Paris: City Of Light, Fashion, Food...And Startups?

Back in 1914, when IBM was a startup, and founder Thomas Watson Sr. decided to expand internationally, he chose Paris as his European headquarters. Today, French business leaders are keen to attract more such ambitious entrepreneurs and are putting the muscle of the American Chamber of Commerce in France (and its 120 years of experience) behind the effort.


That effort is called Next Gen – for “next generation”– a signal that the AmCham is ambitious in shedding its somewhat stodgy image of large companies and middle-aged men sitting around complaining about trans-Atlantic tariffs. Instead, the idea is to put these captains of industry to good use building a transatlantic bridge, acting as mentors, imparting best practices and sharing Am Cham’s formidable trans-Atlantic network with future captains of industry who want to reach the U.S. market.

“This is not going to replace hubs and incubators,” outgoing AmCham France President Clara Gaymard told reporters. “This will be a program for people with ambitions to do transatlantic business to sit down with big companies and learn from their experience and contacts.” And the AmCham France membership roster is full of companies who can help with that: Coca Cola, IBM, GE, Cisco, AIG, Lilly and BNP Paribas to name a few. And the relationship is significant: the EU and U.S. are each other’s main trading partners, and France is number four in the group, with most trade in aircraft (not fashion!). “The U.S. and France had $115 billion in bilateral trade last year,” U.S. Ambassador to France and Monaco Jane D. Hartley told a guests at a recent AmCham event this week. “And that was a 2.8% increase year-on-year.”


Concretely, NextGen will offer startup businesses admitted to the program the opportunity to “shadow” big companies, tap into the AmCham network, and profit from a series of planned lectures, events and podcasts which will share knowledge and best practices about launching and expanding a business. It was all rolled out earlier this week in Paris by Gaymard, who is President of GE France, and incoming AmCham President Alain Bénichou, President of IBM France – arguably the two most influential businesspeople in the country today.

It’s no secret that at least some of the economic reforms working their way through French legislative channels today are the result of considered suggestions proposed under Gaymard’s tenure at the head of AmCham. “The government does listen to AmCham,” Gaymard told me at a gathering in Paris. “And we like what (Economics Minister) Emmanuel Macron and (Prime Minister) Manuel Valls are doing.

New  legislation, known as the “Loi Macron,” would lower some barriers to investment, adjust taxes to make it less expensive to start a business in France and allow more flexibility in hiring and firing. Not surprisingly, in this country that values its generous social security system, it has been criticized by both sides of the political spectrum for going too far and not going far enough.