Building The World’s Largest Startup Campus: Station F Director Roxanne Varza On the Evolution of the French Startup Scene

Roxanne Varza grew up in Palo Alto surrounded by the success of tech companies like Yahoo and Google. Despite not having a big interest in tech when she was younger, learning French at university and studying for a Master’s degree in Paris opened a door into France’s growing startup ecosystem. Today, she is the Director of Station F, the world’s largest startup campus in the world, a champion for entrepreneurs, a scout for Sequoia, and an angel investor. As Station F celebrates its 7th anniversary, we caught up with Roxanne to discover her story, Station F’s plans for the future, and her rules for balancing work and life.

From Palo Alto to leading the world’s largest startup campus, in Paris – Station F’s Director Roxanne Varza talks about French, expansion plans and creativity.

Robin: Hello Roxanne. It’s great that you could join us today. Please start by telling us who you are, both personally and professionally.

Roxanne Varza: Sure, I'll start with who I am professionally. So today, I'm the Director of Station F, the world's largest startup campus located in Paris. We're coming up on our seventh birthday this summer. It’s gone so fast! Outside of my role at Station F, I'm passionate about startups. I'm very engaged in the ecosystem and I have a bunch of different side initiatives, but I started angel investing and I’m a scout for Sequoia. I'm also a board member for a couple of organizations. Outside of work, who am I? Well, I grew up in the US. I've been living in Europe for 15 years, and I’ve loved seeing the startup ecosystem evolve since I've been here.

Can you tell us about your journey up to now? How did you go from growing up next to Silicon Valley to running the world's largest campus for startups here in Europe?

Sometimes I have a hard time explaining it to myself. Growing up in the US, I was always interested in foreign cultures and languages so I decided to study French. I worked for the French government straight out of school. I heard all the great clichés about living and working in France: that it was impossible to work in France, that there are 35-hour work weeks, that there are too many strikes, and that there is too much holiday.

After two years of hearing that again and again, I decided I wanted to go and see what the truth was. When I got to France, I realized there were so many great things just budding and starting in the ecosystem and there were a lot of great startups. There were some funds, but nobody was talking about it in English. So nobody really knew that this startup ecosystem existed. And so, I thought I'd stay here and I would do that. I fell in love with the fact that there was so much to build here that San Francisco was already saturated with. There was a way for me to have a direct impact.

That's been my journey. When I first arrived people looked at me like I was crazy. I think they thought “You're from Palo Alto, go home,” but now, a lot of people are trying to come to France and Europe. So a lot has happened.

Did you study French at school? How did you get so well-versed in the French language?

I studied French at high school, but I went to an English-speaking Public School and there wasn't much French there. But then I did a French degree. My parents were saddened by that choice as they thought it wouldn’t lead to anything but now, I'm quite proud to be able to say “Look, I used what I studied in a very non-conventional way.”

It takes a lot to thrive in a language and culture that's not yours. How did you establish yourself?

I came to Paris to do a Master's degree in 2009. And I remember when I arrived, my Master's degree was supposed to be one year in Paris and one year in London. So I had one year. I remember telling myself I'm going to put everything into this one year and create all the opportunities that I possibly can make so that when I am ready to come back, it will be easier. I was studying of course but I was doing so much more outside of the journey that I almost forgot about the degree. I was writing for TechCrunch. I created a network for women in tech. I launched a conference about failure. I wanted to do as much as I could to open doors and it paid off.

Who have been your biggest role models?

My gosh, I have so many role models. I'm very inspired by my grandma. My family is originally from Iran. My grandma is a poet and one of the first female lawyers in Iran. She's somebody who values her career. She went up against a lot of kind of stereotypes and norms. She broke a lot of barriers. She inspires me. She's very old now, but she has continued to write well into old age when most people would have abandoned writing poetry.

The other person who inspires me is the man I work for – Xavier. I couldn't have dreamed that I would get work for him when I first arrived. I also couldn't have dreamed that working for him would be so great. But he gives people so much autonomy and trust. He's a real visionary. When he told me about this project in France and that he wanted to put a thousand startups under one roof, I thought “This guy is a genius and I want to be a part of whatever this is.” I've loved working for him.

My other role models are the many brilliant people I get to work with at Station F. A lot of the early-stage startups inspire me because of the risks that they take and the crazy ideas they have.

What was it that brought you into the startup world in the first place?

I grew up in Palo Alto, but I was never interested in startups and tech growing up. We grew up with people launching Yahoo and Google and it was kind of normal to have access to that world so we didn't think much about it. But when I started working for the French government in San Francisco straight out of University, the zone that they gave me was the Bay Area. They said, “Go and work with those companies, get them to move to France and open offices in France.” So it’s actually through France that I discovered the tech world. I had to go knock on the doors of all these startups and I started thinking time and again that I had met an incredibly smart, creative, and optimistic person. When you meet one two, three, ten twenty, of these people you just fall in love with entrepreneurs and the industry.

You were working with Tech Crunch and organizing a conference, so what was it that made you think, this is it, I want to work with startups?

All of my experiences seemed to trickle into the other. It started with a job with the French Government, then I moved here, to Paris and I started blogging for myself. I launched a blog called Tech Baguette. My dad told me that nobody would take me seriously. After I started blogging, TechCrunch reached out to me and asked me to write for them, and then things just kind of snowballed. One thing led to another. I've been fortunate to also have great people around me who have opened doors for me, helped me, and supported me, even when I've doubted myself.

Can you tell me about some of your biggest challenges with Station F to date?

There's been so many. When I first took this job, I felt comfortable in the startup ecosystem. I felt like I knew about startups and I knew about corporates. I had the connections. I understood how things worked, for the most part. What I didn't understand was running a massive space and the real estate component in France. There are a lot of regulations and there were a lot of architectural components to this job that I had to contend with. That part was a huge challenge for me. That and running something on this scale. I went and benchmarked a ton of startup spaces around the world, but everything was working with ten to twenty startups. Nobody was working with thousands. So there were some topics that we overlooked and we had to learn to do things differently because these challenges didn't exist for other incubators. For example, other incubators don't have customer service processes and systems because they can just talk to everybody one-on-one. But we're working with several thousands of people every day, so we have to do things differently.

You must need a huge space. I’ve read that 6,000 companies have worked with Station F, but there’s probably been more since that number was published. How many startups would you say you’ve worked with now?

We’re now at 7,000, in 7 years! Every year we're renewing around 700 to 1,000 companies easily and sometimes it's more. So yeah, we're probably near that mark.

Can you share your expansion plans with us? Do you plan to work with even more than even more companies?

We have some expansion plans within Paris, like extending our campus for example. We opened housing in 2019. We house 600 people and we’re always trying to make things easier for entrepreneurs. That was one extension that we did. We're launching some commercial spaces alongside our campus, but it's not necessarily for selling anything. We're trying to add new services like healthcare, and some reparations for hardware products. A lot of people also come to campus with bikes and things like that. So, we're trying to bring the services that they struggle to find closer to them. We're also opening a hotel and that will be done in the next two years. The idea is that the startups we work with shouldn’t need to worry about anything. Those are the plans for Paris.

But we also annually refresh all of our programs to keep up with the new trends and to keep up with the new brands that are important for startups. We have also been contacted by a lot of international ecosystems and we're looking at how we could take this idea internationally. We’re asking ourselves, “How can we help other ecosystems to develop something like this?” And then, finally, we started investing about two or three years ago in our top companies and that's something that we want to continue to work on.

Every year in November, we pick our 40 best companies from that year and they do a demo day. We invite them to meet investors. We do a special dinner for them and those companies. We have a very close relationship with them even, when they leave campus. Those are often the ones that we invest in.

How do you choose who the top startups are, is there a specific spark or something that you see in startups that you want to invest in?

That is the hard part. We have a lot of debates about that. But we look at what their key milestones are and there’s an application process. A lot of recommendations come from their program and we look at customers, investors, and who they worked with on their teams. A lot of it is kind of analyzing, who are they surrounding themselves with and who's recommending them. But then we look at their milestones because obviously, deep tech companies will have very different Milestones from a B2B SaaS company. We’ll look at what they’ve achieved over the last year.

When we have 10 companies working on the same thing, we ask ourselves “What sets this team apart?” “Are they able to attract key investors and talent?” “Are they going way faster than everyone else?” and “Do they have some market insight that sets them apart?” So that's what we're looking for.

What do you enjoy most about your job at Station F?

I love working with entrepreneurs and I love the creativity. There are just so many new ideas popping up every day and things move so fast, you never get bored. I love that when there's a crisis there's a ton of optimism and opportunity. So those are things that I love and then I love the early stage kind of zero to one moment.

So there are moments on campus where we welcome new batches of startups and they're all told to present themselves and you're just hit with 20 incredible ideas back to back and those are moments that I just live for what's up. That's what I love because I think that building the beginnings of seeing an idea transform.

You also do a bit of Angel Investing, what's different about Angel Investing compared to what you do every day?

Yeah, I do angel and Scout investing. It's very different. So I feel like you are looking at a company very differently. You analyzing them. Not even like the necessity. it's very different when I Scout invest and when I invest as an angel because sometimes in angel Investing you're interested in a financial return. But sometimes it's also really just this idea that needs to exist. I want to back this because it needs to be in our future. Sometimes scout investing means working with a fund and thinking about whether this idea is going to make a lot of returns.

You are analyzing things differently, and your relationships with the entrepreneurs are very different. In some cases, they’re much closer because they know that you have skin in the game, and they want to leverage that. I like it and I've enjoyed being able to have that proximity with companies.

How do you decide who to invest in, as an angel investor?

I love looking at diverse teams. And when I see a diverse team, I'll usually jump on that call but I'm not just investing because it's a diverse team. I usually look at what sets this team apart, like I said earlier. I love seeing teams that execute fast. There are some industries that I'm just more comfortable in. If I'm looking at some crazy Health Tech stuff, a lot of the time I don't understand it, and I don't have many connections in that industry that I can leverage. In those instances, I feel like a bit of a waste at a cap table, but I have invested in a few health tech companies just simply because I loved the idea. I felt that this idea needed to exist or I loved the team. It depends on the project and the moment who's doing it and what they're working on.

Can you tell us about your role as a Sequoia Scout?

So Sequoia has had the Scout program in the US, for the last 15 years. They're not the first fund to launch scouting and in Europe, it's been around since 2020. That's when I started with Sequoia. So, I've been doing it for four years and essentially It's doing kind of angel Investing on behalf of a fund. But often there will be deals that I'll do both, I'll write a Sequoia check and invest my own money. The only difference is that when I’m investing for Sequoia I have to align with the fund and what the fund wants to see. Whereas when I’m angel Investing, it’s just about what I want to back and I don't have to keep other incentives and ideas in mind.

I feel like it's great to be able to share and talk about deals. And that's a huge perk about the scout program because you can't always talk to the partners about every deal you see. they don't have time for that, but being able to talk to other scouts is great. We're very close and we’re quite collaborative.

Can I ask you about the announcement that you put out a LinkedIn about this huge investment in AI in France? Can you tell us a bit about that and how it’s going to work?

That's the Microsoft investment. I’m not a Microsoft spokesperson, but what they have announced is incredible. It's just huge. It’s a 4bn investment in AI and there are a couple of different components. There's one that's about building the infrastructure and resources for people building AI which is terrific. A lot of people want to work in AI but are feeling left out, so it would be great for them to be able to leverage their resources. They've also announced that they're going to be training 1 million people using a French company that I worked with when I was running their incubator.

Would you say that Station F has helped to put France on the map for AI?

I hope so. We're not the only player. I think there's a lot of great stuff happening outside of Station F’s walls, but we have brought a lot of key AI moments and people and companies to one location. And, today we're very well-identified within the AI ecosystem in France. For example, we’ve hosted a couple of high-profile AI events such as an AMA with Sam Altman in May 2023, Paris AI Week with John Collison and Stripe in September 2023, a huge event with Scaleway and Nvidia that brought our founders Xavier Niel and Eric Schmidt together with many others, in November 2023, a Hugging Face event attended by 2,000 people in October 2023 and an AI Dinner with Yann LeCun and high-level AI figures in April 2024. What’s more, OpenAI, Nvidia, GitHub, Anthropic AI, and Mistral AI all come to STATION F to offer office hours, AMAs with their CEOs, organize hackathons, and more.

What gets you up in the morning? What excites you?

What gets me up in the morning, is that I love what I do. I just never get bored by it. I mean, I love innovation. I love new ideas. I love this thing that we're building. I’ve also seen this incredible evolution and it seems to continue to get stronger year after year. So I would say just being a part of all of that gets me up in the morning.

What does the future look like for you?

What does it look like? I mean I want to continue to build this and grow this Station F beast for the moment. People have always asked if I see a future in politics. But I don’t. I see myself here, building this and continuing to grow it. I do a lot of things outside of Station F but always with the same objective in mind, how can we strengthen this ecosystem, move it forward, and help entrepreneurs in areas where offers don't exist? I have tiny initiatives to help women invest and bring women to the cap table to help people find co-founders because often the co-founder search is quite vague and there are only a couple of programs that exist but there's nothing that can help people with this process.

What gives you balance outside of work? What is it that helps you to continue to put in the hours every day, and gives you the balance?

First of all, it’s about making sure that you have that balance. I have a cut-off. Some people work around the clock and are always connected but I think there's a time that I stop checking my email and tell people to only contact me in emergencies. Having those rules and not being attached to work is important. I value holidays. I spend a lot of time also doing things that I did growing up. I used to paint and draw and play the piano. I can't say that I do any of those particularly well, but I do them all to refresh my brain. I also try to read and read things that are not always business-related. So yeah, I think just trying to refresh my creativity is how I do it.

Thank you so much for your time today, Roxanne.

Thank you!