Odoo

“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 your internal processes.”

“So on titles that to do, we have something funny is that everybody chooses title, and some people take funny titles, other people say director of X we don't care. We print the business card, they decide when the, what the title they want us to put, because I w…”

“The average age of how to do is 26. And we build a 5000 company, people company.”

“And we always proceed that way. We first find the person and only after the person will define where we go.”

“So if you look at the past 20 years, we basically grew at 50% per year, year after year, every year.”

“We have 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.”

“I keep saying to myself, when there is a doubt, there is no doubt. You know, we are entrepreneurs, and as an entrepreneur, we are always optimistic. We want things to make it work, we think it's gonna be better, and if, even if it doesn't work with someone, we…”

“We are growing since, since, since 2014. We didn't raise money anymore. We are profitable.”

“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.”

“So it was five hundred millions of euros at a five billion valuation. It was Summit Partners, one of our earlier investors who sold to Sequoia Capital, BlackRock, Mubadala, and Capital G.”

“10 to 100 is the time where your job change. As a founder, you start to have middle managers, and so the culture is not you anymore. It's the middle manager and the way they behave with the people. So you spend way more time communicating to ensure that the cu…”

“So we don't look at resumes, we just make them do some practice and look at it.”

“57%. So I only did two fundraising, very bad valuation, but I still kept the majority of the shares.”

“All the managers are always buying shares at Odo. We never sold shares.”

“We just did this five hundred million transaction, and we had more acquires than people selling, so.”

“I think same as SAP, most of the, these companies have still a good way to, I mean, you, they will continue. But other challenges like us will grow much faster.”

“I forbid the recurring meeting at the company. They can do meetings. But on the job, or for specific tasks, or trainings, but not recurring meeting. I mean, recurring meeting is a way to manage people, and we try to avoid managers. We want team leaders that wo…”

“I still if I have money, I don't have a lot of money in my bank account, but if I have money, I will buy or do shares. Even more. I mean, it's the best investment I can do, so. It's purely financial. I don't know another company that can give me 50% year after…”

“And our process is extremely fast. So it's one meeting and we decide right away. So usually we recruit within five days and everything is automated. So you apply online, you can book your meeting with the interviewer right away from his, into his calendar. The…”

“Retrospectively, if I would have opened it elsewhere, I would have preferred, yes.”

“So I decided to stop all my services activities from one day to another. But to fund that, I needed to do my first fundraising.”

“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.”

“No, I was close to zero. I think I had something like two weeks left or something.”

“If you look for people that are perfect in everything, you will get people that are average in everything. I mean, if you want people who speak multiple languages, who is a good developer, who is a good communicator, Probably it's gonna be average. So if you d…”

“Not a good business model, but I grew the company to 100 people on that basis.”

“You have to start with the problem. A lot of people start with the solution. I want to do AI. That's the solution. But if you start from the problem, you look where people are wasting time, where they are inefficient, then you get to good use case. And from th…”

“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.”

“Looking back, if I had 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.”

“When I decided to switch to an open core business model and say, it's not only, it's not anymore 100% open source, it's only 80% open source and 20% for free. I could 10 times the development team, so now I'm contributing way more to open source than before.”

“I think my life is easier now than it was when we were 100.”

“First, I think it's just a matter of time. I think I don't know how they can survive to what's coming in from them. We have so much advance, years in our head, we are stealing so much clients to them, that it's just a matter of time for me. But it's gonna take…”

“We publish our average salaries on our website because it's part of our recruitment process. We tell you the exact salary that you will have, and you can configure it, choose your car, because there is cars in Belgium choose your benefits and everything. It's …”

“We only have one product. One way to deliver the service. Only three big departments. All our companies everywhere operate the same way. Our product is only 400,000 lines of code”

“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…”

“But we are just testing, and we have 30 people out of something like 1800 sales.”

“I couldn't burn much more in marketing, but I don't think it would help a lot.”

“And one of the worst decisions I did is one of these price change, we probably lost one year of growth because when you work with partners, if it doesn't work, then it takes time to rebuild the trust and everything.”

“The equipment rate on the market is still very low, less than 10%.”

“There is no way you can Make a team of developers become a better developer if you are not the best developer of the team yourself.”

“We get so much cash that I can spend it. I'm trying to recruit as fast as I can, and I have enough.”

“It's 3500 ARR.”

“Thanks for Sapphorana, which is a disaster. Nobody wants to go. So that opens the door to new entrants like us.”

“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.”

“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 managers of X.”

“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's it continues to grow.”

“And so, I mean, things are very subjective. If you put KPIs, it's very difficult to and it was obvious, I mean, it was obvious 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.”

“And I fought to keep this open source business model, but To the point where we were close to bankruptcy, so I had to switch.”

“Yes, we never recruit managers and directors. Never ever, even when we reopen a subsidiary in a different country.”

“I think our product is years ahead of the competition. There is no way they can do what we do.”

“So 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 direc…”

“It's five hundred fifty million this year.”

“As a software vendor, the thing I want to do is to lower the service as much as I can. I'm not interested in service revenues. It's only 18% of our revenues.”

“Every round we were buying shares. And to the point where we get a big loan because we don't have money. We are just simple personnel, so we get a big loan just to acquire shares and at every round.”

“No, there will never be an IPO.”

“It was very risky, because it took time to monetize and get to something that I could sell and everything, but now that I am 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 no…”

“We will never sell. At least industrial exit. So it's clear.”

“When you start to have managers and managers of managers and team leaders, they all want to do something. They all have ideas and the complexity is that there is like a dark force that push everyone to complexify the company. And to keep your company simple, y…”

“Continue doing what we do today. Growing 50%. Not defocusing, innovating year after year with the same pace growing the company 50% per year while keeping the culture.”

“I was one year in India last, this year. Because the company was not growing enough, so I relocated myself for one year.”

“I do believe that management software will follow the same trends. Today, there are plenty of factors. But in the future, such technology will be so will be a commodity, like so much mature that there will be one, two, or three players that will have the world…”

“So to be fair, we started a few months ago but it's only a few people, I think, 30 people at the company.”

“But I'm also working, I'm the head of marketing. I'm also working a lot with other departments, service departments, so I'm doing a lot of things.”

“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 SAP at the time, so we used the domain name, we replaced the homepage with one big word, sorry SAP.”

“It's always competencies. For me it's always you will succeed or you will never, but it's always, for us, 90, probably more than 90% of the people we dismiss, it's always competencies.”

“For instance, in accounting, it transforms the market. We have no 98 per five percent recognition on invoice and bills and everything. Which is better than the humans, and that transformed the market.”

“And we beat the market because we are fast, just because of that.”