you Airbus! — or the very close relations between France and China, there’s much that needs to change for the relationship to be one between equals.
France simply isn’t very capable of building the technology companies that America has spent the better part of three decades perfecting. We could teach you — if you’d let us.
So sorry but Mistral AI’s $113m seed isn’t going to do it. A nice headline but not a winning strategy.
It’s time for you to work alongside us — to be our partners once again. The France I admire built the Concorde albeit with British help. Let’s go faster and further together.
