Part IThe Story
Ten Thousand a Month
The post went up in late June 2026, in French, under a headline that sounded like a man packing a suitcase: Adieu la Belgique! Je risque de devoir m'exiler... Farewell, Belgium. I may have to go into exile.
The author was Fabien Pinckaers, founder and chief executive of Odoo, the Walloon software company that sells a suite of business applications to small and mid-sized firms in more than a hundred countries. He was, by any ordinary measure, the richest man in the room wherever he stood in French-speaking Belgium. Belgian billionaire rankings had placed him ninth in the country at €4.2 billion; NRJ radio had introduced him a year earlier as Belgium's third-largest fortune. The post was not about any of that. It was about arithmetic. Les Engagés, a centrist party in the governing coalition, had floated a tax on fortunes above €500,000, and Pinckaers had done the math in public. He owned "a little more than 50%" of Odoo, which was valued at roughly €10 billion. At 0.6% a year, that came to more than €30 million in annual tax.
"How do I do that," he wrote, "with ~€10k net income per month?"
The question was rhetorical, and it was also not. The man whose paper wealth had made him a fixture of magazine covers drew something close to a senior engineer's salary. Selling shares to American investors to pay the bill, he wrote, would mean losing control of the company — hors de question, out of the question. He listed what Odoo Belgium contributed to the country each year: €323 million in exports, roughly €100 million in taxes, more than €500 million in capital gains already returned to Walloon public funds, 15,000 direct and indirect jobs. Then he reached for a metaphor, and the metaphor was a little macabre. Taxing unrealized capital, he wrote, "is a bit like taxing the inheritance of a relative who isn't dead yet." The only way to pay the tax is to kill the relative.
The reply came from Yvan Verougstraete of Les Engagés, and it was pointed in the way only an old acquaintance can be pointed. "I can well imagine you don't want to pay €30 million," Verougstraete said. "It's clear nobody likes paying taxes or making cuts. Not you, not me."
There was history between them. In early 2020, both men had been finalists for Trends-Tendances' Manager of the Year for 2019, and Verougstraete — then chief executive of the pharmacy chain Medi-Market — had won. Pinckaers came back twelve months later and took the title for 2020, becoming, at 41, the youngest winner since the award was established in 1985. Two entrepreneurs from the same small French-speaking business world, one of whom had gone into politics and one of whom had gone into his own company and never come out. Within days they met in person. Verougstraete posted a six-point summary of their "positive, respectful and constructive" conversation; point five agreed that one must "take care not to penalize financial capital that is still only 'potential.'" Pinckaers, in a long interview with a Belgian journalist, offered a line that went straight into the headlines in both national languages: if he ever sold his Odoo shares, they could tax him at 90 percent, and it wouldn't bother him.
"The real problem," he said, "is confusing cash with the value of a company."
It is an odd sentence to hear from a billionaire, and an even odder one from this particular billionaire, because for most of the twenty-four years he had been running his company, the problem had been the reverse: plenty of value, no cash. For seven years he struggled to make payroll at the end of the month. Sometimes he paid it late. In 2014, by his own account, he raised €7 million and watched the balance fall from €8 million to €2 million in less than a year. He named his first product Tiny. He bought the domain SorrySAP.com at 26 and waited six years to use it. He grew up the son of an auctioneer, wrote his first serious software for auction houses, and has spent two decades refusing to put his own company under the hammer.
Everything about the wealth-tax post — the refusal to sell, the €10,000 a month, the insistence that a company's value is not a pile of money but a set of things in motion — had been rehearsed, in some form, long before anyone thought him worth taxing.
By the Numbers
The Odoo Ledger
1Employees at Tiny sprl in 2002 and again in 2003
7 yearsPinckaers spent near bankruptcy, struggling to meet payroll
€3MFirst outside capital, raised in 2010 — after reaching 100 employees
2.8×Increase in customer acquisition after the 2022 single-price switch
12MUsers worldwide, per Pinckaers in September 2025
~€10BCompany valuation Pinckaers cited in June 2026
26Average age of an Odoo employee, per Pinckaers in 2025
The Auctioneer's Son
Michel Pinckaers was an antiques dealer and auctioneer in Walloon Brabant, the band of rolling farmland and commuter towns that runs south of Brussels toward Namur. His son, born in 1979, grew up among consignments and lots, among people whose entire profession consisted of establishing what a thing was worth at the precise moment someone agreed to pay for it. Belgian profiles of Fabien tend to treat this upbringing as a curiosity — the IT billionaire raised in the antique trade — but Forbes Belgium got closer to the point when it noted that the world of the auction house, which seems at first glance to sit at right angles to software, fit "perfectly with family entrepreneurship and a culture of working efficiently."
He was typing on his first keyboard at twelve. At thirteen he sold his first piece of management software to Les Transports Verts, a Brussels transport company run by a friend of his father's. It handled invoicing and customer management. "I learnt how VAT works," he told the Luxembourg business weekly Paperjam decades later, with the faint relish of a man who still considers value-added tax a reasonable thing for a thirteen-year-old to master. "But at the time, I mainly saw it as a fun project. I was looking for things to develop. If it wasn't that, it would have been something else."
That last sentence is worth holding onto. There was no vision. He has said so repeatedly and with what seems like genuine impatience at the suggestion otherwise. "At the beginning it's not like I had a vision," he told Odoo's in-house podcast in its first episode. "I had no vision at all. I was just serving one client and then another one and then another one."
After the transport company came more friends of his father. Then came his father. The auction house needed software, and the son built it, and the logic of the family trade began to shape the logic of the code. When he went to the Université catholique de Louvain at Louvain-la-Neuve to study engineering — the purpose-built university town that would eventually host one of Odoo's two Belgian campuses — the art business came with him. He built Auction-in-Europe, a platform for auctioneers, antique dealers, and galleries. Within two years it was, by the company's own account, the leading player in the Belgian art market, moving 15,000 art objects a month. "So I was bigger than eBay," he said, and then, as if catching himself, he moved on.
He was clear-eyed about that market. "The art market is very bad," he said. "They don't have money." He was making something like €10,000 a month as a student — "which was okay for a student" — but the auctioneers were not going to fund the thing he actually wanted to build. So he did something that, looked at from the outside, resembles waste and is actually its opposite. "What they needed, I could have done it in two months," he said. "Just managing auctioneers is very easy, but I did it in one year because I started to do an accounting and inventory management software, all the things I needed for the future."
The auctioneers paid for a year of work on generic accounting, inventory, and stock management that they did not, strictly speaking, need. The founder used a small, poor, fragmented market as scaffolding for a large one. "I use them to leverage," he said. "And as soon as it started to work, I switched to other segments of the market."
A software developer who joined the company in India in 2007, writing an affectionate tribute on his firm's blog years later, remembered a small detail from those days that the official histories don't mention. Fabien, he wrote, "never made anyone touch 'Auction' module doing more changes."
Ten Thousand Flyers in Leuven
The founding myth of Odoo, as Pinckaers tells it, is not a story of a single idea. It is a story of a great many ideas, most of which did not work.
There were games. There were viruses and antivirus programs — he lists them in that order, with no apparent irony. There was Openstuff, a Linux store that sold software, posters, and T-shirts printed with penguins to the open-source faithful across Europe; for a time it was, by the company's account, the leading Linux store on the continent, and he kept it running until 2007. He founded the Linux User Group at Louvain-la-Neuve. And there was nomoreviagra.com, which he still describes with something like love.
The idea was elegant. This was before Gmail; most people fetched their mail from a POP or IMAP server. To clean your inbox, you simply appended ".nomoreviagra.com" to your mail server's address, and everything was routed through his machine, which stripped out spam and viruses before passing the rest along. No sign-up. No configuration. "The onboarding was extremely efficient," he said, in the language of a product manager describing something he built as a teenager.
He printed — the number in his memory is 10,000 — flyers to distribute in Leuven, one for every student room in the Flemish university town. "I never did it," he said. "And I did that for nothing. And I had zero clients."
The ten thousand undistributed flyers are the kind of detail that a more image-conscious founder would have pruned from the official story long ago. Pinckaers volunteers it in the first five minutes. He is similarly unbothered telling an employee-interviewer, on a company podcast, that he nearly failed to graduate. In his final year he had not written his thesis — "that didn't interest me at all" — and had four exams outstanding. He skipped the June session and planned to sit them in August. He did not, however, check when or where the August exams would be held. In the middle of the session, Antony, a friend from those years who would become Odoo's chief technology officer, told him he needed to go look at the calendar. All four exams, by luck, fell in the second week. He passed. He got the diploma. "And after that, I had nightmares for maybe six, ten years of me not getting the degree."
Asked how he had balanced his studies with his businesses, he gave an answer that is either a joke or isn't. "I don't think I managed very well because I ended up with cirrhosis," he said. "My liver is dead. Basically, I drank too much beer." The host laughed and moved on. So, it seemed, did Pinckaers.
There is a temptation to file all of this under charming self-deprecation, the billionaire's humility routine. But the failures share a structure. They were all quick, cheap, and abandoned the moment they stopped working. The anti-spam service cost him a print run. The Linux T-shirts worked because he already lived inside the communities that would buy them — "everything I developed was open source," he said, and he has never, by his own account, used Windows for a single day of his life. ("When you are a developer, you always have a friend that tells you, Hey, my computer is broken… I don't even know how to put the Wi-Fi on it.") What made the management software different was not that it was a better idea. It was the only one that kept working after he stopped pushing it. "At some point, one of the things worked better than the other," he said. "And then, at some point, I stopped all the other activities."
He was eighteen when he started his first company, according to a 2008 conference biography. In 2002 he registered Tiny sprl. He was its only employee that year, and the next.
Picking a Fight With the Class Bully
In April 2013, Pinckaers published a long essay on the company blog titled "The Odoo Story." It begins mid-gesture, like a man starting a toast before he has quite stood up.
"I needed to change the world. I wanted to … You know how it is when you are young; you have big dreams, a lot of energy and naive stupidity."
His dream, he wrote, was to lead the enterprise management market with fully open-source software. He had a secondary goal — a hundred employees before the age of thirty, in a self-financed company — which he missed "by only a few months." And to fuel his motivation, he needed an enemy.
"In business, it's like a playground. When you arrive in a new school, if you want to quickly become the leader, you must choose the class bully, the older guy who terrorizes small boys, and kick his butt in front of everyone. That was my strategy with SAP, the enterprise software giant."
The German company was, at the time, the most expensive and most resented name in corporate software — the vendor whose implementations ran for years, consumed consultants by the battalion, and left CFOs with eight-figure invoices and a workforce that hated the screens they now had to stare at. Pinckaers began developing the TinyERP product in 2005. In 2006, "while preparing for the 'day of the fight,'" he bought the domain SorrySAP.com. He was 26.
— Fabien Pinckaers, “The Odoo Story,” April 16, 2013I thought it would take 3 years to deprecate a 77 billion dollars company just because open source is so cool. Sometimes it's better for your self-motivation not to face reality...
He held the domain for six years, "waiting for the right moment to use it." The right moment eventually came, in the form of cheeky billboards that a consultancy history of the company describes as positioning Odoo "as a mould breaker in the ERP market." But the most revealing thing about SorrySAP.com is not the campaign. It is the waiting. A 26-year-old bought a taunt and then kept it in a drawer through the entire period in which his company was too weak to deliver it.
The enemy was not invented in a vacuum. Asked in 2019 by Brussels' Bulletin for the most memorable quote he carried with him, Pinckaers went back to a conference in Paris around 2003, where an Oracle vice president of sales was asked about MySQL and other open-source databases. The answer, as he recalled it, was dismissive. Sixteen years later, he still remembered the tone.
What followed the domain purchase was not three years. It was seven years of thirteen-hour days, seven days a week, with no vacations. "I lost friendships and broke up with my girlfriend in the process," he wrote, and then, in one of the parentheticals that make his prose sound like an engineer writing a eulogy for his own twenties: "(fortunately, I found a more valuable wife now. I will explain later why she is worth 1 million EUR :)."
The name turned out to be a problem before SAP did. "Three years later, I discovered you can't change the world if you are 'tiny,'" he wrote. "Especially if the United States is part of this world, where it's better to be a BigERP, rather than a TinyERP. Can you imagine how small you feel in front of Danone's directors asking; 'But why should we pay millions of dollars for a tiny software?'"
In 2008 TinyERP became OpenERP. He wrote books under the new banner — a French guide with Eyrolles, Tiny ERP–Open ERP: Pour une gestion d'entreprise efficace et intégrée; and Open ERP for Retail and Industrial Management, co-written with Geoff Gardiner in 2009, followed by a run of self-published manuals on accounting, logistics, manufacturing, and sales put out under the Tiny imprint in 2011. In June 2009, Trends-Tendances put him on its cover beneath a headline that would follow him for the rest of his career: "The new Bill Gates is Belgian." The comparison was flattering and almost exactly wrong. Gates built an empire on proprietary licenses. Pinckaers, at that point, had never charged for a line of code.
A Hydra With Ten Heads
By 2010 the company had more than a hundred employees, offices on three continents, and, in the founder's words, "a powerful but ugly product."
The ugliness was structural. Because the software was free, the company earned its money selling services: custom development, implementation, consulting. A client would describe what they needed, and the company would build it. "When you do that for seven, seven years," Pinckaers said, "you get software that has tons of features, everything people ask for, but that is ugly and complex, like a hydra with ten heads."
The diagnosis he arrived at runs against one of the most sacred pieties of modern software. "In order to develop a product that is simple and clean, we shouldn't listen to the customer," he said. "We should invest in research and development. But you cannot do that with the margin of a service company." Service margins were too thin to fund a real R&D organization. The only way out was to stop selling services entirely — to hand implementation to a network of partners and become a pure software publisher, earning money from maintenance contracts.
The problem with stopping services was that services were the revenue. "We stopped the revenue from day one to day two," he said. To survive the gap, he needed outside money for the first time in eight years.
After a few months of pitching, he had roughly ten letters of intent from venture firms. He chose Sofinnova Partners, which he called the biggest venture capital firm in Europe, and Xavier Niel — the founder of the French telecom group Iliad, a self-made provocateur who had built a broadband empire by undercutting incumbents on price and who, in Pinckaers' telling, ran the only French company in a decade to reach a billion-euro valuation from its own funding. A rebel against a bloated incumbent, backing another. The round was €3 million, at a €7 million pre-money valuation; TechCrunch covered it in February 2010 as "OpenERP gets €3 million for US expansion."
"I signed the LOI," he wrote in 2013. "I didn't realize that this contract could have turned me into a homeless person."
The pivot worked for about a year. "When we get the three million of euro, we had like one year where we were comfortable," he said. Then the second flaw in the model surfaced, and it was almost comic in its simplicity. Customers bought a support contract for the first year, when implementation was risky and something might break. In the second year they called to say they loved the product. "I love it, I'm using it, but I don't need support because it works." Worse, the partners the company had recruited to do implementation were selling their own support. The better the software became, the less anyone needed to pay its maker.
He had built a business model that punished quality.
Two Months of Runway
There is a version of startup mythology in which the near-death experience is a single dramatic night. Pinckaers' version is longer and more grinding: seven years, by his count, of being within a month of bankruptcy. "We couldn't pay salaries," he said. "The business model was not working. We needed tens or hundreds of developers to develop such a product because the product is large and complex. But we didn't have the revenues to follow our ambitions."
In 2013 he laid off 30 percent of the staff. He has called it, in a French podcast that a host later summarized, the night he had to let a third of his teams go. In that same telling, the company had two weeks of cash remaining, and some of his investors attempted to take control. He responded with a tactic that most founders would consider suicidal: he published the company's cash position to employees in charts, in the middle of the crisis. At the 2025 Odoo Experience conference, speaking to some 2,000 people in a Brussels auditorium, he distilled the episode into rules. Cut once, and cut hard, rather than in slices that destroy morale. Never lie to employees about the company's health.
The second rescue came in 2014: €7 million, raised specifically to fund a second pivot. Cash went from €8 million to €2 million in less than a year, he said later, leaving two months of runway. The money paid for three things at once: a cloud platform, a cleanup of the product so that it would be simple enough to sell as a service, and a decision he had promised for a decade never to make.
The company would go open core. Roughly 80 percent of the product would remain free and open-source in what became Odoo Community. Twenty percent of features would be proprietary, sold as Odoo Enterprise. "I always praise the community that we will always be 100% open source," he said. "I always refused to develop proprietary features." Now he would.
He had to tell the people who had joined him because of that refusal.
— Fabien Pinckaers, Planet Odoo podcast, 2023And at some point, me, the founder tells them, Guys, sorry, I was wrong and I was really wrong. Nothing was planned. I had no other options if I wanted the software to survive… And so I deceived everyone. Everyone was deceived.
The reaction was what he expected and, he says now, deserved. "Very bad. And I understand. I mean, they were right." The community bashed the company; it was "very hard emotionally for us." His later analysis of the episode is unusually precise about where the mistake actually lay. The decision was right. "It completely saved us and it allowed us to grow ten times easily," he said. The 20 percent that was proprietary funded the 80 percent that wasn't — "it allowed me to contribute ten times to the open-source community because we have ten times more developers now." The error was upstream, in the promise. "If I have told the community, okay, today we are open source, we are not sure we will stay open-source… If we have been clear from the early beginning about that, I think the community would have understood. But then we sold them dream that actually was impossible."
The same period produced the company's other great act of discipline. The product had been a desktop application built on the GTK toolkit; the future was the browser. Moving to the web, he said at the 2025 masterclass, was the kind of transition that killed most competitors. The way to survive it, he concluded, was not to make the web "a priority," which in practice adds ten percent to everyone's existing workload. Instead, leadership declared that there would be no new features for one year. Focus by subtraction.
A Dutch-language billionaire ranking later summarized the decade without sentiment. "Every year he was out of money again." Pinckaers' own summary is closer to gratitude. "We didn't notice we were suffering," he said. "But now, if I look back, I'm very happy that we went through these difficult phases because it's one of the reasons why we are extremely competitive today."
A Name That Means Nothing
On May 14, 2014, OpenERP became Odoo.
For the press, the company produced a chart. "We analyzed every company in the IT sector based on their valuation," Pinckaers recalled, "and if you do a graph of all the companies on the number of 'o' they have in the name and their valuation, you had like a graph that is growing like crazy." Zero o's, low valuation. One o, midsize. Google, Microsoft, Salesforce.com — two o's, explosive. "So we decided to put three O's in the name."
The press ran with it. It is still in encyclopedias.
It was, he admits cheerfully, fake. Asked about the name, he likes to offer interviewers a choice: "You want the real answer or the fake one we did for the public?" The real answer is a confession of two mistakes. Tiny had frightened large clients. Open had made some buyers nervous — "open source was not perceived very positively" in the world of accounting software — and ERP was worse: "everyone imaging SAP, which is very bad and everyone has bad experience with that kind of software." Twice he had chosen a name that meant something, and twice the meaning had cost him. "So we said, okay, the third time we pick a name that doesn't mean anything so that at least we don't do a mistake."
"De naam Odoo betekent eigenlijk niets," he told a Flemish trade publication years later, without embarrassment. The name Odoo doesn't actually mean anything.
There is a lesson in this that runs deeper than branding. The company had learned, at real expense, that the founder's convictions — about smallness, about openness, about defining yourself against a bully — were not always useful to the customer, who wanted neither a manifesto nor a joke but simply something that worked. The answer to a name that kept carrying the wrong freight was a name that carried nothing at all. When Paperjam asked him how to pronounce it, he said: "Like Google or Yahoo."
Twenty Euros From a CFO's Pocket
If the founding decade was a story about business models, the second decade turned on a quieter variable that Pinckaers has come to treat as almost equally dangerous: price.
He describes ten years of pricing experiments, and he is precise about the worst one. At one point the company priced its software as €10, multiplied by the number of users, multiplied by the number of applications. It is a formula that looks rational on a spreadsheet and behaves like a tax on curiosity. The more of the product a customer used, the more each additional user cost, and the more each additional application cost each user. Partners revolted. It took nine months to revert, and longer to rebuild their trust; Pinckaers has said the experiment cost the company about a year of growth.
The model that followed was better but still lopsided. A self-employed customer using a handful of apps ended up paying around €100 per user per month, because he was the only user. A large company was paying about €18 per user. "In the end, it's not fair," Pinckaers said. "Small companies pay way more than a large company per user." He had seen, at a large customer, the evidence of how little the price meant at the top. When told that one extra user would cost more, a CFO "getting a €20 bill from his pocket and saying, here it is. Here is my €20."
There was a second problem, which was that customers were using perhaps 10 to 20 percent of what Odoo offered — accounting, sales, purchasing, inventory — and ignoring e-signature, document management, knowledge management, human resources. Each of those cost extra, which meant each required a conversation with a purchasing department. "I need to ask the purchase department if they agree to buy the 16€ you have to pay for the sign," he said, mimicking the internal friction.
At the Odoo Experience conference in October 2022, he announced a single price per user, with every application included — at the time, more than seventy of them. Small customers would pay much less; large customers somewhat more. "We reversed the logic," he said. "Before, the logic was we sell apps, and the more a company wants to use apps, they will have to pay more. Now, the logic is completely the opposite. We give them for free." Give the HR app away, and the HR department starts using the system, and the HR department becomes more paying users.
The result arrived faster than the theory. "We were at 1,200 new clients per month two months ago," he said shortly afterward, "and now we are 3,400 new clients per month." He added, with the habitual honesty that sometimes reads like a man undercutting his own press release, that most of them were small and "the revenue are not that much. That's a big of an issue." Over time he settled on the figure of 2.8 times more customer acquisition, and on a price — €19.90 per user per month, all apps included — that he describes as something his bloated competitors "will never be able to afford."
Nobody From Outside
When Olivier Colson joined Odoo as a developer in 2016, he dressed entirely in black. A year in, he told the founder what he liked about the place. Pinckaers remembered the exchange years later, on the first episode of the company podcast, with Colson as host. "You told me, I really like Odoo because I am who I am. I can be myself. I don't have to play the role of a good employee."
Colson's own account was more anxious. He had graduated worried about becoming "someone else" for an employer, about fitting into "the little box that they designed for you." By the time he hosted that podcast, his team had doubled in a year. By the 2026 conference program, he was listed as an R&D team leader, presenting what was new in accounting reports.
He is, in other words, exactly the kind of manager Odoo makes: grown inside, technically better than the people he leads, and still in the building. The policy is absolute. "We never recruit managers and directors," Pinckaers told the venture investor Harry Stebbings in 2025. "We only promote people we already work with." The reasoning is less ideological than it sounds. "One way to keep the culture alive is to avoid having these external managers and team leaders coming with their habits," he said. "They're probably good habits, but they won't be suited to our environment."
The definition of the role is narrow to the point of severity. A team leader is not a people manager — "that has no use," he told a Flemish interviewer. "What I expect from a team leader is to just make your team become better. That's the only objective I have," he said on the same podcast. "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." In some departments, according to one Belgian report, team leaders are elected by the people they lead. Meetings are avoided unless there is no alternative. Reporting is dismissed as allemaal tijdverlies — all a waste of time.
He has a story about KPIs, and he tells it with the patience of someone who let an experiment run to its natural end. In the American office, some consulting projects were going badly, so he sent over his best person from Belgium to rescue them. The local director insisted on managing by individual metrics. "I couldn't convince him to drop his KPIs, and so I waited to see what happened." Three months later, the employee with the worst numbers was the Belgian expert who had personally delivered every troubled project. "It was obvious for the whole team that this guy was the best, yet on the KPIs, he was the worst." His conclusion: "When you work with people, you know who's good or not. You don't need to put a KPI."
The culture he is protecting has an origin story he tells simply. "When you start, the culture is you," he said. "When you start to recruit your first five employees, the culture is still you… And then you start growing up, and as you become a mid-sized company, the culture is not you anymore." To keep it from drifting, the company wrote a handbook — The Survival Guide for Odooers — trained its managers, and enforced its norms with a bluntness that occasionally slips into the vocabulary of a different profession. Of people who play politics or seek management for its own sake: "We kill them as soon as we see them."
Shouting is tolerated. "Sometimes we even shout at each other. Not me, because it's not my character," he said. Some colleagues can be heard three offices away. "If people are shouting… it's actually because they care."
The hiring machine that feeds this culture is built like the product: integrated, automated, impatient with anything resembling a form. Average salaries by role and experience are published on the website; candidates assemble their own compensation package — car, fuel allowance, days off — before applying. They book interviews directly into the recruiter's calendar, an automation born of his old observation that recruiters spend 60 percent of their email scheduling meetings. Technical tests are taken online. Pinckaers has said an IQ test proved the second-best predictor of performance. The company says it hires about 1.5 percent of shortlisted candidates, with about a week from application to offer. Referrals account for roughly 40 percent of hires. Every developer who joins receives €10,000 in their bank account, no conditions. "Otherwise," he said, "I have to spend it on a headhunter."
Then there are the books. Pinckaers has long believed that "you evolve as you read good books," and for years the company gave employees two books each. Nobody read them. Colson, on air, admitted that his — The Hidden Life of Trees — was still on a shelf. The founder's fix was characteristically procedural: mail the books before the employee starts, between the contract signature and the first day. "They have a pressure," he said. "I know they read the book." The canon he has recommended over the years is idiosyncratic: Avinash Dixit's The Art of Strategy, Sun Tzu, Chris Voss's Never Split the Difference (which he gave to his daughter), a book on the Aldi supermarket chain that has "A LOT in common with Odoo's mindset," Joseph Williams' Style on writing clearly, and — listed without comment on a French podcast in 2021 — The Count of Monte Cristo, the great novel of patience and settled scores.
The average Odoo employee, he said in 2025, is 26 years old. Of roughly 1,500 people in Belgium, about half had been there less than eighteen months. He says young people are more capable than they are given credit for, and that retention matters more than almost anything: an employee in their fourth or fifth year, he estimates, is more than twice as productive as one in their first. That is why the company hires in places like Buffalo, New York, where, he told Stebbings, "nobody is leaving. People are happy. They have a very high salary for the area" — rather than next door to Google, Apple, and Microsoft. New offices are not placed on a map by strategy. The company finds the right internal person to lead one, and then opens the office wherever that person wants to live.
He tested this philosophy on himself. Around 2024, he moved to western India for about a year, near the company's Gandhinagar operation. He told his Indian director they needed to start a team to sign up restaurants. The director said he would put 250 interns on it. "250 interns? Yes, it doesn't matter, they're students," Pinckaers recalled, still faintly incredulous. They visited restaurants across Gujarat, and the company signed hundreds of clients directly. "I couldn't even imagine being able to do that." Back in Belgium, he put fifty interns on the roads of Wallonia, visiting every restaurant they could find. "India taught me to execute faster."
The Hammer That Never Falls
The company's capital history reads, from the outside, like a conventional venture story. In December 2019, Odoo raised $90 million. By 2021 it was valued at $2.3 billion, the first Walloon unicorn. In June 2023, General Atlantic invested €150 million, buying shares that the regional public investor — Wallonie Entreprendre, formerly the SRIW, an early backer — had decided to sell; Wallonia booked a €100 million gain. The valuation rose to €3.75 billion, and La Libre announced that Pinckaers, holding 55 percent, had become the youngest billionaire in Belgium, worth €1.6 billion. In November 2024 came a secondary sale of roughly $500 million backed by Alphabet's CapitalG, Sequoia Capital, and BlackRock, at a valuation of $5.26 billion. CNBC's headline called Odoo a "little-known SAP rival." By the spring of 2026, Forbes Belgium put him on its cover with the company valued at more than €7 billion; by June, he was citing roughly €10 billion.
What the headlines elided was the direction of the money. These were overwhelmingly secondary transactions: existing shareholders selling, new ones buying, the company itself barely touched. Pinckaers was not selling. "I always wanted the price to be low," he told Stebbings, "because in every transaction I was purchasing shares. All the managers are always buying shares at Odoo. We never sold shares." Then, with the flatness of a closed question: "No, there will never be an IPO." Public-company reporting, he argues, would refocus everyone on quarterly earnings and derail the long-term obsession with product.
It is an inversion worth sitting with. Most founders want the price high. He wanted it low because he was a buyer. The auctioneer's son, in the one auction that concerned him most, had placed himself permanently on the bidding side of the room.
Hence the June 2026 post, and the €10,000 a month, and the 90 percent line. Hence, too, his irritation when the company's rising paper value was described as wealth. He told one interviewer that Odoo was valued so highly in part because a public shareholder had chosen to sell to Google's fund to realize cash — "a strategy that neither he nor his company favors." Belgian commentators split predictably. One LinkedIn reply called the wealth-tax threat "blackmail by expatriation"; another declared that Pinckaers should be held up as proof that one can still succeed by work. Verougstraete created an advisory committee. The debate moved on, as debates do.
He remains, by most accounts, almost suspiciously unchanged by the money. He runs the company from Walloon Brabant, where the 2023 rankings described him living on his farm "somewhere between Wavre and Namur" — not far from the converted farmhouse that served as OpenERP's office in 2009. He wears sneakers with the Odoo name worked into them. The company campus at Louvain-la-Neuve is lined with hundreds of white cars bearing the logo in large letters, and because he likes to hold the strings himself, Odoo runs its own garage. He spends half his time on product. He signs internal emails without a title. He has said he no longer writes much code, "unless to amuse myself," and that if Odoo didn't exist, he would take a job as a developer at an open-source company: "Development is cool, management is boring." He takes, according to a 2025 profile, five vacation days a year, which counts as a concession. "Going on a beach is boring," he told Colson, "compared to what we do."
His mission statements are almost aggressively undramatic. "The difference between us and SAP," he told Paperjam, "is that our users are happy." The "Sorry SAP" billboards eventually went up; the bully was never deposed, and he has stopped pretending it would take three years. "We have only 1 percent of the market," he told a Flemish outlet, on the way to half a billion euros in revenue. NASA, Toyota, Blue Origin, Denon, and Commonwealth Fusion Systems now run on the software. The 6,500 employees of 2025 had become 7,400 by the following spring, with 3,500 more to come.
And somewhere in Belgium, as he admitted to Colson with a kind of rueful horror, there are still servers belonging to the earliest customers — art dealers, auctioneers — running OpenERP version 4.1, untouched for years.
"I'm always afraid to see OpenERP version 4.1 running since years on a server that nobody has access to," he said. "Unfortunately, they are still using it and it runs." He thought about it a moment longer, and the engineer in him overruled the CEO. "The same software run for fifteen years. So that means that there were no memory leak. No memory leak, nothing, because nobody managed these servers, and it's still running."
On those machines, presumably, sits the oldest module of all — the one he built for his father's trade, the one an early colleague remembered nobody being allowed to touch. Software for selling things to the highest bidder, written by a man who never sold, still quietly counting lots in a room no one enters.
Part IIThe Playbook
What follows is an attempt to extract the operating logic beneath Odoo's twenty-four years — not the slogans Pinckaers offers at conferences, though some are useful, but the decisions that recur when the stakes are high. Several of these principles run directly against standard venture-backed practice: raise late, raise only to change the model, never hire leaders from outside, keep the share price low. They are presented with the evidence from his own record, including the failures that produced them.
The principles
- 1.Use a small market as scaffolding for a large product.
- 2.Choose an enemy, then wait.
- 3.Separate the development model from the business model.
- 4.Promise less than you believe.
- 5.Raise money to change the model, not to grow the model.
- 6.Cut once, cut hard, and show the cash.
- 7.Focus by subtraction.
- 8.Price to eliminate the internal conversation.
- 9.Grow your leaders; require them to be the best on the team.
- 10.Start onboarding before the first day.
- 11.Treat marketing as education for the ecosystem.
- 12.Distinguish value from cash — and stay on the buying side.
O
Twenty-Four Years, Three Names, Two Pivots
The capital and business-model history behind Odoo's growth.
2002
Tiny sprl founded at Louvain-la-Neuve; Pinckaers is the only employee, and remains so in 2003.
2005
TinyERP product launched; the company has six people.
2006
Pinckaers, 26, buys SorrySAP.com and holds it for six years.
2008
TinyERP renamed OpenERP after large clients balk at buying "tiny" software.
2010
With 100+ employees, raises €3M from Sofinnova and Xavier Niel to stop services and sell maintenance.
2013
Maintenance model fails; 30% of staff laid off; Odoo Community Association formed.
2014
Raises €7M; renamed Odoo; moves to cloud and open core (80% free, 20% proprietary).
2019
Raises $90M.
2022
Single per-user price including all applications; customer acquisition rises 2.8×.
2023
General Atlantic invests €150M at €3.75B; Pinckaers holds 55%.
2024
~$500M secondary backed by CapitalG, Sequoia, BlackRock at $5.26B.
2026
Valuation ~€10B; Pinckaers publicly opposes a wealth tax on unrealized equity.
Principle 1
Use a small market as scaffolding for a large product
The auctioneers needed two months of software. Pinckaers billed them for a year of it, spending the difference building general-purpose accounting and inventory modules that the art market had no special use for. This is not quite the "minimum viable product" doctrine, and it is not quite its opposite. It is a third thing: using a niche customer as a patron of infrastructure. The niche pays for the generic layer because the generic layer is needed to deliver the niche feature, and the founder quietly designs for a customer who has not yet arrived.
The move required two judgments. The first was that the art market was a bad market — "they don't have money" — and therefore not worth optimizing for. The second was that the bad market was nonetheless a perfectly good laboratory. Auction-in-Europe handled 15,000 objects a month; the software had to work at real volume. A founder who had mistaken the beachhead for the destination would have built the best auction software in Belgium and stopped. Pinckaers built the foundation of an ERP and then, "as soon as it started to work," walked away from the segment that had paid for it.
Tactic: When serving your first niche customer, ask which parts of their request are generic infrastructure, build those properly on their budget, and plan your exit from the niche before you enter it.
Principle 2
Choose an enemy, then wait
Pinckaers is candid that his rivalry with SAP was a motivational device more than a market analysis — the new kid at school picking the class bully. The enemy gave a one-man company a reason to work thirteen-hour days, a story to tell recruits, and a contrast to sell against. But the instructive part is not the choosing. It is the waiting. He bought SorrySAP.com in 2006 and sat on it for six years, until the company was large enough that the taunt would be funny rather than pathetic.
The founder's own retrospective deflates the fantasy — he thought it would take three years to bring down a $77 billion company and admits "it's better for your self-motivation not to face reality." The enemy, in the end, was never defeated; Odoo claims about 1 percent of the market. What it got instead was positioning. "The difference between us and SAP is that our users are happy" is a sentence that only works because SAP is the reference point everyone already resents.
Tactic: Name the incumbent you are defining yourself against internally from day one, but hold any public attack until you can survive the counterpunch.
Principle 3
Separate the development model from the business model
For a decade Pinckaers treated open source as both his method of building software and his method of earning money. The second assumption nearly killed the company twice. Selling services on free software produced a "hydra with ten heads." Selling maintenance produced a perverse incentive: the better the software, the fewer customers renewed. His eventual formulation is crisp: open source is "a very good development model… I also believe it's not a good business model."
Once the two were separated, each could be optimized independently. The development model — public code, global community feedback, millions of eyes — remained open, and remains the source of what he describes as faster evolution than traditional vendors and, now, a structural advantage in AI, because large language models have trained on Odoo's public code and documentation. The business model became open core: 80 percent free, 20 percent paid, the paid fifth financing the free four-fifths. "It took me 15 years to understand that," he said.
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How Odoo Tried to Get Paid
Each revenue model, what it rewarded, and how it broke.
| Model | Period | What it rewarded | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free software + custom services | 2002–2010 | Saying yes to every customer request | Risk Ugly, complex product; thin margins |
| Free software + maintenance contracts | 2010–2014 | Software that breaks | Risk Year-two churn; near bankruptcy |
| Open core + cloud | 2014– | R&D on a proprietary 20% | Scale Funded ~10× more developers |
| €10 × users × apps | Experiment | Using less of the product | Risk Partner revolt; ~a year of growth lost |
| Per-app pricing (~€100 solo vs ~€18 large) | Pre-2022 | Large customers, narrow usage | Try Unfair; 10–20% of product used |
| Single price, all apps included | 2022– | Adoption across departments | Scale 2.8× customer acquisition |
Tactic: Write down, separately, how you build and how you get paid, and test whether your revenue model rewards or punishes the quality of what you build.
Principle 4
Promise less than you believe
Pinckaers' most interesting self-criticism is not that he went proprietary; he is adamant that was correct. It is that he spent ten years telling his community he never would. "We sold them dream that actually was impossible." The community's anger in 2014 was not a reaction to the 20 percent. It was a reaction to the broken vow, and he concedes "they were right."
The lesson is subtle because the founder believed his own promise when he made it. Conviction is not the same as certainty, and public commitments made from conviction become liabilities when circumstances change. Had he said, as he now wishes he had, "today we are open source, we are not sure we will stay open-source," he believes the community would have understood the eventual shift. The values were defensible; the absolutism was not.
Tactic: When stating company values publicly, phrase them as current commitments with stated conditions, so that a necessary change reads as fulfilling a promise rather than betraying one.
Principle 5
Raise money to change the model, not to grow the model
Odoo did not take outside capital until it had more than a hundred employees, eight years in. Pinckaers notes, with some pride, that this was "very late." More striking than the timing is the stated purpose of each early round. The €3 million in 2010 existed to fund the gap between killing services revenue and building maintenance revenue. The €7 million in 2014 existed to fund the cloud platform and product cleanup required for open core. Neither was raised to "accelerate." Both were bridges across a deliberate revenue hole.
This is capital as pivot insurance. It explains why the company could later describe itself as never far from profitable even in its worst years, and why Pinckaers frames scarcity as formative: "If we are efficient today, it's because of these hard times." The well-funded alternative — hiring, trade shows, marketing before the model works — would, in his reading, have produced a company too expensive to sell full-suite software at €19.90 per user.
Tactic: Before raising, specify the revenue you are about to deliberately give up and the new model the money will carry you to; if you cannot name both, you are raising to grow, not to change.
Principle 6
Cut once, cut hard, and show the cash
The 2013 layoff of 30 percent of staff is the darkest episode in Odoo's history and the one from which Pinckaers has extracted the most explicit rules. Do not cut in rounds; serial small layoffs, he argues, destroy morale more than a single severe one with a clear recovery plan. Never lie to employees about the company's health. During the crisis he published cash charts internally, with two weeks of cash remaining and investors attempting to take control.
He has also offered a rough timing heuristic: from running out of cash to actual bankruptcy takes, in his experience, about two years — enough time to pivot if the founder moves decisively instead of waiting for a miracle. The underlying idea is that transparency is not a nicety in a crisis but a resource. People who can see the numbers can make sense of the cut, and the one thing that would make them leave — discovering they were deceived — is removed.
Tactic: If you must reduce headcount, do it in a single decisive cut sized to the worst plausible case, and show employees the cash position that justified it.
Principle 7
Focus by subtraction
When Odoo moved from a desktop GTK client to a web application, Pinckaers concluded that announcing a "priority" would fail, because priorities in practice get added on top of existing work. Instead the company declared there would be no new features for a year. The organization's capacity did not change; its denominator did.
The same instinct governs the company's structure two decades later. He describes Odoo at 6,500 employees as one product, two platforms, three core departments. It has grown without acquisitions, which he says only distract you and leave you "with managers you don't want." He has warned that large companies "defocus themselves" — new departments, new countries, new initiatives — until they are "bloated and very complex." His own defense is to remove options rather than rank them.
Tactic: For your next critical initiative, name the specific work the company will stop doing for its duration, and announce the stoppage rather than the priority.
Principle 8
Price to eliminate the internal conversation
The 2022 pricing change is usually told as a story about fairness — small customers had been paying roughly €100 per user while large ones paid about €18. The more interesting insight is about friction. Under per-app pricing, every additional module required a purchasing-department discussion, so customers used only 10 to 20 percent of the suite. A single price that included everything turned each unused app from a cost center into a free trial, and each new department using an app into new paying users.
The failed €10 × users × apps formula is the mirror image of the same lesson: pricing that charges more for deeper adoption teaches customers to adopt less. The swing from 1,200 to 3,400 new customers a month followed within two months of the change. Pinckaers was honest that many were small and revenue lagged — but the bet was on expansion within accounts, the land that becomes an estate.
Tactic: Identify the purchase decision your customers must escalate internally to expand usage, and restructure pricing so that the expansion requires no new approval.
Principle 9
Grow your leaders; require them to be the best on the team
Odoo's refusal to hire outside managers and directors is unusual at its scale, and Pinckaers' justification is cultural rather than ideological: outsiders arrive with habits, "probably good habits," that do not suit the environment. The more demanding half of the rule is the definition of leadership itself. A team leader's single objective is to make the team better, which requires being the best practitioner on it. In some departments, the team chooses its leader.
The KPI story from the U.S. office is the sharpest evidence for why this matters. Metrics ranked the company's top expert last, because he had been assigned the hardest rescues. Leaders who are themselves expert practitioners do not need dashboards to see who is good. Olivier Colson's path — junior developer in 2016, team leader a decade later — is the system working as designed. The geographic corollary is that offices follow people: find the trusted internal leader first, then open the office wherever they want to live.
Tactic: Make "best practitioner on the team" a hard prerequisite for any leadership role, and before adding a metric, ask whether a competent leader would already know what it measures.
Principle 10
Start onboarding before the first day
Odoo's hiring system is a product, designed with the same hostility to administrative waste as the software. Salaries are published before candidates apply. Interviews are self-scheduled — the direct descendant of Pinckaers' early observation that recruiters spend 60 percent of their email scheduling meetings. Offers follow within about a week. Every developer receives €10,000 on joining, the money the company would otherwise give a headhunter.
The books policy is the smallest and most revealing mechanism. Gifts to existing employees went unread; the same books mailed between contract signature and start date got read, because new hires feel the pressure of arriving. The insight generalizes: the window between "yes" and "day one" is a period of unusual motivation, and most companies waste it on paperwork.
Tactic: Use the gap between offer acceptance and start date to deliver something formative — reading, context, a small task — that shapes how the hire thinks before they meet the team.
Principle 11
Treat marketing as education for the ecosystem
Pinckaers frames Odoo's real constraint not as demand but as competence. By his estimate, about 100,000 people already earn their living developing, selling, or implementing Odoo, and that figure must reach 500,000. Someone has to train 400,000 people, and if they are bad at it, customers suffer. So marketing, in his formulation, "creates value by teaching, explaining, and educating" — e-learning, documentation, university programs like LabOdoo, and a calendar of around 400 events a year that the company says is run by three people. Influencer marketing arrived late and was steered toward explaining features rather than displaying logos.
The approach has a disciplining effect on the product. "When you open source, you cannot hide," he said. Paying customers can see the enterprise code on GitHub; anyone can try the software. Marketing that over-promises is instantly falsifiable, which leaves explanation as the only honest strategy. His one controversy here — an education minister's review of whether LabOdoo's school visits amounted to commercial intrusion — shows the line can be contested; he insists the program aligns with curricula.
Tactic: Measure your marketing by how many people it makes competent with your product, not by how many it makes aware of it.
Principle 12
Distinguish value from cash — and stay on the buying side
Through every secondary round, Pinckaers wanted the share price low because he and Odoo's managers were buying. He has ruled out an IPO on the grounds that quarterly reporting would redirect attention from product. In June 2026 he made the logic explicit in public: his paper wealth is not money but the working parts of a company — intellectual property, employees, buildings — and the only way to convert it into a wealth-tax payment would be to sell control to American investors. Hence his willingness to accept a 90 percent tax on any eventual sale, alongside his refusal of a tax on value he has not realized.
The principle applies well beyond billionaires. Founders who confuse valuation with liquidity make bad decisions in both directions — spending against paper gains, or selling control to cover obligations that were never cash in the first place. Majority ownership, maintained across every round, is what gave Pinckaers the freedom to ignore exits entirely and run the company on a decades-long horizon.
Tactic: Keep a strict separation in your planning between the company's valuation and the cash actually available to you, and decide in advance what level of ownership you will never sell below.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Fabien Pinckaers, Planet Odoo podcast, 2023The reason why we are so efficient today is because we had to fight for ten years without money, trying to do things with nothing. And that forced us who we are today.
— Fabien Pinckaers, Planet Odoo podcast, 2023When you open source, you cannot hide. People have access to the source code. They can try it, and so if it's bad, they will notice.
— Fabien Pinckaers, to PaperjamNothing is more important than the product. Many executives lose sight of the bigger picture entirely. They spend their time in business circles, discussing positioning, new departments and organisational structures.
— Fabien Pinckaers, Planet Odoo podcast, 2023When you start, the culture is you. And when you start to recruit your first five employees, the culture is still you because it's you that talks to them.
— Fabien Pinckaers, LinkedIn, June 2026Taxer le capital non réalisé, c'est un peu comme taxer l'héritage d'un proche qui n'est pas encore mort.
Maxims
- Let the bad market pay for the good one. A niche customer can fund the generic foundation of a much larger product if you build beyond their request.
- Many ideas, fast deaths. Abandon what doesn't work at the cost of a print run; keep only what keeps working after you stop pushing.
- Open source is how you build, not how you earn. Decouple the development model from the business model before the business model decouples you from solvency.
- Never promise forever. State your values with their conditions, so that necessary change doesn't read as betrayal.
- Raise to cross a gap, not to grow. Outside capital is best spent bridging a deliberate revenue hole between one model and the next.
- Cut once and show the numbers. One hard reduction with transparent cash beats a slow series of cuts and comforting lies.
- Subtract to prioritize. "No new features for a year" achieves what "make it a priority" never will.
- Price away the purchase meeting. If adopting more of your product requires internal approval, your pricing is suppressing your growth.
- Lead only if you're the best on the team. Grow leaders from within and trust their judgment over dashboards.
- Value is not cash. Keep the price low while you're buying, and never sell the control you need to keep playing the long game.
