French startups need to step up their game

heard a funny story about a friend who worked at a French LLM startup:

1. their plan. to be the first to market with a certain type of multilingual model

2. early in year: incorporate. start building

3. hired an awesome team by march

4. scraped / acquired all the data by june

5. critical infra almost ready by july

6. then comes august > entire team goes on vacation for the entire month

7. while they're gone, at least three competitors launch models

8. team returns in september > office vibe completely dead

9. startup pivots to consulting