YouSaid · the spoken record

Fabien Pinckaers

lines on the record: 134
first: 2025-02-12
most recent: 2025-02-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“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.”
2025-02-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 advanced 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.”
2025-02-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 SEP.”
2025-02-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we used it when we released the version 14, I guess, because that was a really good version that was, I mean, my opinion much better than SCP at the time. So we used the domain name, we replaced the home page with one big word, sorry CP.”
2025-02-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 sorrysp.com because I thought that one day would be much bigger than them and then I would use this domain name. I just had 26 years old.”
2025-02-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not an investor. What I would look to is the product and the capability to build a product. At the end, it's always the best product that wins.”
2025-02-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 transforms companies who have an impact to your clients.”
2025-02-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't care. I mean, what I want to do is to develop Odo. 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...”
2025-02-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-02-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I think why is that important? I mean, we don't have cache 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?”
2025-02-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a way, it's true, but if you want to communitize the market and have every company on your software, you have to have a very small price.”
2025-02-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 against.”
2025-02-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, an accounting, a logistic. So we do everything the companies need. And we do it extremely affordable. You start with 20 euro, it's 20 euro 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 SCP 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, Send email, Trello, Asana, and so on. They do one thing very well. So it acquires a lot of users, but they only do one thing. Nobody succeeded to do the benefits of both. Have all the applications that the company needs and being extremely simple and affordable. So for me, it's more about cracking something that nobody succeeded to crack, rather than competing against others.”
2025-02-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 1 to 5,000.”
2025-02-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-02-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Retrospectively, if I would have opened it elsewhere, I would have preferred 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.”
2025-02-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The key when you scale a business is retention. And when you go to tier one cities, we have an office in San Francisco. We didn't always follow. But we learned from that. When you are next to...”
2025-02-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-02-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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 to you to create a company and build something. He wanted to go to Buffalo. So he said, okay, create it in Buffalo.”
2025-02-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Keep saying to myself when there is a doubt, there is no doubt. You know, we are entrepreneurs and as an entrepreneur, we are always optimistic. We want things to make it work. We think it's going to be better. And even if it doesn't work with someone, we always think it's going to be better. You can survive if you are not optimistic as an entrepreneur. And so when you start to think negatively about someone, like it doesn't work, I don't know how to work with him, that's probably because it's too late.”
2025-02-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me, it really depends on the departments. I have departments that are extremely flexible. They can accommodate anybody. You are not social, they will put you in a super heat office and so on. That's fine. So it really depends on the context.”
2025-02-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, with a good communicator, probably it's going to be average. So if you dismiss people because they are bad on something, expect to have average on everything. If you want people who transform your company, they have to be extremely good on something. And for that, you will have to accept their weaknesses. So I train recruiters to look for the strengths and accept some of the weaknesses. Some you can't, but it's important to not look for people. So when you discuss the aftermath of the interview is more about OEZ, a very good developer, easy, a very good something, and not about, I think it doesn't speak that language very well, or it doesn't do that. Focus on where is good rather than weakness.”
2025-02-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For 1 to 10 is about building the business. So it could be the product, the service offer, it's all about you and the team working on improving the business and the product. 10 to 100 is the time where your job changes. As a founder, you start to have middle managers, and so the culture is not you anymore. The middle manager and the way they behave with the people. So you spend way more time communicating to ensure that the culture is aligned, that everybody's aligned, so on. Going to above 1000 and more, it's all about scalability to make things super smooth and clean so that you keep growing.”
2025-02-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-02-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 1000, it's still a different challenge. The director there was one of our first empreers, 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.”
2025-02-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It changed month by month. It could be if we have E4 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.”
2025-02-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-02-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you look at the 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”
2025-02-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't have a lot of meetings. I forbid the recurring meeting in the company. They can do meetings, but on the job or for specific tasks or trainings, but not recurring meetings. I mean, recurring meeting is a way to manage people, and we try to avoid managers. We want team leaders that work with them. So we try to avoid recurring meetings.”
2025-02-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first month we have a dedicated team to train everybody, and after that they joined the team and then they did the team leader.”
2025-02-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-02-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-02-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 of Atto is 26. And we build 5,000 people company with 20.”
2025-02-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. He's not a good developer, he doesn't understand.”
2025-02-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even before the promise for younger team leaders to act, nobody wants to dismiss someone. So it's hard to act, but you quickly notice.”
2025-02-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's really exceptions. The majority of the time people will fit in your culture. If your culture is great, I will come to it after what we are. I do believe that most people match”
2025-02-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-02-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's it. And our process is extremely fast. It's one meeting. And we decide right away. So usually we recruit within five days. And everything is automated. So you apply online, you can book your meeting with the interviewer right away into his calendar. Then you get a meeting within two, three, four days.”
2025-02-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first being all 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 a topic. So if you discuss a lot about the resume, then it will impact the way you will qualify the candidate. So I ask them to stop working on the resume because the problem with the logic test is that they just get a number. It did 19% or 20 or 90. But you don't spend time on it. You just get a number. So I had to train them to say, no, this IQ test is really important. Your discussion on the resume is not so much, so spend less time on that.”
2025-02-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-02-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's easier to scale when you don't need to get the top people. I mean, you just recruit young people, a lot of them, and train them and make them evolve. It's easier than always looking at the best VP of X, the best manager's Office.”
2025-02-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Months, the guys who had the worst KPIs were the top expert I get from Belgium to deliver all the projects. And it says, and when you look at the number, then we understood the reason why I 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 it was the worst. It's just that we gave him the worst project.”
2025-02-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's so. I'm from Belgium. And we had the company in the US who 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. We have 10 to 3, but they were completely overloaded. Too many clients and projects was a real mess. And the quality was not great of what we were delivering. So I asked one of our best consultants from Belgium to come in the US and help me restructure the app, grow the team, take the most complex project and deliver them. And this guy came, went to the US. And I had a director in the US at that time who told me, here is how I manage the team, I have KPI about customer satisfaction, time to deliver a project, a number of applications deployed. And I told him, no, no, don't do that just focus on delivering your project. Say, no, I need this KPI. How can you manage? So I couldn't convince him to drop his KPIs. And so I waited to see what happened. So he did his KPI. And after three months,”
2025-02-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, on some teams, like the salespeople, we have goals, obviously, they have sales target, but it's an exception. Most of the teams don't have. I have a story about that.”
2025-02-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, what kind of gold can you give to a developer? I mean, it's very subjective, like develop this task, maybe you can do to that task.”
2025-02-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-02-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You don't need to measure, you know. When you walk 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 what's good or not. You don't need to put a KPI, I'm pretty sure in your teams, you know who is good and who's not just by working with them.”
2025-02-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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”
2025-02-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 to do, we have no planning, no budget, no forecast, none of this, no process. What I expect from a team leader is they have a team, just make your team become better. That's the only objectives I have on a team leader. And so in order to do that, you have to be the best of the team. There is no way you can make a team of developers become better developers if you are not the best developer of the team yourself. And when you recruit external managers, they are probably not as good as your team already.”
2025-02-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not so much about the money in order to build such a complex software because companies are complex, to make it super easy, it's more about having the right people, a few of them, a few genius guys, rather than having an army of 10,000 developers. And we get that. We are extremely good developers and good management. We are extremely focused. I think as companies grow, they defocus themselves. You will have middle management that want to launch their new departure.”
2025-02-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source