two places in paris every builder should stand in

i keep thinking about how every city has two versions - the postcard one and the one where people actually make things. paris might be the most extreme case of this. everyone flies in for the tower and the louvre, and tourists just sits there.

so if you're an entrepreneur and you are on a way to Paris (keep in mind that the tempreture here still ~30+ a day☀️🥵)!

but here's the first one - station f. a 1920s train depot in the 13th that xavier niel turned into the biggest startup campus on the planet. 34,000 square metres, a thousand startups under one roof, microsoft and lvmh running programs next to twenty year olds with a laptop and a theory. you walk in and it's not the architecture that gets you, it's the density - a thousand teams betting their years on an idea, in one room.the giant food hall inside, is open to anyone. sit there for an hour. just listen.

second - café de flore in saint-germain. pouring coffee since 1887. sartre and de beauvoir basically ran their whole operation from those tables - writing, arguing, shipping ideas with no wifi and no pitch deck. the coffee is stupidly overpriced and honestly that's fair, you're not buying coffee, you're renting a seat in the oldest coworking space in europe.

and that's the punchline - it's the same room, 130 years apart. a place where people who take ideas seriously sit close enough to overhear each other.

Thanks for the recommendations G.M.