Word: liautaud
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Dates: during 2001-2001
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Shortly after Denis Payre and Bernard Liautaud formed Business Objects, which makes intelligence software, they started shifting operations from Paris to San Jose, California. Today only the development team of the 11-year-old firm remains in its native land. France was, and is, a tough place to do business. Liautaud recently did his best to encourage French entrepreneurs and global venture capitalists gathered in, of all places, Paris. The meeting, sponsored by the European Tech Tour Association, was intended to match start-ups with money-men. But the occasion also provided spirited discussion about what France was doing wrong...
...Liautaud believes that taxes on stock options are too high and labor laws too rigid, citing the 35-hour-a-week work restriction, as well as the difficulty and expense of laying off workers. Privately, he says he is not sure he would start a business in France today...
...launched in France have their roots in its research labs and are based on technologies that are often superior to those developed in the U.S. But such firms struggle because their founders believe that good products simply sell themselves. "The French are great engineers but terrible at marketing," says Liautaud. He puts the blame partly on the university system, which he says churns out technologists who lack business training and respect for marketing...
Though lack of management expertise is often cited as another weakness, the country?s pool of seasoned executives is starting to get larger, says Jean-Bernard Schmidt, president of a Paris-based venture-capital fund, Sofinnova Partners. Consider the career of Pierre Liautaud, another Tech Tour participant and the brother of Business Objects? CEO. This Liautaud started at IBM in 1982, first as an engineer for IBM France and later as vice president of marketing for its Internet unit in the U.S. He left Big Blue in 1999, returning to France to take the job of CEO of @Viso...
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