Four Traits of the Most Successful Founders

Oh, thank you Harry Fiving me.

Oh, yeah, very good question. I don’t tell this story very often, but it happened that I had to be in bed for one year. That was just before Pigment. I had to go through three surgeries in one row. It was the first time I think in my life that I could actually settle. So I was at Index Ventures at the time and that happened to me and I had to settle and think. And so I started to think and it was the first time I could be like, what do I want to do next?

And that’s where I had time to actually say that now I want to be a founder. And so I took the time to really think about that, think about what I wanted to do next, what type of adventure and more importantly, who I would like to do that with. And this is where I started to do my list of who I would like to fund the company with. And that’s how I found Romain.

So it’s a good question. So first of all, I would say I knew that at some point in my life, I wanted to create my own company. That was way before being a VC. That was really when I was even like, you know, very young kids. I have always wanted to be an entrepreneur. Freedom was one of the most important thing for me, but the world of venture was very new to me when I started at Index. And I absolutely loved it. I loved it for many reasons.

I made the best of the best founders. I made the smartest people in the world. But at the same time, being at Index, I realized that really being a founder was something that was more important than anything for me right now because I felt why am I not on the other side of the table.

The reason about Index is simple. All of the people at Index are my friends and they were already helping me. And in a way, I already knew the way they were thinking. And so for me, it was really important to bring new people, fresh ideas to the table. And it’s the same, I think, for everything I do at Pigment today. It’s like, I’m not hiring my friends at Pigment. I’m hiring people that I don’t know about that can bring things that I don’t know. And in VC, something that I think is critical is to find people that can challenge you every day.

And if I think about people like Martin Minho that I absolutely love or Yan or other people, well, in a way they are more friends now than anything. And I wanted people that could be really true to me.

I think you are wrong because you might think that challenging a founder is actually about thinking big enough. I don’t think that’s the case. I think challenging a founder is making them think about things that maybe you think they are obvious to them, but that they tend to forget because there are so many things in their plates. The investors that are on my board and people that are helping me on a daily basis, they just help me become true to myself and finger point where things hurt.

And that’s what I try to do with my own team, right, is just making sure that every day I am alert on what can break my company tomorrow.

You’re probably saying I was a bit nuts on that, but I have a big, big on hiring that I actually keep refining. So I would say, first of all, you need to find someone that obviously works well with your value. So here, there is nothing new about that, but you really need to find someone where you know you’re going to click forever because the reality is that I am now with Romain for probably the next twenty years of my life. And there are not so many people with which I would like to spend the next twenty years of my life.

So that means that in order to do that, I did a big, big exercise of sourcing. Sourcing, the things that you need to do is really thinking about what are the best schools out there in terms of entrepreneurship, who have been the best founders out there. And I was very lucky because as a VC, I had a huge network where I could learn what have been the companies that scaled in the best way that were the most respected as founders, etcetera. And I wanted someone that was very complimentary to me.

So someone obviously that would know exactly how to scale an engineering team, know how to build the best of the best product, would know how to scale team. And someone obviously the most important who could hire the best of the best talents. So I started to source and that really took me a lot of time because I had to ask hundreds of people in my network about who do they think are the best CTOs out there, the best founders, etcetera. And from there, I did a list.

So I did a list of people and you won’t believe me, but true Romain was number one in that list in terms of the person that really people would recommend. And then from there, what I did is retrain to understand doing some CIA work on what makes them so great. And do this attribute would work with someone like me? That was even before I knew that I was going to contact him. So really trying to understand the personality traits of the people that were on my list, getting as much backchannel as possible beforehand, and then from there going and selling men.

So selling, pitching, pitching.

Whoever you are with for your life, you will need to constantly adapt and change and everything. But I do think that there are traits of people that for sure are traits that make you want to stay with a person for the next twenty years of your life. And these traits are being very balanced, being very true to themselves, whether the business is going bad or very well. People that haven’t been attacked by the celebrity virus. And Romain was already very successful with his first company, Criteo, a company that he put public ten years ago.

And yet he’s the most humble person in the planet. Okay. Someone that people respect as well. And that’s where people have followed him for the past ten years. They are saying, you know, you don’t work for someone for ten years, is a person is an S. And that wasn’t trauma. And so I think there are a lot of traits you can find. And it’s the same, you know, when I do my executive recruiting is like, when you see that people have stayed at the same company for eight years, ten years, and that people love working with them, that tells you something.

You would not do that if the person was impossible to work with.

I would say, so first of all, having seen the movie always help. Let’s be clear. When I hire my executive today, I always try to find people that have seen the movie one time, at least, that have scaled from where I am in terms of ARR to like multiple billion, if possible, because they will have learned things in the journey of building. So I still think that there is incredible value when you see that. You see that also with some repeat founders, you see the founder of Wiz and you see other people, they’ve seen it.

They are not first time founder. And I can tell you that with Romain, he’s probably my number one mentor. I learn from him every day. Every day I avoid one mistake because of him. But the most important, it’s to have a value which we have at Pigment, which is curiosity and never settle. That’s what makes a difference, is to find a co founder if he has already seen the experience that never settle and always try to learn to be better and always try to adapt. And with Romain, there is not a single day where I don’t call him and ask him, how can we do better here?

What can we do differently? After the show, I’m going ask you, Harry, what can we do differently here? What did I do wrong? And that’s the most important. And that’s what makes Romain so great is that he doesn’t come with his own assumption about, I’ve done Criteo, I know better. Let me tell you. It’s more, this is what I’ve seen. This is also the pattern that we’ve seen at other companies. And here’s how we should think about it now in ’25 with Pigment.

I think co CEOs only work in certain setups. First of all, let’s be clear. It works with your personality. For us, it works super well because we are so complimentary. He focuses obviously on building the best product out there. I focus on building the best business out there and we listen to each other every day. What makes us so strong is that we talk at least three times a day and we spend, you have no idea of the number of hours we spend on strategy, on product strategy.

I talk to customer all the time and I come back to him and I said, that’s what we need to do. That’s what we need to do. And we also try to think obviously outside the box in terms of the vision, because there is only so much your customer can bring you in terms of what is the next product. They probably don’t know what it is, right? So we talk all the time. And when you think about what is important for a company, what is probably the most important is being customer first.

You need to focus, be obsessed, obsessed, obsessed about the customer. This is what the best founders always do. And in order to do that, it means you need an indefinite amount of time with your customers. Well, when you are co CEO, you actually have that superpower of being able to spend twice as much time with your customer, listening to them. And the reality, if you think about, for instance, you take example of like a boutique coffee that is in the street that maybe won like the price of the best coffee in the world.

There is a coffee like that next to my house in Paris. And you look at what makes them so great is a focus on the customer. This is the only thing, right? Is that they’re able to do something at a boutique level that you are probably not able to do at the level of a Starbucks, right? This time that they are spending listening to the customer, sourcing the best product, trying to refine their coffee. When you have twice the time as a co CEO, that gives you a superpower.

It also gives you a balance and a way to always think on your feet. At the end of the day, when you are co CEO, every day I challenge myself and I ask Romain to change myself. And I think that every day we can do better. Yesterday is yesterday. The most important is to focus on what’s next for you. And in order to do that, you need to be challenged every day by someone that is almost like your partner.

We never had a single fight, actually.

Never.

Yeah.

Disagreement, yes, but not a fight.

Completely. I think I would be so different if I hadn’t been that index. Index was the best school of life for me. It’s something I would advise to any founder, pretty much, being a VC, because it created so many things. First of all, I think I saw what amazing looks like. I was very lucky to be close to people like Olivier at Datadog or Dylan at Figma. I learned to Peter at Adyen. I learned to see how they would do and I still learn today from them.

And it gives you an edge that nobody else on earth is capable of seeing what great looks like and what it takes. So I learned, first of all, so much from them. And then I learned what makes them so great. Yuri Milner visited me yesterday in Paris. And I was asking him, I was like, What do you think are the best founders out there? And so he gave me four things that he thinks makes the best founder. So can you guess what they are?

One.

So they were actually quite different. First of all, being very good at psychology, understanding people in and out. Understanding the human better than anyone, because that’s what you will need to hire the best of the best. Second is being an incredible storyteller. That is something that probably you don’t understand. You know, I’m an engineer. And so you think you’re French, you engineer, you have nothing right there. Okay? You have nothing right because you think it’s a new product that is going to win. You’re like, I’m building the best product.

I have Romain. You know, stories done. Not at all, my friends. The reality is that you can see the power of many US companies out there is a power of marketing, how much they have understood the importance of marketing and storytelling. And that’s what I’ve learned at Index, the importance of storytelling. The third one, a little bit controversial.

Oh, I don’t know. I would perhaps disagree there.

So first of all, I don’t know Nic enough personally to tell you. But what I can tell you is that Nick knows how to hire.

hires the best.

And also I would say storytelling, there is storytelling and storytelling. Who are you storytelling to?

And maybe the stories you need to tell when you’re revolt is more tell stories, first of all, to investors and also tell stories to the public. And the stories to the public are not necessarily coming from Nick. But again, he has one of the best marketing team in the world. Full stop.

Partner. Having a partner.

In life.

I’m sorry. Why? Why? When he says a partner, it can be also your sister, your brother. And for me actually, and that’s why I’m saying Cursor can work too, is having someone that will tell you the truth. Having someone that will not be afraid of telling you the truth. And that’s very rare, especially as your company grows. He was telling me that the most of the best founders out there, they actually have that.

But again, partner, as I say, doesn’t mean like your husband or your wife. That’s not about that. Having a partner who will tell you the truth. Maybe it’s your brother, maybe it’s someone else.

And four, a loving family.

My hiring process is very complex. So starting with sourcing, I’m always sourcing.

Exactly. So when I do sourcing, will give you a couple of examples, but think about when you want to hire the best football player in the game, like imagine you are the best football club in The US or the best soccer club in Europe, what will they do? They will go on the field. They will go look at, like 16 years old. They will see how they play and they will try to source them very early. I try to do the same every day. I lose a deal against another company.

I always ask the name of the rep. I do something where I hear that Giving you a recent example. We had the Olympic Games in Paris last year, and I met the other day the CFO of the Olympic Games, the one that organized that. And obviously he has to fire his entire team now that the Olympics are over. So I asked him, I said, Who was the best person in your team? This guy. Okay. I went to him and I said, I want to hire you now.

And I do that with every single person I meet when I’m always trying to find something extraordinary out there. I say, Who are the best people you know? Where do you think I could look for new people? And the other thing that is important is also trying to find the best schools out there, best schools of something. For instance, I hire very recently an executive in my go to market team. The thing is you realize as a founder that there are so many things you don’t know.

You don’t know, you know what amazing looks like. So I asked literally 20 executives that are doing exactly like him, what good looks like. So what do they think is amazing and what are the best schools out there for what I do? And again, it has to be very specific to what you do. And so for me, I did the list of, okay, these are the best companies coming from John like the school of John McMahon. This is what they do so great, etcetera. And then from there, I found into these schools the best people in these schools and asked them for the best people.

And then that gave me my list of people to go after. Then after that, you have your list of people. So you are always recruiting, always be hiring everywhere you go, conferences, you ask people everywhere. Then from there, you have your list of people. What you need to do on these people is to try to understand now how you’re going to approach them, because I think the hardest thing is not so much to know who are the best out there, but it’s how are you going to get to them?

Because usually they are so good, trust me, they’re going to be locked in their companies forever. So then you need to find the defining moment on when they are going to leave their companies or when you will have a trigger moment where you know that this person might become available. So it might be a couple of things. It might be a change in leadership. It may be a company that is bought by private equity. There are so many events that can trigger these things. And so you need to follow that closely as well to know, okay, these people, this is the timing because timing is everything with hiring.

So you do that. Sorry.

I have a couple of things. So first of all, if I’m actively doing a search, I ask my search firm to track that and to tell me what are the people that actually have these triggers that are going to happen. If I am just tracking them over time while I try to actually track them And we have a team internally, which is called Miro’s team, that is also helping me track people with attributes to see where they have gone, what they are doing, etcetera. And that helped me think if there is a moment.

A bit like what you would do anyway with your own CRM. Always try to see with a prospect when they are becoming warm and hot and when they are going to buy pigment. Well, it’s the same here. I’m trying to see when these people are going to be able to be interested. So that’s one thing, but then you also need to start talking to them early. So you need to find ways to get introduced to them.

First of all, you need to know what obvious means. And that I didn’t tell you, but that’s the other thing I have to do in parallel is to do my rubric of question. I need to ask them because the problem usually when you make a mistake is because you didn’t know what you were looking for. A great CRO for a company, maybe for HubSpot, is not the great CRO for Pigment and HubSpot at the time of Pigment. Or a great CRO for Figma tomorrow is not the great CRO for Pigment.

We are very different companies. Some are more product led, some are more sales led. That’s probably what a lot of people get wrong is that they don’t know what they’re looking for. They look maybe for smartness, they look for culture skills, but do they really understand what they are looking for in the role?

So the advice is to talk to 20 people in the field, 50 people, and ask them for what are the best questions. But guess what now? The thing is even I think with AI platforms out there, you can refine so much what you are looking for as well. You can explain, you can even put profiles in there and say, I’m looking for someone like that. What traits do they have, etcetera? But for me, the biggest advice is go human to human. Ask when you’re hiring your CRO, ask the 20 best CROs out there.

Best CROs again in your category. What have they done so great? What makes them so different? That’s really my number one advice to anyone. Do your rubric, do a CRO rubric, do a CMO rubric, do a CFO rubric based on questions that other people have told you about, will have told you what to ask. And that’s what I do for every single role. What I do is very, very precise. It’s not only like questions that I write down. I put the question and then I put them into different parts.

And then I ask my execs that are going to be part of the process to really focus on every part and depending on how that interview went and what question then I refined. So every process is tailored to the person to say, okay, he actually failed in these two questions. She actually did super well there. What do we ask next? How do we go to the next part? Because the next part will vary. That’s a lot of work. It’s

I totally agree with that. I think I see it constantly. The skill sets are very different and I think sometimes we make it a bad thing. You know, we’re like, oh, we hired that person. It was a mistake. Now they are not scaling with us. I always think perhaps it’s not a mistake, actually. It was the best person for that stage. They did things that no one else would have been able to do at that stage. And of course, now you need a totally different skill set they have never seen, so they are not scaling with you, but probably that’s fine.

I don’t like when someone asks me for their titles. Definitely not. I really don’t like that because I think no matter what is the stage of the company, a person should come not for the only go on their own agenda, but because they want to build something great. I want someone that comes for the journey, for the mission, for saying, I’m here to have an impact at Pigment. And I know that if you hire me, it’s because you want me to have an impact and the rest doesn’t matter.

The titles should be reserved for very large companies. Internally, I do believe that being horizontal as a company is key for your success. The day you start having people that think about that, you are in politics and that’s what you should avoid.

Going back to the football analogy, you should think about if you want the best player, you will have to pay. So you will have to pay and you will do it because you know, maybe it will be transformative or you want Antoine Dubon for it be. So you will pay, but you cannot do that for every role. So you have to decide where do you absolutely need the superstar and where are the roles that are maybe a little bit less critical. But my philosophy is always being generous with every hire because the difference they will make on the field is more than you can imagine.

The lever, if you have found the right people, you should be generous and make them happy with their living. The other thing is that you can play so much with equity. And I have seen many founders that are not generous enough with equity, but I do think that the best hire, you really need to make them part of the

I think we could be more appreciative of equity. Employees, a lot of employees do not understand equity as well as US employees. And I also think that I have seen companies not being generous enough in terms of what they offer to the best executives out there, to your leadership team. And that’s, again, if you want the best people out there, you cannot compromise on that. You just can’t.

I have done so many mistakes already in six years. It’s just unbelievable. You were asking me how I refined my interview process over the years. Now I do some things that I didn’t know in the past, is putting in front of my candidates a deck to show them what’s going be hard at Pigment and make it very clear to them, saying you’re to work harder than ever in your life here. These are the impossible things you will have to solve. This is the shit show you are going into for that specific team that you’re going to lead.

And that’s what you will need to solve when you join Pigment.

Yes. Yeah.

Yes. And I put in writing our values as well. And I explained, if you don’t like these values, it’s totally fine. Think about them carefully. Do you agree with them or do you think you don’t like that? For instance, if you absolutely care about your title, if you like a lot of governance, if you like maybe more, you know, from one person to the next, things can be very different in what you enjoy in life.

About 400.

If you apply very strong principles, I think you can really keep the pace of A players still at that size. I think we are not at a size where we can afford actually B or C player. Second is when we don’t, we have to realize that fast, making sure that very early on you identify when someone is not an A and then really trying to think how is that going to impact the organization. If that person becomes a manager tomorrow, you know that the team obviously that they will hire will definitely not be at the right skill set that you are expecting for.

It’s about being very, very fast at managing performance. And it’s also being have the courage, the managerial courage to finger point what is wrong in the organization. At Pigment last week with my leadership team, I went to them all and I said, We have too much politics at Pigment. How can we solve that? You find me three example each of where we have politics. You tell me where, you tell me in which team, we try to fix that. What made you think

Nothing, but I’m sure there is politics. I’m trying to always think there is something there that every company has. Politics, everything that can kill a company, process, politics, people that don’t have the right attitude, people that are not nice, people that don’t have managerial courage. So finger point these things and try to find the point of failure in your org and try to fix them.

So we did a list actually two weeks ago of that. I asked my team as well. I was like, probably too many process at Pigment at our stage. I’m pretty sure. So what do we do? And I got a list and then we voted what are the biggest one. And so there are things that are insane at our stage that I’m not happy at all about. Procurement process that is crazy, expense policies that is way too complex, things that are slowing down the company for zero reason.

And so when we see that, we have to remove immediately. And I have no patience for that. Everybody at Pigment should be spending pretty much all of their time with their customer.

I do. That’s what keeps I all our companies

I think process can mean different things. There are processes that are amazing because it will help you scale. You have to put in place some processes in your company, otherwise you will never scale. Now they need to be efficient. If they put more time in the calendar of anyone at the company instead of removing time, it means the process is not good. So you need to think for every process. Is it to improve the efficiency of the company so that everyone can spend more time on innovation and with the customer?

To give you an example, even what we do with Pigment planning, that’s a process almost that should not exist. It should not exist. And so what can we do to actually remove that process is the question, is how can we make sure people don’t spend their life on spreadsheets? Or how do you make sure that you don’t spend your life doing performance review? All of these things that take forever. That’s what you need to think about when you think about process.

It’s probably partially true. My full executive team pretty much is in The US. I think that there are specific jobs that we have very small pools of talents in Europe. So we were talking about marketing, PR, comms, enablement. Are several, I think, roles where unfortunately we haven’t seen scale enough, I would say, especially when you think like SaaS, B2B, etcetera. And where clearly there is a lot we can learn from other countries still, but there are things where we have big competitive advantages too. So I think you always have to pick the best of both worlds and make sure that, you know, again, going back to what we’re saying about talent, where to find the biggest pool of talents for the role you’re looking for.

I go to bed very late. But

Yes. So first of all, the team is split between The US and Europe. So we have a global company. That was the ambition day one. And so it’s not that they are managing people in Europe and sitting on their own in The US. Like half of the team today of Pigment is in The US. Most of our business, 60% of our business is in The US. Our largest customers are all in The US. We are legitimately almost more US companies than a European company, I would say, a headcount standpoint.

Not every VC. Several have told me to move to The US, but not every VC. There is no playbook for building a massive company. And so for us, one of the key strengths of Pigment is that we have the best engineering team in Europe. We have one of the best engineering team in Europe. We have access to best talents that are loyal, that are incredible. And so that’s a very big competitive advantage. Every company is different. The most important is for me to spend a lot of time in The US.

So I go there very, very often. I am never shy of flying to meet one customer, to meet one person that I want to hire, to have them come to France as well visit Paris. There is never a customer that will tell you I don’t want to come to Paris. So that’s great as well. So I would say everybody has to work on their own strengths. For me, a logistics standpoint, I am a mom of young kids. I have to be in France these days, and I am also managing my engineering team here with Romain.

Tomorrow, maybe at some point I will have to move, I don’t know. But for now, there is no good reason to move for me to The US.

The very first round, maybe 5,000,000. No. 3,000,000. I yes. Then you raised,

I would say never me wanting to raise, first of all. So we got all of our rounds preempted by investors. I’m very lucky to have a big network of investors because of my past. So we got preempted. And the reason why we raised was always because of my co founder who is paranoid. And I would say not because I would say thanks to him. He has seen the movie and I think he has seen that when you create a company, one of the key is to always have money to keep innovating and you never know what tomorrow looks like.

So it’s better to have good cash in your bank account than being in a very difficult position, two years time, etcetera. So he always pushed me actually to have more than this. So every time we raised, we always had the money from at least the past fundraising, if not the past two fundraising, but that has always been in order to be able to see what the future will look like. So I don’t really regret the large rounds or anything. How does

I could not care less for a couple of reasons. I would say I’m not being doing this money for money, first of all. So do I care that my financial outcome is X, Y, Z? I don’t care at all. Okay? I’m here to build a big company, a massive business. I want to build a company that scales for the next thirty years and I want the best people around the table. So I will never take the best term sheet based on whatever is written in there because you just want the best people on your board.

You want the best people to build an engineering company. The dilution that you get today anyway, what do you know what’s going to happen if one day you go public, maybe you will get price twice as much with one bank. It doesn’t matter at all. What matters though, is to put in place the right governance early. So making sure, for instance, that when you create your shareholder agreement, maybe you can make sure that if one day you are public, you don’t have activist investors that can actually knock at the door and get in your cap table.

These are probably the thing to worry about more than you as a founder, because it could not matter less. Again, what you should only care about if you really like what you do is innovation, impact for your customers and building something massive.

Don’t go for too much, I would say, because it can really hurt you. When you are very early stage, let’s say you raise at 50,000,000 and you know you have the ambition to create a multi billion dollar company, maybe that’s kind of okay between raising at 50 or raising at 20, that you can probably But then when you start getting into the billion valuation, that’s where you have to start to be careful because at some point, you know, if one day you are public or if you are getting bigger, the price will matter.

So be careful of not going again with a higher valuation.

To go for the brand, to go for

It depends on the brand, but people think about the brand before thinking about the person. And at your board, you get one person. You don’t get a brand. And there are two things you need to think about when you hire someone and when you take an investor. It’s first of all, like, will they have a board seat on us? Because that makes a big difference. Sometimes you can actually just have someone investing. They don’t really have any governance power in your company, so then maybe that doesn’t really matter who you take.

But if it’s someone that’s going to come on your board, well, you better think about it because there are a couple of things that are going to happen. Firstly is that there are people like you that are founders of their fund. So Harry, unless something bad happened, you’re here forever. Yeah. That’s a great thing. That’s a great thing for a founder because it means that if I have you on my board, I probably have you for a very long time.

Yeah.

And that’s something that I’ve seen happening is that give a firm a seat and then the person leaves and then you get someone else and that’s a total disaster. And then the second thing that will happen is that this person will be there again, even if they are there, they are there for fifteen years and maybe you haven’t done your proper due deal on that person. And I would suggest you do exactly the same as what I described before, is CIA due diligence on the person, as many bad channels as you can.

It’s spending as much time as you can understanding what is wrong about that person, Deep diving into what is wrong, what is wrong. Because the day there is something hard about the company, trust me, they’re going to kill you.

I would really try to do some truth seeking that goes way beyond that. Because the problem is always the same, is every VC, they will call their founder and say, Please sell for this company. And you never get the truth because it’s a small world. So maybe if the founder is your friend, he will tell you the truth, but actually that might be half of the truth most of the time. So I would go step deeper. And so what you do is you can ask exec at the company.

You can ask them because they will not know actually that you are maybe fundraising with that fund. And you can say, Hey, I know that on your board, are, for instance, CFO of X company. You have this person, how is it going? How are they with the CEO? You can even ask the fund himself, right? You can ask people at the fund that you know that completely unrelated, ask some people to ask for you. I mean, you need to find ways to find spy in the industry to really get to know the person because I have done that mistake myself.

And I have seen at Index too many founders doing that mistake. That’s the biggest mistake you can make because the power of the board is bigger than you think.

If the board wants to fire you one day, probably they can. If the board wants at some point to influence your strategy in one way or another, I have seen the best founders out there having to do things that they would never want to do. And I have seen some founders that you would not even think of that actually were in very, very difficult situation because of the board. The problem is that when you start having this type of clash, it might be that this board member is great founder of the company, by the way.

It doesn’t mean that this person is not good. But if you start having these type of problems internally, it can literally kill your company and you cannot divorce. You just cannot divorce.

I like the governance, I would say. So if you have the right board member, actually governance is great. But I would say if you don’t, of course, that’s when things can be difficult. So I would say you need to find My answer to that is more that you need to find board member that understand that the founder probably is right. That’s what I try to have at Pigment is people that understand how hard it is to create a company and that give me enough freedom to take my decisions at Pigment.

So I would recommend to try to find people that understand that I’ve seen some movies before and that understand that they can give me amazing advice on anything, but that at the end of the day, when you run the company, you see more than them and you probably have more insight into what is right for the company.

No, definitely not. It can be counterproductive. You might have some things that are happening today in the market, a market that is shaking for whatever reason. What you see is that the most experienced investors have seen that movie before, and they know that maybe the market is shaking now, but in three years it’s going to get better again. And so for instance, I have Rob Ward around the table and Rob has seen the movie so many times. And Rob is always saying me, when there is a crisis, it’s time to invest.

Let’s go, let’s go because your competitors cannot invest right now. Or I have other people. So for instance, Divesh from ICONIQ, who has helped so many, so many founders, has also this way of stepping back and being able to actually tell you the sort of macro picture and the long term is what will make any company successful.

Yes. I would say not only marketing, but innovation, more importantly. What is that? Innovation, R and D. Invest in engineers. Invest in spending more time when it’s crazy smooth, building the best of the best product. When it’s the end of the crisis, you go out and you just kill the market. So I would say it’s both taking market share and building the best product.

I think the best founders anyway out there, they are never here for the money. Money doesn’t buy them anything and they are just here to keep going. And sometimes maybe they would do secondary to actually have an amazing person coming into the round. So it may even be something completely different, a good reason to do it. But I would say always think about what will put your mind at ease on making sure you can focus all of your time and energy on building the company. For me, it was about an apartment and some logistics to make sure I had a lot of my logistics ready to take care of my kids, build an amazing company.

I think probably key pillars. First, we went very early to find customers in The US. First year of selling, pretty much we went to The US to sell. First

Yes. I did that because I knew that the market there was much more ready to buy than in Europe. It depends on what you do, but we sell to CFOs and CFOs, their duty is to be conservative, not only, but it’s one of the duty because they need to be the gatekeeper of the company. They need to have the right governance, the right trust. That’s what they are here for. And so bringing a financial platform that is new to the market is quite crazy. Okay? It’s quite counterintuitive.

So when we were one year old, doing that in Europe where people are probably slightly more conservative than in The US, it’s probably harder. So we went very early to The US, but we did that from Europe. And we were lucky because that was just post COVID where all of our customers were on Zoom. And so we didn’t even have to travel or to have anyone on the ground. We just sold directly from Europe. And that helped a lot because a lot of companies turn to this.

We started first with tech companies. We sold to tech companies and they are forward looking companies that everybody else in the world is looking up to, to say, how can I become as good as Figma or and that’s first company we went and sold to?

Figma was one of the first, yeah. Did you get Figma? Brix was the very first, I think.

No. Lot can

No, it’s super hard. It’s hard because nobody knows you. And even today, Pigment is almost six years old. We have zero brand awareness still in The US. So thanks to this show, maybe I will get a few leads, Harry. But it’s hard every single lead because the reality is why Does

Yeah. So it’s true that that’s on our favor is that there is nobody else in front of us today. It’s a world where a lot of companies out there are private equity owned. And so unfortunately not innovating at the pace at which they used to innovate. And most of our competitors are 20 years old plus, 15 years old plus, and I’ve lost this speed of innovation and this customer obsession. So we are lucky and that’s why it made us successful so early on, by the way, The US and in Europe, but nothing is easy.

And I say that because I think founders should never think that something will be easy when it comes to selling. Nothing is easy. You always, especially when you do strategic sales like pigments. We do strategic sales where when you buy pigment, you buy it for a very, very long time, almost forever. It’s going to be a backbone in your company. So you will have many stakeholders involved. And so putting the first foot in the door is what’s going to be the hardest part.

A lot of people say it’s harder than you think, where I think it’s actually easier than you think. Because I said it’s hard, yes, but it’s easier than Europe. People buy faster. People buy and are very brave to have the courage to actually go in front of the leadership team and say, In order to be successful, I need the best technology. I think a lot of companies in The US are wired this way. And so they are not buying a brand. They are not thinking, Oh, I’m going to buy SAP or IBM because the brand is trustworthy.

They understand the power of the biggest technology. I can give you a fun example. It was actually, so one of our largest deal at Pigment. I was at the Olympic games at the ceremony of the Olympic games. Okay. It’s pouring rain. We are with customers. Oh my gosh. You remember? It was like hell. So we were there. The ceremony finishes quite late. It was probably midnight. And then like Paris was completely locked down. I had to go back home pretty much walking. Then I take the subway super far.

So I’m in the subway, I’m dredged, I’m completely soaked. And I received an email and it’s probably about 01:30 in the morning from one of the biggest tech CEOs in the valley. Okay. One of the largest tech companies out there. He said, Can I call you now? Make sure. And he calls me and it’s 2AM. He says, Elinor, I want to do the biggest rip and replace of one of your competitor right now. And I want you to start tomorrow. I’m buying you right now. I don’t care.

Like, let’s go. And literally this deal was done in not even fifteen days. He called me, it’s 2AM.

Yes. Very big one. He called me and I called my team and my team is amazing. So they are always on top of everything, passion, customer, customer obsessed, and they started to work straight away. Luckily, I have a team in The US and we did the deal in the fastest fashion. These are things that I’ve not seen yet happening in Europe.

There are a lot of things that I do wrong is that sometimes I have a tendency to act very fast and act When someone tells me something, I’m very pragmatic. Let’s fix that. And sometimes actually you need to make sure you understand what it means to act fast, but also to think slow about the problem and not make a mistake between the two, making sure that I understand where I can take more time or when I can act very fast.

The first customers to find is so hard. That’s so hard. Like nobody believes in you. Nobody knows what you’re doing. Why would they buy your platform? That’s so hard. And I would say now that the company is getting bigger, everything is becoming harder as well because you know that every decision- It doesn’t get

easy.

Some things get easier for you as a founder because you have hired people that can scale with you. So you can delegate a lot more. You have people that are truly empowered to build the massive business with you so that much easier than when you have to do everything on your own. But the complexity of the company gets harder because you know that every decision you take is going to now have a big impact. So you better think slow about your cultural change, but act fast on putting them in place because your company still needs to change very fast, but you need to do it right now that you have a larger team.

Why would you worry of performance is my question to you, is that what is important in life? Going back to that, to the fundamentals. So what is important in life? What is critical is to be happy. So what makes you happy in life? What makes you happy?

Mean, do you list? Because I’m going to tell you, if your list of happiness actually puts that what you care about is only your work, your ambition, your And I have to say, I had no clue about kids before having my own. And I still have no clue, by the way, but in a different manner.

I’m asking this question to myself pretty much every day. It’s impossible to create a company if you don’t think about that. You need to have a drive every day. You need to find more energy than anyone on the planet to actually build, and you need to know what will make you happy in life so that, first of all, at work where you spend most of your time, you do these things that make you happy because this is where you’re going to be excellent. And two, you need to think about your life outside work.

What will make you happy? Because this is, first of all, to build a great company, you need the best balance in the world. You are a true athlete. You are like an Olympic athlete out there that needs to be the happiest person every day for your customers, for your employees, for everybody. People deserve to have a person that is balanced in front of them, that knows why they are doing certain things, whatnot, etcetera, and that brings them optimism every day. So that’s critical for your company, but not only.

I’m talking about you first. Your life is short. Okay? I see that every day. My grandmother tells me, You have no idea how time went for me. I haven’t seen anything here. I haven’t realized. I’m now more than 90 years old and my life went super, super fast. And so I think about that every day. It’s like, how can I enjoy every single of my life? I love being with you today because I love this show. I love what you’re doing and I love this conversation.

I think you’re always asking fantastic questions. You need to think about what brings this happiness. And I didn’t know if kids would bring me happiness because I didn’t have any. But what I knew what bringing me happiness was I love my family and I know you do as well. I know you love your brother. You already shared some stories with me around that. You love your friends. I know that. And so you know that this will be a big part of your balance every day. So think about that and think that having kids is not going to be easy.

Clearly, it’s never easy. It brings you more joy than anything on earth because you have these human beings that are true to yourself, that you can learn from every day, that every day you teach them something new and more importantly, remind you every day what happiness is about. They are at the core of what happiness is in the world. They get excited. They see the moon, they get so happy. They see a flower. They’re like, look, that’s And you’re like, oh my God, they understand the power of nature.

They understand what happiness is. And for me, that’s the biggest joy you can have in the world. I saw the other day a play at the Opera at Paris, Opera Gagne, called Play, actually. It’s from Alexander Eckman. And it’s about reminding adults that playing is the biggest thing you should think about every day. How can you bring play in your own life? Because everything in your life should be about playing, not taking yourself too seriously and having fun. Do you think we’ve lost that?

depends

Gosh, I will quote you, Harry. No, think about your own limits. For instance, on my side as a founder, yeah, I don’t drink. I try to have a very good rhythm because I’m so tired. Otherwise, I have to say, so it’s like, I need a good rhythm because every day I need to show that happiness and optimism to my company and my customers. But I do it to the limit that I will never do some things that makes me unhappy. Okay? And so if one day I actually want to go and party, I would never fast, for instance, that would make me unhappy.

Think about what are your own limits? And play is, I would say, being healthy is different from playing. I do believe that I’m like you in the sense that I want to be here forever. I love life. We are so lucky to be in this world, to be living in the most extraordinary condition. I have wonderful kids that are super healthy. So you watch your aura ring. That’s amazing. You need to be healthy. And it’s good that you don’t drink. These are things that makes you healthy.

That’s great. But that doesn’t mean you cannot play. And play is different. It’s thinking every day. How can I have fun? Whether it’s for you with your own founders and investors? How can I reinvent the way I work? How can I be more creative? How can I have fun with my friends? How can I make them happy? That’s also, I’m always going back to that because when you’re a founder, you’re so autocentric. Everything brings this back to you, even like your interview is all about me.

Who cares? Like what I care about every day is not me, it’s Pigment. And so the question is, in order to be happy, how can I make other happy? How can I make my kids, my family, my friends, my employees, etcetera? And so think about that and think about making them happy through playing with them, playing, having fun.

I think you

How does that work? Yes, it’s probably you should ask my husband about that. Maybe he will give you the right answer. I would say we’ve been together for a very long time, so he knew me way before I started Pigment. And I think we have both evolved a lot. I tried to I’m going to tell you something, maybe you won’t believe me, but it’s true. He doesn’t know anything about Pigment. We never talk about work together.

The only thing he knows about is things that are very serious that are and losing a customer, of course, it’s a big problem for Pigment, but is it a big problem for my life? Probably not. So I always think what is critical, what is really The biggest problem at Pigment for me are always people problem when someone comes to me and tell me that, you know, they have a huge health issue or that, you know, something is going very wrong in their life or, you know, these are the things that I’m super worried about or where I have a big people problem.

The rest I would say is, you know, he doesn’t even know I’m on the show today. Like, he doesn’t know anything about what I do. And that’s our way of working. It’s just that when I go home, I don’t have a lot of time with him. I don’t have a lot of time with the kid at all. So we optimize to be a family and to talk about what it is to be a family.

Yeah. So what I do is obviously I work a lot on US time zone. So I try to come home to take care of them for basically best time, having dinner, putting them to bed, then I work the entire evening until very, very late. That works well for me. That works well for him. He also works super hard and he’s also big into sports. So, you know, also has his own work life balance. And again, what I try to remember to think about is, am I doing enough to make him happy?

Am I doing enough to make my kid happy? I’m trying to really never settle on that either because I know that’s too easy to lose that.

Play offense on AI. We have to be a lot more aggressive into our AI investments. I’m seeing bigger, seeing global. I hear a lot of European companies thinking Europe only. We all need to think global, create global companies out there and just think how to invest massively, massively in AI as everyone in The US is doing today.

Creating a company is harder than they think is one. Some people think that a company did so well and, you know, founder was almost lucky. I don’t think any founder is lucky. I think founders work harder than anyone out there.

I don’t know if it’s completely BS. I think there is probably truth to that. It depends on what vertical AI apps you’re doing. So if you’re doing an app that, you know, if you are building a layer, like a marketing tool that is just a layer, probably you can be killed by AI. If you’re building something more fundamental that requires like, for instance, at Pigment, we have this huge database, huge compute power, UX that needs to work with workflows for hundreds, if not thousands of people in your company.

There you will need more AI on the shelf coming from SaaS. So I would probably split the world of SaaS into different company, into different buckets. Some will be killed certainly, but some, the one that will embed AI in the right way will kill the game.

Probably on the way enterprises think about AI in the sense that we saw that companies were very serious about AI day one, but I think I didn’t understand to which angle they actually didn’t know anything about how to be serious about AI. I understood now how much we need to actually help them understand how to use AI for their own good. So I can give you a concrete example A for lot of customers were telling me AI is going to It’s super hard to use AI in finance because AI is going to do so many mistakes and it’s impossible.

And then, you know, you think about that, you’re like, wait a minute. Today, all of you analysts are doing hundreds of mistakes. AI is actually going to remove the part of like preparing the data. So we are, for instance, with Pigment, you know, have our agents. So with our agents, we are removing a lot of manual tasks. And now the analyst has actually time to check more their data, to reflect on their data, to do more business partnering, to understand where to go, what is right, have more of a critical mindset.

So I would say, of course, AI will perhaps never give you like the most perfect answer, but oh gosh, now you will have time to think if it’s a perfect answer or not. So I would say, I really understood that a lot of companies were not thinking the right way about where AI could bring value and how.

An OpenAI or could be Anthropic, could be OpenAI, definitely one of these companies. I do believe that we need to understand the future better than anyone. And I think there is no other company that can work with more forward looking customers than them today.

Yeah. That

could be a good one too.

Do you have a name for me? I think

That’s amazing. I love that. You will give me your list. On my side, I would love also to have

You will pitch them for me then?

Yeah, Pigment on the board.

And I would say probably I would love to add one of these AI founders also to my board because that’s the future of Pigment. That’s what we are building every day is really building the future of how company will work. So being at the forefront of innovation is key.

Fuck you. We need to be a 200,000,000,000 company.

but I think, first of all, I don’t know where it’s going to lend us, but nothing is preventing me from thinking how can I create a trillion dollar company out there? So what I am constantly thinking about, and this is where you need to think slow, is what is the second, the third, the fourth act of Pigment? Because the platform we have today will not bring us there. And we need to start innovating now on this other acts if we actually want to build that large company and be a true platform.

So that’s what’s an obsession for me every day is trying to, even if it’s not something we are necessarily starting to execute on right now, is knowing exactly where we’re going. And we keep showing that vision actually to the entire company, to explain it to them how far we want to go and that we might not know everything there, but trying to know what are the technical debt we cannot afford so that we can build this axe because that’s the only way to create something large.

Thank you. Thank you, Harry.