France is broken: How to fix it | Pavel Durov and Lex Fridman

I think the European society must decide where they want the ever-increasing public sector to stop increasing, what they think should be the right size of government. Because today, if you take France for example, which is a beautiful country with a lot of talented people, but public expenses are 58% of the country's GDP. It's maybe as much or more than in the latest stage of the Soviet Union. So you have this disbalance where you have many more people representing the state as opposed to people trying to bring the country's economy forward by creating great products and great companies. The startup field and my field, social media field, has been affected by it immensely.

There was one great startup in this realm in France in the last 10 years. It was a location-based social network that was eventually sold to Snapchat. But before it was sold, the founder asked me whether he should sell. I told him never sell. You have a great thing going. You have lots of users. You have organic traction in many countries, and the first of its kind success story in France. But then he sold anyway in a couple weeks, and later I met him, he's trying to do a new thing now. I met him and I was trying to understand what went wrong, and one of the things he told me about is that while he was trying to run his company, you know, competing with Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, having all this pressure from investors, trying to hire the best people and persuade them to go to Paris. And he did a great job, by the way. But while he was trying to do that, he got also attacked by some silly investigation, again involving the data protection issues, which lasted forever and was gradually sucking blood of his team and his company. Constant interrogations, disclosure requests, and you know, this is a young company.

It significantly increases the level of stress, and at some point I think the pressure was too much. He decided I'm going to just sell it. Eventually it turned out that there was no issue. The investigation ended, as far as I understand, with no charges. But such investigations, they have a price. They have a cost. And unless the society realizes the cost of projects, of companies, of startups that are never created or are sold to the United States at the very early stage or other countries, resulting in decreased economic growth, things won't change.