Is Vivatech Paris worth it for early-stage startups ?

First day of the conference — quite busy

Based on my experience attending the 2017 edition, I decided to write an article to help early-stage startups that are thinking about attending the event figure out if it’s a good investment. And I say investment, because the pass costs 240 euros per person and it’s a quite a lot for a startup that hasn’t yet began to earn any money.

For those who haven’t heard about Vivatech, it’s an event marketed as “a hub for the world’s innovators, tech-lovers and pioneers of the future (…) to create relationships that will change business and society for tomorrow”. It takes place in Paris and this year was the second edition with over 50,000 participants, 6,000 startups and a lot of famous speakers, including CEOs and executives of global companies such as Alibaba, Alphabet, Stripe, LVMH etc. So to sum up, quite a big event!

From the perspective of representing wimuv.com, a startup in the field of transportation and tourism I founded a couple of months ago, still in the phase of finding product-market fit, I had some expectations regarding the event and what I could get from it. And these expectations had their roots in what I read on the website, such as:

• the possibility of meeting investors and accelerators and discussing the possibility of joining their programs;
• making valuable connections and find partners for the development of my startup;
• access to an app that allows you to connect with the other participants;
• learning about new trends and perspectives of innovation, techology and marketing;
• discovering new products and finding out what other startups are doing that could inspire me.

As you probably already figured out, some of these expectations were met, while others weren’t, like it’s the case for all the events. I am going to put them all here on a list of pluses and minuses and it’s up to you after you read them to decide if the advantages of attending this event are worth paying the price.

What’s Vivatech good for:

• checking out what other startups are doing and being able to talk to them about how they got there, from the initial idea to product-market fit, about how they got their first round of investment or their business model. All the startups I met were very open to discussion and I was able to grasp how they commercialize their products and with some of them even initiated talks about a possible collaboration.
• initiating contacts with big companies in your sector that are willing to invest in or partner with startups. The sour note here is that they only invite one big company per sector (and in general it is a French company from what I noticed: Carrefour for retail, Orange for telecom, BNP Paribas for finance, etc.) so you won’t be able to compare between the incubation or partnership offers. For the railway sector which interested me, the only major company present was SNCF, while I was hoping to also meet other railway companies from Europe, like Deutche Bahn, National Railways and Renfe, or companies that develop systems capable of interacting with the railway ones, such as Silver Rail.

• discovering innovations in a wide range of sectors. As I mentioned before, there were more than 5000 startups (according to the organizers, but I read an article about the 2016 edition saying there were only about 1000 companies present in total:https://www.maddyness.com/entrepreneurs/2016/07/09/vivatech-critiques-attentes/) coming from all the sectors, from energy to finance, traveling, healthcare, whether in the B2C, B2B2C or B2B area. The stars of this year’s edition were definitely the artificial intelligence providers, followed by virtual reality.

Testing Carrefour’s VR set to discover the startups the company incubates

• all talks were in English. I think this was great as it allowed to have speakers and attendees coming from all over the world.
• you can use the event to show your prototype or MVP to the public and ask people to try it in order to get feedback, but for that you don’t need to buy a 3-day pass. You could buy only a ticket for the last day of the event when the public can participate. Unfortunately I couldn’t have my prototype ready for the event to take advantage of this. :(

What was not so good about the event:

Pepper, the robot

• the event focused too much on robots coming in all shapes and dimensions, while most of the ones I saw gave me the impression of being quite basic. For example, there was one robot named Pepper that I have seen at a great number of booths. You could only interact with him via a tablet which was inconveniently placed on his chest. Therefore, to be able to touch the screen, you had to bend, because he was too small. The robot “talked” to the user via his recorded messages, but it was more of a monologue, because it only presented the services and functionalities you could choose from on the tablet.

I couldn’t see the difference between touching the screen of a tablet or of an interactive terminal and a robot like Pepper, except for the recorded voice and the fact that he could gesticulate.

• many of the conferences and talks were too short (15 min) and in my opinion, there was not enough time to get at the heart of a subject, especially for talks with a complex theme. I think the time was limited also because there were too many speakers (about 500, again according to the organizers), too many people and companies that wanted to present something. When I was trying to plan the 3 days, I noticed there were a lot of talks with the same subject in the program with just a slightly different approach. I would definitely have preferred to have longer talks about a limited but more diverse number of subjects, than to have so many short talks and mini-events about the same one (mainly AI and VR).
• many talks included in the startup-factory program were very basic. To give an example, I attended a Google talk about “How to rely on your audience to build cool products” and unfortunately I didn’t hear anything new.
• startups without a booth, like in my case, don’t have access to investors corner. Well that was really upsetting as it was one of the things I expected to have access to, given that I bought a startup ticket. Apparently this was possible on invitation only, but there is no explanation on the website about what do you have to do to get this invitation.
• during the event you could also request a time slot to “receive advice on successful fundraising, tax optimization or growth acceleration” at the Coaching Center from the National Company of Statutory Auditors & The Order of Chartered Accountants. The idea was great, unfortunately, I felt that the advice I received about how to set up the legal entity for my startup were not very helpful as the information I had put in the registration form somehow got lost on the way and I had to explain my situation. Also, they redirected me to the Chamber of Commerce because they couldn’t answer my questions. On top of that, I’m not really sure how can a structure like this answer questions about successful fundraising or growth acceleration, but maybe I’m wrong and someone who has asked them about these subjects could clarify this.

My conference planning on Swapcard, in the form of a list, not a calendar as I expected

• the app for the event Swapcard was not easy to use, especially for creating your program where you had a list of all the events you had picked instead of an hourly program, for searching the booth of a startup on the map which was not interactive or for talking to the basic chatbot.
• on a more practical note, there was a lot of noise because there were so many events at the same time that you could barely hear what the presenters were saying at the talk you were attending.
• last point but not least, as I said, I paid 240 euros and some of the startups that had a booth and with which I talked said they were invited for free to the event.

Conclusion

So is the event really worth it for the early-stage startups that haven’t received investment?

From my point of view and experience I described above, I would say no. I think it’s more appropriate for those startups that have already had at least their seed or series A investment and want to showcase their product to investors, executives from large companies with which they could partner and the public. I would say don’t waste the money on a 3-days pass and just buy a ticket for the last day (public day), as it will suffice to meet execs from companies that interest you, other startups you could partner with and accelerators you would like to join.

I am willing to hear your thoughts on this and about your experiences at Vivatech. If you think this could help other early-stage startups that are thinking of attending the event in the future and don’t know what to expect, please share the article.