Why I moved from France to the US to build Concord

Back in 2014 when I first landed in the U.S., I had no money, no visa, and no connections. All I had was a rock-solid belief that this was the country I needed to be in to build a market-leading CLM platform.

Why did I leave my native France? Well, while it may be a great country for wine, cheese, and quality of life, I knew Concord could never rise to its full potential on French soil.

But what surprised me most wasn’t the challenge of relocating. It was the astonishing differences in how people evaluate you in the U.S. versus in France.

In France, your background matters a lot more than your ideas. Back there, I spend years fighting an uphill battle against a system where people base their opinions of you on where you went to school. For example, after I graduated from Sciences Po (France’s equivalent of Harvard), I noticed that people started taking me seriously overnight. I was still the same person, with the same ideas and ambitions. But all of a sudden, I had credibility. All because of my diploma.

In America, by contract, nobody knew (or cared!) where I’d gone to school. Nobody cared that I’d worked with Nicholas Sarkozy, one of France’s leading politicians.

All they cared about was one simple question: “What are you trying to build?”

And I loved it.

If you’re a founder considering a move to the U.S., here’s what you can learn from my experience:

• Credentialism exists everywhere, but to vastly different degrees. Some places let your ideas speak for themselves.
• Moving to a new country doesn’t just change your access to the market. It changes how you think about building. People in different countries have dramatically varying speed of execution, and willingness to take risks.
• Cultural content matters a lot in B2B. It me a miserable experience with contract management at a French telecom company to develop Concord’s vision, but it took American market dynamics to actually get this platform built.

In short, the decision to relocate isn’t just about the size of your new market. It’s about finding an ecosystem that matches your philosophy of product development.

Today, 10 years later, Concord serves thousands of customers all around the globe. We’ve build a solution that truly matters to people. And that would’ve have been possible on anywhere near this scale if we hadn’t had the courage to venture away from home.

So ask yourself, does your current environment value what you’re building? Do the people around you value the person you were before you started building it?

If not, then maybe it’s time to take your company on its own overseas adventure.

Matt Lhoumeau is the CEO and co-founder of Concord, a leading provider of Agreement Intelligence solutions. Concord empowers growing businesses to make smarter operational decisions by unlocking actionable insights from contracts, and is trusted by over 1,500 companies worldwide.