The idea was crazy: Pour millions of dollars into rehabbing an enormous abandoned railway station, fill it with desks, and christen it into the world’s largest startup hub. But if you’re French billionaire Xavier Niel, crazy ideas actually work. Now, after years of abandonment and renovation, Paris’s Halle Freyssinet—a 366,000-square-foot freight depot built in the 1920s and barely saved from demolition in 2011—is Station F, the largest startup campus on earth.
