20VC: 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

Summary

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo

Host: Harry Stebbings
Guest: Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO of Odoo
Release Date: February 12, 2025

---

Introduction

In this captivating episode of The Twenty Minute VC (20VC), host Harry Stebbings engages in an insightful conversation with Fabien Pinckaers, the visionary founder and CEO of Odoo. Odoo, built from the picturesque countryside of Belgium, has grown into a powerhouse boasting €650 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), over 5,000 employees, and serving more than 50,000 companies worldwide. What sets Odoo apart is its unconventional stance on ownership and growth—Fabien has steadfastly resisted selling the company or pursuing an Initial Public Offering (IPO), prioritizing product excellence and long-term vision over financial exit strategies.

---

Early Journey and First Ventures

Fabien's entrepreneurial spirit ignited at the tender age of 13 when he founded his first business—a management software company. His passion for development and management led him to various ventures during his youth, including an open-source Linux T-shirt company and an art marketplace that astonishingly outsold eBay with 15,000 art pieces sold monthly.

Notable Quote:
“You have to be obsessed. I don't think you can succeed if you are not obsessed.”
— Fabien Pinckaers [00:00]

---

Founding Odoo: The Initial Vision

Driven by his diverse experiences, Fabien founded Odoo as a comprehensive management software suite. Unlike the traditional Lean Startup approach of launching a Minimal Viable Product (MVP), Fabien opted to build a full-fledged suite encompassing accounting, logistics, and purchase modules from the outset. This ambitious strategy, which took two years to develop, aimed to address complex business needs seamlessly.

Notable Quote:
“I did the opposite of traditional. Usually, you start with an MVC small product. I did the complete opposite.”
— Fabien Pinckaers [07:14]

---

Business Model Pivots

Odoo's journey was marked by significant pivots to stabilize and scale the business. Initially operating as a service company, Fabien transitioned to a maintenance contract model, selling maintenance support and bug fixes. However, this model faltered as customers often discontinued service payments after the first year, exploiting the open-source nature without contributing financially.

Struggling with Sustainability:
“Most customers were paying for the first year, but second year they were telling us the software is good, I don't need maintenance anymore.”
— Fabien Pinckaers [11:38]

To counter this, Fabien introduced the Open Core model—80% of Odoo's software remained open source, while the remaining 20% comprised premium features available for a fee. This strategic shift not only enhanced revenue streams but also fostered sustainable growth.

Notable Quote:
“Once we started to monetize efficiently, everything went very smooth.”
— Fabien Pinckaers [12:24]

---

Scaling Odoo: Growth and Funding

Fabien's approach to scaling was unorthodox, especially regarding fundraising. In 2010, Odoo raised its first funding round of €3 million at a pre-money valuation of €7 million, resulting in a 30% equity dilution. Despite the seemingly unfavorable terms, this capital infusion was crucial for transitioning to a software vendor model.

Notable Quote:
“We got something like 10 offers, which was quite good. So I picked the best one.”
— Fabien Pinckaers [10:37]

The second round saw Odoo raising €7 million at a €23 million pre-money valuation, which Fabien acknowledged as another low valuation. Nevertheless, these funds empowered Odoo to replace its service-based operations with a solid partner network, ultimately stabilizing the company's financial footing.

---

Overcoming Financial Struggles

Throughout its growth trajectory, Odoo faced persistent financial challenges, often teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Fabien navigated these turbulent times by focusing on rapid monetization and strategic pivots, ensuring that Odoo emerged stronger each time.

Notable Quote:
“Because of that, I was the main shareholder and I stayed one. So I didn't need money at the time.”
— Fabien Pinckaers [09:23]

---

Company Culture and Management Style

Central to Odoo's success is its unique management philosophy. Fabien eschews traditional hierarchical structures, avoiding roles such as VPs, managers, or team leaders. Instead, Odoo fosters a culture of autonomy, responsibility, and continuous evolution. Team leaders are expected to be the best in their domain, focusing solely on enhancing their team's capabilities without the burden of budgets or forecasts.

Notable Quote:
“We have a very strong culture. We are a startup that grew super fast, so we have a culture that is very strong.”
— Fabien Pinckaers [23:15]

This approach ensures that the team remains cohesive and aligned with Odoo's core values, promoting efficiency and innovation without the constraints of traditional management processes.

---

Hiring Practices

Odoo's recruitment strategy is both rigorous and unconventional. The company prioritizes on-the-job assessments and IQ testing over conventional resume evaluations. This method ensures that candidates demonstrate their capabilities in real-time, facilitating swift and accurate hiring decisions.

Notable Quote:
“We recruit within five days. And everything is automated.”
— Fabien Pinckaers [28:49]

This efficient process, combined with a focus on practical skills and cognitive abilities, allows Odoo to build a talented and dedicated workforce rapidly.

---

Product Philosophy: Horizontal vs. Vertical SaaS

Odoo distinguishes itself by adopting a horizontal SaaS model, striving to be the best across various business applications rather than specializing in a single industry. Fabien envisions a future where management software becomes commoditized, much like how Office applications are universally adopted regardless of industry.

Notable Quote:
“Instead of being the best in one industry, what we want is to be the best in applications.”
— Fabien Pinckaers [20:21]

This strategy aims to provide a comprehensive, integrated suite that caters to diverse business needs, enhancing efficiency and simplifying operations for companies of all sizes.

---

Competition and Market Position

Fabien perceives Odoo as having a unique competitive edge. While giants like SAP and Microsoft offer extensive suites, they are often criticized for their complexity, high costs, and inefficiency. In contrast, Odoo provides a streamlined, affordable, and user-friendly alternative that bridges the gap between large enterprise solutions and specialized tools like Slack or Mailchimp.

Notable Quote:
“We do everything the companies need and we do it extremely affordable.”
— Fabien Pinckaers [41:04]

This positioning allows Odoo to capture a significant market share by offering versatility and value that larger competitors struggle to match.

---

International Expansion

Odoo's global footprint is a testament to its scalable business model. Fabien emphasizes that geographic location is secondary to finding the right leadership. By promoting internal talent to lead new regions, Odoo ensures consistency in culture and operational efficiency. Notably, the expansion into Buffalo and India underscores this strategy, with the latter growing from 16 to 800 employees under Fabien's direct involvement.

Notable Quote:
“The key when you scale a business is retention.”
— Fabien Pinckaers [38:07]

This focus on leadership quality and employee retention has facilitated Odoo's seamless expansion across diverse markets.

---

Sales Strategy

Odoo's sales methodology primarily relies on inbound leads, supplemented by outbound efforts as the company scales. With an average contract value (ACV) of €3,500 ARR, Odoo maintains affordability while ensuring steady revenue growth. The sales team undergoes rigorous training, conducting multiple demos daily to refine their approach and optimize customer acquisition.

Notable Quote:
“We do two demos per day... and once they do that for a few weeks they start to become good.”
— Fabien Pinckaers [47:39]

This disciplined sales approach ensures that Odoo effectively communicates its value proposition to potential clients.

---

Future Vision and Goals

Looking ahead, Fabien remains committed to Odoo's foundational principles—continuous innovation, maintaining simplicity, and fostering a strong company culture. His long-term goal is to disrupt industry leaders like SAP by providing an integrated, affordable, and efficient management software suite.

Notable Quote:
“Continue doing what we do today. Not defocusing. Innovating year after year with the same pace.”
— Fabien Pinckaers [58:27]

This unwavering focus on product excellence and sustainable growth positions Odoo for continued success and market dominance.

---

Reflections and Lessons Learned

Fabien candidly reflects on his journey, acknowledging mistakes—particularly in pricing strategies and communication with the open-source community. These lessons have shaped Odoo's current business model, emphasizing transparency, value-aligned pricing, and community trust.

Notable Quote:
“I wish I would have better communicated to the community...”
— Fabien Pinckaers [49:56]

These insights highlight the importance of adaptability and effective communication in steering a company towards success.

---

Personal Insights

Balancing a demanding role as a CEO with personal life, Fabien shares how Odoo's financial stability has eased his responsibilities, allowing him to focus more on personal growth and family.

Notable Quote:
“It's not difficult to be a father.”
— Fabien Pinckaers [63:45]

This balance underscores the significance of building a resilient and sustainable business model that supports both professional and personal well-being.

---

Rapid-Fire Round Highlights

In a concluding rapid-fire segment, Fabien offers succinct insights:

• Investors Adding Value:
  “They challenge you but don't tell you what to do.”
  — Fabien Pinckaers [66:11]

• Board Preferences:
  “Executive committee and team leaders are more important than the board.”
  — Fabien Pinckaers [66:40]

• Education Reforms:
  “In India, at 11, they have lectures on entrepreneurship, leadership, Python development, chess...”
  — Fabien Pinckaers [67:16]

• Future Investments:
  Fabien remains steadfast in his belief in Odoo, viewing it as the best investment despite offering limited personal financial returns.

Final Notable Quote:
“If you want to commoditize the market and have every company on your software, you have to have a very small price.”
— Fabien Pinckaers [42:33]

---

Conclusion

Fabien Pinckaers' journey with Odoo is a compelling narrative of passion, resilience, and unwavering commitment to product excellence. By prioritizing sustainable growth, fostering a unique company culture, and maintaining a steadfast vision, Odoo has carved out a distinctive space in the competitive SaaS landscape. Fabien's insights offer invaluable lessons for entrepreneurs and venture capitalists alike, emphasizing the importance of adaptability, community trust, and relentless innovation.

For a deeper dive into Fabien's entrepreneurial saga and Odoo's remarkable growth story, listen to the full episode available on YouTube.

Transcript

[Fabian Pinkers]

You 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 Odo, we never sold shares. We will never sell. No, there will Never be an IPO. When I was 26, I purchased the domain name sorryscp.com because I thought that one day I would be much bigger than them and then I would use this domain name.

[Harry Stabbings]

This is 20VC with me, Harry Stabbings. 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]

Odoo.

[Harry Stabbings]

Built from the countryside of Belgium, they do an astonishing 650 million 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. You thought about management will be changed following this episode and I'm so excited to welcome Fabian Pinkers, founder and CEO of Odoo. But before we dive in today, here are two fun facts about our newest brand sponsor, Kajabi. First, their customers just crossed a collective $8 billion in total revenue. Wow. Second, Kajabi's users keep 100% of their earnings, with the average Kajabi creator bringing in over $30,000 per year. In case you didn't know, Kajabi is the leading creator. Commerce Plat an all in one suite of tools including websites, email marketing, digital products, payment processing and analytics for as low as $69 per month. Whether you are looking to build a private community, write a paid newsletter or launch a course, Kajabi is the only platform that will enable you to build and grow your online business without taking a cut of your revenue. 20VC listeners can try Kajabi for free for 30 days by going to kajabi.com 20VC that's kajabi.com K A J-A B I.com Kubraj once you've built your creator empire with Kajabi, take your insights and decision making to the next level with AlphaSense, the ultimate platform for uncovering trusted research and expert perspectives. As an investor, I'm always on the lookout for tools that really transform how I work. Tools that don't just save time, but fundamentally change how I uncover insights. That's exactly what AlphaSense does. With the acquisition of Tagus, AlphaSense is now the ultimate research platform built for professionals who need insights they can trust fast. Used Teegas before for company deep dives right here on the podcast. It's been an incredible resource for expert insights, but now with AlphaSense leading the way, it combines those insights with premium content, top broker research and cutting edge generative AI. The result? A platform that works like a supercharged junior analyst, delivering trusted insights and analysis on demand. AlphaSense has completely reimagined fundamental research, helping you uncover opportunities from perspectives you didn't even know how they existed. It's faster, it's smarter, and it's built to give you the edge in every decision you make. To any VC listeners, don't miss your chance to try AlphaSense for free. Visit AlphaSense.com20 to unlock your trial. That's AlphaSense.com20 and speaking of incredible products, when you're building a business you're going to encounter obstacles. Your banking doesn't have to be one of them though. Just talk to a founder who uses Mercury. Like Sampe Omichi, the founder of Ellis.com, a modern immigration law firm, helping startups and their employees immigrate to the US and they're a 20 VC portfolio company. And Sanpay says using Mercury was a no brainer for me. When I started my company I was able to get an account open immediately and using treasury and the checking account has been a breeze. So you need to visit mercury.com to see why. Founders like Sanpay use Mercury to help them hit the ground running, make the most of their money and see all their business moves in one place. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column N A and Evolve bank and Trust members of fdic, the provider of this testimonial was not compensated and is a client of Mercury Advisory llc.

[Odoo]

You have now arrived at your destination. Fabian, I am so excited for this.

[Harry Stabbings]

Listen, I am a SaaS nerd and.

[Odoo]

Odoo is one of the most incredible stories. So thank you so much for joining me today.

[Fabian Pinkers]

Thank you for having me.

[Odoo]

Now I would love to start you started your first business at 13 with a business management software company. What's the story there?

[Fabian Pinkers]

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.

[Odoo]

Were you kind of aware that you were building A business. And you were wanting to make money at the time, how were you thinking about it?

[Fabian Pinkers]

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, but it was €150 at the time. So it was just for doing something.

[Odoo]

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.

[Fabian Pinkers]

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 E commerce. I did various antivirus games. I had a T shirt company, lots of different things.

[Odoo]

You had a T shirt company?

[Fabian Pinkers]

Yeah.

[Odoo]

What was that about?

[Fabian Pinkers]

I'm passionate about open source Linux stuff and so on. So I did E commerce with Linux T shirts and ties and Debian and everything. I totally sold a lot, but it was really painful to post all these T shirts every day.

[Odoo]

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

[Fabian Pinkers]

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

[Odoo]

I love that. Okay, so what would you say was your first real business? Because you had an art marketplace. No.

[Fabian Pinkers]

Yes. That's a big one. Yes.

[Harry Stabbings]

Outsold eBay.

[Fabian Pinkers]

I was selling more objects than eBay be. So 15,000 art per month. @ the time I was working with auction houses, antique dealers, art palace. And I started to be one of the biggest of Belgium, actually.

[Odoo]

Was that making much money?

[Fabian Pinkers]

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.

[Odoo]

Okay, so we have that and then Odoo. How does Odoo come about?

[Fabian Pinkers]

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 market, antivirus and everything. And at some point I said, okay, I will stop everything and focus on. One thing that I really like is to build management software. And that's what I did with ado. And I started small with the auction houses. They were my customer for E commerce websites.

[Odoo]

What was your first product?

[Fabian Pinkers]

I did the opposite of traditional. Usually you start with an MVC small product. I did the complete opposite. I did everything. I started with accounting, logistics, purchase everything at once. So it took me Two years to build the first version of the product.

[Odoo]

Was that the right decision? Because we're trained in mvp. Lean startup. You went for, as my team called it, the fat startup is doing it all first.

[Fabian Pinkers]

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 started to tackle this challenge.

[Harry Stabbings]

I love that.

[Odoo]

Do you worry that by doing everything you lose focus?

[Fabian Pinkers]

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

[Odoo]

How do you have feature parity?

[Harry Stabbings]

How are the products as good as.

[Odoo]

The single point solutions when there are 50 of them? In the early days, initially I started.

[Fabian Pinkers]

As a service company, so I built everything customers were asking for. So I built features and features and.

[Odoo]

Features, which is what we're told not to do.

[Fabian Pinkers]

Yeah, but I bootstrapped the company. So when you bootstrap a company, you need money. And my way of getting money was to just sell services and development and not a good business model. But I grew the company to 100 people on that basis. So it kind of worked. But I struggled a lot. Like I had a few years close to bankruptcy.

[Odoo]

Wow, okay. So you scaled to 100 people with professional services. Very hands on approach. In that time you said bankruptcy loomed. Take me to one of those times. What happened? What was the worst time?

[Fabian Pinkers]

It's not like there is one time 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, so you do bad trade off. But because of that, I was the main shareholder and I stayed one. So I didn't need money at the time.

[Odoo]

Why did you not raise money?

[Fabian Pinkers]

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 and 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.

[Odoo]

So 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.

[Fabian Pinkers]

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 shitty user interface. So I was not happy about it. 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.

[Odoo]

Wow.

[Fabian Pinkers]

But to fund that, I needed to do my first fundraising.

[Odoo]

How much did you raise in that fund?

[Fabian Pinkers]

3 million euro.

[Odoo]

3 million. How did it go? This is your first round. This is the first round.

[Fabian Pinkers]

You've raised 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.

[Odoo]

Wow. Who did you pick?

[Fabian Pinkers]

It was Sophinova Partners leading the round.

[Odoo]

Amazing. Love that. Okay, and so you do 3 million. What was the price?

[Fabian Pinkers]

It was 7 millions of euro pre money. So 10 millions of post money.

[Harry Stabbings]

Wow.

[Odoo]

So 30% of the company.

[Fabian Pinkers]

Yeah.

[Harry Stabbings]

Wow.

[Fabian Pinkers]

That was not a good valuation.

[Odoo]

What a good deal for them, though. 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?

[Fabian Pinkers]

So Odoo is open source. So even though I started a software vendor model, we were still open source. So what we were selling is maintenance software and maintenance support, bug fixes and things like that. So maintenance contract. So 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 Stabbings]

Wow.

[Odoo]

Okay, what do we do now?

[Fabian Pinkers]

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.

[Odoo]

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

[Fabian Pinkers]

No, I was close to zero. I think I had something like two weeks left or something.

[Odoo]

Are you sleeping?

[Fabian Pinkers]

Not that much at the time. Because you have problems, we have pressure from the board, you have issues with the business. Everything goes together when you don't have money. So it's very hard. But we made it, so it's okay.

[Odoo]

And so we're doing open call now. We're going to do the 20% paid features. What happens then?

[Fabian Pinkers]

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. And 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. And 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.

[Odoo]

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

[Fabian Pinkers]

Something like 15 million.

[Odoo]

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

[Fabian Pinkers]

That's the business model we still have today, where we grew on top of that. So if you look at the past 20 years, we basically grew at 50% per year, year after year, every year. There was not a big bang, it was just continuous growth year after year with the growth.

[Odoo]

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

[Fabian Pinkers]

So one of the big issue I had at the time is that I deceived the community because I built the community with me on the open source mindset. We are open source, we will always be open source and property is bad and we are not like that. And things 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. And 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. A lot of people criticizing us or partners 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 do you think.

[Odoo]

Great product always wins?

[Fabian Pinkers]

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

[Odoo]

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.

[Fabian Pinkers]

But at the end, the great products always win. You can save time with marketing, you can save two or three years, you can grow the company, but at some point the product matters. I am on a market that is very slow. ERPs are very slow. SAP is still shitty after 20 years. Microsoft Dynamics 2 on a slower market, it's the best product that wins.

[Odoo]

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

[Fabian Pinkers]

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. Change the product, the business model, the service you sell and the pricing. So at the time we were changing the pricing every year, which was very complex.

[Odoo]

Changing the pricing every year?

[Fabian Pinkers]

Yeah, we were experimenting.

[Odoo]

Wow.

[Fabian Pinkers]

And one of the worst decision I did is one of these price change. 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.

[Odoo]

What was wrong with the pricing, the.

[Fabian Pinkers]

Way Odoo works is that you have a suite of business apps, CRM, E commerce, accounting.

[Odoo]

You have so many products.

[Fabian Pinkers]

Yes. And at that point I wanted to have a price that grows 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. So 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 pushback, they refused to sell it. It was really difficult. But you know when you have partner network and you change the price, you never know the partners, they always react to any change. So you never know if it's because the price is wrong or it's because of the transition, the resistance to change. So when you have this for a few months, you try to convince them, my price is good. You don't understand the value. It's 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.

[Odoo]

Incredibly challenging working with partner networks and pricing. You also did a pricing change in.

[Fabian Pinkers]

2022 that's one of our best decisions.

[Odoo]

Yeah, I mean, I saw the numbers post, the pricing, and it's like this. Up and to the right. Why was that such a good decision? On the benefit of hindsight, this price.

[Fabian Pinkers]

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 use per month. But if you have a single user or two user, €120 is still a budget. So we decreased it to €20 at a time where everybody were increasing their price. It was big inflation. Everybody was increasing the price. So we said, okay, let's decrease €20. And so acquisitions started to boost very quickly. We attracted 2.8 times more clients since that date.

[Odoo]

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?

[Fabian Pinkers]

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 they bring us more clients. Still today, majority of wallet is word of mouth.

[Odoo]

Going back to the point of product.

[Fabian Pinkers]

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

[Odoo]

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

[Fabian Pinkers]

I agree, I agree, but I see that in speed of how you build your assets. For me, it's the product. So it's very important to move forward fast and. 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, the revenue grew at 50% per year. It's not huge, but it's still good. It's just that they did it for 20 years.

[Odoo]

That's what leads to such large revenue numbers today.

[Fabian Pinkers]

At the end, it's big.

[Odoo]

Totally. What was the hardest things in those early days?

[Fabian Pinkers]

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 to.

[Odoo]

Why did you not raise more? Talk to me about this second fundraiser. You said the first one was good, where we sold 30% of the company.

[Fabian Pinkers]

It was not that good. Second was the same.

[Odoo]

What about the second one? How did that go and where was the business?

[Fabian Pinkers]

So in every fundraising, the timing is the most important thing. And for me the timing was not right at the time. So we raised 7 million euros at a valuation of 23 pre money, so authority post. And it was a time where we needed money.

[Odoo]

How much revenue were we at?

[Fabian Pinkers]

I don't know exactly. Maybe 20. 20 million.

[Odoo]

20 million in revenue?

[Fabian Pinkers]

Yeah.

[Odoo]

And you were doing it at 30 million post?

[Fabian Pinkers]

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

[Odoo]

Wow. How did that fundraise go?

[Fabian Pinkers]

It was not. We got one offer from X Ange, but only one.

[Odoo]

Did you meet many investors?

[Fabian Pinkers]

Yes.

[Odoo]

Why were they saying no?

[Fabian Pinkers]

I think they were scared. But we had to pivot. The business model was not there, the traction wasn't there. We had difficulties to be profitable. We had a growth, but not exceptional growth, regular growth.

[Odoo]

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 an customer profile that you can message to. You know where they are. You have a very horizontal product.

[Fabian Pinkers]

Yeah, we did the opposite.

[Odoo]

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

[Fabian Pinkers]

Instead of being the best in one industry, what we want it to be is to be the best in applications. So we want it to be the best CRM or the best accounting or the best website builder. And that's the way we see things. Not based on customer, but based on applications. As these applications get mature, pretty much all the CRM, they look the same today. So it's not so much about CRM for that business or that business, they are the same. So it's more about the quality of your product now rather than how you customize it for a specific segment. As part of my vision is to commoditize the management software market. And 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.

[Odoo]

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?

[Fabian Pinkers]

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 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. Something 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%. So I do believe that once you get to the maturity level, management software will be like Office. Everybody use the same Word and Excel and slides and PowerPoints and everything. I think for management software it's going to be the same when it gets mature, perfectly integrated and very affordable. Then you can transform the market and offer this product for very low.

[Odoo]

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

[Fabian Pinkers]

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

[Harry Stabbings]

Why?

[Odoo]

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

[Fabian Pinkers]

It's not so much about the money in order to build such a 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 company grow, they defocus themselves. You always have middle management that want to launch their new departments, their new product. We have been focused all along on this one single thing is to improve our products.

[Odoo]

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?

[Fabian Pinkers]

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 extra 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 at Odoo we have no planning, no budget, no forecast, 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 objectives 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.

[Odoo]

Already I'm confused. If you don't have a budget, how do you plan your business?

[Fabian Pinkers]

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.

[Odoo]

And how do you measure more efficient?

[Fabian Pinkers]

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 who's good or not, you don't need to put a KPI, I'm pretty sure in your teams you know who's good and who is not just by working with them.

[Odoo]

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

[Fabian Pinkers]

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.

[Odoo]

Do you get them to set goals or no?

[Fabian Pinkers]

No, no. What kind of goal can you give to a developer? I mean, it's very subjective. Like develop this task, maybe you can.

[Odoo]

Do today this task by this timeline.

[Fabian Pinkers]

Yeah, but when you are agile, the tasks change all the time. The features change all the time.

[Odoo]

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

[Fabian Pinkers]

So on some teams, like the salespeople, we have goals. Obviously they have sales target, but it's an exception most teams don't have. I have a story about that.

[Odoo]

Yeah, please. It's so different. I love it.

[Fabian Pinkers]

I'm from Belgium and we had the company in the US was struggling 10 years ago, was struggling to grow and so I needed to relocate myself and I went there for three years and when I arrived there, we had three consultants and they were completely overloaded. No, we have 10 to consult. 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 the app, grow the team, take the most complex project and deliver them. And this guy came, went to the us and 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, no, don't do that. Just focus on delivering your project. Say, 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 was the top expert I get from Belgium to deliver all the projects. And he says, you see? And 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. I mean, 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. It was the worst. It's just that we gave him the worst project.

[Odoo]

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.

[Fabian Pinkers]

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 at the best VP of X, the best managers of X.

[Odoo]

Tell me about how you recruit young people so successfully because you have such a big team now. I mean, In Belgium, there's 1800, you say yes. Yeah, 5000 in total. How do you recruit young people so well?

[Fabian Pinkers]

So the way we proceed is that we just assess on the job. So if a developer will 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, we 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.

[Odoo]

The first being how good you Are.

[Fabian Pinkers]

The first being how good at development you are and so on. One of the issues I had with the recruiter at the time is that if they were talking like 30 minutes, 40 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.

[Odoo]

So IQ tests are the second biggest predictor.

[Fabian Pinkers]

Yes.

[Odoo]

Fascinating. So we get them to do the call action, we get them to do the IQ test. What else is involved in that process?

[Fabian Pinkers]

That's it. And our process is extremely fast. It's one meeting and we decide right away. So 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.

[Odoo]

Wow.

[Fabian Pinkers]

And we beat the market because we are fast. Just because of that.

[Odoo]

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

[Fabian Pinkers]

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.

[Odoo]

We've got core action, how good they are 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?

[Fabian Pinkers]

It's really exceptions. The majority of the time people will fit in your culture. If your culture is great, I'll come to it. After what we are. I do believe that most people match.

[Odoo]

Really?

[Fabian Pinkers]

Sometimes you have issue, but it's really exceptional.

[Odoo]

It's probably less than 1% when someone's not great. How fast do you know?

[Fabian Pinkers]

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

[Odoo]

Reasons why younger people struggle when you bring them on?

[Fabian Pinkers]

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 good developer, he doesn't understand sales.

[Odoo]

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. Do you agree with that statement?

[Fabian Pinkers]

I think young people are different from what you used to have 20 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 things because the average age of how to do is 26. And we built a 5,000 people company with six.

[Odoo]

The average age is 26.

[Fabian Pinkers]

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 an impact. They won't work if they feel like they don't have an impact.

[Odoo]

Average age is 26.

[Fabian Pinkers]

Yes.

[Odoo]

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 that ever a challenge?

[Fabian Pinkers]

No. I think the key is to train people, to make them evolve fast. You can get younger ones, but if.

[Odoo]

They evolve fast, how do you structure training?

[Fabian Pinkers]

One month of onboarding where you have a lot of E learning, test exercise, certification, everything. And then it's more about coaching on the job by the team leader.

[Odoo]

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

[Fabian Pinkers]

The first month we have a dedicated team to train everybody. And after that they join the team and then to the team leader.

[Odoo]

Okay, got you. How many people are in a team?

[Fabian Pinkers]

It's quite small team, like 10 people.

[Odoo]

10 people.

[Fabian Pinkers]

One team leader is around 10 people.

[Odoo]

Okay, got you. And they have like weekly team meeting.

[Fabian Pinkers]

And that's like we don't have a lot of meeting. 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, recurring meeting is a way to manage people. And we try to avoid managers. We want team leaders that work with them. So we try to avoid recurring meetings.

[Harry Stabbings]

Wow.

[Odoo]

So they don't have a weekly team reoccurring meeting?

[Fabian Pinkers]

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

[Odoo]

Sure. Do you like remote work?

[Fabian Pinkers]

It's okay. I don't do. I don't do it.

[Odoo]

But are there any other elements of traditional management that we always hear? Reoccurring meetings, a huge emphasis on culture fit more than you'd suggest. Are there any other elements of management that you're like, that's not right?

[Fabian Pinkers]

I think a lot of CEOs are not right.

[Odoo]

Why?

[Fabian Pinkers]

If you look at their 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.

[Odoo]

How do you spend your days?

[Fabian Pinkers]

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 your internal process.

[Odoo]

What does that mean? Improving your internal.

[Fabian Pinkers]

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

[Odoo]

You relocated yourself to India for a year?

[Fabian Pinkers]

Yeah.

[Odoo]

You've got a wife and kids as well?

[Fabian Pinkers]

Yes, they came with me. They came with you that time because when I was to the us it was not that easy.

[Harry Stabbings]

How was that?

[Odoo]

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

[Fabian Pinkers]

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

[Odoo]

Why was India not growing?

[Fabian Pinkers]

You know, when you grow a company from one to 10, it's a challenge, real challenge. But when you grow to 10 to 100 people, it's a different challenge. And then 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 it 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. So 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.

[Odoo]

Okay. And so they need a little bit of Help. Where's India at now for?

[Fabian Pinkers]

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 continues to grow.

[Odoo]

If I were to ask you the challenges going from 1 to 10, 10 to 100 and 100 to 500 or whatever we want that number to be, how would you describe them?

[Fabian Pinkers]

So for one to ten 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's aligned. So on going to above 1000 and more, it's all about scalability, to make things super smooth and clean so that you keep growing.

[Odoo]

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, I 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?

[Fabian Pinkers]

If you look for people that are perfect in everything, you will get people that are average on everything. I mean, if you want people who speak multiple language, 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 our 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 is more about how 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. Focus on where is good rather than weakness.

[Odoo]

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

[Fabian Pinkers]

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

[Odoo]

What have been your biggest hiring mistakes, Fabian?

[Fabian Pinkers]

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

[Odoo]

How do you think about improving that moving forward?

[Fabian Pinkers]

I keep saying to myself, when there is a doubt, there is no doubt. You know, 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. And so 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.

[Odoo]

And so you would fire sooner.

[Fabian Pinkers]

Yes.

[Odoo]

In terms of sooner, you mentioned India there and the incredible scaling from 16 to 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 and what didn't?

[Fabian Pinkers]

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 director. It won't. It will actually be very bad. You will spend a lot of money and 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 U.S. it's because we had an amazing guy in your team. We wanted to do something with him and say we want you to create a company and build some. He wanted to go to Buffalo, so he said, okay, create it in Buffalo.

[Odoo]

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

[Fabian Pinkers]

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

[Odoo]

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

[Fabian Pinkers]

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 so we know they are going to be good, they will spend efficiently. We don't have that kind of issue.

[Odoo]

I would say you only do Internal promotions?

[Fabian Pinkers]

Yes. We never recruit managers and directors. Never, ever. Even when you open a subsidiary in.

[Odoo]

A different country, you send them out?

[Fabian Pinkers]

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 2 cities.

[Odoo]

Why?

[Fabian Pinkers]

The key when you scale a business is retention. And when you go to tier one cities, we have an office in San Francisco, so we didn't always follow the. But we learned from that. When you are next to. Was it bad retrospectively, if I would have opened it elsewhere, I would have preferred yes.

[Odoo]

Why?

[Fabian Pinkers]

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's leaving, People are happy, they have a very high salary for the area. Retention is very good. And retention is the key of growing your business. People retention.

[Odoo]

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

[Fabian Pinkers]

For every job, 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.

[Odoo]

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.

[Fabian Pinkers]

No, I think, 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 and we grew from 1 to 5,000.

[Odoo]

You mentioned there, you're around Google, you're around Facebook and all the big players in San Francisco. You are in intensely competitive markets. This week I interviewed two people, Fabian Odo and Marc Benioff. At Salesforce, you compete with the biggest companies in the world. How do you think about competition?

[Fabian Pinkers]

So I feel like we have no competition, which we have plenty of competitors, but I don't feel like we have competition. I'll explain why. So we are a suite of business apps. Whatever you need, we have it like a CRM, accounting, logistics. So 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 succeeded on the market. You have two types of market. You have the large players like SAP and Microsoft. They do several applications, but it's shitty, it's slow it's expensive, expensive and people are not happy using it. And then you have the small player like Slack mailchimp to send email, 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 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.

[Odoo]

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

[Fabian Pinkers]

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 I would prefer.

[Odoo]

It goes against all lessons. Mark Andreessen, very famous investor, always says, I mean literally. We released a show today and Marc Andreessen says, if you own a small company, charge small prices. You own a medium company, medium prices, big company, big prices.

[Fabian Pinkers]

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.

[Odoo]

Do you think we're in a race?

[Fabian Pinkers]

I mean, what's the price of Google Workspace or Microsoft Office? It's not a very high price, but everybody use them.

[Odoo]

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

[Fabian Pinkers]

But I think why is that important? I mean, we don't have cash issues. We are growing 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?

[Odoo]

Because you are. I don't know if your revenues are public.

[Fabian Pinkers]

It's 550 million this year.

[Odoo]

550 million this year. Great. Fantastic. Wow. Fuck. I saw a deck of yours our team got from like 2023 and it was like 200 million or whatever it was.

[Fabian Pinkers]

Yeah, we grew by 50% per year almost.

[Odoo]

Yeah. Wow. Okay. Fuck. Okay. But 550, if you want to get to be $100 billion business, you need what, 10 billion in revenue first.

[Fabian Pinkers]

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 or do. That's the thing I would like to do. I don't care about money. I don't need money. So why should I care about valuation.

[Odoo]

When you have to understand? Fabian, this show is very strange for me. We don't hire VPs. I don't care about valuation. Okay, great.

[Fabian Pinkers]

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 who have an impact to your clients.

[Odoo]

Do you think we 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 get your Series C?

[Fabian Pinkers]

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

[Odoo]

You said financing what you need to finance.

[Fabian Pinkers]

Yeah, I can't spend. We get so much cash that I can't spend it. I'm trying to recruit as fast as I can and I have enough.

[Odoo]

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

[Fabian Pinkers]

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

[Odoo]

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

[Fabian Pinkers]

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

[Odoo]

What stage do you start to see your brand build?

[Fabian Pinkers]

When we started to invest in marketing more aggressively, like four or five years ago.

[Odoo]

Because Jason Lemkin says when you get to $10 million in revenue, you get to have a mini brand. Do you think that's true?

[Fabian Pinkers]

Yeah.

[Odoo]

The other thing you mentioned earlier was you have to be optimistic as a founder. It's core to what we do.

[Fabian Pinkers]

Otherwise you don't survive.

[Odoo]

How important is naivety?

[Fabian Pinkers]

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 sorryscp.com because I thought that one day I would be much bigger than them and then I would use this domain name. Just at 26 years old.

[Odoo]

I love that. Sorry, Sab.

[Fabian Pinkers]

And I thought I was rethinking. I would in five years disrupt SAP because I was very naive.

[Odoo]

That is absolutely amazing. Do you still have the domain name?

[Fabian Pinkers]

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.

[Odoo]

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

[Fabian Pinkers]

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.

[Odoo]

Do you still want to displace SAP?

[Fabian Pinkers]

Yeah.

[Odoo]

What do you think that timeline is now?

[Fabian Pinkers]

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 ahead. We are stealing so much clients today that it's just a matter of time for me. But it's going to take time. 10 or 20 years, I don't know.

[Odoo]

Where is SAP better than you today?

[Fabian Pinkers]

On products? No, on marketing. Not even. They are way more known but 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 size, they failed. On the large companies they are still the main option.

[Odoo]

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?

[Fabian Pinkers]

Fabian, how do you recruit the VP of sales? For us it was not recruiting but promoting. And 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.

[Odoo]

Two demos per day?

[Fabian Pinkers]

Yes.

[Odoo]

When the product is so cheap. What's the ACV? The average contract value?

[Fabian Pinkers]

It's 3500 ARR.

[Odoo]

3500 ARR? That's not enough to justify outbound.

[Fabian Pinkers]

We don't do outbound, we only do inbound. We are not typical.

[Odoo]

Why do we not do outbound even now?

[Fabian Pinkers]

So to be fair, we started a few months ago, but it's only a few people, I think 30 people at the company.

[Odoo]

So this was before up to half a billion in revenue. You were only doing inbound leads?

[Fabian Pinkers]

Yes.

[Odoo]

Wow.

[Fabian Pinkers]

But we get a lot of leads.

[Odoo]

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

[Fabian Pinkers]

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 launch 50 industries and that's easier with the onboard strategy. But we are just testing and we have 30 people out of something like 1,800 sales.

[Odoo]

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

[Fabian Pinkers]

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 going.

[Odoo]

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 touched on CEOs, we touched on hard.

[Fabian Pinkers]

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

[Odoo]

I'm not being rude, is that not what you've done?

[Fabian Pinkers]

No. We only have one product, one way to deliver the service. Only three big departments, all our companies everywhere operate the same way. Our product is only 400,000 lines of code. So 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.

[Odoo]

How do they defocus then?

[Fabian Pinkers]

They launch new products, new departments, they have marketing ideas of X. They spend time meeting clients and the press and everything. When you start to have managers and manager 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 push everyone to complexify the company and to keep your company simple. You always have to fight back against that.

[Odoo]

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?

[Fabian Pinkers]

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.

[Odoo]

How long did it take to rebuild that trust?

[Fabian Pinkers]

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

[Odoo]

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.

[Fabian Pinkers]

Yes.

[Odoo]

What was the transaction? Talk to me about that.

[Fabian Pinkers]

So it was 500 million of euro at a 5 billion valuation. It was Summit Partners, one of our earlier investors, who sold to Sequoia Capital.

[Odoo]

Blackrock, Mubadala, capital G. Okay, so 500 at 5 billion. Do you think that's the right price?

[Fabian Pinkers]

It starts to be a correct price.

[Odoo]

Do you think so? I think it's still quite low.

[Fabian Pinkers]

I think so.

[Odoo]

But you're doing half a billion in revenue.

[Fabian Pinkers]

But you have to understand something.

[Odoo]

Your margins are good too.

[Fabian Pinkers]

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

[Odoo]

Except you were buying shares every round.

[Fabian Pinkers]

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 personal. So we get a big loan just to acquire shares at every round.

[Odoo]

Were you getting investors emailing you constantly saying, hey, we want to meet, we want to meet, we want to meet?

[Fabian Pinkers]

Yes.

[Odoo]

Why did you not meet them?

[Fabian Pinkers]

Waste of time. I meet them when we have an operation. So once every three years we get a transaction, then I'm happy to meet everybody.

[Odoo]

Do you not think it's helpful to build a relationship beforehand?

[Fabian Pinkers]

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

[Odoo]

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

[Fabian Pinkers]

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

[Odoo]

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

[Fabian Pinkers]

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

[Odoo]

Can I ask, how much of the company do you have?

[Fabian Pinkers]

57%. So I only did two fundraising. Very bad valuation, but I still kept the majority of the shares.

[Odoo]

Do you factor in that? That makes you worth $2.8 billion?

[Fabian Pinkers]

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 just. I own a company that's huge. But that's it.

[Odoo]

It's not. But you have a real company.

[Fabian Pinkers]

That's way more important.

[Odoo]

Yeah, but most valuations are fake. Yours is real. You could sell it.

[Fabian Pinkers]

It's a real one. We are extremely profitable.

[Odoo]

Yeah, you could sell to SAP or to anyone today.

[Fabian Pinkers]

We will never sell. At least Industrial Exit. So it's clear.

[Odoo]

Why do you not want to sell.

[Fabian Pinkers]

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

[Odoo]

Would you like to ipo?

[Fabian Pinkers]

No, there will never be an ipo. I don't want to.

[Odoo]

Why?

[Fabian Pinkers]

Because I think public companies tends 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 is worth way more than 5 billion, maybe 7 billion. But if I was public, I couldn't say that. So I like to be 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.

[Odoo]

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

[Fabian Pinkers]

At some point 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. But if you have a really good business, really, really good business that is growing like crazy profitable with the best KPI you can get, it's going to be easy to sell.

[Odoo]

And you do that on a staged every three years?

[Fabian Pinkers]

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

[Odoo]

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

[Fabian Pinkers]

No. No. Because we just did this 500 millions transaction and we had more acquirers than people selling.

[Odoo]

How did you choose the people that you chose?

[Fabian Pinkers]

We are working with Sequoia Capital G, blackrock, Mobada. It's just the best, the best you can get.

[Odoo]

It really is. How do you think about the future of. I spoke to, I had Benny off on the show. Everyone is saying that Salesforce is the company to be disrupted. What do you think about the future of Salesforce?

[Fabian Pinkers]

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

[Odoo]

Do you think agents help or hurt you?

[Fabian Pinkers]

Yes, but I also think it's overrated. It's a mix of both. There is plenty of good use cases in AI but there are also plenty of overrating in AI too. What's overrated for Marc Benioff, the AgentForce AgentForce 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 go, you click on a button from your email and then change your order on the it's way more efficient. I'm pretty sure that if I code this help desk with my shitty English accent, he won't recognize me, only 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 is bad. For instance, in accounting, it transformed the market. We have no 98.5% recognition on invoice and bills and everything, which is better than the humans. And that transformed the market? No, the accountants, they don't need to record data in the system anymore, they just validate.

[Odoo]

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

[Fabian Pinkers]

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. And 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 tool to improve your software, but there are a lot of them.

[Odoo]

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?

[Fabian Pinkers]

It's going to be interesting, but for sure there will be also very disruptive use case. So even though that happens, we will win a lot of things.

[Odoo]

Kaas, do you have a board for your company?

[Fabian Pinkers]

Yes, five people.

[Odoo]

Do you like it?

[Fabian Pinkers]

It's one of the only things that I don't like to do presentations in general. Why I prefer to work on the product improve the 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 good because we have good investors.

[Odoo]

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

[Fabian Pinkers]

I think 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.

[Odoo]

Would you say that you're also the cpo, the Chief Product Officer are the best companies.

[Fabian Pinkers]

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 doing a lot of things.

[Odoo]

Which is the least natural for you?

[Fabian Pinkers]

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

[Odoo]

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

[Fabian Pinkers]

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

[Odoo]

When do you really need to go into enterprise?

[Fabian Pinkers]

We are doing enterprise now.

[Odoo]

You're taking clients from SAP? The biggest and the biggest.

[Fabian Pinkers]

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

[Odoo]

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

[Fabian Pinkers]

Yeah, I had to create a different department. The methodology, the way we pitch and we sell 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.

[Odoo]

How's it different? First, I'm just too interested.

[Fabian Pinkers]

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% of our revenues. But the service is necessary. You need to deliver and put the client in production and everything. And because we tried to sell the least service possible, that changed a lot in our implementation methodologies. And so we developed methodologies over the time that are extremely efficient, not focusing too much and that bypass some of the heaviness of traditional methods.

[Odoo]

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

[Fabian Pinkers]

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 doesn't work very well with the culture of large companies. They just want to deliver and move forward. And we sometimes have a cultural clash within the first or second month and then both companies align themselves and then the project gets smooth. But we often have that.

[Odoo]

How do you think about your culture more broadly? Company culture is one of the hardest things. And you said before to me that it matters more than processes.

[Fabian Pinkers]

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.

[Odoo]

Autonomy, responsibility and evolution.

[Fabian Pinkers]

Yes.

[Odoo]

Autonomy, meaning everyone can make decisions.

[Fabian Pinkers]

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

[Odoo]

Even one way. Door decisions.

[Fabian Pinkers]

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 won't do things that are against the company.

[Odoo]

What was the second one?

[Fabian Pinkers]

Responsibilities. People must take the responsibilities. And young people, they are not responsible by default. School. The education system killed that. So we have to train them of deciding.

[Odoo]

How do you train them to be responsible?

[Fabian Pinkers]

It's the way you behave with them. So let's say you have a salesperson where we need to do demo to a client. He comes to your office, I need a barcode scanner for my daughter. 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 know if it's worth it or not. Decide and the way you behave with the people will force them to take their responsibilities.

[Odoo]

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

[Fabian Pinkers]

Having a process that control 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 at to do, you can just buy online on Amazon and get reimbursed right away. It's a good trade off.

[Odoo]

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

[Fabian Pinkers]

So on titles at Todo we have something Funny is that everybody chooses title and 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 put. Because I want to kill that. What matters is what you do, not the title you have.

[Odoo]

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 and I put VP of Sales.

[Fabian Pinkers]

Yes, but people are smart. Most people won't do that. What you will do is a director of sales department and that's fine.

[Odoo]

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 any that come to mind?

[Fabian Pinkers]

The business model has been hard. Took me 15 years to get to the right business model. Open core business model. I tried as a service company, then I tried as selling, maintenance and support. And only after I went to. I tried SaaS. SaaS worked and then the OpenCore.

[Odoo]

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 like everybody else?

[Fabian Pinkers]

It's not difficult to be a father.

[Odoo]

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

[Fabian Pinkers]

Yeah. I think my life is easier now than it was when we were 100.

[Odoo]

Why?

[Fabian Pinkers]

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

[Odoo]

So it gets easier over time?

[Fabian Pinkers]

Yes, it gets easier as the company gets mature and financially sustainable.

[Odoo]

What does great fatherhood mean to you?

[Fabian Pinkers]

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

[Odoo]

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

[Fabian Pinkers]

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.

[Odoo]

That one's really stuck with you. Yeah.

[Fabian Pinkers]

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. And it's funny because what I wanted to do is to build an open source software. That was my purpose. And it turns out that when I decided to switch to an open core business model and say it's not anymore 100% open source. It's only 80% open source and 20% for a fee. I could 10 times the development team. So now I'm contributing way more to open source than before. So it was bad computation from my side.

[Odoo]

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

[Fabian Pinkers]

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

[Odoo]

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

[Fabian Pinkers]

Yeah, it is. 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. Just 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.

[Odoo]

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.

[Fabian Pinkers]

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

[Odoo]

Listen, I've so enjoyed this. I want to move to a quick fire round. So I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay?

[Fabian Pinkers]

Yes.

[Odoo]

Do you think investors add value?

[Fabian Pinkers]

It's hard to say. But it's very difficult for someone who participate 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 have to come from you. So they give you the point of view, they challenge you, but they will never tell you what to do. At least if you treat them that way, you might do a lot of mistakes.

[Odoo]

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

[Fabian Pinkers]

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

[Odoo]

For me as an advisor.

[Fabian Pinkers]

Yeah. 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.

[Odoo]

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

[Fabian Pinkers]

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

[Odoo]

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

[Fabian Pinkers]

The government, Yeah. I have to be president then.

[Odoo]

Of Belgium?

[Fabian Pinkers]

Yes.

[Odoo]

What would you change?

[Fabian Pinkers]

Education.

[Odoo]

Why is education broken?

[Fabian Pinkers]

It's very slow. They don't have good expectations 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 and physics, biology.

[Odoo]

Wow. Is Indian education better than Belgium?

[Fabian Pinkers]

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 much broader. But you have extremely good schools in India.

[Odoo]

Do you pay people differently, depending on geography?

[Fabian Pinkers]

Yes, of course.

[Odoo]

There's not uniform salaries?

[Fabian Pinkers]

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

[Odoo]

Do you have transparency around salaries?

[Fabian Pinkers]

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. Choose your car, because there is cars in Belgium. Choose your benefits and everything. It's online.

[Odoo]

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

[Fabian Pinkers]

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

[Odoo]

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

[Fabian Pinkers]

I don't like both of them.

[Odoo]

Why not?

[Fabian Pinkers]

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

[Odoo]

What do you do with your money today?

[Fabian Pinkers]

If I have money, I don't have a lot of money in my bank account. But if I have money, I 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.

[Odoo]

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

[Fabian Pinkers]

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

[Odoo]

Does that make bringing children up easier? If I gave you 2.6 billion, it doesn't change anything.

[Fabian Pinkers]

Because I'm still the same man than 10 years before.

[Odoo]

What about the way that you are?

[Fabian Pinkers]

You 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.

[Odoo]

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

[Fabian Pinkers]

My father, he was an auction house selling old stuff, more in the modern stuff. But he teached me that how work is important. Work is important. He was and it's still today, working 10 to 12 hours per day. He's working even more than me sometimes.

[Odoo]

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

[Fabian Pinkers]

I think you're good at your job.

[Odoo]

If I were to say that you owed you 10 years time, what would be a great answer?

[Fabian Pinkers]

To predict the future, you have to understand the past. If you look at the past in it, it started with the operating system. So it started with. You're probably too young.

[Odoo]

But I'm sadly not too young, I don't think.

[Fabian Pinkers]

But teach me Ms. Dos Dr. Dos unix. Meaning it started with a lot of operations, lots of operating system. 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, Word, Excel and so on. There was a lot of Office tools, Works, WordPerfect and everything. Lotus 1, 2, 3. Fast forward. Today it's only Microsoft Office and Google Workspace. And now comes the 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 the world market. That's my goal, to do it, just to survive.

[Odoo]

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

[Fabian Pinkers]

Thank you. It's good for my ego to come here.

[Harry Stabbings]

You know. The world needs more entrepreneurs like Fabian. What an incredible authenticity Founder. I just love telling the Odoo story. I love it also. I never want to sell. I never want to ipo. Our management team have never sold stock. Just what an incredible founder. What a joy to do. If you want to watch the episode in full, you can find it on YouTube by searching for 20VC. That's 20VC on YouTube. But before we leave you today, here are two fun facts about our newest brand sponsor, Kajabi. First, their customers just crossed a collection $8 billion in total revenue. Wow. Second, Kajabi's users keep 100% of their earnings with the average Kajabi creator bringing in over $30,000 per year. In case you didn't know, Kajabi is the leading creator commerce platform with an all in one suite of tools including websites, email marketing, digital products, payment processing, and analytics for as low as $69 per month. Whether you are looking to build a product, private community, write a paid newsletter, or launch a course, Kajabi is the only platform that will enable you to build and grow your online business without taking a cut of your revenue. 20VC listeners can try Kajabi for free for 30 days by going to kajabi.com 20VC that's kajabi.com K-A-A-A-B-I.com 20VC once you've built your creator empire with Kajabi, take your insights and decision making to the next level. Level with AlphaSense, the ultimate platform for uncovering trusted research and expert perspectives. As an investor, I'm always on the lookout for tools that really transform how I work. Tools that don't just save time, but fundamentally change how I uncover insights. That's exactly what AlphaSense does. With the acquisition of Tagus, AlphaSense is now the ultimate research platform built for professionals who need insights they can trust fast. I've used Tegus before for company deep dives right here on the podcast. It's been an incredible resource for expert insights, but now with AlphaSense leading the way, it combines those insights with premium content, top broker research and cutting edge generative AI. The result? A platform that works like a supercharged junior analyst delivering trusted insights and analysis on demand AlphaSense has completely reimagined fundamental research, helping you uncover opportunities from perspective perspectives you didn't even know how they existed. It's faster, it's smarter, and it's built to give you the edge in every decision you make to any VC listeners. Don't miss your chance to try AlphaSense for free. Visit AlphaSense.com 20 to unlock your trial. That's AlphaSense.com 20 and speaking of incredible products, when you're building a business, you're going to encounter obstacles. Your banking doesn't have to be one of them though. Just talk to a founder who uses merchandise Mercury Like Sanpei Omichi, the founder of Elis.com, a modern immigration law firm helping startups and their employees immigrate to the US and they're a 20 VC portfolio company. And Sampe says using Mercury was a no brainer for me. When I started my company I was able to get an account open immediately and using treasury and the checking account has been a breeze. So you need to visit mercury.com to see why. Founders like Sanpay use Mercury to help them hit the ground running, make the most of their money and see all their business moves in one place. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column N A and Evolve bank and Trust, members of the fdic. The provider of this testimonial, was not compensated and is a client of Mercury Advisory llc. As always, we so appreciate your support and we hope you enjoyed the episode today with Fabien.