# The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside

The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo

20VC · Feb 12, 2025 · 76 min · 15,049 words
Speakers: Fabien Pinckaers, Harry Stebbings
Source: https://www.996.fm/episodes/20vc--ep-6590e310/

## Cold open

**Fabien Pinckaers** [0:00]:

Have to be obsessed. I don't think you can succeed if you are not obsessed. I always wanted the price to be low, because in every transaction I was purchasing shares. All the managers are always buying shares at Odoo. We never sold shares. We we will never sell. No? There will never be an an IPO. When I was 26, I purchased the domain name, sorry, sep.com, because I thought that one day I would be much bigger than them, and then I would use this domain name.

**Harry Stebbings** [0:25]:

This is 20 VC

## Intro

**Harry Stebbings** [0:26]:

with me, Harry Stebbings, and I cannot tell you the joy it brings me to share this story today. The world needs more entrepreneurs like this one. Today, we tell you the story of the best company that you might not have heard of, Odoo, built from the countryside of Belgium. They do an astonishing 650,000,000 in ARR. They have over 5,000 employees, and they have over 50,000 companies as customers. As you heard in the intro, their founder does not ever want to sell the company IPO. He believes that titles in companies are total BS, and most management is done completely wrong. Everything you thought about management will be changed following this episode, and I'm so excited to welcome Fabien Pinckaers, founder and CEO of Odoo.

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## Conversation

**Harry Stebbings** [4:24]:

Fabien, I am so excited for this. Listen. I am a SaaS nerd, and Odoo is one of the most incredible stories. So thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for having me. Now I would love to start. You started your first business at 13 with a business management software company. What's the story there?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [4:42]:

Oh, it was just I'm a developer. I also like management. I was reading a lot of books. It was just friends of my father, and I did management software for them. And I started with one and then two and then a lot of people.

**Harry Stebbings** [4:54]:

Were aware you that you were building a business and you were wanting to make money at the time? How were you thinking about it?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [4:58]:

It was not so much about getting money, it was more about building something. What I like is to build software that people use, that have an impact for them. So the money was great, I mean, but it was €150 at the time. So so it's just for doing something.

**Harry Stebbings** [5:14]:

What happens next? Then you're in school, you're 15, 16. Are you just like the smartest kid in school and school's easy?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [5:21]:

I didn't go to the lecture. I was more doing business or having fun and drinking beers. But I continued developing software for companies during the university. I did a lot of things like eCommerce. I did various antivirus games. I had a T shirt company, lots of different things. You had a T shirt company? Yeah. What was that about? I'm passionate about open source, you know, Linux stuff and so on. So I did e commerce with Linux T shirt and ties and DBN and everything. I actually sold a lot, but it was really painful to post all these T shirts every day.

**Harry Stebbings** [5:55]:

My god. You realize that the challenges of actually selling physical products.

**Fabien Pinckaers** [5:58]:

It started to be a logistic challenge for for a student that wants to drink beer. It's not great. I I love that.

**Harry Stebbings** [6:04]:

Okay. So what would you say was your, like, first real business? Because you had, like, an art marketplace. No? Yes.

**Fabien Pinckaers** [6:10]:

That's what that's a big one. Yes. This

**Harry Stebbings** [6:12]:

outsold eBay?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [6:14]:

Yeah. I I was selling more objects than eBay. Be, so 15,000 art per month at the time. I was working with auction houses, antique dealers, art palettes, and I started to be one of the biggest of Belgian, actually. Was that making much money? Not so much. The business model was shitty. I think I get something like €5,000 per month, which for me as a student was great, but for what I built was nothing.

**Harry Stebbings** [6:42]:

Okay. So we have that. And then Odoo. How does Odoo come about?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [6:47]:

I'm passionate about development, of course, and management. And Odoo was for me kind of a way of putting all my patients together in a single software. So I had all these different activities, t shirt, art markets, antivirus and everything. And at some point I said, okay, will top everything and focus on one thing that I really like, to build management software. And that's what I did with Odoo. And I started small with the auction houses. They were my customer for eCommerce websites. What was your first product? I did the opposite of traditional of the you know, usually you start with an MVC, small product. I did the complete opposite. I did everything. I started with accounting, logistic, purchase, everything at once. So it took me two years to build the first version of the product.

**Harry Stebbings** [7:29]:

Was that the right decision? Because we're trained in like MVP, lean startup. You went for, as my team called it, the fat startup, which is, you know, doing it all first.

**Fabien Pinckaers** [7:40]:

So I remember an article of Paul Graham at the time, and he said if you want to have a big impact, to build a big company, you have to fix a big problem. So I had this story in mind that I want to do something very complex. And doing everything companies need is actually a big problem, so I I started to to to tackle this challenge.

**Harry Stebbings** [7:58]:

I love that. Do you worry that by doing everything you lose focus?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [8:01]:

Yes. And so it it was very risky because it took time to monetize and and get to something that I could sell and everything. But now that I am looking back, it's probably what Odoo do today. It's because I I thought about the big picture, everything's smooth together, and it's not a patch of different software.

**Harry Stebbings** [8:19]:

How do you have feature parity? How are the products as good as the single point solutions when there are 50 of them in the early days?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [8:26]:

Initially, I started as a service company, so I built everything customers were asking for. So I built features and features and features. The product Which is what we're told not to do. Yeah. But I bootstrapped the company. So When you bootstrapped a company, you need money, and my way of getting money is always to just sell services and development. Not a good business model, but I grew the company to 100 people on that basis. It kind of worked, but I struggled a lot. Like, I had a few years close to bankruptcy.

**Harry Stebbings** [8:54]:

Wow. But okay. So you scaled to a 100 people with professional services, very hands on approach. Yes. In that time, you said bankruptcy loomed. Take me to one of those times. What happened?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [9:04]:

What was the

**Harry Stebbings** [9:05]:

worst time?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [9:06]:

It's not like there is one time. It's when you are close to bankruptcy, it's for months and months and months. So you don't sleep, you work much harder, you get customers just because they pay faster, not because it's a good deal. You So do bad trade off, but because of that I was the main shareholder and I stayed one, so I didn't needed money at the time. Why did you not raise money? Initially, I think I was not just thinking about it. I was building the business, growing the company, focusing on that. I wanted to keep the majority of the shares, In 2010, then I had to do a pivot in the business model. I wanted to stop services activities and refocus as a software vendor model. That's when I raised my first round.

**Harry Stebbings** [9:44]:

In 2010 we go, we want to focus on software and we want to be less services. Talk to me about that decision and how you came to it.

**Fabien Pinckaers** [9:50]:

That's what I wanted to do initially from the beginning, but it gets to a point where the software was very complete but with a shit user interface. So I was not happy about it and I thought now it's time to refocus and invest in R and D and build a software model where I get recurring revenues and everything. So I decided to stop all my services activities from one day to another. Wow. But to fund that, I needed to do my first fundraising.

**Harry Stebbings** [10:12]:

How much did you raise in that fund? 3

**Fabien Pinckaers** [10:14]:

millions of euro.

**Harry Stebbings** [10:15]:

€3,000,000. How did it go? This is your first round. This is the first round you've raised.

**Fabien Pinckaers** [10:19]:

Very well actually, this time. Second time not so. As a Belgian company there is not a lot of big VCs in Belgium, so you basically go to Paris, London and Germany, and you meet all of them. The IT world is not that big. And I got at the end something like 10 offers, which was quite good, so I picked the best one.

**Harry Stebbings** [10:37]:

Wow. Who did you pick?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [10:38]:

It was Sofinnova Partners leading the round.

**Harry Stebbings** [10:41]:

Amazing. Love that. Okay. And so you do 3,000,000. What was the price?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [10:44]:

It was 7 millions of euro, pre money, so 10 millions of post money.

**Harry Stebbings** [10:48]:

Wow. So 30% of the company.

**Fabien Pinckaers** [10:49]:

Yeah.

**Harry Stebbings** [10:50]:

Wow.

**Fabien Pinckaers** [10:51]:

That that was not a good valuation.

**Harry Stebbings** [10:53]:

That what a good deal for them, though. Fight it. Okay. That's amazing. So Then we raised that money and we replaced the services side of the business. Now we can focus on UI. What happens next?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [11:03]:

So Odoo is open source. Even though I started a software vendor model, we were still open source. What we were selling is maintenance software, and maintenance support, bug fixes and things like that, so maintenance contracts. We stopped our service activities and we built a partner network all around the world. It worked well. The thing is most customers, they were paying for the first year, but second year they were telling us the software is good, I don't need maintenance anymore. So the business model was not great because the product was open source, there was no license fee, so they were just continuing using the software but not paying me.

**Harry Stebbings** [11:38]:

Wow. Okay. So What do we do now? What's the problem?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [11:41]:

After two years, I get close to zero money in the bank account again, so I had to do another pivot in the business model. And that time, I switched to an open core business model, where 80% of the features are open source and 20% are for a fee.

**Harry Stebbings** [11:55]:

Okay. And so we switched to open core with that 20% being for a fee. How does it go then? Do we have much money at this point?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [12:01]:

No. It's close to to zero. I think I had something like two weeks left or or something. Are you sleeping? Not that much at the time. Because you have problems, we have pressure from the board, you have issues with the business, you have everything goes together when you don't have money. It's very hard, but we made it, so it's okay.

**Harry Stebbings** [12:19]:

So we're doing OpenCore now, we're going to do the 20% paid features. What happens then?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [12:24]:

Then everything gets really good. So during all these years Odoo built a software and a community, so we had a big software and a big community, but no revenues, or limited revenues. Once we started to monetize efficiently, then everything went very smooth. It was different because we used to fight to survive. That was our main motivation, just surviving and optimizing everything because we had no cash. From one year to another then we get a lot of cash and the business model worked and we had no more cash issues. And we had to find our motivations elsewhere.

**Harry Stebbings** [12:55]:

Absolutely love this. Okay. So Open Call starts going really well. What does that mean? We're making a lot of money? What sort of revenues are we at now?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [13:02]:

Something like 15 millions.

**Harry Stebbings** [13:04]:

So what happens then? We just progress with OpenCore and continue to scale?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [13:08]:

That's the business model we still have today, where we grew on top of that. So if you look at the past twenty years, we basically grew at 50% per year, year after year, every year. There was not a big bang or it was just continuous growth year after year.

**Harry Stebbings** [13:24]:

With the growth, there are always challenges. There are always problems with culture, with scaling teams. What are the first things that broke?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [13:31]:

So one of the big issues I had at the time is that I deceived the community. Because I built the community with me on the open source mindset. Like we are open source, we will always be open source, and property is bad, we are not like that, and things like that. I fought to keep this open source business model, but to the point where we were close to bankruptcy, so I had to switch. When I switched to OpenCore it started a big fight with the community. They were deceived because we built them on another story, and so the marketing was very bad. Lot of people criticizing us or partners who were leaving, trying to find competitors. But the product was good, so the majority of them stayed with the product. Looking back, if I had pitched them correctly, like we are today open source, but maybe in the future we will need to monetize, then I wouldn't have had that many issues.

**Harry Stebbings** [14:17]:

Do you think great product always wins?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [14:20]:

Yes. I'm sure about that. We have had difficulties, but the thing that kept us is the product.

**Harry Stebbings** [14:26]:

Okay. Why is it then that we are told focus on distribution, focus on marketing, focus on brand? If great product always won, the world would look very different.

**Fabien Pinckaers** [14:37]:

But at the end, the great products always win, no? You can save time with marketing. You can save two or three years. You can grow the company, but at some point you cannot the product matters. I am on a market that is very slow. Know, ERPs are very slow, SAP is still shitty after twenty years, Microsoft Dynamics two. On a slower market, it's the best product that wins.

**Harry Stebbings** [14:59]:

What product decision did you make that with the benefit of hindsight looking back, you wish you hadn't made?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [15:05]:

The worst decision I did, and the best ones, are the pricing. I did a very bad pricing change, so when you have difficulties you try to change everything. You try to change the product, the business model, the service you sell and the pricing. At the time we were changing the pricing every year, which was very complex.

**Harry Stebbings** [15:21]:

Changing the pricing every year?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [15:23]:

Yeah, we were experimenting. Wow. One of the worst decisions I did is one of these price changes, we probably lost one year of growth, because when you work with partners, if it doesn't work, then it takes time to rebuild the trust and everything.

**Harry Stebbings** [15:38]:

What was wrong with the pricing?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [15:40]:

So the way Odoo works is that you have a suite of business apps, CRM, eCommerce, accounting. You have

**Harry Stebbings** [15:46]:

so many products.

**Fabien Pinckaers** [15:47]:

Yes. At that point I wanted to have a price that grows with the value of the software. The more users you have, the bigger the price, like usual, but also the more applications you have, the bigger the price. I did a price which was like €10 times the number of users times the number of applications you use. So it was growing very aggressively. It was too high, so the partners didn't like it, they did a big push back, they refused to sell it, it was really difficult. But you know when you have a partner network and you change the price you never know, the partners always react to any change. You never know if it's because the price is wrong or it's because of the transition, the resistance to change. When you have this, for a few months you try to convince them. My price is good, you don't understand the value, good to have a price aligned with the value. So it took us like nine months to go back to the old price, it was very hard for the company.

**Harry Stebbings** [16:39]:

Incredibly challenging working with partner networks and pricing. You also did a pricing change in 2022. That's one of our best decisions. Yeah. I mean, saw the numbers post the pricing, and it's like this. It's up and to the right. Why was that such a good decision on the benefit of hindsight?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [16:55]:

This price change was actually to decrease the price on the small clients and increase it for the larger clients. And for the small clients we were actually too expensive. For all our applications it was something around €120 per user and per month, but if you have a single user or two users €120 is still a budget. So we decreased it to €20 at a time where everybody were increasing their price. It was with inflation, everybody was increasing the price, so we said okay, let's decrease €20. And so acquisitions started to to boost very quickly. We attracted 2.8 times more clients since that date.

**Harry Stebbings** [17:30]:

Wow. That's insane. How are we acquiring customers in the early days? What does that look like in terms of that marketing acquisition funnel?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [17:38]:

Early days and today it's still the same. Our main user acquisition is word-of-mouth. It's because we have clients that are very happy. They talk to other clients and then bring us more clients. Still today, the majority of our leads is word-of-mouth.

**Harry Stebbings** [17:52]:

Going back to the point of product winning.

**Fabien Pinckaers** [17:54]:

You need a strong product to do that. You need a product that is capable of turning your users into fans.

**Harry Stebbings** [18:00]:

What do you think about the kind of adage, the common say in startups, that speed is the single most important thing in success?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [18:07]:

I agree. I agree, but I see that in speed of how you build your assets, or with the product. So it's very important to move forward fast and evolve very quickly and innovate and also build a business. It's not so much about build your revenue. At least in my case, revenue grew at 50% per year. It's not huge, but it's still good. It's just that I did it for twenty years. What

**Harry Stebbings** [18:31]:

leads to such large revenue numbers today.

**Fabien Pinckaers** [18:34]:

At the end it's big.

**Harry Stebbings** [18:36]:

What was the hardest things in those early days?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [18:38]:

I think it was always a matter of survival. When you don't have cash to pay the employees at the end of the month, it's really hard. When you have to dismiss people you like but you have no other options, it's very hard too.

**Harry Stebbings** [18:49]:

Yeah. Why did you not raise more? Talk to me about this second fundraiser. You said the first one was good, but we sold 30% of the company. It was not that good. Second one is the same. What what about the second one? How did that go? And where was the business?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [19:01]:

So in every fundraising, the timing is the most important thing. For And me, the timing was not right at the time. So we raised 7 millions of euro at a valuation of 23 pre money. Mhmm. So 30 post. And it was a time where we we need we needed money. How much revenue were we at? Don't know exactly. Maybe $20.20 millions. 20,000,000 in revenue? Yeah.

**Harry Stebbings** [19:23]:

And you were doing it at 30,000,000 post?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [19:25]:

Yes. Oh. I think we were a bit less, but still it was not a good valuation. Wow.

**Harry Stebbings** [19:31]:

How did that fundraise go?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [19:33]:

It was not we got one offer from Xchange, but only one.

**Harry Stebbings** [19:39]:

Did you meet many investors?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [19:41]:

Yes. Why were they saying no? I think they were scared about everything that we had to pivot. It was the business model wasn't there. The traction wasn't there. We had difficulties to be profitable. We had a growth but not an exceptional growth, a regular growth.

**Harry Stebbings** [19:57]:

Wow. That is amazing. What a great deal there. One thing that people particularly like today is vertical SaaS because it's not bluntly it's a lot more targeted in your customers. You have a customer profile that you can message to. You know where they are. You have a very horizontal product.

**Fabien Pinckaers** [20:15]:

Yeah. We did the opposite.

**Harry Stebbings** [20:16]:

Yeah. How do you think about winning with a horizontal product when your customer is everyone?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [20:21]:

Instead of being the best in one industry, what we wanted to be is to be the best in applications. So we wanted to be the best CRM or the best accounting or the best website builder. That's the way we see things, not based on customer but based on applications. As these applications get mature, pretty much all the CRMs look the same today. It's not so much about CRM for that business or that business, they are the same. It's more about the quality of your product now rather than how you customize it for a specific segment. My vision is to commoditize the management software market. When you see that as a commoditization I think everybody will use the same CRM, the same accounting, the same website builder. It doesn't have to be dedicated to one industry. It's like a phone. Whatever your industry, you use the same phone.

**Harry Stebbings** [21:09]:

What do you mean when you say the commoditization of software? Because there are so many different people in so many different markets within your product lineup who have different views on UI, on workflows, on messaging. What do you mean when you say about the commoditization of business?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [21:23]:

If you look today, the small and mid sized companies, they don't have a single application, they have a mix of a lot of different applications. They have a lot of spreadsheets, but they use Slack for discussion, Mailchimp to send email, WordPress for a website, they have plenty of applications. These applications don't integrate well to each other, it costs a lot to maintain, it's not completely efficient. The thing that nobody succeeded to do is to offer one platform that does everything they need in just a few clicks, and that's what we started to do. Everybody failed. Microsoft tried with Dynamics, SAP tried, Oracle with NetSuite tried, but equipment rate on the market is still very low, less than 10%. I do believe that once you get to the maturity level, management software will be like Office. Everybody uses the same word and Excel and Slides and PowerPoint and everything. I think for management software it's gonna be the same. When it gets mature, perfectly integrated, and very affordable, then you you can transform the market and offer this product for very long.

**Harry Stebbings** [22:21]:

Why do you think you've done so well and grown to such scale where Microsoft and SAP have tried and failed?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [22:28]:

Our thing, our product is years ahead of the competition. There is no way they can do what we do.

**Harry Stebbings** [22:33]:

Why? I mean they have the money, they have the talent, why?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [22:35]:

It's not so much about the money. In order to build such complex software, because companies are complex, to make it super easy, it's more about having the right people, a few of them, a few genius guys, rather than having an army of 10,000 developers. And we get that. We are extremely good developers and good management. We are extremely focused. I think as companies grow, they defocus themselves. You always have middle management that want to launch their new departments, their new product, their new We have been focused all along on this one thing, your thing is to improve our products.

**Harry Stebbings** [23:06]:

I did want to talk about the team because you said to me earlier, Odoo never recruits VPs, managers, or even team leaders. Yes. That's very unusual. Why?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [23:15]:

So we have a very strong culture. We are a startup that grew super fast. So We have a culture that is very strong. One way to keep the culture alive is to avoid having these external managers and team leaders coming with their habits. Probably good habits, but not in our environment. That's one thing. The other reason is that the way I see team leaders is that they are not there to manage people. So what to do, we have no planning, no budget, no forecasts, none of this, no process. What I expect from a team leader is to have a team, just make your team become better. That's the only objective I have on a team leader. And so in order to do that you have to be the best of the team. There is no way you can make a team of developers become better developers if you are not the best developer of the team yourself. And when you recruit external managers, they are probably not as good as your team already. I'm confused. If

**Harry Stebbings** [24:06]:

you don't have a budget, how do you plan your business?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [24:09]:

We do have a budget, but it's the role of the CFO, the finance team. And we don't share that with the teams. So the budget is just about can we recruit yes or no, or much, And that's it. The team leaders, they don't have to worry about that. Even the directors, they don't have to worry about that. They only have to worry about making their team become more efficient.

**Harry Stebbings** [24:27]:

And how do you measure more efficient?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [24:29]:

You don't need to measure, you know. When you work with the team, and that's what I expect from the team leader is to work with the people. When you work with people, you know what's good or not. You don't need to put a KPI. I'm pretty sure in your teams, you know who is good and who is not just by working with them.

**Harry Stebbings** [24:41]:

And so when we think about no forecasts, how does that work?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [24:45]:

So we do have so the finance, the CFO has a forecast just to check that the cash is okay. But apart from that, it's more rational thinking. I need to buy this. Is it worth it? Is the investment worth that? If you give budget to people, they will just spend the budget. They won't have any responsibility or whatever. If you don't give them budget, they will have to spend responsibly. And so we teach our team leader to be responsible.

**Harry Stebbings** [25:09]:

Do you get them to set goals or

**Fabien Pinckaers** [25:11]:

No.

**Harry Stebbings** [25:12]:

No.

**Fabien Pinckaers** [25:12]:

No? What kind of goal can you give to a developer? Mean, it's very subjective. Like, develop this task. Maybe you can do today.

**Harry Stebbings** [25:19]:

This task by this timeline?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [25:21]:

Yeah. But there's I mean, when you are agile, the the tasks change all the time, the features change all the time.

**Harry Stebbings** [25:26]:

Hit this number of users, hit this number of activity retention.

**Fabien Pinckaers** [25:30]:

So on some teams, like the salespeople, we have goals, obviously. They have sales target, but it's an exception. Most of the teams don't have. I have a story about that.

**Harry Stebbings** [25:38]:

Yeah. Please. It's so different. I love it.

**Fabien Pinckaers** [25:41]:

I'm from Belgium, and we had a the company in The US was struggling a few ten years ago, was struggling to grow, and so I needed to relocate myself and I went there for three years. When I arrived there we had three consultants and they were completely overloaded. We have 10 consultants, but they were completely overloaded. Too many clients and projects, was a real mess. And the quality was not great of what we were delivering. So I asked one of our best consultants from Belgium to come in The US and help me restructure that, grow the team, take the most complex projects and deliver them. And this guy came, went to The US. I had a director in The US at that time who told me, Here is how I manage the team. I have KPI about customer satisfaction, time to deliver a project, a number of applications deployed, and I told him, No, no, don't do that. Just focus on delivering your project. I said no, I need this KPI, how can you manage? So I couldn't convince him to drop his KPIs and so I waited to see what happened. So he did his KPI and after three months the guys who had the worst KPIs were the top experts I get from Belgium to deliver all the projects. When you look at the number then we understood the reason why he had the worst KPIs because we gave him all the shitty projects that were complex to deliver. Things are very subjective. If you put KPIs it's very difficult. It was abuse for the whole team that this guy was the best, yet on the KPIs he was the worst. It's just that we gave him the worst project.

**Harry Stebbings** [27:00]:

Can I ask, when you don't have the titles and you have team leads, does that make it harder to hire really great people? Because great people often want big titles.

**Fabien Pinckaers** [27:08]:

I think it's easier to scale when you don't need to get the top people. I mean, you just recruit young people, a lot of them, and train them and make them evolve. It's easier than always looking for the best VP of x, the best managers of x.

**Harry Stebbings** [27:21]:

Tell me about how you recruit young people so successfully, because you you have such a big team now. I mean, in Belgium there's 1,800, you say?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [27:28]:

Yes. 5,000 in total.

**Harry Stebbings** [27:29]:

Yeah. 5,000 in total. How do you recruit young people so well?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [27:33]:

So the way we proceed is that we just assess on the job. So if a developer, we'll ask him to develop. A salesperson will ask him to do a demo and pitch the product, just that. So we don't look at resumes, just make them do some practice and look at it. One thing I noticed is that we also do an IQ test, and it's the second best predictive KPI on the performance of the person. The first being how good they are. First being Yeah. How good The development you are. One of the issues I had with the recruiter at the time is that if they were talking like thirty minutes, forty minutes on the resume, doing the test for two hours, the way they assess people is based on how much time they spend on talking on a topic. So if you discuss a lot about the resume then it will impact the way you will qualify the candidate. So I asked them to stop working on the resume because the problem with the logic test is that they just get a number. It did 19% or 20% or 90%, but you don't spend time on it. You just get a number. So I had to train them to say, no, this IQ test is really important. Your discussion on the resume is not so much, so spend less time on that.

**Harry Stebbings** [28:40]:

So IQ tests are the second biggest predictor. Yes. Fascinating. So we get them to do the core action, we get them to do the IQ test. What What else is involved in that process?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [28:49]:

That's it. And our process is extremely fast. It's one meeting and we decide right away. Usually we recruit within five days. And everything is automated. So you apply online, you can book your meeting with the interviewer right away into his calendar, then you get a meeting within two, three, four days. After the meeting, the next day you get an offer.

**Harry Stebbings** [29:10]:

Wow.

**Fabien Pinckaers** [29:10]:

And we beat the market because we are fast, just because of that.

**Harry Stebbings** [29:13]:

Wow. How often are you right? We're often told that actually good hires are right 50% of the time.

**Fabien Pinckaers** [29:20]:

If you are recruiting smart people, it's quite easy to notice. I mean, if you watch a developer developing for three hours, you probably know at the end if it's good or not.

**Harry Stebbings** [29:30]:

We've got core action, how good they are at developing, how good they are at sales, their IQ tests as well. That's not a culture fit. You can have smart people who are politely assholes. How do you think about that added human component?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [29:43]:

It's really exceptions. Majority of the time, people will fit in your culture. If your your culture is great, I'll come to it after what we are, I do believe that most people match. Really? Sometimes you have issue, but it's really exceptional. It's probably less than 1%.

**Harry Stebbings** [29:57]:

When someone's not great, how fast do you know?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [30:01]:

Quite quickly. Within six months. Okay. Even before. The problem is for younger team leader to to act. Nobody wants to dismiss someone, so it's hard to act, but you quickly notice.

**Harry Stebbings** [30:14]:

What are the reasons why younger people struggle when you bring them on?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [30:18]:

It's always competencies. For me, it's always you will succeed or you will never. But for us, probably more than 90% of the people we dismiss, it's always competencies. Like, he's not a good developer, he doesn't understand CSO.

**Harry Stebbings** [30:31]:

And we're often characterized. We're both European. I'm a proud Londoner, you're a proud Belgian. People always say that young people in Europe, we don't want to work like they do in The US. We don't have the work ethic. Yeah. Do you agree with that statement?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [30:42]:

I think young people are different from what you used to have twenty years ago, but the new generation, they want to work. It's just that they need a purpose. They are ready to work a lot, to do a great thing, and we did great thing because the average age of Odoo is 26, and we built a 5,000 people company with The average age is 26. 26 years old. So it's young, and we built something big with millions of users. So they are capable of working, it's just that they need purpose, they need a passion, they need to have They won't work if they feel like they don't have an impact.

**Harry Stebbings** [31:16]:

Average age is 26. Yes. Do you ever worry about emotional maturity? As I get older, I just look at like, I've changed a lot. When I was younger, I was more rash, more fast and emotional, and now I'm just more thoughtful and deliberate, more calm. Is is that ever a challenge?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [31:33]:

No. I think the the key is to train people, to make them evolve fast. You can get the younger one, but if they evolve fast, it's How do you structure training? One month of onboarding, where you have a lot of elearning, test, exercise, certification, everything. And then it's more about coaching on the job by the team leader.

**Harry Stebbings** [31:50]:

And so the team leader is responsible for the training of their teams?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [31:53]:

Oh, no. The first months, we have a dedicated team to train everybody, and after that, they join the team and then it's the team leader.

**Harry Stebbings** [31:59]:

Okay. Got you. How many people are in a team?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [32:01]:

It's quite small team, like 10 people. 10 people. One team leader is around 10 people.

**Harry Stebbings** [32:07]:

Okay. Got you. And they have like weekly team meeting in that second one?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [32:10]:

We don't have a lot of meeting. I I forbid the recurring meeting at the company. They can do meetings, but on the job or for specific tasks or trainings, but not recurring meeting. I mean, meeting is a way to manage people, and we try to avoid manager. We want team leaders that work with them, so we try to avoid recurring meetings.

**Harry Stebbings** [32:29]:

Wow. So they don't have a weekly team recurring meeting?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [32:32]:

No. They they work with each other every day, so they don't need.

**Harry Stebbings** [32:35]:

Sure. Do you like remote work? It's okay. I I don't do. I don't do it. But Are there any other elements of traditional management that we always hear reoccurring meetings, a huge emphasis on culture fit more than that you'd suggest. Are there any other elements of management that you're like, that's not right?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [32:53]:

I think a lot of CEOs are not right. Why? If you look at the agenda, they are constantly meeting people, going to have a coffee with someone, or going to events, and I think the company needs them more than the external people.

**Harry Stebbings** [33:07]:

How do you spend your days?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [33:09]:

50% of my time is in the product, so research and development, with the product owners and the developers, and the other 50% is improving our internal processes.

**Harry Stebbings** [33:18]:

What does that mean, improving your internal processes?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [33:20]:

It changes month by month. It could be if our marketing is not good enough, work one or two months with marketing. If the service needs some pivot or improvements, I would work there. Sometimes it's in a country. I was one year in India last this year because the company was not growing enough, I relocated myself for one year. So it changes.

**Harry Stebbings** [33:38]:

You relocated yourself to India for a year?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [33:40]:

Yeah.

**Harry Stebbings** [33:41]:

You've got a wife and kids as well.

**Fabien Pinckaers** [33:43]:

Yes. They came with me. They came with you? That time because when I was to The US, it's because it was not that easy. How was that?

**Harry Stebbings** [33:49]:

You're in Gujarat. Yes. Yeah. How how was going to India for you packing up with your two kids and wife?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [33:55]:

I loved it. I mean, India is an experience. It's colorful. It's noisy. It's full of activity. Why was India

**Harry Stebbings** [34:02]:

not growing?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [34:03]:

You know, when you grow a company from one to 10, it's a challenge, a real challenge. But when you grow to 10 to 100 people, it's a different challenge. Then And from 100 to 1,000 it's still a different challenge. The director there was one of our first employees. I started with him when he was a student. He grew the company to 200 people and then it struggled there. It's been seven years since the company only had 200 employees and he couldn't grow. And the guy was good, it's just that he needed some help. So I came there to help, and we grew to 800 people. Still the same team, it's still the same managers, so I replaced nobody because they were all very good. It's just that they needed a little bit of help.

**Harry Stebbings** [34:40]:

Okay. And so they needed a little bit of help. Where's India at now for you?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [34:44]:

Yeah. Now we have 800 employees. We grew contracts. So when I arrived there, we were signing 16 new clients per month. It's nothing. And now we are around 800 per month, and it's growing it's it continues to grow.

**Harry Stebbings** [35:00]:

If I were to ask you the challenges going from one to ten, ten to a 100, and a 100 to 500, or whatever you want that number to

**Fabien Pinckaers** [35:06]:

be. Yes.

**Harry Stebbings** [35:08]:

How would you describe them?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [35:09]:

So for one to 10 is about building the business. So it could be the product, the service offer, it's all about you and the team working on improving the business and the product. 10 to 100 is the time where your job change. As a founder you start to have middle managers, and so the culture is not you anymore. It's the middle manager and the way they behave with the people. So you spend way more time communicating to ensure that the culture is aligned, that everybody is aligned. Going to above 1,000 and more, it's all about scalability, to make things super smooth and clean so that you keep growing.

**Harry Stebbings** [35:45]:

When we speak about the team, I actually spoke to one of your investors. I think it was one of your investors or team members. Can't remember which one said this. But they said that you said, I hire people for being world class at something. The flip side is that they are catastrophic at other things. Can you talk to me about that?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [36:02]:

If you look for people that are perfect in everything, you will get people that are average in everything. I If you want people who speak multiple languages, who is a good developer, who is a good communicator, probably it's going to be average. So if you dismiss people because they are bad on something, expect to have average on everything. If you want people who transform your company, they have to be extremely good on something. And for that you will have to accept their weaknesses. So I train recruiters to look for the strengths and accept some of the weaknesses. Some you can't, but it's important to not look for people. So when you discuss the aftermath of the interview, it's more about, oh, is he a very good developer? Or is he a very good something? And not about, I think he doesn't speak that language very well, or he doesn't do that. You focus on where is good rather than weakness. Are

**Harry Stebbings** [36:48]:

there unacceptable versus acceptable weaknesses, or is it just how good your strength is?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [36:54]:

For me it really depends on the departments. I have departments that are extremely flexible. They can accommodate anybody. If you are not social, they will put you in a separate office and so on. That's fine. So it really depends on the context.

**Harry Stebbings** [37:08]:

What have been your biggest hiring mistakes, Fabien?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [37:11]:

It's not so much about hiring, but it's about firing. I'm always too late.

**Harry Stebbings** [37:14]:

How do you think about improving that moving forwards?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [37:17]:

I keep saying to myself, when there is a doubt, is no doubt. We are entrepreneurs, and as an entrepreneur we are always optimistic. We want things to make it work, we think it's going to be better, and even if it doesn't work with someone, we always think it's going to be better. You can survive if you are not optimistic as an entrepreneur. When you start to think negatively about someone like it doesn't work, I don't want to work with them, that's probably because it's too late.

**Harry Stebbings** [37:40]:

So you would fire sooner? Yes. In terms of sooner, you mentioned India there and the incredible scaling from '16 to, you know, 800 or whatever it is. Going into different geographies, going international is a massive strategic decision for companies. You seem to have done it pretty early and all over the world. You've got people in Dubai. You've got people in India. How did you think about going global geographically, and what worked, what didn't?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [38:07]:

The key is not so much about the country or the city. The key is to find the right director. You can have the best location. You go in San Francisco or Silicon Valley and you have an average like that, it won't work. It actually be very bad. You will spend a lot of money everything. If you have the right director, the city is not that much important, especially for us as a SaaS player where we sell everything online. So that's why we have a company in Buffalo. Nobody goes to Buffalo in The US. It's because we had an amazing guy in our team. They wanted to do something with him and said, we want you to create a company and build something. He wanted to go to to Buffalo. So he said, okay. Create it in Buffalo.

**Harry Stebbings** [38:44]:

So he hires a team in Buffalo, opens an office?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [38:47]:

Yes. And we we always proceed that way. We first find the person, and only after the person will define where we go.

**Harry Stebbings** [38:54]:

How do you think about, like, budgeting then for them? I know it's the finance teams, but you just give them a budget and let them go?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [38:59]:

No. We don't work with budget, but we have people that are responsible. And because we only do internal promotions, it's people we worked with for years, we know they are gonna be good, they will spend efficiently. We don't have that kind of issue, I would say. You only do internal promotions? Yes. We never recruit managers and directors. Never ever. Even when you open a subsidiary in a different country.

**Harry Stebbings** [39:20]:

You send them out?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [39:21]:

Yes. And one thing I try too is to never go to tier one cities. I think it's much better to go to tier two cities. Why? The key when you scale a business is retention. And when you go to tier one cities we have an office in San Francisco. Something we didn't always That's exactly what you're talking about. We learned from that. When you are next to Was it bad? Retrospectively, if I would have opened it elsewhere, would have preferred, yes. Why? Because you are next to Google and Microsoft and Apple. How can you get the best people with that? And then you have a higher turnover than in other cities. In Buffalo, we have no issue. Nobody is leaving. People are happy. They have a very high salary for the area. Retention is very good, and retention the key of growing your business, people retention.

**Harry Stebbings** [40:05]:

Why do you think it's the key to growing your business?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [40:07]:

For every job like, take a salesperson. His first two years, he will sell x. When he has three, four, five years experience, he will sell double. If you keep them only three years, you will have way less efficiency than if you keep them five, six, seven years.

**Harry Stebbings** [40:21]:

Do you think people are destined for certain stages of company development? It's a Silicon Valley trope that, oh, he's a zero to one person or she's a zero to one person, but they're not an at scale person.

**Fabien Pinckaers** [40:34]:

No. I think it's possible, some of the people, but smart people, they can evolve. The majority of the people that are still working with me were with me since the beginning, so and we grew from one to 5,000, so

**Harry Stebbings** [40:45]:

Can I ask you, you mentioned that you're around Google, you're around, you know, Facebook and all the big players in San Francisco? You are in intensely competitive markets. I interviewed this week, I interviewed two people, Fabien at Odoo and Marc Benioff at Salesforce. You compete with the biggest companies in the world.

**Fabien Pinckaers** [41:03]:

How do you think about competition? So I feel like we have no competition, which we have plenty of competitors, but I don't feel like we have competition. I will I'll explain why. So we have a suite of business apps. Whatever you need, we have it, like a CRM, accounting, logistics. We do everything the companies need, and we do it extremely affordable. You start with €20 It's €20 per user and you get all these apps. Nobody did that. Nobody On the market you have two types of markets. You have the large players like SAP and Microsoft. They do several applications, it's shitty, it's slow, it's expensive, and people are not happy using it. Then you have the small player like Slack, Mailchimp, SendEmail, Trello, Asana, and so on. They do one thing very well, so it acquires a lot of users, but they only do one thing. Nobody succeeded to do the benefits of both. They have all the applications that the company needs, and being extremely simple and affordable. So for me, it's more about cracking something that nobody succeeded to crack rather than competing against others.

**Harry Stebbings** [41:56]:

How would you feel if someone said, oh, we're with Odoo because they're the cheapest?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [42:00]:

Yeah. It's true. It's part of my value to try to be the cheapest. If I can decrease the price, I would do it right away because I want to commoditize the market to make technology affordable. Obviously, would prefer that

**Harry Stebbings** [42:11]:

against all lessons. Marc Andreessen, a very famous investor, always says I mean, literally, we released the show today, and Marc Andreessen says, if you want a small company, charge small prices. You want a medium company, medium prices. Big company, big prices.

**Fabien Pinckaers** [42:25]:

Yes. In a way it's true, but if you want to commoditize the market and have every company on your software, you have to have a very small price. Do you think we're in a race? I mean, what's the price of Google Workspace or Microsoft Office? It's not a very high price, but everybody everybody used them.

**Harry Stebbings** [42:41]:

But they monetize those businesses with other cash cows, which is, you know, search for Google and most predominantly. But how do you think about your ultimate cash cow if we're doing commoditization to the bottom?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [42:52]:

I think why is that important? I mean, we don't have cash issues. We are growing since since 2014. We didn't raise money anymore. We are profitable. So why would I charge more if I have all the money I need to accelerate?

**Harry Stebbings** [43:05]:

Because you are I don't know if your revenues are public. It's 550,000,000 this year. 550,000,000 this year. Great. Fantastic. Wow. Fuck. I saw a deck of yours our team got from, like, 2023, and it was, like, 200,000,000 or whatever it

**Fabien Pinckaers** [43:21]:

was. Yeah. We grew by 50% per year almost.

**Harry Stebbings** [43:23]:

Yeah. Wow. Okay. Fuck. Okay. But $5.50. If you wanna get to be a $100,000,000,000 business, you need, what, 10,000,000,000 in revenue?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [43:30]:

First, I don't care about the valuation. I do care about the revenue because cash is a way to finance what I need to do. Valuation is not important for me. Why? I don't care. I mean, what I want to do is to develop Odoo. That's the thing I would like to do. I I don't care about money. I don't need money. So why should I care about valuation when

**Harry Stebbings** [43:49]:

You have to understand, Fabien, this show is very strange for me.

**Unknown** [43:52]:

You're like, we don't hire VPs. I don't care about valuation. Okay. Great.

**Fabien Pinckaers** [43:59]:

It's a it's a good side effect to have a good value, but it's not what should drive you. I mean, it's way more important to deliver software that transform companies to have an impact to your clients. Do you think we

**Harry Stebbings** [44:10]:

build companies completely wrong today? Because all I talk about with founders is what revenue do you need to get to to raise your series b? What revenue do you need to get to to get your series c?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [44:21]:

I'm not an investor. What I would look to is the product and the capability to build the product. At the end, it's always the best product that wins.

**Harry Stebbings** [44:29]:

You said financing what you need to finance.

**Fabien Pinckaers** [44:32]:

Yeah. What I can spend we we get so much cash that I can spend it. I'm trying to recruit as fast as I can, and I have enough.

**Harry Stebbings** [44:39]:

Is there anything that you would love to spend on that you don't have the cash to spend on?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [44:43]:

No. I couldn't burn much more in marketing, but I don't think it would help a lot.

**Harry Stebbings** [44:48]:

What do you think about the Odoo brand? Because respectfully, for the size of company you are and how many customers you have, in in traditional technology circles, it's not the biggest brand.

**Fabien Pinckaers** [44:59]:

In the VC circles, no. In small and mid sized companies, it starts to be.

**Harry Stebbings** [45:04]:

What stage do you start to see your brand build?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [45:08]:

When we started to invest in marketing more aggressively, like

**Harry Stebbings** [45:11]:

four or five years ago. Because Jason Lamkin says when you get to, like, 10,000,000 in revenue, you get to have, like, a mini brand. Do you think that's true? Yeah. The other thing you mentioned earlier was, you know, you have to be optimistic as a founder. It's, like, core to what we do.

**Fabien Pinckaers** [45:25]:

Otherwise, you don't survive. How

**Harry Stebbings** [45:27]:

important is naivety?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [45:29]:

I think I was very naive. I don't know if it was good or bad, but I was very naive. When I was 26, I purchased the domain name, sorry sep.com, because I thought that one day I would be much bigger than them, and then I would use this domain name. I just had twenty twenty six years old. I love that.

**Harry Stebbings** [45:46]:

Yeah. Sorry, s a b. And I

**Fabien Pinckaers** [45:47]:

thought it was I I I was really thinking I would, in five years, disrupt SAP because I was very naive. That is absolutely amazing.

**Harry Stebbings** [45:55]:

Do you still have the domain name?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [45:56]:

Yeah. We used it when we released the version 14, I guess, because that was a really good version that was, in my opinion, much better than SAP at the time. So we used the domain name. We replaced the homepage with one big word, sorry, SAP.

**Harry Stebbings** [46:09]:

How are SAP still so big? Because they are a monster.

**Fabien Pinckaers** [46:13]:

They are the clear and nearly only leader for large companies. For very large companies, there is only SAP. Oracle tries to do something, but it's all about SAP.

**Harry Stebbings** [46:24]:

Do you still want to displace SAP? Yeah. Do you think that timeline is now?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [46:28]:

First, I think it's just a matter of time. I think I don't know how they can survive to what's coming in from them. We have so much advance, years in our head. We are stealing so much clearance to them that it's just a matter of time for me. But it's gonna take time, ten or twenty years, I don't know.

**Harry Stebbings** [46:43]:

Where is SAP better than you today?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [46:45]:

On products, no. On marketing, not even. They are way more known, they don't have a good brand, but they have a huge market. So their customer base is massive. Where they succeed today is large corporations. On small and mid sized they failed, on the large companies they are still the main option.

**Harry Stebbings** [47:05]:

You spoke earlier about your sales team. Sales teams are really hard to build. Building a go to market function is tough. What have been your biggest lessons on building the sales team effectively, Fabien?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [47:16]:

How do you recruit the VP of Sales? For us it was not recruiting, but promoting. For me it was clearly a leader, someone who trains the other, who can explain everything, so that's important. About scaling the system for us, it's all about the product. We really teach them about doing demos a lot. They do two demos per day, and then once they do that for a few weeks, they start to become good.

**Harry Stebbings** [47:39]:

Two demos per day? Yes. When the product is so cheap, what's the ACV, the average contract value?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [47:46]:

It's 3,500 ARR.

**Harry Stebbings** [47:50]:

3,500 ARR. That's not enough to justify outbound.

**Fabien Pinckaers** [47:55]:

We don't do outbound.

**Harry Stebbings** [47:56]:

We only

**Fabien Pinckaers** [47:57]:

do inbound. We are not typical

**Harry Stebbings** [48:03]:

Why do we not do outbound even now? It's a 500,000,000 revenue.

**Fabien Pinckaers** [48:06]:

We We started a few months ago, but it's only a few people, I think 30 people at the company.

**Harry Stebbings** [48:11]:

So this was before up to 500,000,000 in revenue, you were only doing inbound leads? Yes. Wow.

**Fabien Pinckaers** [48:17]:

But we we get a lot of leads.

**Harry Stebbings** [48:19]:

Okay. And so why did we decide to do outbound now?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [48:23]:

So as we are getting very mature, now we are starting to launch applications per industry. So we have applications for the plumber, for the restaurant, for every industry. We launched 50 industries, and that's easier with our on board strategy. But we are just testing now. We have 30 people out of something like 1,800 sales.

**Harry Stebbings** [48:42]:

Wow. How did you determine which industries to go into? You mentioned that plumbing and restaurants. It's

**Fabien Pinckaers** [48:47]:

it's a matter of product market fit. So we have the product we have, and this product already answers a lot of industries. So we started where we are good.

**Harry Stebbings** [48:54]:

This is the most unique story I've done. Where else do most other companies fail as they grow? We've touched on a lot. We've touched on CEOs. We've touched on hiring.

**Fabien Pinckaers** [49:02]:

They defocus. A lot of companies, they defocus as they grow.

**Harry Stebbings** [49:05]:

I'm not being rude. Is that not what you've done?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [49:07]:

No. We only have one product, one way to deliver the service, only three big departments. All our companies operate the same way. Our product is only 400,000 lines of code. Even though it looks like it's complex because it does a lot of things, it's still extremely simple. No, I still feel that we are a very simple company.

**Harry Stebbings** [49:27]:

How do they defocus then?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [49:29]:

Oh, they launch new products, new departments, they have marketing IDs of x, they spend time meeting clients and the press and everything. When you start to have managers and managers of managers and team leaders, they all want to do something, they all have ideas, and the complexity is that there is a dark force that pushes everyone to complexify the company. And to keep your company simple, you always have to fight back against that.

**Harry Stebbings** [49:56]:

My favorite is brainstorming meetings. Hate brainstorming meetings. Can I ask you, when you look back on this incredible journey, what did you do that you wish you hadn't done?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [50:07]:

I wish I would have better communicated to the community because I built this open source community on the fact that we are open source and will always remain open source. I think I would have saved one year in the development of the company if we would have pitched we are open source today, but maybe in the future we'll need to monetize.

**Harry Stebbings** [50:22]:

How long did it take to rebuild that trust?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [50:24]:

Probably a year. And still today, you you have negative people claiming, oh, but you are not really open source. And we still have, from time to time, negative comments over that time. It was a few years ago.

**Harry Stebbings** [50:35]:

You said about also the money. I'm not really that fussed about the money. Very interesting thing to say to a venture capitalist, by the way. But you recently did this transaction, a secondary transaction. Yes. What was the transaction? Talk to you about that.

**Fabien Pinckaers** [50:47]:

So So it was 500 millions of euro at a 5,000,000,000 valuation. It was Summit Partners, one of our earlier investors, who sold to Sequoia Capital, BlackRock, Mubadala, Capital G.

**Harry Stebbings** [51:00]:

Okay. So 500 at 5,000,000,000. You think that's the right price? You're doing a half

**Fabien Pinckaers** [51:05]:

be a correct price.

**Harry Stebbings** [51:06]:

You think so? I think it's still quite low. I think so. But I You're doing 500,000,000 in revenue, going 50 But you have to understand

**Fabien Pinckaers** [51:14]:

something.

**Harry Stebbings** [51:14]:

Your margins are good too.

**Fabien Pinckaers** [51:16]:

You have to understand something. I always wanted the price to be low because in every transaction I was purchasing shares. All the manager are always buying shares at Odoo. We never sold shares. So for us, if the price is low, that's fine. Except You

**Harry Stebbings** [51:31]:

were buying shares every round?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [51:33]:

Every round we were buying shares, and to the point where we get a big loan because we don't have money. We are just simple personnel, so we get a big loan just to acquire shares at every round.

**Harry Stebbings** [51:43]:

Were you getting investors emailing you constantly saying, hey. We wanna meet. We wanna meet. We wanna meet.

**Fabien Pinckaers** [51:48]:

Yes. Why did you not meet them? Waste of time. I meet them when we have an operation. So once every three years, we we we get a transaction. Then I'm happy to meet everybody. But Do you not

**Harry Stebbings** [51:59]:

think it's helpful to build a relationship beforehand?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [52:01]:

I think it is, but I had better things to do, like developing the company.

**Harry Stebbings** [52:05]:

Okay. And so you have 500,000,000 now in secondaries. Who does that go to? That's early employees or?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [52:10]:

No. It was the Summit Partners mostly, who were it was also a secondary. We acquired shares as a secondary transaction in 2019.

**Harry Stebbings** [52:20]:

And so you didn't sell any in this round either?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [52:22]:

No. No. Since 2014, we didn't do any fundraising. It's only secondary transactions. Can

**Harry Stebbings** [52:27]:

I ask how

**Fabien Pinckaers** [52:28]:

much of the company do you have? 57%. I only did two fundraising, very bad valuation, but I still kept the majority of the shares.

**Harry Stebbings** [52:36]:

Do you factor in that that makes you worth $2,800,000,000?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [52:40]:

Yeah. But as I said, it's on the paper. I don't care. It's not like I have money in my bank account. It's just I own a company that's huge, but that's it.

**Harry Stebbings** [52:47]:

It's not, but you could you have a real company.

**Fabien Pinckaers** [52:49]:

That's way more important.

**Harry Stebbings** [52:50]:

Yeah. But, like, most valuations are, like, fake. Yours is real. Like, you could sell fake.

**Fabien Pinckaers** [52:55]:

Real one. We are extremely profitable. Yeah. You could sell to SAP or

**Harry Stebbings** [52:59]:

to anyone today.

**Fabien Pinckaers** [53:00]:

We we will never sell. At least industrial exit. So it's it's clear we Why do you not

**Harry Stebbings** [53:05]:

wanna sell ever? Because

**Fabien Pinckaers** [53:07]:

it's much better to transform companies, change the world, disrupt SAP than having money and go on the beach.

**Unknown** [53:14]:

Would you like to IPO?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [53:16]:

No. There will never be an IPO. I don't want to. Why? Because I think public companies tend to refocus on the short term, and our success has always been to build for the long term, and I don't want to refocus everybody on the earning calls, quarterly results, and that kind of thing, first. Second, I don't want the constraints and the complexity that comes with being public. I like to say anything, like I could say I think Odoo was way more than 5,000,000,000, maybe 7,000,000,000. But if I was public I couldn't say that. So I like to able to disclose whatever I want, to not have the reporting. So I want to keep the company simple, and for that I prefer to avoid IPO.

**Harry Stebbings** [53:55]:

How do you think about liquidity then for the other 43% of your cap table who will want some financial exit at some point?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [54:04]:

First, we are all aligned. So it was very clear since the beginning with every investor that there is no IPO, no industrial exit, it's going to be secondary transactions. And they all agreed for one reason, is that if you have a really good business, really, really good business that is growing like crazy, profitable, with the best KPI you can you can get on, it's gonna be easy to sell.

**Harry Stebbings** [54:27]:

And you do that on a stage every three years?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [54:29]:

Yeah. Every three, four years. When when one of the investor wants to to to sell, we help him sell.

**Harry Stebbings** [54:34]:

Do have you any investors that would like to sell now?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [54:37]:

No.

**Harry Stebbings** [54:37]:

Okay. No.

**Fabien Pinckaers** [54:38]:

That's because we just did this 500,000,000 transaction, and we had more acquirers than people selling.

**Harry Stebbings** [54:44]:

How did you choose the people that you chose?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [54:47]:

We are working with Sequoia, Capital G, BlackRock, Mubadah. It's just the best

**Harry Stebbings** [54:53]:

the best you can get. It really is. How do you think about the future of I I I had spoke to you. I had Benioff on the show. Everyone is saying that Salesforce is the company to be disrupted. What do you think about the future of Salesforce?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [55:06]:

They they will they will continue, but other challenges like us will grow much faster.

**Harry Stebbings** [55:10]:

Do you think agents help or hurt you?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [55:14]:

Yes. But I also think it's overrated. It's a mix of both. There is plenty of good use case in AI, but there are also plenty of overrating in AI too.

**Harry Stebbings** [55:22]:

What's overrated?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [55:24]:

For Marc Benioff, the Agent Force? Agent Force that they presented during Dreamforce. The use case where it showed that you can call a help desk and ask information about your order and then change your order. For that you have a very good UX, a good portal when you click on a button from your email and then change your order. It's way more efficient. I'm pretty sure that if I call this help desk with my shitty English accent, it won't recognize me, or it will ask me questions to identify me that are very complex to answer to. So in a lot of ways, UX, having a very, very good product, is more efficient than AI, but there are also a lot of use cases where AI is good. I'm not saying it's bad, For instance, in accounting, it transformed the market. We have now 98.5% recognition on the invoice and bills and everything, which is better than the humans, and that transformed the market. Now the accountants, they don't need to record data in the system anymore, they just validate.

**Harry Stebbings** [56:20]:

How do you think about integrating AI most effectively into Odoo today and moving forward?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [56:26]:

I think you have to start with the problem. A lot of people start with the solution. I want to do AI. That's the solution. But if you start from the problem, you look where people are wasting time, where they are inefficient, then you get to good use case. From this problem, what is the best solution? Sometimes it's just UX, very well done features that make them save a lot of time. Sometimes it's AI, sometimes it's different algorithms. AI is one of the tools to improve your software, there are a lot of them.

**Harry Stebbings** [56:53]:

Do you think we'll go through an AI winter in the next few years, where the ROI that's been promised isn't quite delivered in the timeframe that's expected?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [57:02]:

It's going to be interesting. But for sure, there will be also very disruptive use case. Even though if that happens, we'll we'll have we will win a lot of things.

**Harry Stebbings** [57:11]:

Lars, do you have a board for your company?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [57:13]:

Yes. Five people.

**Harry Stebbings** [57:15]:

Do you like it?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [57:18]:

It's one of the the other things that I don't like to do presentations in general. Why? I prefer to work on the product, improve marketing department or the salespeople rather than writing PowerPoint. Having said that, yes, there was time where I didn't like it, but no, it's it's it's good because we have good investors.

**Harry Stebbings** [57:39]:

When you look at your own CEO ship, where do you need to improve?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [57:43]:

I think I I don't want to be older. As time goes on, I feel like I'm not as smart as I was before, and I'm slowing down a little bit, and I don't like that.

**Harry Stebbings** [57:53]:

Would you say that you're also the CPO, the chief product officer? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Are the best companies?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [57:59]:

But I'm also working I'm the head of marketing. I'm also working a lot with the other department, service department, so I'm

**Harry Stebbings** [58:06]:

doing a lot of things. Which is the least natural for you?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [58:09]:

I'm a generalist, so I think I'm good in a lot of things. Maybe what we are doing now.

**Harry Stebbings** [58:14]:

I I trust that. I I I think you're very good at this. When we think about Odoo becoming a $100,000,000,000 company, I know you said you don't care about the valuation, but just like, what does Odoo need to do to become a $100,000,000,000?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [58:27]:

Continue doing what we do today. Right? Not defocusing, innovating year after year with the same pace, growing the company 50% per year while keeping the culture.

**Harry Stebbings** [58:36]:

When do you really need to go into enterprise?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [58:39]:

We are doing enterprise now.

**Harry Stebbings** [58:40]:

You're taking clients from SAP, the biggest and the biggest.

**Fabien Pinckaers** [58:43]:

Thanks for Southwanna, which is a disaster. Nobody wants to go. So that opens the door to new entrants like us.

**Harry Stebbings** [58:49]:

Do you need to build an entirely different company if you go into the enterprise?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [58:53]:

Yeah. Had to create a different department. The methodology, the way we pitch and and we sell is is different. Having said that, we kept part of our culture. Even though it's a different department, they are still part of our company. How is it different

**Harry Stebbings** [59:06]:

first? I'm just so interested.

**Fabien Pinckaers** [59:07]:

This market is owned by service companies. So when you want to buy an ERP, it costs millions in service and implementation and everything. As a software vendor, the thing I want to do is to lower the service as much as I can. I'm not interested in service revenues. It's only 18 percent of our revenues. But the service is necessary, you need to deliver and put the client in production and everything. And because we try to sell the least service possible, that changed a lot in our implementation methodologies. So we developed methodologies over the time that are extremely efficient, not focusing too much, and that bypass some of the heaviness of traditional methodologies.

**Harry Stebbings** [59:42]:

Love that. What was the biggest challenge in building out enterprise?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [59:45]:

For us it was the culture. There is something funny when we start working with a large client. Usually when we do the demos and they see the product they are dreaming, everybody is excited, but I know that the first one, two or three months are difficult because it's going to be a culture clash. Our teams are extremely efficient, direct, Sometimes it doesn't work very well with the culture of large companies. They just want to deliver and move forward, we sometimes have a cultural clash within the first or second months, and then both companies align themselves and then the project is smooth, But we often have that.

**Harry Stebbings** [60:20]:

How do you think about your culture more broadly? You know, company culture is one of the hardest things, and you said before to me that it matters more than processes.

**Fabien Pinckaers** [60:28]:

Yes. Yeah, obviously. So the culture for me to do is three things, at least for the people. It's autonomy, responsibilities, and evolution. I think everybody says that, but for us it's true, and for a lot of companies it's not true.

**Harry Stebbings** [60:43]:

Autonomy, responsibility, and evolution. Yes. Autonomy meaning everyone can make decisions?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [60:48]:

Yes. And you give them the authority to do it and the tools to do it.

**Harry Stebbings** [60:54]:

Even one way door decisions?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [60:56]:

Yes. But people are smart. If they are not sure, they will still ask. So they can decide whatever they want, but you know that they are smart or they do things that are against the company.

**Harry Stebbings** [61:05]:

What was the second one?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [61:07]:

Responsibilities. People must take the responsibility. And young people, they are not responsible by default. School, the education system killed that, so we have to train them of deciding. How do you train them to

**Harry Stebbings** [61:20]:

be responsible?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [61:21]:

It's the way you behave with them. So let's say you have a salesperson where we need to do a demo to a client. He comes to your office, I need a barcode scanner for my demo. Can I buy one at $50 I don't know? If you answer, he will always ask you. If you tell him you're smart, I mean, you you know if it's worth it or not, decide. And the way you behave with the people will force them to take their responsibilities.

**Harry Stebbings** [61:41]:

How do you think about the, like, expenses element? In Netflix, it's like, hey. You're the owner. If you think it's reasonable, spend company money on it. Yeah. How do you feel about that?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [61:52]:

Having a process that controls what they spend would cost more. Because if you have a purchasing department and this guy has to ask the purchase department just to buy a $30 scanner, It will cost you more than $30. It will waste maybe five days just to get the product, whereas you can just buy online on Amazon and get reimbursed right away. It's a good trade off.

**Harry Stebbings** [62:11]:

You said about evolution and growth. People want titles when they grow. It's a way of showing their progression. I'm I'm gonna get VP of sales. I'm gonna get a a head of product, whatever it is. When you don't have those titles you have team leads, how do you think about evolution and signifying?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [62:30]:

So on titles that to do, have something funny that everybody chooses title. Some people take funny titles, other people say director of x. We don't care. We print the business card, they decide what the title they want us to because I want to kill that. It's what matters is what you do, not the title you have.

**Harry Stebbings** [62:47]:

Do you worry about what that says to the external world? And what I mean by that is if I'm 23 or 24 and I'm a junior salesperson, say, and I put VP of sales.

**Fabien Pinckaers** [62:58]:

Yes. But people are smart. Most people won't do that. What you will do is a This is what you director of sales department, and

**Harry Stebbings** [63:05]:

and

**Fabien Pinckaers** [63:05]:

that's fine.

**Harry Stebbings** [63:06]:

Can I ask, when you think about your strategic mistake building the business, if I ask you one that really comes to mind, is there anything that come to mind?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [63:14]:

The business model has been hard. Took me fifteen years to get to the right business model, open core business model. I tried as a service company, then I tried as a selling maintenance and support, And only after I went to I tried SaaS, SaaS worked, and then the OpenCore.

**Harry Stebbings** [63:29]:

I've so enjoyed doing this. You are an incredible CEO, CMO, CPO. You've built this insane business. You've also got two kids. How do you balance being a father to two children and being the CEO of now a 5,000 person company?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [63:43]:

Like everybody else. It's not difficult to be a father. Yeah.

**Harry Stebbings** [63:48]:

But they don't run a 5,000 person company.

**Fabien Pinckaers** [63:50]:

Yeah. I think my life is easier now than it was when we were 100. Why? Because we don't have cash issues anymore. You don't sleep when you don't have cash, when you pay salaries late or you feel very bad, you have to work two times more. I think my life now is still complex but much easier than before.

**Harry Stebbings** [64:07]:

So it gets easier over time? Yes.

**Fabien Pinckaers** [64:10]:

It gets easier as the company gets mature and and financially sustainable.

**Harry Stebbings** [64:15]:

What does great fatherhood mean to you? I

**Fabien Pinckaers** [64:19]:

don't know. Just make them evolve like like my teams had to do.

**Harry Stebbings** [64:25]:

Final one. If you could change anything about the journey, anything at all, what would you change?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [64:31]:

I think I would say to myself when I was younger, take care about how you manage the community. The switch on the business model took me too much time to

**Harry Stebbings** [64:39]:

That one's really stuck with you hasn't Yeah.

**Fabien Pinckaers** [64:42]:

Yeah because I went too far. I really wanted to build something open source, it was my passion, and I went up to the level where I couldn't pay salaries for years and years. It's funny because what I wanted to do is to build an open source software, that was my purpose. It turns out that when I decided to switch to an open core business model, it's not anymore 100% open source, only 80% open source and 20% for free. I could spend 10 times the development team, now I'm contributing way more to OpenSolve than before. So it was bad computation from my side.

**Harry Stebbings** [65:13]:

What would you do if you weren't doing this?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [65:16]:

I think I would do the same. Don't know what I can do better than that.

**Harry Stebbings** [65:20]:

It just seems like Odoo is such a part of you. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. It is.

**Fabien Pinckaers** [65:25]:

Yeah. But I mean, when you build such business with fast growing company, you have to be obsessed. I don't think you can succeed if you are not obsessed thinking about it all the time. If you look at it like just a job, I don't think you can get such a fast growing company.

**Harry Stebbings** [65:40]:

Do you mind people looking at it as a job? Because I think what I struggle with is my expectations are misaligned to their expectations. Like you, I work like a founder. I work my ass off. I'm obsessed. But to people that work in our companies, it's a job.

**Fabien Pinckaers** [65:55]:

That's fine. I understand. I mean, they don't own 56% of the company, so I understand. It's normal.

**Harry Stebbings** [66:01]:

Listen. I I've so enjoyed this. I I wanna move to a quick fire answer. I say a short statement. You give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay? Yes. Do you think investors add value?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [66:11]:

It's hard to say, but it's very difficult for some they they participates a few hours per month, like two hours per month, four hours per month, to be as deep as you in the business. So I do believe they add value to pinpoint elements, to challenge you, but at the end the solution always has to come from you. So they give you the point of view, they challenge you, but they they will never tell you what to do. At least if you if you treat them that way, you may do a lot of mistakes.

**Harry Stebbings** [66:35]:

Who do you not have on the board that you would most like to have on the board?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [66:40]:

Don't care. As I said, the board is not the most important thing for me.

**Harry Stebbings** [66:43]:

As an adviser?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [66:44]:

Yeah. An even for me, the executive committee and the team leaders I'm working with are way more important than the board. And I shouldn't say that.

**Unknown** [66:55]:

No. It's fine. No one listens. It's fine. No one listens. At

**Fabien Pinckaers** [66:58]:

the end, it's the guys who do the things, and they challenge me even more than the board.

**Harry Stebbings** [67:04]:

You can be CEO of any other company for a day. Which company do you choose?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [67:09]:

Oh, the government. The government? Yeah. Have to be president then. Of

**Harry Stebbings** [67:12]:

Belgium? Yes. What would you change?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [67:14]:

Oh, education. Is education broken? It's very slow. They don't have good expectation on the on the kids. In Belgium they don't even teach IT, no computer course. My kids were in India. In India at 11 he has lectures on entrepreneurship, on leadership, Python development, chess, and things like that. In Belgium we have none of these. We only have math, French, physics, biology.

**Harry Stebbings** [67:39]:

Wow. Is Indian education better than Belgium?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [67:43]:

No. In Belgium all the schools are average good. In India, you have from the very war very bad to very, very good ones. So the range is is much broader. Do you pay But you have extremely good schools in India.

**Harry Stebbings** [67:56]:

Do you pay people differently depending on geography?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [67:59]:

Yes. Of course.

**Harry Stebbings** [68:00]:

There's not uniform salaries for you?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [68:02]:

No. I think you should pay people very differently based on competencies too. The best people should have much more than the other ones.

**Harry Stebbings** [68:08]:

Do you have transparency around salaries?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [68:10]:

We publish our average salaries on our website because it's part of our recruitment process. We tell you the exact salary that you will have, and you can configure it to choose your car, because there is cars in Belgium. Choose your benefits and everything. It's online on our website.

**Harry Stebbings** [68:23]:

People say if if the candidate's really obsessed about title, they're not good. Do you agree?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [68:29]:

No. I understand that some people like title. It's okay. That's why they can choose the title at the doo. If they like it, they will do it. If they don't care, they will just get a funny title.

**Harry Stebbings** [68:37]:

You can buy you're an investor now for a second. You can buy OpenAI at 160,000,000,000, Anthropic at 40, or x at 50.

**Fabien Pinckaers** [68:47]:

I don't like both of them. Why not? They are both risky. They are both difficult it's difficult to say what will happen with both. First, I I don't want to be an investor. The thing I like the least is to go to board meetings, things like that. So that doesn't interest me.

**Harry Stebbings** [69:05]:

What do you do with your money today?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [69:07]:

I still if I have money, don't have a lot of money in my bank account, but if I have money, will buy Odoo shares, even more. I mean it's the best investment I can do. It's purely financial. I don't know another company that can give me 50% year after year, and I'm quite sure about it. I'm pretty sure there are companies that do better, but this one I'm sure it will do.

**Harry Stebbings** [69:29]:

You said it's purely financial, you don't give a shit about the financials, dude. If you were to cash out, say if I gave you 2.6

**Fabien Pinckaers** [69:35]:

The small amount of money I have on my bank account, still have to decide what I do with it. Yeah. And because I don't need money, I just invest it in Odoo.

**Harry Stebbings** [69:43]:

Does that make bringing children up easier? If I give you 2,600,000,000?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [69:47]:

It doesn't change anything, because I'm still the same man than ten years before, so

**Harry Stebbings** [69:52]:

What about the way that you You

**Fabien Pinckaers** [69:53]:

know, I have a very small car. I don't have a house. I live in the house of my wife. We were in India in a very small apartment, so it's not like I have a big living. Doesn't change anything to me.

**Harry Stebbings** [70:05]:

What about the way that your parents brought you up? Have you done differently with your children?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [70:10]:

My father, he was an auction house selling old stuff, more in the modern stuff. But he teach me that how hard is important. Work is important. He was and it's still today working ten to twelve hours per day. He's working even more than me sometimes.

**Harry Stebbings** [70:27]:

What question have I not asked that I should have asked?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [70:31]:

I think you're good at your job.

**Harry Stebbings** [70:33]:

If I were to say that you Odoo ten years' time, what would be a great answer?

**Fabien Pinckaers** [70:38]:

To predict the future, have to understand the past. If you look at the past in IT, it started with the operating system. So it started with you are probably too young, but I'm

**Harry Stebbings** [70:49]:

sadly not too young, don't think, but teach

**Fabien Pinckaers** [70:50]:

MS DOS, Doctor DOS, Unix, Munich. It started with a lot of operating I'm too young. Lots of operating systems. Fast forward today, it's only Windows, iOS and Linux. And then came the Office. After the complexity of operating system, we were purely technical, came the Office with the complexity of user experience, world excellence. There were a lot of office tools: Works, WordPerfect, everything, Lotus one, three. Fast forward today, it's only Microsoft Office and Google Workspace. And now comes, in addition to the technical complexity and the UX complexity, we also have the complexity of businesses. Companies are complex. I do believe that management software will follow the same trends. Today there are plenty of factors, but in the future such technology will be a commodity, like so much mature that there will be one, two, or three players that will have to wall market. That's my goal, to do it, just to survive.

**Harry Stebbings** [71:43]:

It's so special for me, seriously, to do shows like this. One, I mean, what an amazing business. But two, and I didn't mean this, like, sycophantically, what an amazing guy. Like, no. But, like, it's so rare to find someone who is so pure in their love for their company, their product. And it it really is just inspiring, dude. So you say that your this is your least natural habitat. You've been incredible, and thank you so much for being so fantastic. Thank you. It's good for my ego

**Fabien Pinckaers** [72:12]:

to come here.

**Harry Stebbings** [72:16]:

You know, the world needs more entrepreneurs like Fabien. What an incredible authentic founder. I just love telling the Odoo story. I love it also. I never wanna sell. I never wanna IPO. Our management team have never sold stock. Just what an incredible founder. What a joy to do. If you wanna watch the episode in full, you can find it on YouTube by searching for 20 VC. That's two zero VC on YouTube. But before we leave you today,

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**Harry Stebbings** [72:41]:

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