Day two is over, which means we are already halfway done with VivaTech! Before we head into the 2nd half, check out the highlights of today’s sessions.
Lamaison, Carbonnelle, Gosalvez, and Garcia. Photo credit: VivaTech
“The [decarbonization] battle has started,” Cyril Garcia.
The amount of greenhouse gasses we have produced is so significant that reducing emissions alone will not be enough to correct the course of climate change. We sat down with three decarbonization experts to ask the fundamental question: can we decarbonize the earth
Sarah Lamaison, CEO of Dioxycle; Cyril Garcia, Global CSR Head at Capgemini; and Julie Gosalvez, CMO of Climeworks all gave their opinion on the matter.
“We are in a world where customer satisfaction is fed by speed and immediacy, developed by marketing campaigns of the last 80 years,” said Garcia. “I have no doubt that technology will help us get to net zero very soon. The big doubt I have is how we can move this marketing machine and change our brains, change the culture.”
Multiple breakthrough decarbonization technologies are now at our disposal, among them Carbon Capture & Storage, Carbon Capture & Usage, and Direct Air Capture & Sequestration. But their development goes hand in hand with the deployment of renewable energies.
In Europe, governments could play a useful role in helping to develop climate tech by defining the areas in which it would be wiser to promote solar panels or to produce hydrogen for example, depending on the climate and environmental conditions. However, “governments should incentivize the goal, not the means of decarbonization,” insisted Lamaison.
The deployment of decarbonization technologies will be the major question in the next decade: the faster they will be deployed, the faster the prices will go down and the faster the capacities will be built. A wide range of diversified and complementary technological solutions exist, now it is time to implement them and scale them up. “The [decarbonization] battle has started,” Garcia stated.
De Cheveigné, Khan, & Mouratoglou. Photo credit: VivaTech
“Something new has to happen every 20 seconds, otherwise you lose GenZ,” Patrick Mouratoglou.
The purveyors and promoters of athletic competitions cannot afford to ignore the challenge increasingly bearing down on them: attracting and retaining the attention of Generation Z.
In the Stadium we sat down with Patrick Mouratoglou, Founder of the Mouratoglou Tennis Group; Adrien de Cheveigné, Head of Digital Transformation at Union Cycliste Internationale; and David Khan, President of Paris Basketball, to talk about “Keeping the Fans Happy.”
Given the average age of tennis consumers (61 years old), Patrick Mouratoglou has created a new competition, the UTS, a global tennis league that aims to redefine how tennis is consumed by new generations.
“What people watch nowadays takes zero effort to get into and is super exciting straightaway. Something new has to happen every 20 seconds, otherwise, you lose GenZ. If we don’t find a way to teach tennis and traditional sports in a way that is fun, we will lose a lot of people. The key for us is the way to teach differently”
Khan jumped in to explain that “the amount of data that is available for the teams and the average fans has exploded. The NBA is to credit for this. They decided to make a lot of information available to the end user and fans, even some things that are controversial. It builds interest in the young generation, but it needs to be monetized for the business of the game.”
Keeping fans happy is pertinent to sports organizations because “otherwise there is a risk that traditional sports themselves will die,” Mouratoglou said.
Heim, Saad, Destin, & Ergul. Photo credit: VivaTech
“Fundraising is a war campaign,” Fred Destin.
The pandemic has disrupted the global economy and created new challenges for startups and investors. Jean-Pierre Saad, Partner at KKR; Tugce Ergul, Founding Partner of Hypernova Capital; and Fred Destin, Founder of Stride.VC, discussed “Navigating the Shift: How to Scale When Capital is Scarce” on Stage 3 this afternoon.
Ergul jumped right in to explain the current climate of fundraising. “Startups are defaulting, which affects investment schedule, which means delayed capital calls. Investors are waiting to see what will happen in Q3 and Q4 2023, to see if the market will start picking up as expected, before retaking their positions.”
"With any good crisis a lot of people become entrepreneurs,” said Destin. “They get fired… or they decide they"e;ve had enough, or they jump on generative AI now that blockchain has died off, so we"e;re seeing a massive wave of entrepreneurs coming to market."
However, with more entrepreneurs comes more competition for already limited funds. “Fundraising is a war campaign,” Destin continued. Like the conquistadors when they arrived in Latin America, entrepreneurs need to burn their boats. With limited amounts of time, money, and resources, they need to make radical choices. The job of founders is to make the hard decision to shut down a third of their business, to kill new initiatives, and to stay really close to their customers, with an execution path that is simply funded, narrowed down, and with a clear set of executables.
Even though VivaTech is halfway over, so much is still set to happen on our VivaTech stages over the next two days. Catch the breaking news on our social media: Instagram, Twitter, and Linkedin.
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