GO Entrepreneurs: the business of putting everyone in the room

There is a Ferris wheel in the photograph. Below it, hundreds of people gather around a pink stage, while exhibition stands crowd the arena floor. This is GO Entrepreneurs in Paris in 2025. Somewhere in that crowd, presumably, somebody has a question about finding customers. The setting makes an unexpectedly good argument: starting a business need not look like sitting alone with a spreadsheet.

The company behind the gathering sells something rather old-fashioned: the chance to be in the same place as someone useful. Its modern apparatus includes workshops, demonstrations, expert consultations, digital invitations and recorded talks. But the underlying problem is familiar. An entrepreneur needs help, and the people who can provide it are scattered across organisations, professions and appointment calendars.

The room came before the glamour

Xavier Kergall launched the Salon des Entrepreneurs in Paris in 1993. In a 2018 interview, he recalled a linguistic obstacle. People thought he was organising a construction exhibition, complete with concrete mixers and building blocks. The word “entrepreneur” carried an altogether dustier meaning. He also remembered an early event oriented towards established businesses, rather than the people hoping to create one.

“Tout le monde pensait que je faisais le salon du BTP”

Xavier Kergall, recalling the early years
People expected a construction exhibition.

That recollection makes the subsequent audience expansion more interesting than a simple tale of bigger crowds. The event’s present constituency includes aspiring founders, independents, startup teams, company buyers and owners of very small and medium-sized businesses. A person buying an existing company has different questions from someone launching an app. GO Entrepreneurs puts both in the conversation.

One door. Two prices.

For visitors, registration is free. For commercial partners, access to that audience is a product. GO Entrepreneurs offers exhibition space, speaking opportunities, sponsorship and marketing visibility. Its expertise lies in assembling the programme and the audience, then giving businesses and institutions structured ways to participate.

The Lyon 2026 brochure makes this unusually tangible. Its Nickel package lists a furnished nine-square-metre stand, four exhibitor badges, a digital partner space, sixty networking invitations and thirty twenty-minute appointment slots. The price is €8,000 before tax. An exhibitor is buying floor space, certainly, but also machinery for arranging introductions before anybody arrives.

This creates two audiences with complementary interests. Visitors want useful answers and contacts. Partners want relationships with potential clients. Banks, public institutions, support networks and commercial suppliers can meet people who are actively considering business decisions. The organiser sells proximity to that moment. Free entry reduces the visitor’s financial barrier; travel, accommodation and a day away from work still have to earn their keep.

When the room became a screen

An events company has an obvious vulnerability: sometimes people cannot gather. During the pandemic, the Salon changed its name to GO Entrepreneurs and ran its June 2021 Paris edition entirely online. The former organiser explicitly presented the health crisis as an accelerator of transformation. The immediate constraint was physical assembly; the response was to move the programme to a digital setting.

The official history describes a broader redesign: different formats, timing and meeting places, including Paris La Défense Arena and Lyon’s La Sucrière. Video has remained part of the offer. A replay library lets visitors revisit a talk, or lets someone who stayed home hear it later. A conference can therefore have a useful life longer than the journey to its venue.

A media company buys the conversation

In March 2025, EBRA announced the acquisition of GO Entrepreneurs Paris and Lyon, together with the Forum National des Associations & Fondations, from Groupe Les Echos-Le Parisien. EBRA described a strategy of building communities around events with editorial content, supported by its media titles. Les Echos would remain the official media partner of both GO editions for three years.

The fit is easy to understand. A newspaper reaches an audience through stories; an exhibition lets that audience meet. GO supplies both encounters and material that can circulate afterwards. The acquisition announcement supports that strategic reading. It does not, by itself, show whether a visitor found a customer or an exhibitor recovered its spending.

The celebrity gets you there. Your question does the work.

There is room for theatricality. Kergall once recalled Michel et Augustin placing drinkable yoghurts on the auditorium stage during Bill Gates’s 2007 appearance. Gates spoke with the products around him. It is an amusing reminder that an entrepreneurship event can be a place to demonstrate marketing, as well as discuss it.

The 2026 Paris programme mixed figures such as Teddy Riner, OVHcloud founder Octave Klaba and Station F director Roxanne Varza with practical formats. Lyon’s organiser reported 10,100 participants after its September 2026 edition. Regional partners included Bpifrance, the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region and Métropole de Lyon. The combination is the point: recognisable speakers attract attention; institutions and specialists offer places to take a particular problem.

GO operates in a busy market. Salon SME also serves founders, independents and small businesses; Bpifrance’s Big offers another broad entrepreneurial gathering. GO’s distinctive proposition is its Paris-and-Lyon pairing and the combination of exhibition, advice and networking within an event brand dating to 1993. Which room is useful depends on whom you need to meet.

A practical visitor could copy the organiser’s appointment-first logic: arrive with one decision to resolve, identify relevant experts beforehand and leave each conversation with an agreed next step. That is a suggested method, rather than a promised outcome. A crowded fair is less useful when the question demands confidential, sustained specialist work, or when nobody follows up. The company can arrange the room. You still have to make the introduction count.