Welcome to the Smart Startup English Podcast!
Our goal is to help startup professionals take their English from intermediate to advanced in just 10 minutes at a time. In each episode, we’ll talk about a topic related to the startup world, and we’ll learn some vocabulary that you can use to sound more natural in your day-to-day business interactions in English.
In this episode, we’re talking about an initiative of the French government to promote France as one of the most desirable and startup-friendly countries in Europe.
The initiative is called La French Tech, and its goals are to persuade foreign startups to consider Paris when setting up international offices, and to dissuade French entrepreneurs from moving to other startup hubs, such as Berlin, London or Silicon Valley.
Technically, La French Tech is part of the French government, but practically it’s operating right in the middle of the local startup communities in major French cities.
They call themselves a new type of civil servants that can help startups bridge the gap between policy and the practical aspects of starting a business in France. If you bridge the gap – or you close the gap – that means you’re providing something that is missing from a situation.
In this episode, we’ll also teach you 11 Business English terms you can use to talk about how a governmental initiative can encourage and foster a startup-friendly environment.
Here are a few of the expressions we use in this lesson:
- a makerspace
- to fast-track
- to dissuade
Here’s the episode audio.
Here are a few other episodes in which we talk about the startup ecosystem in Europe.
Episode 4 – The challenges of the Italian startup scene
Episode 8 – The Spanish startup scene is heating up
Episode 13 – The stigma of failure in German startups
To get our episodes for free, you can also subscribe to the Smart Startup English podcast on iTunes, Soundcloud and Spotify.
If you want to keep practicing the words you’ve learned in this lesson, sign up below to get the episode transcript for free. We’ll also let you know when we release new episodes, and we’ll give you access to ten free Business English audio lessons and worksheets.
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Image credits: Nil Castellvi on Unsplash
