Station F is an iconic building that is remarkably hard to spot – it’s no Eiffel Tower. The former freight train depot is a low-level sprawl, hidden by trees and residential buildings in the south-eastern 13th arrondissement. It’s close to Gare d’Austerlitz, which is just a 15-minute tube ride from the Eurostar terminal Gare du Nord.
As soon as you enter, you get a sense of the building’s remarkable scale – and a palpable sense of excitement. The share zone hosts more than 600 events every year. When I arrived a huge conference on B2B marketing was taking place and a group of start-ups had set up stalls to “speed date” with a queue of potential investors from venture capital firms.
In an age when many tech start-up teams are happy to work fully remote from the outset, this space concentrates all the benefits of showing up in person in one place, in a very extreme way. Alexandre Duval is co-founder of Entalpic, a start-up that uses AI to dream up new materials to improve industrial design. Duval says his team “loves to gather together in this one place, so we can push together in the same direction, as an efficient start-up”.
He’s not sure what word describes the space in either French or English, “an incubator of incubators”, he suggests?
Station F itself runs a Founder Programme that develops start-ups and gives them full access to all the building’s facilities and resources. Business Schools like EDHEC have campuses here too, where they support both students and entrepreneurs.
Plus, there are organisations with a permanent base in this area, including Tik Tok for Business and La French Tech, which helps start-ups cut through the notorious French red tape. More than 30 large companies, including LVMH, L’Oréal, Meta and Microsoft, have incubators known as partner programmes here to support start-ups they have hand-picked.
All these large institutions pay to be close to the action. And here you see Station F’s genius – it is itself a kind of start-up, not a charity or state institution. The idea is that if you bring lots of start-ups together in one place at this dramatic scale, you also create a valuable commodity. Big companies with deep pockets will pay to access this captive market. This allows Station F to be a viable business proposition, while also boosting national economic growth.
You can read our full in-depth write-up of the visit here or watch our video.
Thanks for reading. Please get in touch with me at dougal.shaw@businessleader.co.uk with any questions you would like to ask future interviewees and any ideas on who you would like us to speak to.
Best,
Dougal
