Two days at Leade.rs Paris
“How to find the next Mark Zuckerberg” — Loic Le Meur
Last month, we were three colleagues from a consulting firm to have the opportunity to listen to 100+ talented entrepreneurs and innovators from all around the world at Leaders. Leaders is an annual gathering event organized by Loic Le Meur’s, well-known in the French tech ecosystem for LeWeb and across the globe for his astounding networking skills.
The conference was a success with more than 50 countries represented and more than 1'200 people attending. We got the opportunity to hear incredible speakers talk about chatbots, artificial intelligence, VR, drones, IoT and connected device, hardware, start-ups ecosystem, innovation, social entrepreneurship and many other topics!
Other Leade.rs events will take place around the world, especially in San Francisco where Loic Le Meur lives; but France was a key milestone for them due to the country’s rising ecosystem. Just take a look at what’s happening with “Station F” and you’ll get why Paris is the place to be for entrepreneurs.
The conference was also a chance for Loic Le Meur to introduce the Leaders platform. It’s mission will be to connect event organizers and well-known speakers in order to ease the pain point of finding good speakers — aka leaders — for their conferences. The Parisian event was the occasion to beta-test the concept and to involve participants to vouch for their favorite Under-30 french entrepreneurs. This initiative gathered more than 450 candidates, and helped Business Insider FR put together their top 100 under 30 french entrepreneurs. (Business Insider article in french here)
The top 8 under-30 french entrepreneurs to watch in the upcoming days / weeks / years
Among the 450 profiles that Leade.rs Paris received, they decided to highligh eight of them and offer them the opportunity to pitch their start-up on the main stage with Frédéric Mazzella (BlaBlaCar), Marie Catherine Beuth (Business Insider journalist), three Leaders volunteers including Arthur Le Meur, and finally Roxanne Varzat (head of Station F, the biggest incubator in the world).
We got the chance to discover (or rediscover):
- Doctrine (Nicolas Bustamante) — Google for lawyers
- Recast.ai (Jasmine Anteunis)— Chatbot building platform
- Rythm (Hugo Mercier) — Deep sleep headband called Dreem
- Damae Medical (Anais Barut)— Hardware to better detect skin cancer
- Bayes Impact (Paul Duhan)— Big data experts solving society problems
- Optimiam (Raodath Aminou)— How to save food with an app
- Riminder (Mouhidine Seiv)— Recruitment with artificial intelligence
- TechFugees (Joséphine Goube)— Leveraging tech for refugees
Technology can do good things too, and not only help resolve selfish problems
If i had to keep only one idea from this top-8 list, it would be that Technology can do good things too, and not only help resolve selfish problems. All too often, we tend to consider tech as a enabler for an easier life (think of the smartphone revolution with an app for everything). But as soon as you consider that technology is here to help us become better human beings, it can really help solve complex society problems.
The power of tech is huge and I tend to think that we still have some major discoveries to make. This conference conforts me in that thought and showed it’s possible. Can’t wait to look at the Leaders profiles, speakers or any participants that got the chance to hear them in ten or twenty years!
How to go one step further
In the upcoming days, I’ll post three articles on subjects that striked me the most during these amazing two-days:
- Chatbots and the upcoming revolution — Article here
- The relationship between technology and human beings
- Paris vs San Francisco, the survival guide for start-ups in the US
I hope you find this list useful and i’d love to know what you think is missing here.
Related content from my collegues
My collegues are also going to share their views on the conference, I’ll post here some links to their opinions.
(To be updated soon)
Stay tuned for more to come,
Quentin
Mail: quentin.de-carne@capgemini.com
Twitter: Quentindc5
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