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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“If you look today, the small and mid-sized 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, WordPress for our website. They have plenty of application. These applications don't integrate well to each other. It costs a lot to maintain. It's not completely efficient. Something that nobody succeeded to do is to offer one platform that does everything they need in just a few clicks. And that's what we started to do. Everybody failed. Microsoft tried with Dynamics, ACP tried, Oracle with Netsuit tried. But equipment rate on the market is still very low, less than 10%. So I do believe that once you get to the maturity level, management software will be like Office. Everybody use the same word and Excel and slides and PowerPoint and everything. I think for management software, it's going to be the same. When it gets mature, perfectly integrated and very affordable, then you can transform the market.”
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
“Instead of being the best in one industry, what we wanted to be is to be the best in applications. So we wanted to be the best CRM or the best accounting or the best website builder. And that's the way we see things, not based on customer, but based on applications. As these applications get mature, pretty much all the CRM, they look the same today. So it's not so much about CRM for that business or that business. They are the same. So it's more about the quality of your product now rather than how you customize it for a specific segment. As part of my vision is to commoditize the management software market. And when you see that as a communitization, I think everybody will use the same CRM, the same accounting, the same website builder. It doesn't have to be dedicated to two on the industry. It's like a phone. Whatever your industry, you use the same phone.”
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 they were scared about everything we had to pivot. It was the business model was not there. The trash model wasn't there. We had difficulties to be profitable. We had a growth, but not a exceptional growth, regular growth.”
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, in every fundraising, the timing is the most important thing. And for me, the timing was not the right at the time. So we raised 7 million of euro at a valuation of 23 pre- So dirty post. And it was a time where we needed money.”
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 was always a matter of survival. When you don't have cash to pay the employees at the end of the month, it's really hard. When you have to dismiss people you like, but you have no other options. It's very hard too.”
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 agree. I agree, but I see that the speed of how you build your asset. For me, it's the product. So it's very important to move forward fast and evolve very quickly and innovate and also build business. It's not so much about build your revenue. At least in my case, the revenue grew at 50% per year. It's not huge, but it's still good. It's just that I did it for 20 years.”
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
“Early days, and today it's still the same. Our main user acquisition is word of mouth. It's because we have clients that are very happy. They talk to other clients and they bring us more clients. Still today, majority of our lead is word of mouth.”
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
“This price change was actually to decrease the price on the small clients and increase it for the larger clients. And for the small clients, we were actually too expensive. For all our applications, it was something around 120 euro per user and per month. But if you have a single user or two user, 120 euro is still a budget. So we decrease it to 20 euros at a time where everybody were increasing their price. It was inflation. Everybody was increasing the price. So we said, okay, let's decrease 20 euros. And so acquisition started to boost very quickly. We attracted 2.8 times more clients since that date.”
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
“Yes, and at that point, I wanted to have a price that grows with the value of the software. The more users you have, the bigger the price, like usual, but also the more applications you have, the bigger the price. So I did a price which was like 10 euro times the number of users times the number of applications you use. So it was growing very aggressively. It was too high. The partners didn't like it, they did a big pushback, they refused to sell it. It was really difficult. But you know when you have partner network and you change the price, you never know the partners, they always react to any change. So you never know if it's because the price is wrong or it's because of the transition, the resistance to change. So when you have this, for a few months, you try to convince them my price is good. You don't understand the value, the price. It's good to have a price aligned with the value. So it took us like nine months to go back to the old price. So it was very hard for the company.”
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 worst decision I did, and the best ones are the pricing. I did a very bad pricing change. So, when you have difficulties, you try to change everything. Change the product, the business model, the service you sell, and the pricing. So at the time, we were changing the pricing every year, which was very complex.”
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 at the end, the grade products always win, no. You can save time with marketing. You can save two, three years, you can grow the company, but at some point the product matters. I am on a market that is very slow. ERPs are very slow. SCPs is still shitty after 20 years. Microsoft Dynamics 2. On a slower market, it's 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
“So, one of the big issues I had at the time is that I deceit the community. Because I build a community with me on the open source mindset. Like we are open source, we will always be open source and property is bad and we are not like that and anything like that. I thought to keep this open source business model, but to the point where we were close to bankruptcy, so I had to switch. And when I switched to open core, it started a big fight with the community. They were deceived because we built them on another story. And so the marketing was very bad. A lot of people criticizing us, our partners were living, trying to find competitors. But the product was good. So the majority of them stayed with the product. Looking back, if I had pitched them correctly, like we are today open source, but maybe in the future we will need to monetize, then I wouldn't have had that many issues.”
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 the business model we still have today, where we grew on top of that. So if you look at the past 20 years, we basically grew at 50% per year, year after year, every year. There was not a big bang, or it was just continuous growth year after year.”
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
“Then everything gets really good. So during all these years, how to build a software and a community, so we had a big software and a big community, but no revenues or limited revenues. And once we started to monetize efficiently, then everything went very smooth. So 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. And from one year to another, then we get a lot of cash and the business model worked and we had no more cache issues. And we had to find our motivations elsewhere.”
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 that much at the time because you have problems with pressure from the board, you have issues with the business, everything goes together when you don't have money. So it's very hard, but we made it, so it's okay.”
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
“What do we do now? That's a problem after two years, I get close to zero money in the bank account again. So I had to do another pivot in the business model. And that time I switched to an open core business model where 80% of the features are open source and 20% are for a fee.”
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 Odo is open source. So even though I started software vendor model, we were still open source. So what we were selling is maintenance software. And maintenance support bug fixes and things like that. So maintenance contract. So we stopped our service activities and we built a partner network all around the world. It worked well. The thing is most customers, they were paying for the first year. But second year they were telling us the software is good. I don't need maintenance anymore. So the business model was not great because the product was open source. There was no license fee. So they were just continuing using the software but not paying me.”
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
“Very well, actually, this time, second time not so. As a Belgian company, there is not a lot of big VCs in Belgium, so you basically go to Paris, London, and Germany, and you meet all of them. The IT world is not that big. And I got at the end something like 10 offers, which was quite good. So I picked the best one.”
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
“What I wanted to do initially from the beginning, but it gets to a point where the software was very complete, but with a sheet user interface. So I was not happy about it and I thought, no, 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 another. To fund that, I needed to do my first fundraising.”
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
“Initially, I think I was not just thinking about it. I was building the business, growing the company, focusing on that. I wanted to keep the majority of the shares. And in 2010, then I had to do a pivot in the business model. I wanted to stop services activities and refocus as a software vendor model. That's when I raised my first round.”
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 not like there is one time when you are close to bankruptcy, it's for months and months and months. So you don't sleep, you walk much harder, you get customers just because they pay faster, not because it's a good deal. So you do bad trade-off. But because of that, I was the main shareholder and I stayed one, so I didn't need it money at the time.”
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 bootstrapped the company. So when you bootstrap a company, you need money. And my way of getting money was to just sell services and development. And not a good business model. But I grew the company to 100 people on that basis. So it's kind of worked, but I struggled a lot like a few years close to bankruptcy.”
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
“Initially, I started as a service company, so I built everything customers were asking for. So I built features and features and features.”
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
“Yes, and so it was very risky because it took time to monetize and get to something that I could sell and everything. But now that I'm looking back, it's probably what Medo do today. It's because I thought about the big picture, everything's smooth together, and it's not a patch of different software.”
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 remember an article of Paul Graham at the time, and he said, if you want to have a big impact, to build a big company, you have to fix a big problem. So I had this story in mind that I want to do something very complex. And doing everything companies need is actually a big problem. So I started to tackle this challenge.”
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 did the opposite of the, you know, usually you start with an MVC small product. I did the complete opposite. I did everything. I started with accounting, logistics, purchase, everything at once. So it took me two years to build the first version of the product.”
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
“Passionate about development, of course, and management. And Odof was for me kind of a way of putting all my patients together in a single software. So I had all these different activities, t-shirts, art markets, antivirus and everything. And at some point I said, okay, I will top everything and focus on one thing that I really like is to build management software. And that's what I did with Odo. And I started small with the auction houses. They were my customer for e-commerce websites.”
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 the business model was shitty. I think I get something like 5,000 euro per month, which for me as a student was great, but for what I built was nothing.”
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 was selling more objects than eBay.be. So 15,000 arts per month at the time. I was working with the auction houses, antique dealers, art police. And I started to be big one of the biggest of Belgian, actually.”
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 passionate about open source Linux stuff and so on. So I did e commerce with Linux t-shirts and ties and Debian and everything. I totally sold a lot, but it was really painful to post all these t-shirts every day.”
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 didn't go to the lecture, I was more doing business or having fun and drinking beers. But I continued developing software for companies during the university. I did a lot of things like e-commerce. I did various antivirus games. I had a t-shirt company, lots of different things. Yeah”
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 was not so much about getting money, it was more about building something. What I like is to build software that people use that have an impact for them. So the money was great, but it was one hundred fifty euro at the time. So it was just for doing something.”
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 was just, I'm a developer. I also like management. I was reading a lot of books. It was just friends of my father and I did management software for them. And I started with one and then two and a lot of people.”
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 have to be obsessed. I don't think you can succeed if you are not obsessed. I always wanted the price to be low because in every transaction I was purchasing shares. All the managers are always buying shares at a do. We never sold shares. We will never sell. No, there will never be an IPO. When I was 26, I purchased the domain name sorry SCP.com because I thought that one day I will be much bigger than them and then I would use this domain name.”
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