There are unspoken rules in Silicon Valley that are inscrutable to outsiders (Europeans, lots of founders outside the Bay, etc.) One of the most important ones is: sell the vision before the product can prove it. ie: you don't wait until the product is perfect to tell everyone on Twitter what you're building. You don't raise a small round because you're scared to ask for the big one. Doing these things is experienced as thinking small, and people move their attention to the founder who isn't. But you do the exact opposite in a city like Paris. In that world the whole point is to build in silence, keep your burn low, and only show the product to a few people once it's ready. And if you get loud about something that isn't perfect yet, it feels like overselling. Essentially, in SF attention is a mechanism to get to a great product, in Paris a great product is a mechanism to earn attention. I suspect this is why despite having so much beauty and potential, Paris isn't where innovation is happening right now. Founders are unable to parse or adapt to the new rules, and so someone in SF builds the same thing, raises a huge round, and outmarkets (runs laps around) them.