Every French founder I meet past seed asks me the same question, usually at the end of the meeting, as if it were a detail: should we move to the US? I split my time between Paris and Miami, so I get asked on both sides of the Atlantic. The answer people expect is yes. The honest answer is that it depends on four things, and for a large share of French companies the right answer is no.

I made part of this argument in Le Figaro last month, in a piece on the opportunities French tech has let slip. The short version: on regulated markets, our best companies have no reason to leave. On AI, competing from Paris is much harder. Here is the longer version, as a test a founder can run on their own company.

1. Where is your moat?

If your advantage comes from regulation, licences, local integrations or trust built with domestic institutions, it does not travel. It is also exactly what a US competitor cannot copy quickly.

Qonto, Alan and Doctolib are the clearest examples. Banking, health insurance, healthcare: three markets where the rules differ by country and where getting approved, integrated and trusted takes years. None of them needed San Francisco to become a category leader. They expanded across Europe, market by market, and that was the right sequence. A regulatory moat is a reason to stay, not a handicap to escape.

The same logic applies to a lot of B2B software sold to European industry, public buyers, utilities or insurers. If your buyer is in Lyon, Munich or Milan, your headquarters should not be in Palo Alto.

2. Is your market global on day one?

Some products have no home market. Developer tools, AI models and infrastructure, security, anything bought by engineers through a credit card or an open-source download. The customers, the talent and the reference accounts concentrate in the US, and the competition does too.

Here the question changes. It is no longer "should we go?" but "can we win from here?" It can be done: Mistral is the proof. But the default is harder, and the French founders of Hugging Face made the opposite call, building the company from New York while keeping a large team in Paris. If your category is decided in the US, you need to be present where it is decided, at least the CEO and the first commercial hires.

3. Who will lead your next round?

France has become a good place to raise a seed or a Series A. The gap is after that. The number of funds able to lead a large growth round drops sharply, and at that stage, many of the candidates are American. I wrote about it in the six pillars of French tech: late-stage capital is one of the pillars that is cracking.

This is the most common real reason to move, and it is often misread. US investors do not require you to relocate. They want proof that you can win in the US market, which is not the same thing. A company with real US revenue, a US entity and a CEO who spends serious time there can raise a large round without moving its R&D or its team. A company that moves its address and nothing else will not.

4. Who actually goes?

This is the question that sorts the serious projects from the others. A US expansion run by a VP Sales hired from LinkedIn, while the founders stay in Paris, almost never works. The market is large, expensive and indifferent. Someone with full authority has to be there, take decisions on the spot and absorb the cost of being wrong.

In practice, that means one founder relocating for at least eighteen months, with a clear mandate and a budget that assumes customer acquisition will cost more than at home. If no founder is willing to go, the answer to question 4 is no, whatever the answers to questions 1 to 3.

The middle path

Most of the companies I work with end up with the same structure: the product, the team and the company stay in France; the CEO or a co-founder spends half their time in the US; the first US customers are mid-market accounts, signed directly, before any large office opens. It keeps the cost base of Paris, the engineering talent of Paris and the French public funding that comes with it, while building the proof that a US investor will ask for.

Miami has become an interesting option for this. Same time zone as New York, direct flights to Paris and to Latin America, a growing base of funds and operators, and a cost of living that does not burn a seed round in six months. It is not the right answer for every company, but it changes the arithmetic for a founder who wants to be present without moving the whole business.

The question is not "Paris or the US". It is where your market is decided, and who is willing to go there.

A quick test

Going to the US is a strategic decision, not a rite of passage. Some of our best companies became leaders precisely because they did not go. Others lost years because they went too late, or went without a founder. Running the four questions honestly, early, saves a lot of both.