“I had to turn down President Obama” 

Celebrating its tenth anniversary with a tech “take-over” of the Champs-Élysées in Paris, Publicis’ Maurice Lévy reveals why “not having a plan” was the only way to launch VivaTech, Europe’s biggest tech conference.

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VivaTech in Paris is ten years old. In 2016, 45,000 attended the first event. This year, at least 180,000 delegates will make the trip to the French capital. One highlight will be a “tech takeover” of the Champs-Élysées, where robots will walk amongst the plane trees. In a world where America and China dominate the technology debate, this is Europe’s moment. 

The conversations will be familiar in Hall 7 at the Porte de Versailles, where delegates will gather in June. The productivity and revenue impact of artificial intelligence (where results are mixed), sovereignty and ethics (disputed), sustainability (AI is an energy-suck) and cyber-security and defense (vital and not always understood). 

There will also be a familiar face cajoling and encouraging, in the background as well as on the main public stages. Maurice Lévy, who led Publicis for thirty years and is credited with building the group into a global giant, is the man who put France on the technology map. That it happened at all is a surprise, given the country’s testy relationship with the freewheeling chaos of Silicon Valley and “move fast and break things” attitudes. There was once talk of a civilizing “French internet” to keep the barbarians at arm’s length. 

“The idea [for VivaTech] started a long, long time ago,” Lévy tells me. “In fact, it started at the turn of the millennium. That is when I started to think about this. We were seeing how buoyant the ecosystem of startups in some countries was. And I thought that what we needed [was] to have something working like a lighthouse, in order that all the people could turn their eyes to Paris, to France, and say there is room for the entrepreneur, there is room for ideas, and we will do something.” 

In 2011, the then-president, Nicolas Sarkozy, invited Lévy to “bring together” some people in the technology sector and host a summit in France alongside that year’s G8 meeting of world leaders. This was Lévy’s chance. Six weeks later, he had indeed “brought together a few people” in tech, including Eric Schmidt (then executive chair of Google), John Donahoe (CEO of eBay), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Sheryl Sandberg (chief operating officer at Facebook), Paul Jacobs (CEO of Qualcomm) and Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia). The leading brains in the technology world produced a report on the battle over internet regulation (the tech leaders were not keen), which was presented to the G8 leadership, including President Barack Obama, the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, and the British Prime Minister, David........

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