I would say I'm not doing this money for money, first of all.
So do I care that my financial outcome is X, Y, Z?
I don't care at all.
I'm here to build a big company, a massive business.
I want to build a company that scales for the next 30 years.
And I want the best people around the table.
The power of the board is bigger than you think.
If the board wants to fire you one day, probably they can.
This is 20VC, The Memo, the monthly show where I sit down with an incredible founder and tell the story of building one of the generational defining businesses of our time.
Now joining us today is one of Europe's fastest growing companies and their founder, Eleanor Crespo, co-founder and CEO at Pigment.
Now, with Pigment, Eleanor's raised over 397 million from some of the best in the world, including iconic Green Oaks IVP, to name a few.
Prior to Pigment, Eleanor was on the other side of the table as an investor with Index Ventures.
This was so much fun to do.
Eleanor is one of the kindest, most genuine people in this business.
I so appreciate our friendship and it really means a lot to me.
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You have now arrived at your destination.
Eleanor, listen, I've wanted to do this one for such a long time.
Obviously have heard so many great things from JC.
I so appreciate our friendship.
Thank you so much for joining me today.
Thank you for having me.
You know, what's really funny is when you're actually like doing work for a guest, when you know and you find things out that you're like actually I had no idea about that.
And so, in the context that I found I was listening to a show you did in French, which was a challenge for me.
And I heard that you essentially had a back injury and that led to the founding of Pigment.
How did the back injury lead to the founding of Pigment?
Oh yeah, very good question.
Yeah, I don't tell this story very often, but it happened that I had to be in bed for one year.
That was just before pigment.
I had to go through three surgeries in one row.
It was the first time I think in my life that I could actually settle.
So I was at Index Venture at the time and that happened to me and I had to settle and think.
And so I started to think and it was the first time I could be like, what do I want to do next?
And that's where I had time to actually say that now I want to be a founder.
And so I took the time to really think about that, think about what I wanted to do next, what type of adventure and, more importantly, who I would like to do that with.
And this is where I started to do my list of who I would like to fund the company with.
And that's how I found Roma.
When you went into Venture, did you think Venture was your thing, or did you know that you were using it as a stepping stone to be a founder?
So it's a good question.
So first of all, I would say I knew that at some point in my life I wanted to create my own company.
And that was way before being a VC.
That was really when I was even like, you know, very young kids.
I have always wanted to be an entrepreneur.
Freedom was one of the most important thing for me.
But the world of venture was very new to me when I started at Index.
And I absolutely loved it.
I loved it for many reasons.
I met the best of the best founders.
I met the smartest people in the world.
But at the same time, being at Index, I realized that really being a founder was something that was more important than anything for me right now, because I felt why am I not on the other side of the table?
Can I ask a spicy question early?
Why aren't Index on your cap table at all?
The reason about Index is simple.
All of the people at Index are my friends and they were already helping me.
And in a way, I already knew the way they were thinking.
And so for me, it was really important to bring new people, fresh ideas to the table.
And it's the same, I think, for everything I do at Pigment today.
It's like I'm not hiring my friends at Pigment.
I'm hiring people that I don't know about that can bring things that I don't know.
And in VC, something that I think is critical is to find people that can challenge you every day.
And you know, if I think about people like Martin Mignot, that I absolutely love, or Jan or other people well, in a way, they are more friends now than anything.
And I wanted people that could be really true to me.
Maybe I'm wrong.
I worry when I'm like, I shouldn't be challenging a founder.
The best founders challenge me.
They push me and they're like, no, we can do more.
And they are just so maniacal in their thinking.
I worry that if I'm challenging the founder, are they thinking big enough?
Why am I wrong?
I think you are wrong, because you might think that challenging a founder is only about thinking big enough.
I don't think that's the case.
I think challenging a founder is making them think about things that maybe you think they are obvious to them but that they tend to forget because there are so many things in their plates.
The investors that are on my board and people that are helping me on a daily basis.
They just help me become true to myself and finger point where things hurt.
And that's what I try to do with my own team.
Right is just making sure that every day I am alert on what can break my company tomorrow.
I want to go back to something you said, which was you were lying in bed thinking about the type of founder that you wanted to have with you in the process.
And there was a list.
What was the list that you wanted in that co-founder?
And how do you advise others on choosing their partner?
You'll probably think I was a bit nuts on that, but I have a big, big philosophy on hiring that I actually keep refining.
So I would say, first of all, you need to find someone that obviously works well with your value.
So here there is nothing new about that.
But you really need to find someone where you know you're going to click forever.
Because the reality is that I am now with Romain for probably the next 20 years of my life.
And there are not so many people with which I would like to spend the next 20 years of my life.
So that means that in order to do that, I did a big, big exercise of sourcing.
Sourcing.
The thing that you need to do is really thinking about what are the best schools out there in terms of entrepreneurship.
Who have been the best founders out there?
And I was very lucky because, as a VC, I had a huge network where I could learn what have been the companies that scaled in the best way, that were the most respected as founders, et cetera.
And I wanted someone that was very complimentary to me.
So someone obviously, that would know exactly how to scale an engineering team, would know how to build the best of the best product, would know how to scale team.
And someone obviously the most important who could hire the best of the best talents.
So I started to source and that really took me a lot of time because I had to ask hundreds of people in my network about who do they think are the best CTOs out there, the best founders, etc.
And from there, I did a list.
So I did a list of people and you won't believe me, but it's true.
Romain was number one in that list in terms of the person that really people would recommend.
And then from there what I did is really trying to understand, doing some CIA work on, what makes them so great.
And do this attribute would work with someone like me.
That was even before I knew that I was going to contact him.
So really trying to understand the personality traits of the people that were on my list, getting as much back channel as possible beforehand.
And then from there, going and selling men.
So selling, pitching, pitching.
Before we talk about the actual engagement process and selling and pitching.
You said that about clicking for 20 years.
Maybe it's being the child of divorced parents.
I didn't mean to bring a dark tone to the interview, but I don't know if you can ever proactively know that it's going to work for 20 years.
Whoever you are with for your life, you will need to constantly adapt and change and everything.
But I do think that there are traits of people that for sure are traits that make you want to stay with a person for the next 20 years of your life.
And these traits are being very balanced, being very true to themselves whether the business is going bad or very well.
People that haven't been attacked by the celebrity virus.
And Romain was already very successful with his first company Criteo, a company that he put public 10 years ago, and yet he's the most humble person in the planet.
Someone that people respect as well, and where people have followed him for the past 10 years.
They are saying, you don't work for someone for 10 years, this person is a mess.
That wasn't Romain.
I think there are a lot of traits you can find, and it's the same when I do my executive recruiting.
When you see that people have stayed at the same company for eight years, 10 years and that people love working with them, that tells you something.
You would not do that if the person was impossible to work with.
When you thought about the complementary elements, the incredible experience of taking a company public, being this incredible technology leader.
The question I have is how do you think about when to value experience as a positive versus when experience can actually hold you back?
When a playbook no longer works.
In a world of AI technology, stats are changing faster than ever.
When is it good versus bad?
I would say, so first of all, having seen the movie always help.
Let's be clear.
When I hire my executive today, I always try to find people that have seen the movie one time at least.
That you know have scaled.
So from where I am in terms of AR to like multiple billion, if possible, because I
They will have learned things in the journey of building.
So I still think that there is incredible value when you see that.
You see that also with some repeat founders.
You see the founder of Wizz and you see other people.
They've seen it.
They are not first time founder.
And I can tell you that with Romain, he's probably my number one mentor.
I learn from him every day.
Every day, I avoid one mistake because of him.
But the most important it's to have a value, which we have at Pigment, which is curiosity and never settle.
That's what makes the difference is to find a co-founder if he has already seen the experience that never settle and always try to learn to be better and always try to adapt.
And with Romain there is not a single day where I don't call him and ask him how can we do better here?
What can we do differently?
After the show, I'm going to ask you, Ari, what can we do differently?
What did I do wrong?
And that's the most important.
And that's what makes Romain so great is that he doesn't come with his own assumption about.
I've done Criteo, I know better.
Let me tell you.
It's more, this is what I've seen.
This is also the pattern that we've seen at other companies.
And here's how we should think about it now in 25 with Pigment.
When you look at the structure of your roles together your co-CEOs that is extremely counter what all VCs suggest to founders.
Why are VCs wrong and co-CEOs is good?
And how do you make it work?
I think co-COs only work in certain setups, first of all, let's be clear.
It works with your personality.
For us, it works super well because we are so complementary.
He focuses, obviously, on building the best product out there.
I focus on building the best business out there.
And we listen to each other every day.
What makes us so strong is that we talk at least three times a day.
And we spend, you have no idea the number of hours we spend on strategy, on product strategy.
I talk to customers all the time.
And I come back to him and I said, that's what we need to do.
That's what we need to do.
And we also try to think obviously outside the box in terms of the vision, because there is only so much your customer can bring you in terms of what is the next product.
They probably don't know what it is, right?
So we talk all the time.
And when you think about what is important for a company, what is probably the most important is being customer first.
You need to focus, be obsessed, obsessed, obsessed about the customer.
This is what the best founders always do.
And in order to do that, it means you need an indefinite amount of time with your customers.
Well, when you are a co-CEO, you actually have that superpower of being able to spend twice as much time with your customer, listening to them.
And the reality, if you think about, for instance you take example of, like a boutique coffee that is in the street that maybe won like the price of the best coffee in the world.
There is a coffee like that next to my house in Paris.
And you look at what makes them so great. is the focus on the customer.
This is the only thing, right?
Is that they're able to do something at a boutique level that you are probably not able to do at the level of a Starbucks right.
This time that they are spending listening to the customer sourcing the best product, trying to refine their coffee.
When you have twice the time as a co-CEO, that gives you a superpower.
It also gives you a balance and a way to always think on your feet.
At the end of the day, when you are co-CEO.
Every day, I challenge myself and I ask Romain to challenge myself.
And I think that every day we can do better.
You know, yesterday is yesterday.
The most important is to focus on what's next for you.
And in order to do that, you need to be challenged every day by someone that is almost like your partner.
Do you agree never go to sleep angry?
We never had a single fight, actually.
You never had a single fight?
Never.
Are you serious?
Yeah.
A disagreement?
Disagreement, yes, but not a fight.
I mean, three calls a day is incredible.
Your husband must feel rather unloved.
I do just want to go back to the index days in a way and just say you saw so many founders that were great when you were working in index.
How did being an investor change the type of founder that you are?
Completely.
I think I would be so different if I hadn't been at Index.
Index was the best school of life for me.
It's something I would advise to any founder pretty much being a VC, because it created so many things.
First of all, I think I saw what amazing looks like.
I was very lucky to be close to people like Olivier at Datalog or Dylan at Figma.
I learned to Peter at Adyen.
I learned to see how they would do.
And I still learn today from them.
And It gives you an edge that nobody else on earth is capable of seeing what great looks like and what it takes.
So I learned, first of all, so much from them.
And then I learned what makes them so great.
Yuri Milner visited me the other day in Paris.
And I was asking me, I was like, what do you think are the best founders out there?
And so he gave me four things that he thinks make the best founder.
So can you guess what they are?
Relentlessness.
Aggression.
Ambition.
Persevering.
Insight.
So they were actually quite different.
First of all, being very good at psychology, understanding people in and out, understanding the human better than anyone, because that's what you will need to hire the best of the best.
Second is being an incredible storyteller.
That is something that probably you don't understand.
You know, I'm an engineer.
And so you think you're French, you're engineer, you have nothing right there.
Okay.
You have nothing, right?
Because you think it's only your product that is going to win.
You're like, I'm building the best product.
I have Romain, you know, stories done.
Not at all, my friend.
The reality is that you can see the power of many US companies out.
There is a power of marketing.
How much they have understood the importance of marketing and storytelling.
And that's what I've learned at Index, the importance of storytelling.
The third one, a little bit controversial.
Go on.
It goes back to my story of Cossio.
Because respectfully, sorry, it sounds awful.
I'm like, probably his best investment, Revolut, does not take psychology or storytelling.
Oh, I don't know.
I would perhaps disagree there.
You think Nick is good for psychology or storytelling?
So first of all, I don't know Nick enough personally to tell you.
But what I can tell you is that Nick knows how to hire.
A hundred percent.
He hires the best.
But I don't know if that's psychology and storytelling.
And also I would say storytelling, there is storytelling and storytelling.
Who are you storytelling to?
That's a fantastic question because you're absolutely right.
If you're hiring execs, you need to be a storyteller.
Nick does not traditionally hire execs and hasn't for a very long period.
He hires young people and trains them.
You don't need to tell stories so well to very, very young people who want jobs.
And maybe the stories you need to tell when you revolute is more tell stories first of all, to investors, and also tell stories to the public.
And the stories to the public are not necessarily coming from Nick, but again, he has one of the best marketing team in the world, full stop.
Totally.
Antoine Lunel.
Brilliant man.
Three.
Three.
What was controversial?
Partner.
Having a partner.
In life?
In life.
Oh, fuck.
I'm sorry, Harry.
Why?
Why?
When he says a partner, it can be also your sister, your brother.
And for me actually, you know, and that's why I'm saying Co-CEO can work too is having someone that will tell you the truth.
Having someone that will not be afraid of telling you the truth.
And that's very rare, especially as your company grows.
He was telling me that most of the best founders out there, they actually have that.
Wow.
He doesn't get most British managers.
There's very little truth in them.
But again, partner, as I said, it doesn't mean like your husband or your wife.
That's not about that.
Having a partner who will tell you the truth.
Maybe it's your brother.
Maybe it's someone else.
Love that.
Okay.
So a partner where truth is front.
Got you.
What's four?
And four, a loving family.
You are probably the biggest hiring machine that i know and you place it i mean you've said before many times to me about it from being the number one role of the head of you know, selling to customers or anything.
It is number one.
It's like hiring everyone up hiring.
If we're honest i mean i don't know if i've had any company that's just nailed hiring.
What's your hiring process and how has it changed?
My hiring process is very complex.
So starting with sourcing, I'm always sourcing.
Sourcing means just like meeting people that could be potentially good to add to the organization.
Exactly.
So when I do sourcing, I will give you a couple of examples.
But think about when you want to hire the best football player in the game.
Like imagine you are the best football club in the US or the best soccer club in Europe.
What will they do?
They will go on the field.
They will go look at, you know, like 16 years old.
They will see how they play and they will try to source them very early.
I try to do the same every day.
I lose a deal against another company, I always ask the name of the rep.
I do something, you know where I hear that there is.
Giving you a recent example.
We had the Olympic Games in Paris last year.
And I met the other day the CFO of the Olympic Games, the one that organized that.
And obviously he has to fire his entire team now that the Olympics are over.
So I asked him, I said, who was the first person in your team?
This guy.
Okay.
I went to him and I said, I want to hire you now.
And I do that with every single person I meet, when I'm always trying to find something extraordinary out there.
And I say, who are the best people you know?
Where do you think I could look for new people?
And the other thing that is important is also trying to find the best schools out there, best schools of something.
For instance, I hired very recently an executive in my go-to-market team.
The thing is, you realize as a founder that there are so many things you don't know.
You don't know, you know what amazing looks like.
So I asked literally 20 executives that are doing exactly like him, what good looks like.
So what do they think is amazing and what are the best schools out there for what I do?
And again, it has to be very specific to what you do.
And so for me I did the list of okay, these are the best companies coming from John McMahon, like the school of John McMahon.
This is what they do so great, et cetera.
And then from there I found into these schools the best people in these schools and as them for the best people.
And then that gave me my list of people to go after.
Then after that, you have your list of people.
So you are always recruiting, always be hiring everywhere you go conferences, you ask people everywhere.
Then from there, you have your list of people.
What you need to do on these people is to try to understand now how you're going to approach them.
Because I think the hardest thing is not so much to know who are the best out there, but it's how are you going to get to them?
Because usually, if they are so good, trust me, they're going to be locked in their companies forever.
So then, you need to find the defining moment on when they are going to leave their companies, or when you will have a trigger moment where you know that this person might become available.
So it might be a couple of things.
It might be a change in leadership.
It might be a company that is bought by private equity.
There are so many events that can trigger these things.
And so you need to follow that closely as well to know okay, these people, this is the timing, because timing is everything with hiring.
So you do that.
Sorry, I
How do you track them?
You mentioned the trigger moments that cause them to be maybe disjointed, the contracts to maybe be void in some way.
How do you track them actually?
I have a couple of things.
So, first of all, if I'm actively doing a search, I ask my search firm to track that and to tell me what are the people that actually have these triggers that are going to happen.
If I am just tracking them over time, well, I try to actually track them.
And we have a team internally which is called my growth team that is also helping me track people with attributes to see where they have gone, what they are doing, etc.
And that helps me think if there is a moment.
A bit like what you would do anyway with your own CRM.
You always try to see with a prospect when they are becoming warm and hot and when they are going to buy pigment.
Well, it's the same here.
I'm trying to see when these people are going to be able to be interested.
So that's one thing, but then you also need to start talking to them early.
So you need to find ways to get introduced to them.
Can I ask you, are great people obvious?
When you meet them, is it obvious that you think they're great at what they do, or do you think great people can take time to show themselves?
First of all, you need to know what obvious means.
And that I didn't tell you.
But that's the other thing I have to do in parallel is to do my rubric of questions.
I need to ask them because the problem usually when you make a mistake is because you didn't know what you were looking for.
A great CRO for a company, maybe for HubSpot is not the great CRO for Pigment, and HubSpot at the time of Pigment or a great CRO for Figma tomorrow is not the great CRO for Pigment.
We are very different companies.
Some are more product-led, some are more sales-led.
That's probably what a lot of people get wrong is that they don't know what they are looking for.
They look maybe for smartness, they look for culture skills, but do they really understand what they are looking for in the role?
I don't think most do know what they're looking for in the role.
And I also think most are hiring for roles that they don't know what great is.
Say it's a sales led founder and they don't know what a great CTO actually looks like.
What's your advice for hiring execs or just talented people in roles where it's not your speciality?
So the advice is to talk to 20 people in the field, 50 people, and ask them for what are the best questions.
But guess what?
Now the thing is even, I think, with AI platforms out there, you can refine so much what you are looking for as well.
You can explain.
You can even put profiles in there and say, I'm looking for someone like that.
What traits do they have, et cetera?
But for me the biggest advice is go human to human.
Ask when you're hiring your CRO, ask the 20 best CROs out there.
Best CROs, again, in your category, what have they done so great?
What makes them so different?
That's really my number one advice to anyone.
Do your rubric, do a CRO rubric, do a CMO rubric, do a CFO rubric based on questions that other people will have told you about, will have told you what to ask.
And that's what I do for every single role.
And I have What I do is very, very precise.
It's not only like questions that I write down.
I put the question and then I put them into different parts.
And then I ask my execs that are going to be part of the process to really focus on every part.
And depending on how that interview went and what question there, then I refine.
So every process is tailored to the person to say, okay, he actually failed in these two questions.
She actually did super well there.
What do we ask next?
How do we go to the next part?
Because the next part will vary.
That's a lot of work, huge amount of work.
At the end of each expert call, when you're finding out like, what great looks like in each role, i always ask like hey, who are the three best people that you've worked with under 35?
And i always look for the commonalities.
I find there's always common people that came up four or five times.
You know wow, do you think people are destined for certain stages?
People often say oh, they're a great zero to one person.
Do you agree with that or do you think actually people are much more flexible?
I totally agree with that.
I think I see it constantly.
The skill sets are very different.
And I think sometimes we make it a bad thing.
You know, we're like, oh, we hired that person.
It was a mistake.
Now they are not scaling with us.
I always think perhaps it's not a mistake.
Actually, it was the best person for that stage.
They did things that no one else would have been able to do at that stage.
And of course, now you need a totally different skill set they have never seen.
So they are not scaling with you.
But probably that's fine.
What are your biggest lessons on title?
People can often have egos associated.
I want to be head of sales.
I want to be VP of sales.
What are your lessons on titles, when to give them, when not, and what it says about a candidate?
I don't like when someone asks me for their titles.
Definitely not.
I really don't like that because I think, no matter what is the stage of the company, a person should come not for the only goal on their own agenda, but because they want to build something great.
I want someone that comes for the journey, for the mission, for saying I'm here to have an impact at Pigment.
And I know that if you hire me, it's because you want me to have an impact and the rest doesn't matter.
The title should be reserved for very large companies.
Internally, I do believe that being horizontal as a company is key for your success.
The day you start having people that think about that, you are in politics and that's what you should avoid.
Pay is also another really hard one.
People always want to be paid more.
What have been your biggest lessons on salary requests, when to stretch, when not to?
Going back to the football analogy you should think about if you want the best player, you will have to pay.
So you will have to pay and you will do it because you know maybe it will be transformative.
So you will pay, but you cannot do that for every role.
So you have to decide where do you absolutely need the superstar and where are roles that are maybe a little bit less critical?
But my philosophy is always being generous with every hire, because the difference they will make on the field is more than you can imagine.
The lever.
If you have found the right people, you should be generous and make them happy with the living.
The other thing is that you can play so much with equity.
And I have seen many founders that are not generous enough with equity.
But I do think that the best hire, you really need to make them part of the company.
How can you play effectively with equity?
And do you think in Europe that we are appreciative enough of equity as employees?
I think we could be more appreciative of equity.
Employees, a lot of employees do not understand equity as well as US employees.
And I also think that I have seen companies not being generous enough in terms of what they offer to the best executives out there, to your leadership team.
And that's, again, if you want the best people out there, you cannot compromise on that.
You just can't.
Everyone makes mistakes.
When you reflect on a time when you made a hiring mistake, obviously don't share which mistake it is.
It'd be brutal.
But what did you not see that you wish you'd seen?
And how did that maybe change how you think about your process?
I have done so many mistakes already in six years.
It's just unbelievable.
You were asking me how I refined my interview process over the years.
Now I do some things that I didn't know in the past.
It's putting in front of my candidates a deck to show them what's going to be hard at Pigment and make it very clear to them.
Saying you're going to work harder than ever in your life here.
These are the impossible things you will have to solve.
This is the shit show you are going into for that specific team that you're going to lead.
And that's what you will need to solve when you join Pigment.
You put a deck together for it.
Yes.
Yeah.
Wow.
You do that.
Yes.
And I put in writing our values as well.
And I explain, if you don't like these values, it's totally fine.
Think about them carefully.
Do you agree with them or do you think you don't like that?
For instance, if you absolutely care about your title, if you like a lot of governance, if you like maybe more you know, from one person to the next, things can be very different in what you enjoy in life.
How many people are in Pigment today?
About 400.
We hear of like A player, B player, all these kind of, I don't love the letters assigned to it.
But I do wonder, can you truly scale an organization to 400 A players?
And in which case, where is it okay to have a B player versus it has to be an A style player?
If you apply very strong principles, I think you can really keep the pace of A player still at that size.
I think we are not at a size where we can afford actually B or C player.
Second is when we don't, we have to realize that fast.
Making sure that very early on you identify where someone is not an A and then really trying to think how is that going to impact the organization?
If that person becomes a manager tomorrow, you know that the team obviously that they will hire will definitely not be at the right place.
Skill set that you are expecting for.
It's about being very, very fast at managing performance.
And it's also being have the courage, the managerial courage, to finger point what is wrong in the organization.
At Pigment last week with my leadership team.
I went to them all and I said we have too much politics at Pigment.
How can we solve that?
You find me three example each of where we have politics.
You tell me where, you tell me in which team and we try to fix that.
What made you think you had too much politics?
Nothing, but I'm sure there is politics.
I'm trying to always think there is something there that every company has politics.
Everything that can kill a company process politics.
People that you know don't have the right attitude, people that are not nice, people that don't have managerial courage.
So finger point these things and try to find the point of failure in your org and try to fix them.
What process do you have inside Pigment that you would most like to remove?
So we did a list actually two weeks ago of that.
I asked my team as well.
I was like, probably too many processes at Pigment at our stage.
I'm pretty sure.
So what do we do?
And I got a list and then we voted what are the biggest one.
And so there are things that are insane at our stage that I'm not happy at all about.
Procurement process that is crazy.
Expense policy that is way too complex.
Things that are slowing down the company for zero reason.
And so when we see that, we have to remove immediately.
And I have no patience for that.
Everybody at Pigment should be spending pretty much all of their time with the customer.
You're getting into a stage though now where it can be dangerous.
You bring in execs, who are brilliant at managing people and process, and they basically just put in more and more process.
They're kind of managers of managers, so to speak.
Do you worry about that?
I do.
That's what kills all large companies.
I interview them for 20 sales, 20 product, 20 growth.
And I'm like, ah, you're a manager of managers.
And you see it very clearly where they're like just processed to the end of the world.
I think process can mean different things.
There are processes that are amazing because they will help you scale.
You have to put in place some processes in your company, otherwise you will never scale.
Now they need to be efficient.
If they put more time in the calendar of anyone at the company instead of removing time, it means the process is not good.
So you need to think for every process.
Is it to improve the efficiency of the company, so that everyone can spend more time on innovation and with the customer?
To give you an example even what we do with pigment planning.
That's a process almost that should not exist.
It should not exist.
And so what can we do to actually remove that process is the question.
Is how can we make sure people don't spend their life on spreadsheets?
Or how do you make sure that you don't spend your life doing performance review?
All of these things that take forever.
That's what you need to think about when you think about process.
Everyone in Europe says the biggest problem with Europe is that we don't have senior execs who've seen scale before.
And that's what's stopping the next generation of companies scaling to really big companies.
Do you think that's true?
It's probably partially true.
My full executive team pretty much is in the US.
I think that there are specific jobs that we have very small pools of talents in Europe.
So we were talking about marketing, PR, comms, enablement.
There are several, I think, roles where unfortunately we haven't seen scale enough, I would say, especially when you think like SaaS B2B, et cetera, and where clearly there is a lot we can learn from other countries still.
But there are things where we have big competitive advantages too.
So I think you always have to pick the best of both worlds and make sure that you know again, going back to what we're saying about talent, where to find the biggest pool of talents for the role you're looking for.
Your exact team is in the US.
Yes.
How do you make that work with a largely French and European based team?
I go to bed very late.
But what about the inspiration, the motivation that comes from them for the team?
Yes.
So first of all, the team is split between the US and Europe.
So we have a global company.
That was the ambition day one.
And so it's not that they are managing people in Europe and sitting on their own in the US.
Like half of the team today of Pigment is in the US.
Most of our business, 60% of our business is in the US.
Our largest customers are all in the US.
We are legitimately almost more US companies than a European company, I would say from a headcount standpoint.
Did every VC tell you to move to the US?
Yes.
Not every VC.
Several have told me to move to the US, but not every VC.
There is no playbook for building a massive company.
And so, for us, one of the key strengths of Pigment is that we have the best engineering team in Europe.
We have one of the best engineering team in Europe.
We have access to best talents that are loyal, that are incredible.
And so that's a very big competitive advantage.
Every company is different.
The most important is for me to spend a lot of time in the US.
So I go there very, very often.
I am never shy of flying to meet one customer, to meet one person that I want to hire, to have them come to France as well.
Visit Paris.
There is never a customer that will tell you, I don't want to come to Paris.
So that's great as well.
So I would say everybody has to work on their own strengths.
For me, from a logistics standpoint, I am a mom of young kids.
I have to be in France these days.
And I am also managing my engineering team here with Romain.
Tomorrow, you know, maybe at some point I will have to move.
I don't know.
But for now, there is no good reason to move for me to the U.S.
We've spent a lot of time talking about hiring.
We talk about hiring people in the US.
That's expensive.
That needs funding.
You raised quite a lot quite early, to be blunt.
I remember when you raised one of your first rounds.
Your first round was how big?
The very first round, maybe 5 million.
No, 3 million.
And then you raised a big round after that.
Yeah.
What is your biggest lessons, advice, thoughts, having raised quite a lot quite early?
I would say never me wanting to raise, first of all.
So we got all of our runs preempted by investors.
I'm very lucky to have a big network of investors because of my past.
So we got preempted.
And the reason why we raised was always because of my co-founder, who is paranoid.
And I would say not because, I would say thanks to him.
He has seen the movie.
And I think he has seen that when you create a company, one of the key is to always have money to keep innovating.
And you never know what tomorrow looks like.
So it's better to have good cash in your bank account than being in a very difficult position two years time, etc.
So he always pushed me actually to have more than less.
So every time we raised, we always had the money from at least the past fundraising, if not the past two fundraising.
But that has always been in order to be able to see what the future will look like.
So I don't really regret the large rounds or anything.
How does that make you think on dilution?
Founders would say god, if you've got two prior fundraisers of cash, you're not optimizing for dilution.
That's inefficient.
I could not care less for a couple of reasons.
I would say I'm not doing this money for money, first of all.
Do I care that my financial outcome is X, Y, or Z?
I don't care at all.
I'm here to build a big company, a massive business.
I want to build a company that scales for the next 30 years, and I want the best people around the table.
I will never take the best term sheet based on whatever is written in there, because you just want the best people.
On your board, you want the best people to build an engineering company.
The dilution that you get today.
Anyway, what do you know what's going to happen if one day you go public?
Maybe you will get priced twice as much with one bank.
It doesn't matter at all.
What matters, though, is to put in place the right governance early.
So making sure, for instance, that when you create your shareholder agreement, maybe you can make sure that if one day you are public, you don't have activist investors that can actually knock at the door and get in your cap table.
These are probably the things to worry about more than you as a founder, because it could not matter less.
Again, what you should only care about if you really like what you do is innovation, impact for your customers and building something massive.
How do you think about price?
I think we're seeing a situation where a lot of SaaS companies in particular having to live into or grow into just extraordinary prices.
We mentioned before a thousand X ARR revenue, kind of multiple rounds.
How do you think about price and getting comfortable on that?
The last round was expensive.
Don't go for too much, I would say, because it can really hurt you.
When you are very early stage.
Let's say you raise at 50 million and you know you have the ambition to create a multi-billion dollar company.
Maybe that's kind of OK, you know, between raising at 50 or raising at 20 or That you can probably.
But then when you start getting into the billion valuation, that's where you have to start to be careful.
Because at some point you know, if one day you are public or if you're getting bigger, the price will matter.
So be careful of not going again with a higher valuation.
What do you think are the biggest mistakes you see founders make in their early fundraisings?
To go for the brand, to go for... Is brand overrated?
It depends on the brand, but people think about the brand before thinking about the person.
And at your board, you get one person.
You don't get a brand.
And there are two things you need to think about when you hire someone and when you take an investor.
It's first of all, will they have a board seat or not?
Because that makes a big difference.
Sometimes you can actually just have someone investing.
They don't really have any governance power in your company.
So then maybe that doesn't really matter who you take.
But if it's someone that's going to come on your board well, you better think about it, because there are a couple of things that are going to happen.
Firstly, is that there are people like you that are founders of their fund.
So hurry, unless something bad happens, you're here forever.
That's a great thing.
That's a great thing for a founder, because it means that if I have you on my board, I probably have you for a very long time.
Yeah.
And that's something that I've seen happening is that you give a firm a seat and then the person leaves and then you get someone else.
And that's a total disaster.
And then the second thing that will happen is that this person will be there again.
Even if they are there, they are there for 15 years and maybe you haven't done your proper due deal on that person.
And I would suggest you do exactly the same as what I described before is CIA due diligence on the person.
As many back channels as you can.
It's spending as much time as you can understanding what is wrong about that person.
Deep diving into what is wrong.
What is wrong?
Because the day there is something hard about the company, trust me, they're going to kill you.
So what do you do?
You call founders who have not worked out for them in the past and say, hey, how did it go?
What happened when it was not going well?
Is there anything else?
I would really try to do some truth-seeking that goes way beyond that.
Because the problem is always the same.
Every VC, they will call their founder and say, please sell for this company.
And you never get the truth because it's a small world.
So maybe if the founder is your friend, he will tell you the truth.
But actually, that might be half of the truth most of the time.
So I would go a step deeper.
And so what you do is you can ask exec at the company.
You can ask them because they will not know actually that you're maybe fundraising with that fund.
And you can say hey, I know that on your board, for instance, CFO of X company, you have this person.
How is it going?
How are they with the CEO?
You can even ask the fund itself.
You can ask people at the fund that you know are completely unrelated.
Ask some people to ask for you.
I mean, you need to find ways to find spy in the industry to really get to know the person.
Because I have done that mistake myself and I have seen at index too many founders doing that mistake.
That's the biggest mistake you can make because the power of the board is bigger than you think.
To unpack that, the power of the board is bigger than you think.
If the board wants to fire you one day, probably they can.
If the board wants at some point to influence your strategy in one way or another.
I have seen the best founders out there having to do things that they would never want to do.
And I have seen some founders that you would not even think of that actually were in very, very difficult situation because of the board.
The problem is that when you start having this type of clash, it might be that this board member is great for another company.
By the way, it doesn't mean that this person is not good.
But if you start having this type of problems internally, it can literally kill your company and you cannot divorce.
You just cannot divorce.
Do you think it is right to move to a more founder-controlled US model?
You see people like Parker Conrad, who we've had on the show multiple times.
His removal from Zenefits was very public and he now very much favors a founder-control-led company.
Do you think that's actually better?
I like the governance, I would say.
So if you have the right board member, actually governance is great.
But I would say if you don't, of course, you know, that's when things can be difficult.
So I would say you need to find my answer to that, is more that you need to find board member that understand that the founder probably is right.
That's what I try to have at Pigment is people that understand how hard it is to create a company and that give me enough freedom to take my decisions at Pigment.
So I would recommend to try to find people that understand that I've seen some movies before and that understand that they can give me amazing advice on anything but that at the end of the day, when you run the company, you see more than them and you probably have more insight into what is right for the company.
I think the other benefit of you said there about kind of you know, they know that the founder's right.
I think the other benefit of having like a founder of a firm is they don't feel the pressure from their partners.
And what I mean by that is like, no one's going to fire me if I do bad deals.
And my LPs may not give me more money, but none of my partners partners in big firms can get let go.
And they bring that pressure sometimes to founders.
And I sometimes see that in founders we work with, where a partner from a big firm is feeling the heat from their partnership.
That doesn't help a founder.
No, definitely not.
It can be counterproductive.
You might have some things that are happening today in the market, a market that is shaking for whatever reason.
What you see is that the most experienced investors have seen that movie before.
And they know that maybe the market is shaking now but in three years it's going to get better again.
And so, for instance, I have Warboard around the table today.
And Rob has seen the movies so many times.
And Rob is always telling me, when there is a crisis, it's time to invest.
Let's go.
Let's go.
Because your competitors cannot invest right now.
Or I have other people.
So, for instance, Divesh from Iconic, who has helped so many, so many founders, has also this way of stepping back and being able to actually tell you the sort of macro picture.
And the long term is what will make any company successful.
That's so interesting, Rob's advice on like, hey, when everyone else is pulling back, be aggressive.
Because I think the biggest thing that I see is when times get hard, marketing gets cut super fast.
And what you actually see when you look at the data is the ones that win are the ones that thoroughly continue to invest in marketing and ride it out when they come out the other side.
Is that what you see?
Yes, and I would say not only marketing, but innovation, more importantly.
What does that mean?
Innovation RD.
Invest in engineers.
Invest in spending more time when it's crisis mode, building the best of the best product.
When it's the end of the crisis, you go out and you just kill the market.
So I would say it's both taking market share and building the best product.
What's your biggest advice to founders on secondaries?
There's different thoughts on whether it's right, how much is right, what advice is good for different stages?
How do you think about it?
And how does having a little bit change your mindset?
I think the best founders anyway out there They are never here for the money.
Money doesn't buy them anything.
And they are just here to keep going.
And sometimes maybe they would do secondary, to actually have an amazing person coming into the round.
So it may even be something completely different, a good reason to do it.
But I would say, always think about what will put your mind at ease on making sure you can focus all of your time and energy on building the company.
For me it was about an apartment and some logistics to make sure I had a lot of my logistics ready to take care of my kids.
Build an amazing company.
I do just want to go back to the building from Europe in the US though, because I just think it's so important.
Knowing all that you know now, how do you advise founders who are told in Europe you've got to be in the US?
What have you done that's worked to scale so effectively in the US?
I think probably key pillars.
First, we went very early to find customers in the US.
First year of selling, pretty much we went to the US.
First year of selling.
Yeah.
That is countermost advice, which is like get local champions and then scale from there.
Yes, I did that because I knew that the market there was much more ready to buy than in Europe.
It depends on what you do.
But we sell to CFOs and CFOs, their duty is to be conservative.
Not only, but it's one of the duties because they need to be the gatekeeper of the company.
They need to have the right governance, the right trust.
That's what they are here for.
And so bringing a financial platform that is new to the market is quite crazy.
It's quite counterintuitive.
So when we were one year old, doing that in Europe, where people are probably slightly more conservative than in the US, is probably harder.
So we went very early to the US, but we did that from Europe.
And we were lucky because that was just post-COVID where all of our customers were on Zoom.
And so we didn't even have to travel or to have anyone on the ground.
We just sold directly from Europe.
And that helped a lot because a lot of companies turned to this.
We started first with tech companies.
We sold to tech companies.
And they are forward-looking companies that everybody else in the world is looking up to.
To say how can I become as good as Figma?
And that's the first company we went and sold to.
Figma?
Figma was one of the first, yeah.
How did you get Figma?
Breaks was the very first, I think.
Is it easier than people think to get brand name US?
No.
No, it's super hard.
It's hard because nobody knows you.
And even today, a pigment is almost six years old.
We have zero brand awareness still in the US.
So thanks to this show, maybe I will get a few leads, Harry.
But it's hard.
Every single lead, because the reality is Does it not get easier now, when you have brand and you have social validity?
You look at your amazing customer base from your Palo Alto networks, your Figma's and your Brax's and everyone in between.
And then I mean it respectfully and I'm probably going to lose friends here.
But like you know, you're competing against like Anaplan.
Christ, it's not like, you know, there's five others who are great products and amazing teams.
Yeah, so it's true that that's on our favor, is that there is nobody else in front of us today.
It's a world where a lot of companies out there are private equity owned.
And so, unfortunately, not innovating at the pace at which they used to innovate.
And most of our competitors are, you know, 20 years old plus, 15 years old plus, and have lost this speed of innovation and this customer obsession.
So we are lucky.
And that's why it made us successful so early on, by the way, in the US and in Europe.
But nothing is easy.
And I say that because I think founders should never think that something will be easy when it comes to selling.
Nothing is easy.
You always, especially when you do strategic sales like pigment.
We do strategic sales where, when you buy pigment, you buy it for a very, very long time, almost forever.
It's going to be a backbone in your company.
So you will have many stakeholders involved.
And so putting the first foot in the door is what's going to be the hardest part.
What do you think is the biggest BS element told to European founders about winning in the US?
A lot of people say it's harder than you think, where I think it's actually easier than you think.
Because I said it's hard, yes, but it's easier than in Europe.
People buy faster.
People buy and are very brave to have the courage to actually go in front of the leadership team and say in order to be successful, I need the best technology.
I think a lot of companies in the US are wired this way.
And so they are not buying a brand.
They are not thinking, oh, I'm going to buy SAP or IBM because the brand...
It's trustworthy.
They understand the power of the biggest technology.
I can give you a fun example.
It was actually one of our largest deals at Pigment.
I was at the Olympic Games, at the ceremony of the Olympic Games.
It's pouring rain.
We are with customers.
I remember this.
You remember?
It was like hell.
So we were there.
The ceremony finishes quite late, was probably midnight, and then Paris was completely in lockdown.
I had to go back home pretty much walking, then I take the subway super far.
So I'm in the subway, I'm drenched, I'm completely soaked.
And I receive an email and it's probably about 130 in the morning from one of the biggest tech CEOs in the Valley, one of the largest tech companies out there.
He's like, can I call you now?
I'm like, sure.
And he calls me and it's 2 a.m.
He says, Eleanor, I want to do the biggest rip and replace of one of your competitor right now.
And I want you to start tomorrow.
I'm buying you right now.
I don't care.
Like, let's go.
And literally this deal was done in not even 15 days.
He called me.
It's 2 a.m.
Is it a seven figure deal?
Yes, very big one.
He called me and I called my team and my team is amazing.
So they are always, you know, on top of everything, passion, customer, customer obsessed.
And they started to work straight away.
Luckily, I have a team in the US and we did the deal in the fastest fashion.
These are things that I've not seen yet happening in Europe.
What element of CEO ship do you find most difficult today or have you not got a grasp on?
There are a lot of things that I do.
Wrong is that sometimes I have a tendency to act very fast and act when someone tells me something.
I'm very pragmatic.
Let's go, let's fix that.
And sometimes actually, you need to make sure you understand what it means to act fast but also to think slow about the problem and not make a mistake between the two.
Making sure that I understand where I can take more time or when I can act very fast.
When was the hardest time in the pigment journey?
I think it was like 20 BC and for mine it was like COVID.
We were all remote.
I didn't really have the team at all that we had now.
Didn't have the funds that we have now.
I was lonely.
The first customers to find is so hard.
That's so hard.
Like nobody believes in you.
Nobody knows what you're doing.
Why would they buy your platform?
That's so hard.
And I would say now that the company is getting bigger, everything is becoming harder as well.
Because you know that every decision... It doesn't get easier.
Some things get easier for you as a founder because you have hired people that can scale with you.
So you can delegate a lot more.
You have people that are truly empowered to build the massive business with you.
So that's much easier than when you have to do everything on your own.
But the complexity of the company gets harder, because you know that every decision you take is going to now have a big impact.
So you better delegate.
Think slow about your cultural change but act fast on putting them in place, because your company still needs to change very fast, but you need to do it right now that you have a larger team.
Speaking of changing fast, my brother just had a baby and I became an uncle for the first time.
And I'm just like obsessed with this wonderful little girl.
But actually, to be very honest, I'm actually quite nervous because I love children and I would love to be a parent.
But I'm worried that I will lose an inch or two inches or 10 inches on performance, because suddenly you have this little baby that you have to spend a huge amount of time on.
What would you say to me as a friend when you hear me talk about that genuine worry?
I would say you're nuts.
Why?
Why would you worry of performance is my question to you is that what is important in life?
Going back to that, to the fundamentals.
So what is important in life?
What is critical is to be happy.
So what makes you happy in life?
What makes you happy?
DPI, liquidity.
I mean, do you list?
Because I'm going to tell you, if your list of happiness actually puts that what you care about is, you know, only your work, your ambition.
And I have to say, I had no clue about kids before having my own.
And I still have no clue, by the way, but in a different manner.
Did you always know what made you happy?
I'm asking this question to myself pretty much every day.
It's impossible to create a company if you don't think about that.
You need to have a drive every day.
You need to find more energy than anyone on the planet to actually build.
And you need to know what will make you happy in life so that, first of all, at work, where you spend most of your time, you do these things that make you happy, because this is where you're going to be excellent.
And two, you need to think about your life outside work.
What will make you happy?
Because this is, first of all, to build a great company, you need the best balance in the world.
You are a true athlete.
You are like an Olympic athlete out there that needs to be the happiest person every day, for you customers, for you employees, for everybody.
People deserve to have a person that is balanced in front of them, that knows why they are doing certain things whatnot, etc.
And that brings them optimism every day.
So that's critical for your company.
But not only.
I'm talking about you first.
Your life is short.
I see that every day.
My grandmother tells me, you have no idea how time went for me.
I haven't seen anything here.
I haven't realized.
I'm now more than 90 years old and my life went super, super fast.
And so I think about that every day.
It's like, how can I enjoy every second of my life?
I, you know, I love being with you today because I love this show.
I love what you're doing.
And I love this conversation.
I think you're always asking fantastic questions.
You need to think about what brings this happiness.
And I didn't know if kids would bring me happiness because I didn't have any.
But what I knew what bringing me happiness was, I love my family.
And I know you do as well.
I know you love your brother.
You already...
Already shared some stories with me around that.
You love your friends.
I know that.
And so you know that this will be a big part of your balance every day.
So think about that and think that having kids is not going to be easy.
Clearly, it's never easy.
It brings you more joy than anything on earth, because you have these human beings that are true to yourself, that you can, you know, learn from every day, that every day you teach them something new.
And more importantly, that remind you every day what happiness is about.
They are at the core of what happiness is in the world.
You know, they get excited, they see the moon, they get so happy.
They see a flower, they're like look.
And you're like oh my God, you know they understand the power of nature.
They understand what happiness is.
And for me, that's, you know, the biggest joy you can have in the world.
I saw the other day a play at the Opéra de Paris, Opéra Garnier, called Play actually.
It's from Alexander Ekman.
And it's about reminding adults that playing is the biggest thing you should think about every day.
How can you bring play in your own life?
Because everything in your life should be about playing, not taking yourself too seriously and having fun.
Do you think we've lost that?
We are in an age where we optimize the shit out of everything.
We have an Apple Watch with an aura ring and a whoop on the other wrist.
We go to bed at 8.30 because it's the optimal time for our circadian rhythm.
We've all stopped drinking.
We all fucking fast.
I take longevity powder when I get up that's mixed in a fucking special mix.
I don't eat carbs.
Have we lost play?
Yeah.
First, it depends.
And that's why I'm single.
Gosh, I will coach you, Harry.
No, I think think about your own limits.
For instance, on my side as a founder, I don't drink.
I try to have a very good rhythm because I'm so tired.
Otherwise, I have to say so.
It's like I need a good reason, because every day I need to show that happiness and optimism to my company and my customers.
But I do it to the limit that I will never do something that makes me unhappy.
Okay, and so if one day I actually want to go and party, I would never fast, for instance, that would make me unhappy.
Think about what you know, what are your own limits, and play is, I would say.
You know, being healthy is different from playing.
I do believe that I'm like you in the sense that I want to be here forever.
I love life.
We are so lucky to be in this world, to be, you know, living in the most extraordinary condition.
I have wonderful kids that are super healthy.
So you watch your aura.
That's amazing.
You need to be healthy.
And it's good that you don't drink.
These are things that makes you healthy.
That's great.
But that doesn't mean you cannot play.
And play is different.
Thinking every day, how can I have fun, whether it's for you with your own founders and investors?
How can I reinvent the way I work?
How can I be more creative?
How can I have fun with my friends?
How can I make them happy?
I'm always going back to that because when you're a founder, you're so auto-centric.
You know, everything brings this back to you, even like your interview is all about me.
Who cares?
Like what I care about every day is not me, it's pigment.
And so the question is, in order to be happy, how can I make others happy?
How can I make my kids, my family, my friends, my employees, et cetera?
And so think about that and think about making them happy through playing, with them playing having fun.
How do you think about bringing that to a relationship and a marriage?
When you are a CEO and a founder, it's just so intense.
They have to be incredibly patient.
And I'm going to, I always start, and this is another reason why I'm single.
I always start like dating someone.
I'm like, listen, number one is my company.
Always, always.
That is always how it's going to be.
And I think you have to, if you're going to build a $10 billion business.
How does that work?
Yes, probably you should ask my husband about that.
Maybe he will give you the right answer.
I would say we've been together for a very long time.
So he knew me way before I started pigment.
And I think we have both evolved a lot.
I tried to, I'm going to tell you something, maybe you won't believe me, but it's true.
He doesn't know anything about pigment.
We never talk about work together.
Do you not want to have that thought partner where you can come home and say ah, you know, we lost X client and he goes oh no, why what happened?
The only thing he knows about is things that are very serious, that are and losing a customer.
Of course it's a big problem for Pigment, but is it a big problem for my life?
Probably not, you know.
So I always think what is critical, what is really The biggest problem at Pigment?
For me are always people problems.
When someone comes to me and tells me that you know they have a huge health issue or that you know something is going very wrong in their life.
Or you know, these are the things that I'm super worried about or where I have a big people problem.
The rest I would say is...
You know, he doesn't even know I'm on the show today.
Like he doesn't know anything about what I do.
And that's our way of working.
It's just that when I go home, I don't have a lot of time with him.
I don't have a lot of time with the kid at all.
So we optimize to be a family and to talk about what it is to be a family.
What is the outcome of that?
Bath time?
Like being there for bedtime?
How do you think about optimizing that time?
Yeah, so what I do is obviously I work a lot on US time zone.
So I try to come home to take care of them for basically bath time, having dinner, putting them to bed, and then I work the entire evening until very, very late.
That works well for me.
That works well for...
He also works super hard and he's also big into sports.
So, you know, he also has his own work-life balance.
And again, what I try to remember to think about is, am I doing enough to make him happy?
Am I doing enough to make my kid happy?
I'm trying to really never settle on that either because I know that's too easy to lose that.
Listen, I want to move into a quick fire.
So I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts.
Does that sound okay?
If you're advising Europe on how we could be more competitive with the US, what advice would you give?
Play offense on AI.
We have to be a lot more aggressive into our AI investments and think bigger, think global.
I hear a lot of European companies thinking Europe only.
We all need to think global, create global companies out there and just think how to invest massively, massively in AI, as everyone in the US is doing today.
What do you believe that most around you disbelieve?
Creating a company is harder than they think is one.
Some people think that a company did so well and, you know, founder was almost lucky.
I don't think any founder is lucky.
I think founders work harder than anyone out there.
People suggest that AI will kill vertical AI apps and that people will build their own tools and software.
Why is that BS?
I don't know if it's completely BS.
I think there is probably truth to that.
It depends on what vertical AI apps you're doing.
So if you're doing an app that you know, if you are building a layer like a marketing tool, that is just a layer, probably you can be killed by AI.
If you're building something more fundamental that you know requires like, for instance, at Pigment, you know we have this huge database, huge compute power, UX that needs to, you know, work with workflows for hundreds, if not thousands, of people in your company.
There, you will need more AI on the shelf coming from SaaS.
So I would probably split the world of SaaS into different companies, into different buckets.
Some will be killed certainly, but some the one that will embed AI in the right way will kill the game.
What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months?
Probably on the way enterprises think about AI, in the sense that we saw that companies were very serious about AI day one.
But I think I didn't understand to which angle they actually didn't know anything about how to be serious about AI.
I understood now how much we need to actually help them understand how to use AI for their own good.
So I can give you a concrete example for Pigment.
Yeah.
A lot of customers were telling me AI is going to.
It's super hard to use AI in finance because AI is going to do so many mistakes and it's impossible.
And then, you know, you think about that, you're like, wait a minute.
Today, all of you analysts are doing hundreds of mistakes.
AI is actually going to remove the part of preparing the data.
So we are, for instance, with Pigment, you know, we have our agents.
So with our agents, we are removing a lot of manual tasks.
And now the analyst has actually time to check more their data, to reflect on their data, to do more business partnering, to understand where to go what is right.
Have more of a critical mindset.
So I would say, of course AI will perhaps never give you like the most perfect answer but, oh gosh, now you will have time to think if it's a perfect answer or not.
So I would say I, you know, I really understood that a lot of companies were not thinking the right way about where I could bring value on and how.
You can be CEO of any other company for a day.
Which company do you want to be CEO of?
An OpenAI or could be Entropic, could be OpenAI, definitely one of these companies.
I do believe that we need to understand the future better than anyone.
And I think there is no other company that can work with more forward-looking customers than them today.
I'd most like to be the CEO of DeepSeek.
Yeah.
That would be a really interesting one.
That could be a good one too.
Penultimate one.
Who do you not have on your board that you would love to have on your board?
Do you have a name for me?
I think... I mean, my number one would be Bernard Arnault.
Best dealmaker in history in the last 50 years.
Understands the power of brand better than anyone.
Understands human psychology and storytelling better than anyone.
They never do marketing.
Traditionally never did marketing.
That's amazing.
I love that.
You will give me your list.
On my side, I would love also to have... Nick at Revolut.
Yeah, Nick is incredible.
Understanding how to set expectations with people good, great and world-class like knowing it's okay to have all three, but where to put them in an entity.
I mean, Nick is just unbelievable.
You will pitch them for me then.
What, for Pigment?
Yeah, to join Pigment on the board.
Nick also says very little.
So he's not one of these pontificating board members.
It's like, yes, that's it.
That's all you're getting.
Amazing.
And I would say probably.
I would love to add one of these AI founders also to my board, because that's, you know, the future of pigments.
That's what we are building every day.
Is, you know, really building the future of how a company will work?
And so being at the forefront of innovation is key.
I love Yann LeCun.
I mean, he's not like, but I love Yann.
Final one.
When we think about 10 years, I asked you this when we were at an event that we did in Paris.
And I was like, hey, what does it take for Pigment, I think, to be a $10 billion company?
And I think I had like Anna Plan as like the market comp with that market count today.
And you were kind of like, fuck you.
What about a $50 billion company?
What does it take for Pigment to be a $50 billion company?
Fuck you, we need to be at 200 billion.
This is going to keep going.
No, I'm kidding.
No, but I think first of all.
I don't know where it's going to land us, but nothing is preventing me from thinking how can I create a trillion dollar company out there?
So what I am constantly thinking about and this is where you need to think slow is what is the second, the third, the fourth act of pigment?
Because the platform we have today will not bring us there.
And we need to start innovating now on this other axe if we actually want to build that large company and be a true platform.
So that's what's an obsession for me every day is trying to even if it's not something we are necessarily starting to execute on right now is knowing exactly where we're going.
And we keep showing that vision actually to the entire company to explain to them how far we want to go and that we might not know everything there, but trying to know what are the technical depth we cannot afford so that we can build these acts, because that's the only way to create something large.
It is so hard to do.
It is so hard to do well.
Listen, I cannot thank you enough for going in very different tangents.
This has been so lovely to have you on.
It's so nice to do in person.
So thank you so much for doing it with me.
Thank you.
Thank you, Harry.
Gosh, it was so special to do that show with Eleanor.
I've been friends for many years and she was just fantastic to have in the studio.
Huge thanks to her for being so brilliant.
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