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 a do.
We never sold shares.
We will never sell.
No, there will never be an IPO.
When I was 26, I purchased the domain name SorrySCPcom because I thought that one day I would be much bigger than them and then I would use this domain name.
This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and I cannot tell you the joy it brings me to share this story today.
The world needs more entrepreneurs like this one.
Today, we tell you the story of the best company that you might not have heard of, Odoo.
Built from the countryside of Belgium.
They do an astonishing 650 million in ARR, they have over 5000 employees and they have over 50000 companies as customers.
As you heard in the intro, their founder does not ever want to sell the company, IPO.
He believes that titles in companies are total BS and most management is done completely wrong.
Everything you thought about management will be changed following this episode, and I'm so excited to welcome Fabian Pinkers, founder and CEO of Odoo.
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You have now arrived at your destination.
Fabian, I am so excited for this.
Listen, I am a SaaS nerd and Odoo is one of the most incredible stories.
So thank you so much for joining me today.
Thank you for having me.
Now, I would love to start.
You started your first business at 13 with a business management software company.
What's the story there?
Oh, it was just I'm a developer.
I also like management.
I was reading a lot of books.
It was just friends of my father and I did management software for them.
And I started with one and then two and a lot of people.
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?
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.
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?
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 virus, antivirus, games.
I had a t-shirt company, lots of different things.
You had a t-shirt company?
Yeah.
What was that about?
I'm passionate about open source, you know, Linux stuff and so on.
So I did e-commerce with Linux t-shirts and ties and Debian and everything.
I actually sold a lot, but it was really painful to post all these t-shirts every day.
My God, you realize that the challenges of actually selling physical product.
It started to be a logistic challenge for a student that wants to drink beer.
It's not great.
I love that.
Okay, so what would you say was your first real business?
Because you had an art marketplace, no?
Yes.
That's a big one, yes.
It outsold eBay.
Yeah, I was selling more objects than eBay.be.
So 15,000 art per month at the time.
I was working with auction houses, antique dealers, art palaces.
And I started to be one of the biggest of Belgium, actually.
Was that making much money?
Not so much.
The business model was shitty.
I think I get something like 5000 euros per month, which for me as a student was great, but for what I built was nothing.
Okay, so we have that.
And then Odoo.
How does Odoo come about?
I'm passionate about development, of course, and management.
And Hadoop 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-shirts, art markets, antivirus and everything.
And at some point I said okay, I will top everything and focus on one thing that I really like is to build management software.
And that's what I did with Hadoop.
And I started small with the auction houses.
They were my customer for e-commerce websites.
What was your first product?
I did the opposite of traditional, of the, you know, usually you start with an MVC small product.
I did the complete opposite.
I did everything.
I started with accounting, logistic, purchase, everything at once.
So it took me two years to build the first version of the product.
Was that the right decision?
Because we're trained in MVP, lean startup.
You went for, as my team called it, the fat startup version.
Which is, you know, doing it all first.
So I remember an article of Paul Graham at the time.
And he said if you want to have a big impact, to build a big company, you have to fix a big problem.
So I had this story in mind.
I want to do something very complex.
And doing everything companies need is actually a big problem.
So I started to tackle this challenge.
I love that.
Do you worry that by doing everything, you lose focus?
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 made Odoo today.
It's because I thought about the big picture everything smooth together and it's not a patch of different software.
How do you have feature parity?
How are the products as good as the single point solutions when there are 50 of them in the early days?
Initially, I started as a service company.
So I built everything customers were asking for.
So I built features and features and features.
Which is what we're told not to do.
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's kind of worked, but I struggled a lot, like a few years close to bankruptcy.
So you scaled to 100 people with a 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?
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-offs.
But because of that I was the main shareholder and I stayed one, so I didn't need money at the time.
Why did you not raise money?
Initially, I think I was not just thinking about it.
I was building the business, growing the company, focusing on that.
I wanted to keep the majority of the shares.
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.
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.
That's what I wanted to do initially, from the beginning.
But it gets to a point where the software was very complete but with a shit user interface.
So I was not happy about it.
And I thought no, it's time to refocus and invest in RD and build a software model where I get recurring revenue and everything.
So I decided to stop all my services activities from one day to another.
But to fund that, I needed to do my first fundraising.
How much did you raise in that fund?
Three million euros.
Three million euros.
How did it go?
This is your first round.
This is the first round you've raised.
Very well, actually, this time.
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.
Wow.
Who did you pick?
It was Sofinova Partners leading the round.
Amazing.
Love that.
Okay.
And so you do 3 million.
What was the price?
It was 7 millions of euros, pre-money, so 10 millions of post-money.
Wow, so 30% of the company.
Yeah.
Wow.
That was not a good valuation.
What a good deal for them though.
Crikey.
Okay, that's amazing.
So then we raise that money and we replace the services side of the business.
Now we can focus on UI.
What happens next?
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 there was just continuing using the software, but not paying me.
Wow.
Okay.
So what do we do now?
So 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.
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?
No, I was close to zero.
I think I had something like two weeks left or something.
Are you sleeping?
Not that much at the time because 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.
And so we're doing OpenCore now.
We're going to do the 20% paid features.
What happens then?
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.
Absolutely love this.
Okay, so OpenCore starts going really well.
What does that mean?
We're like making a lot of money?
Like what sort of revenues are we at now?
Something like 15 millions.
And so what happens then?
We just progress with OpenCore and continue to scale?
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, there are always challenges.
There are always problems with culture, with scaling teams.
What are the first things that broke?
So one of the big issues I had at the time is that I deceived the community.
Because I built the community with me on the open source mindset.
Like we are open source, we will always be open source.
And the property is bad and we are not like that and things like that.
I fought to keep this open source business model, but to the point where we were close to bankruptcy so I had to switch.
And when I switched to open core, 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 great product always wins?
Yes.
I'm sure about that.
We have had difficulties, but the thing that kept us is the product.
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.
But at the end, the great products always win, no?
You can save time with marketing.
You can save two or three years.
You can grow the company.
But at some point, the product matters.
I am on a market that is very slow.
You know, ERPs are very slow.
LCPs is still shitty after 20 years.
Microsoft Dynamics too.
On a slower market, it's the best product that wins.
What product decision did you make that, with the benefit of hindsight, looking back, you wish you hadn't made?
The worst decision I did and the best ones are the pricing.
I did a very bad pricing change.
So when you have difficulties, you try to change everything.
You try to change the product, the business model, the service you sell, and the pricing.
So at the time, we were changing the pricing every year. which was very complex.
Changing the pricing every year?
Yeah, we were experimenting.
Wow.
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.
What was wrong with the pricing?
So the way Odoo works is that you have a suite of business apps, CRM, e-commerce, accounting.
You have so many products.
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 a 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.
So it was very hard for the company, incredibly challenging working with partner networks and pricing.
You also did a pricing change in 2022.
That's one of our best decisions.
Yeah.
I mean, 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 change was actually to decrease the price on the small clients and increase it for the larger clients.
And for the small clients, we were actually too expensive.
For all our applications, it was something around €120 per user and per month.
But if you have a single user or two users, €120 is still a budget.
So we decreased it to €20 at a time where everybody was increasing their price.
It was with inflation, everybody was increasing the price.
So we said, OK, let's decrease €20.
And so acquisitions started to boost very quickly.
We attracted 2.8 times more clients since that date.
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?
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, the majority of all it is word of mouth.
Going back to the point of product winning.
You need a strong product to do that.
You need a product that is capable of turning your users into fans.
What do you think about the kind of adage the common saying in startups that speed is the single most important thing in success?
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 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 I did it for 20 years.
That's That's what leads to such large revenue numbers today.
At the end, it's big.
Totally.
What was the hardest things in those early days?
I think it was always a matter of survival.
When you don't have cash to pay the employees at the end of the month, it's really hard.
When you have to dismiss people you like, but you have no other options, it's very hard too.
Yeah.
Why did you not raise more?
Talk to me about this second fundraise.
You said the first one was good, but we sold 30% of the company.
Yeah, it wasn't that good.
So good was the same.
What about the second one?
How did that go?
And where was the business?
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 30 post.
And it was a time where we needed money.
How much revenue were we at?
I don't know exactly, maybe 20, 20 millions.
20 million in revenue?
Yeah.
And you were doing it at 30 million post?
Yes.
Oh.
I think we were a bit less, but still it was not a good valuation.
Wow.
How did that fundraise go?
We got one offer from Xange, but only one.
Did you meet many investors?
Yes.
Why were they saying no?
I think they were scared about everything.
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 an exceptional growth, a regular growth.
Wow, that is amazing.
What a great deal there.
One thing that people particularly like today is vertical SaaS, because it's not bluntly, it's a lot more targeted in your customers.
You have a customer profile that you can message to, you know where they are.
You have a very horizontal product.
Yeah, we did the opposite.
Yeah.
How do you think about winning with a horizontal product when your customer is everyone?
Instead of being the best in one industry, what we wanted to be is to be the best in applications.
So we wanted to be the best CRM or the best accounting or the best website builder.
And that's the way we face 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.
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 software?
If you look today, the small and mid-sized companies, they don't have a single application.
They have a mix of a lot of different applications.
They have a lot of spreadsheets.
But they use Slack for discussion, MailChimp to send email, WordPress for a website.
They have plenty of applications.
These applications don't integrate well to each other.
It costs a lot to maintain.
It's not completely efficient.
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 the 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 uses the same word and Excel and slides and PowerPoint 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.
Why do you think you've done so well and grown to such scale where Microsoft and SAP have tried and failed?
Our product is years ahead of the competition.
There is no way they can do what we do.
Why?
I mean, they have the money, they have the talent.
Why?
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 10000 developers.
And we get that.
We are extremely good developers and good management.
We are extremely focused.
I think as companies grow, they defocus themselves.
You will 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 product.
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?
So we have a very strong culture.
We are a startup that grew super fast.
So we have a culture that is very strong.
One way to keep the culture alive is to avoid having these external managers and team leaders coming with their habits.
Probably good habits, but not in our environment.
That's one thing.
The other reason is that the way I see team leaders is that they are not there to manage people.
So how to do 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 developer if you are not the best developer of the team yourself.
And when you recruit external managers, they are probably not as good as your team already.
I'm confused.
If you don't have a budget, how do you plan your business?
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.
And how do you measure more efficiently?
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's not just by working with them.
And so when we think about no forecasts, how does that work?
So we do have 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.
Do you get them to set goals?
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 do today's task by this timeline.
Yeah, but when you are agile, the tasks change all the time, the features change all the time.
Hit this number of users, hit this number of activity, retention.
So on some teams, like the salespeople, we have goals, obviously.
They have sales targets, but it's an exception.
Most other teams don't have.
I have a story about that.
Yeah, please.
It's so different.
I love it.
I'm from Belgium.
And 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 consultants, sorry.
But they were completely overloaded.
Too many clients and projects.
It 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, don't do that.
Just focus on delivering your project.
He said, no, I need this KPI.
How can you manage?
So I couldn't convince him to drop his KPIs.
And so I waited to see what happened.
So he did his KPI.
And after three months the guys who had the worst KPIs 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 abused for the whole team that this guy was the best.
Yet on the KPIs, he was the worst.
It's just that we gave him the worst project.
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.
I think it's easier to scale when you don't need to get the top people.
I mean, you just recruit young people, a lot of them, and train them and make them evolve.
It's easier than always looking for the best VP of X, the best managers of X.
Tell me about how you recruit young people so successfully, because you have such a big team now.
I mean, in Belgium, there's 1,800 users?
Yes, 5,000 in total.
Yeah, 5,000 in total.
How do you recruit young people so well?
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, and 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.
The first being how good at development you are.
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 the 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.
He 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.
So IQ tests are the second biggest predictor.
Yes.
Fascinating.
So we get them to do the core action, we get them to do the IQ test.
What else is involved in that process?
That's it.
And our process is extremely fast.
So 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 to meeting within two, three, four days.
After the meeting, the next day you get an offer.
Wow.
And we beat the market because we are fast, just because of that.
Wow.
How often are you right?
We're often told that actually good hires are right 50% of the time.
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 he's good or not.
We've got core action how good they are developing, how good they are at sales, their IQ test 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?
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.
Really?
Sometimes you have issue, but it's really exceptional.
It's probably less than 1%.
When someone's not great, how fast do you know?
Quite quickly, within six months.
Okay.
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 reasons why younger people struggle when you bring them up?
It's always competencies.
For me, it's always you will succeed or you will never.
But for us, probably more than 90% of the people we dismiss, it's always competencies.
Like he's not a good developer.
He doesn't understand sales.
And we're often characterized.
We're both European.
I'm a proud Londoner.
You're a proud Belgian.
People always say that young people in Europe, we don't want to work like they do in the US.
We don't have the work ethic.
Yeah.
Do you agree with that statement?
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 a great thing because the average age to do is 26.
And we built a 5,000 people company.
The average age is 26.
26 years old.
So it's young.
And we built something big with millions of users.
So they are capable of working.
It's just that they need purpose.
They need passion.
They need to have an impact.
They won't work if they feel like they don't have an impact.
Average age is 26.
Yes, do you ever worry about emotional maturity?
As i get older, i just look at like i've changed a lot.
When i was younger i was more rash, more fast and emotional, and now i'm just more thoughtful and deliberate, more calm.
Is that ever a challenge?
No, I think the key is to train people to make them evolve fast.
You can get younger one, but if they evolve fast, it's... How do you structure training?
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.
And so the team leader is responsible for the training of their teams?
No, the first month, we have a dedicated team to train everybody.
And after that, they join the team and then it's the team leader.
Okay, got you.
How many people are in a team?
It's quite small team, like 10 people.
10 people.
One team leader is around 10 people.
Okay, got you.
And they have like weekly team meeting 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 manager.
We want team leaders that work with them.
So we try to avoid recurring meetings.
Wow, so they don't have a weekly team reoccurring meeting?
No.
They work with each other every day, so they don't need.
Sure.
Do you like remote work?
It's okay.
I don't do it.
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?
I think a lot of CEOs are not right.
Why?
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.
How do you spend your days?
50 of my time is in the product, so research and development with the product owners and the developers.
And the other 50% is improving our internal processes.
What does that mean, improving your internal marketing?
It changes month by month.
It could be 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.
You relocated yourself to India for a year.
Yeah.
You've got a wife and kids as well.
Yes, they came with me.
They came with you.
That time, because when I was to the US, it was not that easy.
How was that?
You're in Gujarat.
Yes.
Yeah.
How was going to India for you, packing up with your two kids and wife?
I loved it.
I mean, India is an experience.
It's colorful, it's noisy, it's full of activity.
Why was India not growing?
You know, when you grow a company from 1 to 10, it's a challenge, a 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 grow 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.
Okay, and so they needed a little bit of help.
Where's India right now for you?
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.
If I were to ask you the challenges going from 1 to 10, 10 to 100 and 100 to 500, or whatever you want that number to be, how would you describe them?
So for 1 to 10, it's 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 changes.
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.
Going to above 1000 and more.
It's all about scalability to make things super smooth and clean so that you keep growing.
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?
If you look for people that are perfect in everything, you will get people that are average in everything.
I mean, if you want people who speak multiple languages, who is a good developer, who is a good communicator?
Probably it's going to be average.
So if you dismiss people because they are bad on something, expect to have average in everything.
If you want people who transform your company, they have to be extremely good at something.
And for that, you will have to accept their weaknesses.
So I train recruiters to look for the strengths and accept some of the weaknesses.
Some you can't.
But it's important to not look for people.
So when you discuss the aftermath of the interview, it's more about, is he a very good developer?
Or is he a very good something?
And not about, I think he doesn't speak that language very well.
Or he doesn't do that.
You...
The focus on where is good rather than weakness.
Are there unacceptable versus acceptable weaknesses, or is it just how good your strength is?
For me, it really depends on the departments.
I have departments that are extremely flexible.
They can accommodate anybody.
If you are not social, they will put you in a separate office and so on.
That's fine.
So it really depends on the context.
What have been your biggest hiring mistakes, Fabien?
It's not so much about hiring, but it's about firing.
I'm always too late.
How do you think about improving that moving forward?
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're not optimistic as an entrepreneur.
And so when you start to think negatively about someone, like it doesn't work, I don't know what to work with him, that's probably because it's too late.
And so you would fire sooner?
Yes.
In terms of like 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?
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 work.
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 US.
It's because we had an amazing guy in our team.
We wanted to do something with him and say, we want you to create a company and build something.
He wanted to go to Buffalo.
So he said, okay, create it in Buffalo.
So he hires a team in Buffalo, opens an office.
Yes.
And we always proceed that way.
We first find the person and only after the person will define where we go.
How do you think about budgeting then for them?
I know it's the finance teams, but you just give them a budget and let them go?
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, I would say.
You only do internal promotions?
Yes.
We never recruit managers and directors.
Never, ever.
Even when we open a subsidiary in a different country.
You send them out.
Yes.
And one thing I try to is to never go to tier one cities.
I think it's much better to go to tier two cities.
Why?
The key when you scale a business is retention.
And when you go to tier one cities, we have an office in San Francisco.
That's an exception.
Yes.
But we learned from that.
Was it bad?
Retrospectively, if I would have opened it elsewhere, I would have preferred, yes.
Why?
Because you are next to Google and Microsoft and Apple.
How can you get the best people with that?
And then you have a higher turnover than in other cities.
In Buffalo, we have no issue.
Nobody'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.
Why do you think it's the key to growing your business?
For every job, like take a salesperson.
His first two years, he will sell X.
When he has three four, five years experience, he will sell double.
If you keep them only three years, you will have way less efficiency than if you keep them five six, seven years.
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.
No, I think it's possible some of the people, but smart people, they can evolve.
The majority of the people that are still working with me were with me since the beginning.
And we grow from one to five thousand.
Can I ask you?
You mentioned that you're around Google, you're around, you know Facebook and all the big players in San Francisco.
You are in intensely competitive markets.
I interviewed this week, I interviewed two people, Fabian Odo and Mark Benioff at Salesforce.
You compete with the biggest companies in the world.
How do you think about competition?
So I feel like we have no competition, which we have plenty of competitors, but I don't feel like we have competition.
I'll explain why.
So we are a suite of business apps.
Whatever you need, we have it.
Like a CRM, accounting, logistic.
So we do everything the companies need.
And we do it extremely affordable.
You start with 20 euros.
It's 20 euros 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 and people are not happy using it.
And then you have the small player, like Slack, MailChimp, SendEmail, Trello, Asana, and so on.
They do one thing very well, so they acquire 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.
How would you feel if someone said, oh, we're with Odoo because they're the cheapest?
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... It goes against all lessons.
Mark Andreessen, a very famous investor, always says I mean literally.
We released a show today.
And Mark Andreessen says if you're in a small company, charge small prices.
You're in a medium company, medium prices.
Big company, big prices.
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.
I mean, what's the price of Google Workspace or Microsoft Office?
It's not a very high price, but everybody uses them.
But they monetize those businesses with other cash cows, which is search for Google and most predominantly.
But how do you think about your ultimate cash cow if we're doing commoditization to the bottom?
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?
Because you are, I don't know if your revenues are public.
It's 550 million this year.
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.
Yeah.
We grow by 50% per year.
Yeah.
Wow.
Okay.
Fuck.
Okay.
But 550, if you want to get to be a hundred billion dollar business, you need what?
10 billion in revenue?
First, I don't care about the valuation.
I do care about the revenue because cash is a way to finance what I need to do.
Valuation is not important for me.
Why?
I don't care.
I mean, what I want to do is to develop Odoo.
That's the thing I would like to do.
I don't care about money.
I don't need money.
So why should I care about valuation when You have to understand, Fabien?
This show is very strange for me.
You're like, we don't hire VPs.
I don't care about valuation.
Okay, great.
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.
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 to get your Series C?
I'm not an investor.
What I would look to is the product or the capability to build a product.
At the end, it's always the best product that wins.
You said financing what you need to finance.
Yeah.
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.
Is there anything that you would love to spend on that you don't have the cash to spend on?
No.
I couldn't burn much more in marketing, but I don't think it would help a lot.
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.
In the VC circles, no.
In small and mid-sized companies, it starts to be.
What stage do you start to see your brand build?
When we started to invest in marketing more aggressively, like four or five years ago?
Because Jason Lampkin says when you get to like 10 million in revenue, you get to have like a mini brand.
Do you think that's true?
Yeah.
The other thing you mentioned earlier was you have to be optimistic as a founder.
It's like core to what we do.
Otherwise you don't survive.
How important is naivety?
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 sorryacpcom because I thought that one day I would be much bigger than them and then I would use this domain name.
I just had 26 years old.
I love that.
Sorry, SAP.
I was really thinking I would, in five years, disrupt SAP because I was very naive.
That is absolutely amazing.
Do you still have the domain name?
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 home page with one big word, sorry, SAP.
How are SAP still so big?
Because they are a monster.
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.
Do you still want to displace SAP?
Yeah.
What do you think that timeline is now?
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 to them 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.
Where is SAP better than you today?
On products, no.
On marketing, not even.
They are 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-sized, they failed.
On the large companies, they are still the main option.
You spoke earlier about your sales team.
Sales teams are really hard to build.
Building a go-to-market function is tough.
What have been your biggest lessons on building the sales team effectively, Fabien?
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 sales team, for us, it's all about the product.
We really teach them about doing demos and a lot.
They do two demos per day.
And then once they do that for a few weeks, they start to become good.
Two demos per day.
Yes.
When the product is so cheap, what's the ACV, the average contract value?
It's 3500 ARR.
3500 ARR.
That's not enough to justify outbound.
We don't do outbound.
We only do inbound.
We are not typical.
Why do we not do outbound even now?
To be fair, we started a few months ago but it's only a few people.
I think 30 people at the company.
So this was before, up to half a billion in revenue, you were only doing inbound leads?
Yes.
Wow.
But we get a lot of leads.
Okay.
And so why did we decide to do outbound now?
Um so, as we are getting very mature, now we are starting to launch applications per industry.
So we have an application for the plumber, for the restaurant, for every industries.
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 1800 sales Wow.
How did you determine which industries to go into?
You mentioned that plumbing and restaurants.
It's a matter of product market fit.
So we have the product we have and this product already answers a lot of industries.
So we started where we are good.
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.
They defocus.
A lot of companies, they defocus as they grow.
I'm not being rude.
Is that not what you've done?
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.
How do they defocus then?
Or they launch new products, new departments.
They have marketing ideas of X. They spend time meeting clients in the press and everything.
When you start to have managers and managers of managers and team leaders, they all want to do something.
They all have ideas.
And the complexity is that there is like a dark force that pushes everyone to complexify the company.
And to keep your company simple, you always have to fight back against that.
My favorite is brainstorming meetings.
I 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?
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.
How long did it take to rebuild that trust?
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 said about also the money.
I'm not really fussed about the money.
Very interesting thing to say to a venture capitalist, by the way.
But you recently did this transaction, a secondary transaction.
Yes.
What was the transaction?
Talk to me about that.
So it was 500 millions of euros at a 5 billion valuation.
It was Summit Partners, one of our earlier investors, who sold to Sequoia Capital BlackRock Mubadala CapitalG.
Okay, so 505 billion.
Do you think that's the right price?
It starts to be a correct price.
Do you think so?
I think it's still quite low.
I think so.
You're doing half a billion in revenue.
But you have to understand something.
Your margins are good too.
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 a do.
We never sold shares.
So for us, if the price is low, that's fine.
You were buying shares every round?
Every round we were buying shares.
And to the point where we get a big loan because we don't have money.
We are just simple personnel, so we get a big loan just to acquire shares at every round.
Were you getting investors emailing you constantly saying hey, we want to meet, we want to meet, we want to meet?
Yes.
Why did you not meet them?
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.
Do you not think it's helpful to build a relationship beforehand?
I think it is, but I had better things to do, like developing the company.
Okay.
And so you have 500 million now in secondaries.
Who does that go to?
That's early employees or...?
No, it was Summit Partners, mostly, where it was also a secondary.
We acquired shares as a secondary transaction in 2019.
And so you didn't sell any in this round either?
No.
No, since 2014, we didn't do any fundraising.
It's only secondary transactions.
Can I ask, how much of the company do you have?
57%.
I only did two fundraisings, very bad valuation, but I still kept the majority of the shares.
Do you factor in that that makes you worth $2.8 billion?
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.
I own a company that's huge, but that's it.
It's not, but you have a real company.
That's way more important.
Yeah, but most valuations are fake.
Yours is real.
You could sell today.
It's a real one.
We are extremely profitable.
Yeah, you could sell to SAP or to anyone today.
We will never sell.
Please, industrial exit.
Why do you not want to sell?
Ever?
Never.
Because it's much better to transform companies, change the world, disrupt the CP than having money and go on the beach.
Would you like to IPO?
No, there will never be an IPO.
I don't want to.
Why?
Because I think public companies tend to refocus on the short term.
And our success has always been to build for the long term.
And I don't want to refocus everybody on the earning calls, quarterly results and that kind of thing.
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.
How do you think about liquidity then for the other 43 of your cap table, who will want some financial exit 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 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.
And you do that on a stage every three years?
Yeah, every three, four years.
When one of the investors wants to sell, we help him sell.
Do you have any investors that would like to sell now?
No.
No, because we just did this 500 million transaction and we had more acquirers than people selling.
How did you choose the people that you chose?
We are working with Sequoia, Capital G, BlackRock, Moobada.
It's just the best, the best you can get.
It really is.
How do you think about the future of, I had to put you, 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?
They will continue, but other challenges like us will grow much faster.
Do you think agents help or hurt you?
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.
What's overrated?
For Mark Benioff, the... Agent Force?
Agent Force that they presented during Dreamforce.
The use case where it shows that you can call a help desk and ask information about your order and then change your order.
For that you have a very good UX, a good portal.
When you click on a button from your email and change your order.
It's way more efficient.
I'm pretty sure that if I call this help desk with my shitty English accent, he won't recognize me.
Or he will ask me questions to identify me that are very complex to answer to.
So in a lot of ways, UX, having a very, very good product, is more efficient than AI.
But there are also a lot of use cases where AI is good.
I'm not saying it's bad.
For instance, in accounting, it transformed the market.
We have no 98.5% recognition on invoices and bills and everything, which is better than the humans.
And that transformed the market.
Now the accountants, they don't need to record data in the system anymore.
They just validate it.
How do you think about integrating AI most effectively into Odoo today and moving forward?
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 cases.
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 tools to improve your software, but there are a lot of them.
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?
It's going to be interesting.
But for sure, there will be also very disruptive use cases.
So even though that happens, we will win a lot of things.
Do you have a board for your company?
Yes, five people.
Do you like it?
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 marketing department or the sales people 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.
When you look at your own CEO-ship, where do you need to improve?
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 them a little bit and I don't like that.
Would you say that you're also the CPO, the Chief Product Officer?
Yes.
Are the best companies?
But I'm also working, I'm the head of marketing.
I'm also working a lot with the other departments, service departments.
I'm doing a lot of things.
Which is the least natural for you?
I'm a generalist, so I think I'm good in a lot of things.
Maybe what we are doing now.
Trust me, 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 like, what does Odoo need to do to become 100 billion?
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.
When do you really need to go into enterprise?
We are doing enterprise now.
You're taking clients from SAP, the biggest and the biggest.
Yes.
Thanks for SAP for HANA, which is a disaster.
Nobody wants to go.
So that opens the door to new entrants like us.
Do you need to build an entirely different company if you go into the enterprise?
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.
How is it different first?
I'm just interested.
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 methodologies.
Love that.
What was the biggest challenge in building our enterprise?
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.
They sometimes don't work very well with the culture of large companies.
They just want to deliver and move forward and And we sometimes have a cultural clash within the first or second months.
And then both companies align themselves and then the project is smooth.
But we often have that.
How do you think about your culture more broadly?
You know, company culture is one of the hardest things.
And you said before to me that it matters more than processes.
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.
Autonomy, responsibility and evolution.
Yes.
Autonomy meaning everyone can make decisions.
Yes, and you give them the authority to do it and the tools to do it.
Even one-way door decisions?
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, so they won't do things that are against the company.
What was the second one?
Responsibilities.
People must take the responsibility.
And young people, they are not responsible by default.
School, the education system killed that.
So we have to train them of deciding.
How do you train them to be responsible?
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 demo.
Can I buy one at $50?
I don't know.
If you answer, he will always ask you.
If you tell him you're smart, I mean, you know, if it's worth it or not, decide.
And the way you behave with the people will force them to take their responsibilities.
How do you think about the like 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?
Having a process that controls what they spend would cost more.
Because if you have a purchasing department and this guy has to ask the purchase department just to buy a 30 scanner, it will cost you more than 30.
He will waste maybe five days just to get the product, whereas if he had to do it, he can just buy online on Amazon and get reimbursed right away.
It's a good trade-off.
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 a head of product, whatever it is.
When you don't have those titles, you have team leads.
How do you think about evolution and signify it?
So on title that to do, 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.
It's what matter is what you do, not the title you have.
Do you worry about what that says to the external world?
And what I mean by that is if I'm 23 or 24 and I'm a junior salesperson say, and I put VP of sales 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.
Can I ask when you think about your strategic mistake building the business?
If I ask you one that really comes to mind, is there anything that comes to mind?
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 a selling maintenance and support.
And only after I went to, I tried SaaS, SaaS worked, and then the open core.
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 5,000 persons?
Like everybody else.
It's not difficult to be a father.
Yeah, but they don't run a 5,000 person company.
Yeah, I think my life is easier now than it was when we were 100.
Why?
Because we don't have cash issues anymore.
You don't sleep when you don't have cash.
When you pay salaries late, you feel very bad.
You have to work two times more.
I think my life now is still complex, but much easier than before.
So it gets easier over time.
Yes.
It gets easier as the company gets mature and financially sustainable.
What does great fatherhood mean to you?
I don't know.
Just make them evolve.
Like my team had to do.
Final one.
If you could change anything about the journey, anything at all, what would you change?
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 That.
One's really stuck with you, hasn't it?
Yeah.
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, it's not anymore 100 open source, it's only 80 open source and 20 for free.
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.
What would you do if you weren't doing this?
I think I would do the same.
I don't know what I can do better than that.
It just seems like Odoo is such a part of you.
Do you know what I mean?
Yeah, it is.
Yeah.
But I mean, when you build such business with fast growing company, you have to be obsessed.
I don't think you can succeed if you are not obsessed, thinking about it all the time.
If you look at it like just a job, I don't think you can get such a fast growing company.
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.
That's fine.
I understand.
I mean, they don't own 56% of the company.
So I understand.
It's normal.
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?
Yes.
Do you think investors add value?
It's hard to say, but it's very difficult for someone who participates a few hours per month like two hours per month, four hours per month to be as deep as you in the business.
So I do believe they add value to pinpoint elements, to challenge you, but at the end the solution always has to come from you.
So they give it a point of view, they challenge you, but they will never tell you what to do.
At least if you treat them that way, you may do a lot of mistakes.
Who do you not have on the board that you would most like to have on the board?
Don't care.
As I said, the board is not the most important thing for me as an advisor.
Yeah, even for me, the executive committee and the team leaders I'm working with are way more important than the board, and I shouldn't say that that's fine, no one listens, it's fine, no one listens.
At the end, it's the guys who do the things, and they challenge me even more than the board.
So you can be CEO of any other company for a day.
Which company do you choose?
Oh, the government.
The government?
Yeah, I have to be president.
Of Belgium?
Yes.
What would you change?
Oh, education.
Why is education broken?
It's very slow.
They don't have good expectation 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.
Wow.
Is Indian education better than Belgian?
No.
In Belgium, all the schools are average good.
In India, you have from the very worst, very bad, to very, very good ones.
So the range is much broader.
But you have extremely good schools in India.
Do you pay people differently depending on geography?
Yes, of course.
There's not uniform salaries?
No.
I think you should pay people very differently based on competencies too.
The best people should have much more than the other ones.
Do you have transparency around salaries?
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 on our website.
People say if the candidate's really obsessed about title, they're not good.
Do you agree?
No, I understand that 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.
You can buy, you're an investor now for a second.
You can buy OpenAI at 160 billion, Anthropic at 40 or X at 50.
I don't like both of them.
Why not?
They are both risky.
They are both difficult.
It's difficult to say what will happen with both.
First, I 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.
What do you do with your money today?
I still, 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.
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 billion.
The small amount of money I have 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 the do.
Does that make bringing children up easier?
If I gave you 2.6 billion?
It doesn't change anything, because I'm still the same man than 10 years before, so...
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.
It doesn't change anything to me.
What about the way that your parents brought you up?
Have you done differently with your children?
My father, he was an auction house, selling old stuff, more in the modern stuff.
But he teach me that work is important.
He was and is still today working 10 to 12 hours per day.
He's working even more than me sometimes.
What question have I not asked that I should have asked?
I think you're good at your job.
If I were to say to you, Odu, 10 years time, what would be a great answer?
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, but I'm sadly not too young, I don't think, but teach me.
MS-DOS, Dr. DOS, Unix, Minix.
It started with a lot of operating systems.
I'm too young, yeah.
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, Word, WordPerfect, and everything, Lotus 1.2.3.
Fast forward today, it's only Microsoft Office and Google Workspace.
And now comes, in addition to the technical complexity and the UX complexity, we also have the complexity of businesses.
Companies are complex.
I do believe that management software will follow the same trends.
Today there are plenty of factors, but in the future such technology will be a commodity like so much mature that there will be one, two or three players that will have the world market.
That's my goal.
I have to do it just to survive.
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 like sycophantically, but what an amazing guy.
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.
Thank you.
It's good.
You know, the world needs more entrepreneurs like Fabian.
What an incredible, authentic 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.
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