Feb 12, 2025 · 1h 15m · news
Fabien Pinckaers, CEO @Odoo: The Billionaire Founder Who Doesn’t Care About Money | E1259 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
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This video features an in-depth interview with Odoo CEO Fabien Pinckaers as he details the company's unconventional journey from a bootstrapped, debt-ridden startup to a highly profitable, 5-billion-euro business management software giant. Pinckaers explains his unique philosophies on rejecting traditional corporate structures, KPIs, and venture capital influence in favor of ruthless product focus, radical HR practices, and disruptive low pricing.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Harry holds 26.7% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Harry as informed peer 2.9 Guest teaching 3.8 Guest disagreement 2.4 Harry pushing back 2.3
speaking balance: gold is Harry, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 11:48 Product superiority vs distribution debate
Pinckaers forcefully pushes back against Stebbings' argument that distribution beats product, insisting that in slow enterprise markets like ERPs, product excellence always prevails.
Hardest push from Harry ▶ 11:48 Stebbings challenges product orthodoxyStebbings explicitly rejects Pinckaers' thesis that the best product always wins, arguing that marketing and distribution routinely outweigh product quality in tech outcomes.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 51:36 Flipping valuation logic for secondary equityPinckaers completely reframes traditional startup thinking around valuations by explaining why he actively prefers lower valuations so that he and his executive team can take loans to buy secondary equity.
Harry holds his own ▶ 41:32 Stebbings cites Andreessen pricing doctrineStebbings directly cites Marc Andreessen's doctrine matching price tiers to company scale to challenge Pinckaers' low-pricing philosophy.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Harry as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Harry pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Linux T-Shirt Venture and Art Marketplace | 3 | 2 | 1 | 2 | Stebbings contrasts Pinckaers' early decision to build a comprehensive product with standard startup wisdom surrounding minimal viable products (MVPs). Pinckaers calmly explains how Paul Graham's writings on solving big problems inspired his initial approach. | |
| Bootstrapping Odoo and Surviving the Threat of Bankruptcy | 3 | 3 | 1 | 2 | Stebbings notes that building custom feature requests for services is usually discouraged, while Pinckaers explains how bootstrapping forced him into services despite the risk of bankruptcy. | |
| Monetization Struggles and the Crucial Shift to Open Core | 3 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Stebbings quickly calculates the 30 percent dilution from Odoo's early round, noting it was a great deal for the investors. Pinckaers explains how open source maintenance churn forced his move to an open-core model with two weeks of runway left. | |
| Managing Backlash from the Open Source Community | 4 | 3 | 4 | 5 | Stebbings directly challenges Pinckaers' claim that the best product always wins, arguing distribution and marketing often trump product quality. Pinckaers pushes back firmly, asserting that in slow enterprise markets like ERPs, product superiority always wins out. | |
| The Successful 2022 Pricing Model and Organic Word of Mouth | 4 | 2 | 1 | 2 | Stebbings highlights the low valuation multiple on Odoo's second fundraise relative to revenue. Pinckaers details how lowering prices during inflationary periods drove massive customer acquisition growth. | |
| Embracing Horizontal SaaS and the Commoditization of Software | 4 | 4 | 3 | 3 | Stebbings contrasts vertical SaaS popularity with Odoo's horizontal approach. Pinckaers reframes management software as an eventual commodity akin to smartphones or office suites. | |
| Radical HR: Protecting Culture by Avoiding External Managers | 3 | 5 | 3 | 4 | Stebbings expresses confusion over operating without formal budgets or KPIs. Pinckaers dismantles traditional corporate planning, explaining how team leaders focus strictly on qualitative team efficiency. | |
| The Inherent Flaws of KPIs and the US Story | 2 | 5 | 2 | 2 | Pinckaers shares a story showing how corporate KPIs penalized his top Belgian expert who took on the hardest US projects. He further challenges traditional interviewing by placing high emphasis on logic tests. | |
| Recruitment Process and Speed | 3 | 4 | 3 | 3 | Stebbings raises the common stereotype that young European workers lack US work ethic. Pinckaers refutes this using Odoo's 5,000-person team with an average age of 26 as proof of European youth drive. | |
| Onboarding, Training, and Flat Team Structures | 3 | 4 | 4 | 3 | Stebbings reacts with surprise to Pinckaers' ban on recurring meetings. Pinckaers criticizes typical CEO habits of coffee chats and networking over internal execution. | |
| Moving to India to Scale Operations | 2 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Pinckaers outlines how he relocated to India to unlock local operational growth without replacing existing managers, explaining how founders must adapt across company scaling tiers. | |
| Geographical Expansion: Buffalo, NY vs. Silicon Valley | 2 | 4 | 2 | 1 | Pinckaers explains why expanding into tier-two cities like Buffalo provides far superior employee retention compared to Silicon Valley, where tech giants churn talent. | |
| Retention and Talent Evolution at Scale | 2 | 4 | 2 | 2 | Pinckaers articulates how retention drives sales performance over time, explaining why Odoo faces no direct competition because point solutions and legacy players target different trade-offs. | |
| Low Pricing Strategy vs. Silicon Valley Wisdom | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | Stebbings quotes Marc Andreessen's rule connecting high pricing to big company scale and questions how low pricing can achieve a $100B valuation. Pinckaers rejects venture pricing dogma and explicitly states he does not care about valuation or personal wealth. | |
| Financing Growth and Building the Brand | 2 | 3 | 2 | 2 | Pinckaers discusses founder naivety and tells the story of purchasing sorrysap.com at age 26 with plans to displace SAP long term. | |
| Building the Sales Machine | 3 | 4 | 2 | 2 | Stebbings expresses astonishment that Odoo scaled to $500M in revenue relying purely on inbound leads. Pinckaers explains how product simplicity wards off internal operational bloat. | |
| Open Source Monetization and Community Trust | 4 | 5 | 3 | 3 | Stebbings suggests a $5B valuation on $550M revenue is quite low. Pinckaers turns the logic upside down, explaining he prefers a low valuation because management takes loans to buy secondary equity in every transaction. | |
| Equity Alignment and Why Fabien Will Never Sell | 3 | 4 | 4 | 3 | Pinckaers rules out an IPO or corporate acquisition, arguing public market quarterly pressures destroy long-term decision making. | |
| The Disruptive Future of Enterprise Software | 3 | 4 | 4 | 2 | Pinckaers criticizes Marc Benioff's Salesforce AgentForce keynote demonstration, explaining why well-designed user interfaces often solve customer issues better than AI voice agents. | |
| Managing the Board and Overcoming Personal Limitations | 2 | 3 | 2 | 1 | Pinckaers reflects candidly on feeling slower intellectually as he ages and discusses Odoo's strategy for taking market share from legacy enterprise players like SAP. | |
| The Three Pillars of Odoo's Culture | 2 | 4 | 2 | 2 | Pinckaers outlines Odoo's three cultural pillars, explaining that formal expense approval systems cost companies more in lost velocity than trusting employees directly. | |
| Odoo's 15-Year Journey to the Right Business Model | 2 | 4 | 2 | 2 | Pinckaers emphasizes that extreme founder obsession is necessary to build a high-growth business, while acknowledging it is reasonable for employees to treat work as just a job. | |
| Quickfire Q&A: Investors, Education, Salaries, and Title Obsession | 3 | 4 | 3 | 2 | In a quickfire round, Pinckaers downplays investor board contributions, noting executive teams add far more operational value than venture capitalists spending a few hours a month. | |
| Reinvesting in Odoo vs. AI Giants | 2 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Pinckaers dismisses personal investing in trending AI companies, stating his extra personal liquidity goes directly into purchasing Odoo equity. |
Statements from this episode (87)
Success in business requires complete obsession, says Odoo CEO
“You have to be obsessed. I don't think you can succeed if you are not obsessed.”
Pinckaers' student art marketplace sold more items monthly than eBay Belgium
“Yeah, I was selling more objects than eBay.be. So, 15,000 art per month at the time. I was working with auction houses, antique dealers, art market, art place. And I started to be big, one of the biggest of Belgium actually.”
Rejecting the MVP model drove Odoo's ultimate success
“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…”
Fabien Pinckaers bootstrapped Odoo to 100 employees via custom services
“Not a good business model, but I grew the company to 100 people on that basis.”
Near-bankruptcy forces founders into bad operational trade-offs
“When you are close to bankruptcy, it's for months and months and months. So you don't sleep, you work much harder, you get customers just because they pay faster, not because it's a good deal. So you do bad trade-off.”
Odoo stopped all services overnight in 2010 to pivot to software
“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.”
Odoo switched to open core with 80% free features
“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.”
Odoo had two weeks of cash left before open-core pivot
“No, I was close to zero. I think I had something like two weeks left or something.”
Odoo grew revenue 50% annually for 20 straight years
“So if you look at the past 20 years, we basically grew at 50% per year, year after year, every year.”
Odoo nearly went bankrupt trying to remain purely open source
“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.”
Framing monetization early would have averted open-source backlash
“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.”
In slow markets like ERPs, superior product always beats marketing
“You can save time with marketing, you can save two or three years, you can grow the company, but at some point you cannot, the product matters. I am on a market that is very slow, you know, ERPs are very slow, LCPs is still shitty after two years, Microsoft Dy…”
Odoo lost a year of growth from a flawed pricing change
“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.”
Software maturity makes product quality matter more than vertical customization
“So we think, I think that 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 ho…”
Management software will commoditize into standardized horizontal tools across industries
“And I think as part of, for my vision is to commoditize the management software market. When you see that as a commoditization, I think everybody will use the same CRM, the same accounting, the same website builder. It doesn't have to be dedicated to one indus…”
Under 10% of SMBs use integrated management software
“The equipment rate on the market is still very low, less than 10%.”
Odoo's product is years ahead of Microsoft and SAP
“I think our product is years ahead of the competition. There is no way they can do what we do.”
Simple complex software requires genius developers, not an army
“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.”
Engineering managers must be the best developer on their team
“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.”
Odoo keeps financial budgets restricted to CFO and finance team
“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…”
Giving budgets to employees encourages irresponsible spending
“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.”
Most teams at Odoo operate without performance goals
“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.”
KPIs fail because performance evaluation is inherently subjective
“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.”
Scaling is easier by training young talent than hiring VPs
“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.”
Odoo ignores resumes and evaluates candidates strictly on practical tests
“So we don't look at resumes, we just make them do some practice and look at it.”
IQ tests are the second best predictor of job performance
“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.”
Odoo recruits within five days using single-meeting automated process
“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…”
Odoo beats competitors in recruiting solely through hiring speed
“And we beat the market because we are fast, just because of that.”
Over 90% of Odoo dismissals stem from competency, not culture fit
“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.”
Odoo has 5,000 employees with an average age of 26
“The average age of how to do is 26. And we build a 5000 company, people company.”
Odoo mandates a one-month onboarding program before on-the-job coaching
“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.”
Odoo bans recurring meetings to avoid traditional managers
“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…”
Tech CEOs waste time on external networking over operational needs
“I think a lot of CEOs are not right. If you look at the agenda, They are constantly meeting people, going to have a coffee with someone, and, or going to events, and I think the company needs them more than the external people.”
Odoo CEO splits time 50/50 between R&D and internal processes
“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.”
Fabien Pinckaers relocated to India for a year to fix regional growth
“I was one year in India last, this year. Because the company was not growing enough, so I relocated myself for one year.”
Odoo scaled its Indian team from 200 to 800 without replacing managers
“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.”
Odoo India scaled monthly client signups from 16 to 800
“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.”
At 10 to 100 employees, middle managers define company culture
“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…”
Hiring well-rounded candidates yields average talent
“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…”
Doubts about an employee signal it is already too late
“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…”
Office expansion succeeds on leadership quality, not location
“For me, the way we operate is that the key is not so much about the country or the city, the key is to find the right director. I mean, you can have the best location, you go in San Francisco or Silicon Valley, and you have an average director, it won't work.”
Odoo lets new local directors choose international expansion cities
“And we always proceed that way. We first find the person and only after the person will define where we go.”
Odoo never hires managers or directors externally
“Yes, we never recruit managers and directors. Never ever, even when we reopen a subsidiary in a different country.”
Opening Odoo's San Francisco office was a mistake
“Retrospectively, if I would have opened it elsewhere, I would have preferred, yes.”
Sales efficiency doubles after three to five years of experience
“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…”
SAP and Microsoft enterprise software is shitty, slow, and expensive
“On the market, you have two types of market. You have the large players, like SAP and Microsoft. They do several applications, but it's shitty, it's slow, it's expensive. And people are not happy using it.”
Universal software adoption requires low pricing
“If you want to commoditize the market and have every company own your software, you have to have a very small price.”
Odoo has been profitable without outside funding since 2014
“We are growing since, since, since 2014. We didn't raise money anymore. We are profitable.”
Odoo generates sufficient cash to hire as fast as possible
“We get so much cash that I can spend it. I'm trying to recruit as fast as I can, and I have enough.”
Burning more money on marketing would not help Odoo much
“I couldn't burn much more in marketing, but I don't think it would help a lot.”
Fabien Pinckaers bought domain sorrysep.com at age 26 to target SAP
“When I was 26, I purchased the domain name sorrysep.com, because I thought that one day I would be much bigger than them, and then I would use this domain name.”
Odoo put 'sorry SAP' homepage live for Odoo Version 14
“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.”
Odoo will displace SAP within 10 to 20 years
“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…”
SAP failed in the small and mid-sized business market
“On small and mid-sized, they failed. On the large companies, they are still the main option.”
Odoo built its inbound engine before testing outbound with 30 reps
“So to be fair, we started a few months ago but it's only a few people, I think, 30 people at the company.”
Odoo employs roughly 1,800 sales reps globally
“But we are just testing, and we have 30 people out of something like 1800 sales.”
Odoo has one product, three departments, and 400,000 lines of code
“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”
Management layers create a constant dark force toward company complexity
“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…”
Odoo completed a €500M secondary deal at a €5B valuation
“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.”
Odoo managers have never sold company shares
“All the managers are always buying shares at Odo. We never sold shares.”
Odoo executives took out loans to purchase shares every funding round
“Every round we were buying shares. And to the point where we get a big loan because we don't have money. We are just simple personnel, so we get a big loan just to acquire shares and at every round.”
Meeting VCs outside active deal cycles is a waste of time
“Waste of time. I meet them when we have an operation, so once every three years we get a transaction, then I'm happy to meet everybody, but .”
Fabien Pinckaers retains 57% ownership of Odoo at $5B valuation
“57%. So I only did two fundraising, very bad valuation, but I still kept the majority of the shares.”
Odoo will never sell to an industrial buyer
“We will never sell. At least industrial exit. So it's clear.”
Odoo completed $500M secondary transaction with excess buyer demand
“We just did this five hundred million transaction, and we had more acquires than people selling, so.”
Odoo and ERP challengers will grow much faster than Salesforce and SAP
“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.”
Good product UX is often more efficient than AI agents
“So in a lot of ways, UX having a very, very good product is more efficient than AI, but there are also a lot of use cases where AI is good.”
Odoo AI reaches 98.5% accuracy on invoice recognition, outperforming humans
“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.”
Software development must address user problems rather than forcing AI
“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…”
Fabien Pinckaers serves as Head of Marketing and CPO at Odoo
“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.”
Odoo reaches $100B by maintaining 50% annual growth and culture
“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.”
SAP's S/4HANA ERP product is a disaster, says Odoo CEO
“Thanks for Sapphorana, which is a disaster. Nobody wants to go. So that opens the door to new entrants like us.”
Service revenue accounts for only 18% of Odoo's business
“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.”
Traditional education destroys personal responsibility in young people
“And young people, they are not responsible by default. School, the education system killed that.”
Expense approval processes cost companies more than direct spending
“I think having a process that controls what they spend would cost more. Because if you have a purchasing department and this guy has to ask the purchase department just to buy a 30 dollar scanner. It will cost you more than 30 dollars. It will waste maybe five…”
Odoo allows employees to choose their own job titles
“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…”
Running Odoo is easier at 5,000 employees than at 100
“I think my life is easier now than it was when we were 100.”
Switching Odoo to open core allowed a 10x dev team expansion
“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.”
Executive committee and team leaders matter far more than board
“For me, the executive committee and the team leaders I'm working with are way more important than the board, and I shouldn't say that.”
Companies should pay top performers significantly higher salaries than average staff
“I think you should pay people very differently based on competencies too. The best people should have much more than the other ones.”
Odoo publishes average salaries online and lets candidates configure exact packages
“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 …”
Reinvesting personal funds in Odoo because it reliably returns 50% yearly
“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…”
Billionaire Odoo CEO does not own a house
“You know, I have a very small car, I don't have a house, I live in the house of my wife.”
Management software market will consolidate to two or three players
“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…”