20VC：从比利时乡间打造出一家50亿美元公司｜Odoo的故事：一家不打算出售、不打算IPO的公司，以及一位不在乎金钱的亿万富翁创始人——Fabien Pinckaers，Odoo创始人兼CEO

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 Odoo. We never sold shares. We will never sell. No, there will never be an IPO.

When I was 26, I purchased the domain name sorrysap.com because I thought that one day I would be much bigger than them, and then I would use this domain name.

Fabien, I am so excited for this. 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.

1. Early Entrepreneurial Experiments

You started your first business at 13 with a business management software company. What's the story there?

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

Were you aware that you were building a business and that you wanted 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 live for is to build software that people use, that has an impact for them. The money was great, but it was €150 at the time. It was just about doing something.

What happens next? Then you're in school. You're 15 or 16. Were you just the smartest kid in school, and was school easy?

I didn't go to the lectures. I was more focused on doing business, having fun, and drinking beers. But I continued developing software for companies during university. I did a lot of things, like e-commerce, antivirus, and games. I had a T-shirt company and lots of different things.

You had a T-shirt company?

Yeah.

What was that about?

I am passionate about open source, Linux, and so on. So I did an e-commerce business with Linux T-shirts and ties, Debian, and everything. I sold a lot, but it was really painful to post all these T-shirts every day.

My God, do you realize the challenges of actually selling physical products?

It started to be a logistics challenge for a student who wanted to drink beer.

Oh, my God.

It was not great.

I love that. What would you say was your first real business? You had an art marketplace, no?

Yes. That's a big one.

It outsold eBay.

Yeah, I was selling more objects than eBay Belgium—15,000 items per month. At the time, I was working with auction houses, antique dealers, and art dealers, and I started to become one of the biggest in Belgium.

Was that making much money?

Not so much. The business model was terrible. I think I made something like €5,000 per month, which, for me as a student, was great, but for what I built, it was nothing.

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

2. Odoo Starts As A Suite

I'm passionate about development, of course, and management, and Odoo was, for me, a way of putting all my passions together in a single piece of software. I had all these different activities—T-shirts, art marketplaces, antique dealers, and everything—and at some point I said, "Okay, I will stop everything and focus on one thing that I really like: building management software."

That's what I did with Odoo. I started small with the auction houses. They were my customers for e-commerce websites.

What was your first product?

I did the opposite of the traditional approach. Usually, you start with an MVP, a small product. I did the complete opposite. I did everything. I started with accounting, logistics, purchasing, and everything at once, so it took me 2 years to build the first version of the product.

Was that the right decision? We are trained in MVP and lean startup. You went for, as my team called it, the fat startup, which is doing it all first.

I remember an article by 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." I had this theory in mind that I wanted 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. It was very risky because it took time to monetize and get to something that I could sell. But now that I look back, it's probably what made Odoo what it is today, because I thought about the big picture. Everything works smoothly together, and it's not a batch 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. I built features and features and features.

Which is what we're told not to do.

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

Wow. But, okay, so you scaled to 100 people with a professional-services, very hands-on approach.

Yes.

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 was one time. When you're close to bankruptcy, it's for months and months and months. 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 make bad trade-offs.

But because of that, I was the main shareholder, so I didn't need money at the time.

Why did you not raise money?

Initially, I wasn't thinking about it. I was building the business, growing the company, and focusing on that. I wanted to keep the majority of the shares. Then, in 2010, I had to pivot the business model. I wanted to stop the services activities and refocus as a software vendor. That's when I raised my first round.

So, in 2010, we go, “We want to focus on software and we want to be less services.” Talk to me about that decision and how you came to it.

That's what I wanted to do initially, from the beginning, but it got to a point where the software was very complete but had a shit user interface. I wasn't happy about it, and I thought, “Now it's time to refocus and invest in R&D and build a software model where I get recurring revenues and everything.”

So I decided to stop all my services activities from one day to the next.

Wow.

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

How much did you raise in that fundraiser?

€3 million.

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

Very well, actually. This time. The second time, not so much. As a Belgian company, there aren't 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.

I got something like 10 offers in the end, which was quite good, so I picked the best one.

Wow. Who did you pick?

Sofinnova Partners was leading the round.

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

It was €7 million pre-money, so €10 million post-money.

Wow, so 30% of the company.

Yeah.

Wow.

That was not a good valuation.

That was a good deal for them, though. Crikey.

Yeah.

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?

Odoo is open source, so even though I started a software vendor model, we were still open source. What we were selling was maintenance, support, bug fixes, and things like that—maintenance contracts.

So we stopped our service activities and built a partner network all around the world. It worked well. The thing is, most customers paid for the first year, but after the 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. They just continued using the software but stopped paying me.

Wow. Okay.

What do we do now? That's a problem.

3. Open Core Saves Odoo

After 2 years, I got close to zero money in the bank account again. So I had to do another pivot in the business model. 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 switch to open core, 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 2 weeks left or something.

Are you sleeping?

Not that much at the time, because you have problems. We had pressure from the board. You had issues with the business. Everything goes together when you don't have money.

It's very hard, but we made it, so it's okay.

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

Then everything gets really good. During all these years, Odoo built software and a community. We had big software and a big community, but no revenues or limited revenues. Once we started to monetize efficiently, everything went very smoothly.

It's different because we used to fight to survive. That was our main motivation: just surviving and optimizing everything because we had no cash. From one year to another, we got a lot of cash, the business model worked, and we had no more cash issues. We had to find our motivations elsewhere.

Absolutely love this. Okay, so open core starts going really well. What does that mean? Are we making a lot of money? What sort of revenues are we at now?

Something like €15 million.

And so what happens then? We just progress with open core and continue to scale?

That's the business model we still have today.

Sure.

We grew on top of that. 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 growth, there are always challenges. There are always problems with culture and scaling teams. What are the first things that broke?

One of the big issues I had at the time was that I deceived the community, because I built the community with an open-source mindset: “We are open source. We will always be open source. Proprietary is bad. We are not like that,” and things like that.

I fought to keep this open-source business model, but we got to the point where we were close to bankruptcy, so I had to switch. When I switched to open core, it started a big fight with the community. They felt deceived because we had built them on another story.

The marketing was very bad. A lot of people criticized us. Our partners were leaving and trying to find competitors. But the product was good, so the majority of them stayed with the product. Looking back, if I had pitched it to them correctly—“We are open source today, but maybe in the future we will need to monetize”—then I wouldn't have had that many issues.

Do you think a great product always wins?

Yes, and I'm sure about that. We've had difficulties, but the thing that kept us going was the product.

Okay. Why is it, then, that we're told, “Focus on distribution. Focus on marketing. Focus on brand”? If a great product always won, the world would look very different.

But in the end, great products always win, no? You can save time with marketing. You can save 2 or 3 years. You can grow the company. But at some point, you cannot avoid it—the product matters.

I'm in a market that is very slow. ERPs are very slow. ERP is still shitty after 20 years of Microsoft Dynamics, too. In 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?

4. Pricing Shapes Growth

The worst decisions I made, and the best ones, were around pricing.

Mm.

I made a very bad pricing change. When you have difficulties, you try to change everything. So I changed the product, the business model, the service you sell, and the pricing. At the time, we were changing the pricing every year, which was very complex.

Changing the pricing every year?

Yeah, we were experimenting.

Wow.

One of the worst decisions I made was one of these price changes. We probably lost 1 year of growth because when you work with partners, if it doesn't work, it takes time to rebuild the trust and everything.

What was wrong with the pricing?

The way Odoo works is that you have a suite of business apps: CRM, e-commerce, accounting, and so on.

You have so many products.

Yes. At that point, I wanted to have a price that grew with the value of the software. The more users you have, the bigger the price, as usual. But also, the more applications you have, the bigger the price.

So I set a price that was €10 times the number of users times the number of applications you used. It was growing very aggressively. It was too high, so the partners didn't like it. They pushed back heavily. They refused to sell it. It was really difficult.

But when you have a partner network and you change the price, you never know. The partners always react to any change, so you never know if it's because the price is wrong or because of the transition and the resistance to change.

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.” It took us about 9 months to go back to the old price. It was very hard for the company.

Incredibly challenging, working with partner networks and pricing. You also did a pricing change in 2022?

That was one of our best decisions.

Yeah. I saw the numbers post-pricing, and it's like this—it's up and to the right. Why was that such a good decision in hindsight?

This price change was actually to decrease the price for smaller clients and increase it for the larger clients. For the smaller clients, we were actually too expensive. For all our applications, it was something around €120 per user per month.

But if you have a single user or 2 users, €120 is still a budget. So we decreased it to €20 at a time when everybody was increasing their prices because of inflation. We said, “Okay, let’s decrease it to €20.” Acquisition started to boost very quickly. We attracted 2.8 times more clients from that date onward.

Wow. That’s insane. How were you acquiring customers in the early days? What did that look like in terms of the marketing acquisition funnel?

In the 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 our leads are from word of mouth.

Going back to the point of product winning.

You need a strong product to do that.

Yeah.

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

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

I agree. I agree, but I see that in terms of the speed of how you build your assets. For me, it’s the product. It’s very important to move forward fast, evolve very quickly, innovate, and also build a business. It’s not so much about building 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 what leads to such large revenue numbers today.

At the end, it’s true. It’s big, yeah.

Totally. What was the hardest thing 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 have no other options, it’s very hard, too.

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

Yeah. The second was the same.

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

In every fundraising, the timing is the most important thing, and for me, the timing was not right at the time. We raised €7 million at a valuation of €23 million pre-money—

Mm-hmm.

—so €30 million post-money. It was a time when we needed money.

How much revenue were we at?

I don’t know exactly. Maybe €20 million.

€20 million in revenue?

Yeah.

And you were doing it at a €30 million post-money valuation?

Yes.

Oh.

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

Wow. How did that fundraise go?

It was not great. We got 1 offer from XAnge, but only 1.

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, and the traction wasn’t there. We had difficulties becoming profitable. We had growth, but not exceptional growth—regular growth.

Wow, that is amazing. What a great deal there.

One thing that people particularly like today is vertical SaaS because it’s a lot more targeted toward 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.

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

Instead of being the best in 1 industry, what we wanted to be was the best in applications. We wanted to be the best CRM, the best accounting software, or the best website builder. That’s the way we see things—not based on the customer, but based on the applications.

As these applications mature, pretty much all CRMs look the same today. It’s not so much about CRM for this 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.

5. Commoditizing Business Software

My vision is to commoditize the management software market. When you see it as commoditization, I think everybody will use the same CRM, the same accounting software, and the same website builder. It doesn’t have to be dedicated to 1 industry. It’s like a phone: Whatever your industry, you use the same phone.

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

If you look today, small and midsize companies 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, and WordPress for a website. They have plenty of applications.

These applications don’t integrate well with each other. It costs a lot to maintain them, and it’s not completely efficient. Nobody has succeeded in offering 1 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. likely SAP tried. Oracle with NetSuite tried. But the adoption rate on the market is still very low, less than 10%.

I do believe that once you get to the maturity level, management software will be like Office. Everybody uses the same Word, Excel, Slides, PowerPoint, and everything. I think management software is going to be the same. When it gets mature, perfectly integrated, and very affordable, then you can transform the market and offer this product at very low prices.

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 complex software—because companies are complex—and make it super easy, it’s more about having the right people, a few of them, a few genius guys, rather than having an army of 10,000 developers. We have that. We are extremely good developers and have good management. We are extremely focused.

I think as companies grow, they defocus themselves. You have middle management that wants to launch new departments and new products. We have been focused all along on 1 singular thing: improving our product.

I did want to talk about the team because you said to me earlier that Odoo never recruits VPs, managers, or even team leaders.

Yes.

That’s very unusual. Why?

6. Building Without Managers

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 external managers and team leaders coming with their habits—probably good habits, but not in our environment.

The other reason is that the way I see team leaders is that they are not there to manage people. At Odoo, we have no planning, no budget, no forecast, none of this, and no process.

What I expect from a team leader is simple: They have a team. Just make your team become better. That’s the only objective I have for a team leader. In order to do that, you have to be the best on the team. There is no way you can make a team of developers become better developers if you are not the best developer on the team yourself. When you recruit external managers, they’re probably not as good as your team already is.

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

We do have a budget, but that’s the role of the CFO and the finance team, and we don’t share that with the teams. The budget is just about whether we can recruit, yes or no, and how much. That’s it.

The team leaders don’t have to worry about that. Even the directors 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 efficient”?

You don’t need to measure. You know. When you work with the team—and that’s what I expect from the team leader, to work with the people—you know who’s good and who’s not. You don’t need to put in a KPI.

I’m pretty sure in your teams you know who is good and who is not just by working with them.

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

We do have a forecast. The CFO has a forecast just to check that the cash is okay. But apart from that, it’s more about rational thinking: “I need to buy this. Is it worth it? Is the investment worth it?”

If you give people a budget, they’ll just spend the budget. If you don’t give them a budget, they’ll have to spend responsibly. And so we teach our team leaders to be responsible.

Do you get them to set goals?

No.

No?

No. What kind of goal can you give to a developer? It’s very subjective. You can say, “Develop this task.” Maybe you can do it today.

This task by this timeline? Hit this number of users?

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

On some teams, like the salespeople, we have goals, obviously. They have sales targets, but it’s an exception. Most of the teams don’t have them. I have a story about that.

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

I’m from Belgium, and 10 years ago, the company in the US was struggling to grow. So I needed to relocate myself, and I went there for 2 years. When I arrived there, we had 10 consultants, and they were completely overloaded. Too many clients and projects. It was a real mess, and the quality of what we were delivering was not great.

I asked one of our best consultants from Belgium to come to the US and help me restructure that, grow the team, take the most complex projects, and deliver them. This guy came to the US. I had a director in the US at that time who told me, “Here is how I manage a team. I have KPIs about customer satisfaction, time to deliver a project, and the number of applications deployed.”

I told him, “No, no, don’t do that. Just focus on delivering your project.” He said, “No, I need these KPIs. How can you manage?” I couldn’t convince him to drop his KPIs, so I waited to see what happened. After 3 months, the guy who had the worst KPIs was the top expert I had brought from Belgium to deliver all the projects. He said, “You see?”

When you look at the numbers, you understand why he had the worst KPIs: we gave him all the terrible projects that were complex to deliver. Things are very subjective. If you put KPIs in place, it’s very difficult. It was obvious to 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 projects.

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? Great people often want big titles.

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

Tell me about how you recruit young people so successfully, because you have such a big team now. In Belgium, there are 1,800, you said?

Yes, 5,000 in total.

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

The way we proceed is that we assess people on the job. If a developer applies, we ask them to develop. For a salesperson, we ask them to do a demo and pitch the product. That’s it. 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 for the performance of the person.

With the first being how good they are at the core action.

The first being how good you are at development.

Yeah.

One of the issues I had with the recruiters at the time was that if they were talking for 30 or 40 minutes about the resume and doing the test for 2 hours, the way they assess people is based on how much time they spend talking about a topic. If you discuss the resume a lot, then it will impact the way you 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 got 19%, 20%, or 90%, but you don’t spend time on it. You just get a number. I had to train them to say, “No, this IQ test is really important. Your discussion of the resume is not so important, so spend less time on that.”

So the IQ test is the second-biggest predictor?

Yes.

Fascinating. 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.

That’s it?

Our process is extremely fast. It’s 1 meeting, and we decide right away. Usually, we recruit within 5 days, and everything is automated. You apply online, and you can book your meeting with the interviewer right away in their calendar. Then you get a meeting within 2, 3, or 4 days. After the meeting, the next day, you get an offer.

Wow.

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

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

If you are recruiting smart people, it’s quite easy to notice. If you watch a developer develop for 3 hours, you probably know at the end if they’re good or not.

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

Those are really exceptions. The majority of the time, people will fit in your culture. If your culture is great—and I’ll come to what ours is—I do believe that most people match.

Really?

Sometimes you have an 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 6 months. Even before that, the problem is for younger team leaders 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 on?

It’s always competencies. For me, you will either succeed or you will never succeed. For us, probably more than 90% of the people we dismiss are dismissed because of competencies. They’re not good developers, or they don’t understand sales.

We’re often characterized in a certain way. We’re both European—I’m a proud Londoner, and you’re a proud Belgian. People always say that young people in Europe 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 we used to have 20 years ago. But the new generation wants to work. They’re ready to work a lot, do a great thing, and we did a great thing because the average age at Odoo is 26. We built a company of 5,000 people with millions of users.

The average age is 26?

26 years old. So it’s young, and we built something big with millions of users. 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.

The average age is 26?

Yes.

Do you ever worry about emotional maturity? As I get older, I look at how much I’ve changed. When I was younger, I was more rash, faster, and more emotional, and now I’m more thoughtful and deliberate, calmer. Is that ever a challenge?

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

How do you structure training?

There’s 1 month of onboarding, where you have a lot of e-learning, tests, exercises, certifications—everything. Then it’s more about coaching on the job by the team leader.

So the team leader is responsible for the training of their teams?

No. During the first month, we have a dedicated team to train everybody. 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 a quite small team, around 10 people.

10 people per—

One team leader is responsible for around 10 people.

Okay, got you. They have weekly team meetings, and that’s like—

We don’t have a lot of meetings. I forbid recurring meetings at the company. They can have meetings for a specific task or training, but not recurring meetings. A recurring meeting is a way to manage people, and we try to avoid managers. We want team leaders who work with their teams, so we try to avoid recurring meetings.

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

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

Sure. Do you like remote work?

It’s okay. I don’t do it, but—

Are there any other elements of traditional management that we always hear about—recurring meetings, a huge emphasis on culture fit—that you would question? Are there any other elements of management where you think, “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 coffee with someone, or going to events. 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. The other 50% is improving our internal processes.

What does that mean, improving your internal processes?

It changes month by month. If our marketing is not good enough, I will work 1 or 2 months with marketing.

If the service needs some pivot or improvements, I will work there. Sometimes it's in a country. I was in India for 1 year this year because the company was not growing enough, so I relocated myself for 1 year.

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 in the US, it was not that easy.

How was that? You were in Gujarat.

Yes.

Yeah. How was going to India for you, packing up with your 2 kids and wife?

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

Why was India not growing?

When you grow a company from 1 to 10, it's a real challenge. But when you grow from 10 to 100 people, it's a different challenge. 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. The company only had 200 employees for 7 years, and it couldn't grow.

The guy was good. It's just that he needed some help. So I came there to help, and we grew to 800 people. It's still the same team, so it's still the same managers. I replaced nobody because they were all very good. It's just that they needed a little bit of help.

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

Yeah, now we have 800 employees. We grew contracts. When I arrived there, we were signing 16 new clients per month. It's nothing. Now we are around 800 per month.

Wow.

And it's growing. It continues to grow.

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

For 1 to 10, it's about building the business. It could be the product or the service offering. It's all about you and the team working on improving the business and the product.

From 10 to 100 is the time when your job changes. As a founder, you start to have middle managers, and so the culture is not you anymore. It's the middle managers and the way they behave with the people. You spend way more time communicating to ensure that the culture is aligned, that everybody's aligned, and so on.

Going above 1,000, 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 who are perfect in everything, you will get people who are average in everything. If you want people who speak multiple languages, who are good developers, who are good communicators, and so on, they're probably going to be average.

So if you dismiss people because they are bad at something, expect to have people who are average in everything. If you want people who transform your company, they have to be extremely good at something. For that, you will have to accept their weaknesses.

I train our recruiters to look for the strengths and accept some of the weaknesses. Some you can't, but it's important not to look for people. When you discuss the aftermath of the interview, it's more about whether he is a very good developer or very good at something, and not about, “I think he doesn't speak that language very well,” or, “He doesn't do that.” You focus on where he is good rather than on his weaknesses.

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

For me, it really depends on the department. 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. 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.

Oh.

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.” We are entrepreneurs, and as entrepreneurs we are always optimistic. We want things to work, and we think it's going to get better. Even if it doesn't work with someone, we always think it's going to get better. You can't survive as an entrepreneur if you are not optimistic.

So when you start to think negatively about someone, like, “It doesn't work. I don't want to work with him,” that's probably because it's too late.

And so you would fire sooner?

Yes.

In terms of sooner, you mentioned India and the incredible scaling from 16 to 800 or whatever it is. Going into different geographies and 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?

7. Scaling Through Local Leaders

The key is not so much the country or the city. The key is to find the right director. You can have the best location—you go to San Francisco or Silicon Valley—and if 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 important, especially for us as a SaaS player where we sell everything online. That's why we have a company in Buffalo. Nobody goes to Buffalo in the US. It's because we had an amazing guy on our team, we wanted to do something with him, and we said, “We want you to create a company.” He wanted to go to Buffalo, so we said, “Okay, create it in Buffalo.”

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

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

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

No, we don't work with a budget. But we have people who are responsible. Because we only do internal promotions, they are people we've worked with for years, so we know they're going to be good and they'll spend efficiently. We don't have that kind of issue, I would say.

You only do internal promotions?

Yes. We never recruit managers or directors. Never, ever. Even when we open a subsidiary in a different country.

You send them out?

Yes. One thing I try to do, too, is never go to tier-1 cities. I think it's much better to go to tier-2 cities.

Why?

The key when you scale a business is retention. When you go to tier-1 cities—we have an office in San Francisco, so we didn't always follow that—

As an exception.

Yes.

Exception.

We learned from that.

Was it bad?

Retrospectively, if I had opened it elsewhere, I would have preferred that, yes.

Why?

Because you are next to Google, Microsoft, and Apple. How can you get the best people with that? 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 to growing your business: people retention.

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

For every job, take a salesperson. In his first 2 years, he will sell X. When he has 3, 4, or 5 years of experience, he will sell double. If you keep him only 3 years, you will have much less efficiency than if you keep him for 5, 6, or 7 years.

Do you think people are destined for certain stages of company development? It's a Silicon Valley trope that, “Oh, he's a 0-to-1 person,” or, “She's a 0-to-1 person, but they're not an at-scale person.”

No, I think it's possible for some people, but smart people can evolve. The majority of the people who are still working with me have been with me since the beginning. We grew from 1 to 5,000.

Can I ask you—you mentioned that you're around Google, Facebook, and all the big players in San Francisco. You are in intensely competitive markets. This week I interviewed 2 people, Fabien at Odoo and Marc Benioff at Salesforce. You compete with the biggest companies in the world. How do you think about competition?

I feel like we have no competition. We have plenty of competitors, but I don't feel like we have competition. I'll explain why.

We are a suite of business apps. Whatever you need, we have it, like a CRM, accounting, logistics. We do everything the companies need, and we do it extremely affordably. You start with €20. It's €20 per user, and you get all these apps.

Nobody did that. Nobody succeeded. In the market, you have 2 types of players. You have the large players like SAP and Microsoft.

They have several applications, but it’s shitty, slow, expensive, and people aren’t happy using it. Then you have the small players like Slack, Mailchimp for sending email, 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 has succeeded in combining the benefits of both: having all the applications that a company needs while being extremely simple and affordable. For me, it’s more about cracking something that nobody has succeeded in cracking rather than competing against others.

How would you feel if someone said, “Oh, we’re with Odoo because they’re the cheapest”?

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 and make technology affordable. Obviously, I would prefer that it—

It goes against all the lessons, though. Marc Andreessen, a very famous investor, always says—I mean, literally, we release the show today and Marc Andreessen says, “If you own a small company, charge small prices. If you own a medium company, charge medium prices. If you own a big company, charge 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.

Do you think we’re in a race, then?

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, predominantly. How do you think about your ultimate cash cow if we’re doing commoditization to the bottom?

Why is that important? We don’t have cash issues. We are growing. Since 2014, we haven’t raised money anymore.

Uh-huh.

We are profitable, so why would I charge more if I have all the money I need to accelerate?

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 that our team got from, like, 2023, and it was, like, $200 million or whatever it was.

Yeah. We grow by almost 50% per year.

Wow. Okay, fuck. Okay, but $550 million. If you want to become a $100 billion 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. What I want to do is develop Odoo. That’s what I would like to do. I don’t care about money. I don’t need money. Why should I care about valuation when—

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

Okay.

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 valuation, but it’s not what should drive you. It’s way more important to deliver software that transforms companies and has an impact on 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 in order to raise your Series B? What revenue do you need to get to in order to get your Series C?”

I’m not an investor. What I would look at is the product and 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.

What—

We get so much cash that I can 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 could burn much more on 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 midsize companies, it starts to be.

At what stage did you start to see your brand build?

When we started to invest in marketing more aggressively, like 4 or 5 years ago.

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

Yeah.

The other thing you mentioned earlier was that you have to be optimistic as a founder. It’s 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 SorrySAP.com because I thought that one day I would be much bigger than them, and then I would use this domain name. I was just 26 years old.

I love that.

I was really thinking that I would, in 5 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 version 14, I guess, because that was a really good version. In my opinion, it was much better than SAP at the time. We used the domain name and replaced the homepage with one big word: “Sorry SAP.”

How is 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 don’t know how they can survive what’s coming for them. We have so many years of advantage ahead. We are stealing so many clients from 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 much more known, but they don’t have a good brand. They have a huge market, so their customer base is massive. Where they succeed today is with large corporations. In small and midsize companies, they failed. With 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.

Yeah.

For me, it was clearly about having a leader—someone who trains the others and can explain everything. That’s important. For us, scaling the system is all about the product. We teach them by doing a lot of demos. They do 2 demos per day, and once they do that for a few weeks, they start to become good.

2 demos per day?

Yes.

8. The Inbound Growth Engine

When the product is so cheap, what’s the ACV, the average contract value?

It’s 3,500 ARR.

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

We don’t do outbound.

You don’t do outbound?

We only do inbound. We’re not typical.

Why did we not do outbound even now, at half a billion in revenue?

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

So before this, up to half a billion in revenue, you were only doing inbound leads?

Yes.

Wow.

But we get a lot of leads.

Okay. So why did we decide to do outbound now?

As we are getting very mature, we are starting to launch applications per industry. We have applications for plumbers, for restaurants, for every industry. We launched in 50 industries, and that’s easier with an outbound strategy. But we’re just testing, and we have 30 people out of something like 1,800 salespeople.

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

It’s a matter of product-market fit. We have the product we have, and this product already answers the needs of 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’ve touched on CEOs and hiring.

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

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

No. We only have 1 product, 1 way to deliver the service, and only 3 big departments. All our companies, everywhere, operate the same way. Our product is only 400,000 lines of code. Even though it looks like it’s complex because it does a lot of things, it’s still extremely simple. No, I still feel that we are a very simple company.

How do they defocus, then?

They launch new products and new departments. They have marketing ideas of X. They spend time meeting clients, in the press, and everything. When you start to have managers, managers of managers, and team leaders, they all want to do something. They all have ideas, and the complexity is that there is a dark force that pushes everyone to complexify the company.

And to keep your company simple, you always have to fight back against that.

My favorite is brainstorming meetings. Fuck, I hate brainstorming meetings.

Yeah.

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 had communicated better with 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 1 year in the development of the company if we had 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 1 year. Still today, you have negative people claiming, “Oh, but you are not really open source.” We still have negative comments from time to time about that period, but it was a few years ago.

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

Yes.

What was the transaction? Talk to me about that.

9. Liquidity Without An Exit

It was €500 million at a 5 billion valuation. It was Summit Partners, one of our earlier investors, who sold to Sequoia Capital, BlackRock, Mubadala, and CapitalG.

Okay, so €500 million at $5 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. You're doing half a billion in revenue, growing 50% year on year. 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 Odoo. We never sold shares. So for us, if the price is low, that's fine—except in this transaction.

Wow. You were buying shares every round?

Every round, we were buying shares, to the point where we got a big loan because we don't have money. We are just simple people, so we got 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 3 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? Is that early employees?

It was Summit Partners, mostly. It was also a secondary transaction; we acquired shares from them in 2019.

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

No. Since 2014, we haven't done any fundraising. It's only secondary transactions.

Can I ask how much of the company you have?

57%. So I only did 2 fundraisings at very bad valuations, but I still kept the majority of the shares.

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

Yeah, but as I said, it's on 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.

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.

Why do you not want to sell, ever?

Because it's much better to transform companies, change the world, and disrupt SAP than have money and go to 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. I don't want to refocus everybody on earnings calls, quarterly results, and that kind of thing.

Second, I don't want the constraints and the complexity that come with being public. I like to be able to say anything. I could say, “I think Odoo is worth way more than 5 billion, maybe 7 billion.” But if I were public, I couldn't say that. So I like to be open, to be able to disclose whatever I want, and not have the reporting. I want to keep the company simple, and for that, I prefer to avoid an 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 from the beginning with every investor that there is no IPO and no industrial exit. It's going to be secondary transactions. They all agreed for one reason: if you have a really good business—a really, really good business—that is growing like crazy, profitable, with the best KPIs you can get, it's going to be easy to sell.

And you do that on a staged basis every 3 years?

Yeah, every 3 or 4 years. When one of the investors wants to sell, we help them sell.

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

No.

Okay.

No, that's 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, CapitalG, BlackRock, and Mubadala. It's just the best you can get.

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

They will continue, but other challengers 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 are plenty of good use cases in AI, but there is also plenty of overrating of AI.

What's overrated?

Agentforce, which they presented during Dreamforce—the use case where Marc Benioff showed that you can call a help desk, ask for information about your order, and then change your order. For that, you have a very good UX, a good portal. You click on a button in your email and then change your order online. 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. 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 now have 98.5% recognition on invoices and bills and everything, which is better than humans, and that transformed the market. Now accountants don't need to record data in the system anymore. They just validate.

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

10. AI Starts With Problems

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 at where people are wasting time and where they are inefficient, and then you get to good use cases.

From this problem, what is the best solution? Sometimes it's just UX, a very well-done feature that saves them a lot of time. Sometimes it's AI; sometimes it's a different algorithm. 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 also be very disruptive use cases, so even if that happens, we'll win a lot of things.

Do you have a board for your company?

Yes, 5 people.

Do you like it?

It's one of the only things that I don't like. I don't like doing presentations in general.

Why?

I prefer to work on the product, improve the marketing department or the salespeople, rather than write PowerPoint presentations. Having said that, yes, there was a time when I didn't like it, but now it's good because we have good investors.

When you look at your own CEO role, 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 down a little bit. I don't like that.

Would you say that you're also the CPO, the chief product officer?

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah. But I'm also working in marketing. I'm the head of marketing. I'm also working a lot with the other departments, including the service department, so I'm doing a lot of things.

Which is the least natural for you?

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

I trust you on that. 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—

Yeah.

What does Odoo need to do to become a $100 billion company?

Continue doing what we do today.

Growing 50%.

Not defocusing, innovating year after year at 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—

Yes, a lot.

The biggest of the biggest.

Yes. Thanks to SAP S/4HANA, which is a disaster. Nobody wants to go there, 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 and the way we pitch and sell are 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? I'm just too interested.

This market is owned by service companies, so when you want to buy an ERP, it costs millions in services, implementation, and everything. As a software vendor, what I want to do is lower the amount of 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 into production and everything. Because we try to sell the least service possible, that changed a lot in our implementation methodologies. We developed methodologies over time that are extremely efficient, without focusing too much on the heaviness of traditional methodologies.

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

For us, it was the culture.

Mm-hmm.

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's excited. But I know that the first, 1, 2, or 3 months are difficult because it's going to be a culture clash.

For instance, our teams are extremely efficient and direct. They sometimes don't work very well with the culture of large companies. They just want to deliver and move forward, and we sometimes have a culture clash within the first or second month. Then both companies align themselves, and the project gets smooth. But we often have that.

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

Yes, obviously. The culture for me at Odoo is at least three things for the people: autonomy, responsibility, 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 and the tools to do it.

Even one-way-door decisions?

Yes. But people are smart. If they're not sure, they'll still ask. They can decide whatever they want, but you know that they're smart, so they won't do things that are against the company.

What was the second one?

Responsibility. People must take responsibility. Young people are not responsible by default. School and the education system killed that, so we have to train them to decide.

How do you train them to be responsible?

It's the way you behave with them. Let's say you have a salesperson who needs to do a demo for a client. He comes to your office and says, "I need a barcode scanner for my demo. Can I buy one for $50?"

I don't know. If you answer, he will always ask you. If you tell him, "You're smart. You know if it's worth it or not. Decide," the way you behave with people will force them to take responsibility.

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

Yeah.

How do you feel about that?

Having a process that controls what they spend would cost more. If you have a purchasing department and this guy has to ask the purchasing department just to buy a $30 scanner, it'll cost you more than $30. It will waste maybe 5 days just to get the product, whereas at Odoo he can just buy online on Amazon and get reimbursed right away. It's a good trade-off.

You said evolution and growth. People want titles when they grow. It's a way of showing their progression.

Yeah.

"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 and you have team leads, how do you think about evolution and signifying it?

On titles, at Odoo we have something funny: everybody chooses a title. Some people take funny titles; other people say "Director of X." We don't care. We print a business card. They decide what title they want us to put on it, because I want to kill that. What matters is what you do, not the title you have.

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

Yes, but people are smart. Most people won't do that. What you will do is "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 for one that really comes to mind, is there any that comes to mind?

The business model has been hard. It took me 15 years to get to the right business model: the open-core business model. I tried being a service company, then I tried selling maintenance and support. Then I tried SaaS. SaaS worked, and then I moved to open core.

I've so enjoyed doing this. You are an incredible CEO, CMO, and CPO. You've built this insane business. You've also got 2 kids. How do you balance being a father to 2 children and being the CEO of a now 5,000-person company?

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 you 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 2 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 teams at Odoo.

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 of how you manage the community." The switch in the business model took me too much time to—

That one's really stuck with you, hasn't it?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, because I went too far. I really wanted to build something open source. It was my passion, and I went to the level where I couldn't pay salaries for years and years.

It's funny because what I wanted to do was build open-source software. That was my purpose. When I decided to switch to an open-core business model and said, "It's not 100% open source anymore. It's only 80% open source and 20% for a fee," I could 10x the development team. So now I'm contributing way more to open source than before. It was a bad computation on 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 when you build such a business with a 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 that my expectations are misaligned with their expectations. Like you, I work like a founder. I work my ass off. I'm obsessed. But to people who work in our companies, it's a job.

That's fine. I understand. 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. I say a short statement, and 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—2 hours per month, 4 hours per month—to be as deep as you are in the business. So I do believe they add value to pinpoint elements and to challenge you. But in the end, the solution always has to come from you. They give you their point of view and challenge you, but they will never tell you what to do. At least if you treat them that way, you may make a lot of mistakes.

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

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

As an advisor.

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

No, it's fine. No one listens.

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

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

The government.

The government?

Yeah. I have to be president then.

Of Belgium?

Yes.

What would you change?

Education and the economy.

Why is education broken?

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

Wow. Is Indian education better than Belgian education?

No. In Belgium, all the schools are, on average, good. In India, you have everything from very bad to very good, 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 aren't uniform salaries for everyone?

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 are cars in Belgium. Choose your benefits and everything. It's online on our website.

People say that if a candidate is really obsessed with their title, they're not good. Do you agree?

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

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

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 going to board meetings and things like that. So that doesn't interest me.

What do you do with your money today?

I don't have a lot of money in my bank account, but if I have money, I will buy even more Odoo shares. It's the best investment I can make. 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 with this one, I'm sure it will do.

Yeah.

It's purely financial.

You say it's purely financial, but you don't give a shit about the financials, dude. Now, if you were to cash out—say, if I gave you $2.6 billion—

Yeah.

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

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 I was 10 years ago.

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

My father was an auctioneer, selling old stuff—I mean, more modern stuff. But he taught me how important hard work is. He was, and he still is 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, “Odoo, 10 years' time,” what would be a great answer?

11. Odoo's Long Term Future

To predict the future, you have to understand the past. If you look at the past, in IT, it started with operating systems. It started with MS-DOS, DR-DOS, Unix, and MINIX. It started with a lot of operating systems.

I'm too young. Yep, yeah.

Lots of operating systems. Fast-forward to today, and it's only Windows, iOS, and Linux. Then came Office. After the complexity of operating systems, when we were purely technical, came Office, with the complexity of user experience. Word, Excel, and all that. There were a lot of Office tools: Microsoft Works, WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, and everything. Fast-forward to today, and it's only Microsoft Office and Google Workspace.

Now, 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 players. But in the future, such technology will be a commodity, so mature that there will be 1, 2, or 3 players that will have the whole market. That's my goal at Odoo: just to survive.

It's so special for me to do shows like this. First, I mean, what an amazing business. But second—and I don't mean this sycophantically—what an amazing guy.

It's so rare to find someone who is so pure in their love for their company and their product. It really is just inspiring, dude. 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 for my ego to come here.