I was at HelloTomorrow in Paris

2024-03-24

I spent the last couple of days at the HelloTomorrow conference in Paris. I listened to several panel discussions, and spoke to many founders, investors, and others working in deep tech. Rather than reporting what I heard, I thought I'd summarise my reflections during the conference in three sections:

On being a founder

HelloTomorrow has a global challenge, where deep tech startups from 10 different sectors apply to pitch their company at the conference. More than 70 finalists were selected this year. They gave a 3-minute pitch, and answered questions from the jury about their product and business model.

On the first day, I sat through the pitches in medical biotech and pharmaceuticals. All of these companies were doing something very exciting. All the while however, what was going on in my head was the gumption and courage these founders must have had to build something from the ground up. It seems to me that it requires a certain constellation of traits to prime someone to build a business, and it doesn't seem to be the same formula for everyone, and I wondered what those were for each of these founders.
I also thought that their work must be vastly different from one day to the next. There is space for "improbability". That must be exciting and, quite possibly, terrifying at times.

The process of building a business

When I hear people starting a business, I always wonder how. From the outside, it looks like a finished product, and we rarely see the steps that led to it.

Listening to investors and founders discuss in detail the process of founding a business (e.g. how to divide equity between the founders, how to find a co-founder, how to go about branding and story-telling, etc.) was revealing, and something I hadn't been exposed to prior.

Unrelated but also kind of related: The backdrop

Over the years, I have gone back and forth on Paris as a city. I first liked it, then thought it was overrated, and have gone to kind of loving it since late last year. All the cliche stuff they say about Paris is true. There is so much concentrated beauty, which I appreciate more now in my thirties than I did in my twenties. At the same time, it feels like it was meant to be a village, and is now brimming with people. It gets dense and it gets rough.

The verdict for now though is that Paris makes me giddy. What can I say - sue me.

Instead of photos from the conference (you can find tons of them on Linkedin), I leave you with some from spring evenings around Paris after the conference. I went full tourist as if I haven't lived in Europe for a decade.