Fabien Pinckaers

Fabien Pinckaers speaks about Odoo almost entirely in terms of survival, execution, and refusal to follow industry convention, and that thread runs through everything from his product announcements to his political commentary. His central historical claim is that the company's culture was forged by crisis: "we learned to execute with nothing, to not spend too much money, so we build a culture of efficiency that you cannot build if you raise too much money" ¹⁰. He frames seven years near bankruptcy not as a setback but as the mechanism that produced Odoo's discipline, and he generalizes from it to a broader theory of business success: "the difference between the very successful companies and the others is the very successful ones just survived" ¹⁰. This is not false modesty about steady, unspectacular growth, he is explicit that the compounding itself is the achievement, "we have done 50% growth year after year for 20 years... it just year after year 50% growth because of good execution" ¹⁰.

That crisis experience also shaped a specific, hard-edged view on how to handle downturns: founders are naturally optimistic and therefore cut too little too late, so the correct approach is to "be transparent, cut once, but cut hard, to be sure that you're safe for the next time" ¹⁰. He applies the same contrarian instinct to pricing. Rather than following the market when inflation hit and every vendor raised prices, Odoo cut prices to 20 euros for all apps, an act he credits with a direct, measurable payoff: "from one day to another we multiplied the new clients per month by 2.8" ¹⁰. The same logic shows up in his more recent product moves, where he took Odoo into a category it normally avoids, POS black boxes for Belgian restaurants, specifically to undercut an entrenched incumbent charging 699€, offering the Odoo version free for life to all users . Undercutting the market, in other words, is not a one-off tactic for him but a recurring strategic reflex.

On organizational design he is just as doctrinaire. He explicitly warns against ever hiring managers from outside: "never ever recruit managers. Because if you recruit experienced directors they will come with their own culture. Maybe it's a good one but it's not yours" ¹⁰. Culture, in his account, has to be grown organically, promoted from within, and reinforced deliberately as the company scales past a few people to thousands. He extends this anti-establishment streak to compensation, rejecting stock options outright because they "always deceive either the company or the employee," pointing to cases of options paying out wildly more than salary ever would, or vesting schedules retaining people who no longer want to be there, or grants simply going to zero, preferring instead to borrow against the company's own shares to fund higher direct salaries ¹⁰.

His product philosophy has a similarly contrarian center of gravity even as the technology conversation shifts. Talking in 2025, he flatly rejects the industry consensus that AI is the frontier: "the real game changer is not so much AI but UX," arguing that mature ERPs already handle workflows adequately and that the real differentiator is user productivity and experience ¹⁰. Yet by mid-2026 his own public posts are dominated by AI capability inside Odoo, showcasing features where the assistant explains its reasoning, "Odoo AI explains its thinking process... Try the 'Steps taken' button" , and demonstrating AI performing an entire year-end accounting audit end to end with prompts like "Start the year end audit" and "Perform the full Equity cycle checks," which he calls "just astonishing" . This is not a contradiction so much as an evolution in emphasis: UX remains the stated long-term differentiator, but AI has become the vehicle through which Odoo is trying to deliver that UX advantage in practice.

Pinckaers's read on the industry's endgame is consolidation, not proliferation. He compares the current ERP landscape to earlier eras of computing that eventually collapsed into a handful of dominant platforms, operating systems settling into Windows, iOS, and Linux, office suites into Office and Workspace, and he sizes Odoo's own ambition accordingly: "my challenge for the future is just to survive and be among these one, two, or three player that have the world" ¹⁰. It's a modest-sounding goal stated with total seriousness, consistent with his broader instinct that endurance, not spectacle, is what separates winners.

That same instinct for self-preservation surfaces sharply, and personally, when he turns to Belgian tax politics. Responding to a proposed wealth tax targeting large shareholdings, he calculates the levy would cost him over 30 million euros a year against roughly 10,000 euros in monthly net income, and treats the underlying premise as a misunderstanding of what wealth actually is: entrepreneurs' assets are equity tied up in the company, its intellectual property, accounts, real estate, and employees, not liquid cash sitting idle, and taxing it at that scale would force him to choose between exile or ceding control of Odoo to American shareholders, an option he calls "hors de question" . He closes the point with blunt resignation, "adieu la Belgique," even while elsewhere praising the country's quality of life as "incredible" ¹⁰, underscoring that his objection is specifically to policy design, not to Belgium itself.

Across the record, the throughline is a founder who treats scarcity, contrarian pricing, internal promotion, and long-horizon patience as the actual mechanics of building an enduring company, while resisting anything that looks like following the herd, whether that's the herd raising prices, the herd hiring outside executives, the herd granting stock options, or, more recently, the herd's assumption that AI alone will decide the next era of business software.