Fabien Pinckaers

The through-line

Ask Fabien Pinckaers what separates the winners from everyone else and the answer is deliberately unglamorous: "The difference between the very successful companies and the others is the very successful ones just survived." [19] Odoo's record, as he tells it, has no inflection point and no breakout year: "We have done 50% growth year after year for 20 years. There is we didn't have a very big year, we didn't have an explosion, it just year after year 50% growth because of good execution." [19] Seven years spent close to bankruptcy are treated not as a scar but as the source of the company's operating discipline. [19]

That same logic projects forward. He frames business software as an industry heading for the same consolidation that flattened operating systems and office suites, from the MS-DOS era into Windows, iOS and Linux, and from WordPerfect into Office and Workspace [19]. His stated ten-year ambition follows directly: "My challenge for the future is just to survive and be among these one, two, or three player that have the world." [19] Everything else, pricing, hiring, compensation, product design, is subordinated to staying in the game long enough to be one of the survivors.

On why scarcity built the company

Not raising much money is presented as an advantage rather than a constraint accepted under duress. "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." [19] The point is that efficiency is path-dependent: a company that has never been short of cash cannot retrofit the habit later [19].

The corollary is a specific view on how founders handle crises. Entrepreneurial optimism makes people cut too little and too late, so the correct instinct is the opposite of the natural one: "Be transparent, cut once, but cut hard, to be sure that you're safe for the next time." [19]

On pricing as the contrarian lever

The most concrete demonstration of the low-cost vision came when inflation pushed every other software vendor to raise prices and Odoo moved the other way, dropping to €20 for all apps [19]. The result was immediate and measurable: "From one day to another we multiplied the new clients per month by 2.8." [19] Beyond the volume, the move bought brand awareness and kept the company consistent with the position it claims [19].

The same instinct shows up in hardware, a category Odoo generally avoids. When the main Belgian producer of restaurant black boxes was selling them at 699€, Odoo entered the market specifically to change that, offering black boxes 2.0 free for life to all Odoo users, with no purchase and no subscription [15].

On culture and never hiring managers

The hiring rule is absolute and stated as such: "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." [19] Scaling from a handful of people past 6,000 therefore rests on always promoting from within, writing a culture book that every new employee receives, and growing organically with no acquisitions [19].

What that culture contains is three employee values: autonomy, responsibility and professional development [16]. The distinction he draws is between companies that advertise autonomy while surrounding it with budgets and approval processes, and Odoo, which he says provides the freedom genuinely, with no budget constraints and no control mechanisms [16].

On why stock options deceive somebody

Odoo has no stock options, and the argument is that the instrument always misleads one side or the other [19]. Either it pays out far more than salary would have, as with a frustrated director who received €4.5M, or it holds unmotivated people in place through vesting, or it ends up worth nothing [19]. The alternative Odoo uses is to borrow against its own shares in order to pay higher salaries instead [19].

On UX being the real game changer, and AI being the product

The strategic claim is blunt: "The real game changer is not so much AI but UX." [19] The reasoning is that mature ERPs all handle workflows adequately, so the remaining differentiation lies in user productivity and experience [19]. That belief is visible in how the next version is being built and discussed in public, with the Odoo 20 redesign put up side by side against Odoo 19 and opened to comment on material design icons replacing font awesome, headers on grey with inputs on white, rounded borders and pastel tags and statuses, all flagged as work in progress [6]. The same attention runs through a new dialog that cleanly separates chats, channels, meetings, AI sessions, livechats and Whatsapp [5], and through call flows you design yourself, buying phone numbers in a few clicks and automating incoming and outgoing flows [4].

None of which means AI is absent from the roadmap. He points to accounting work being automated end to end, with prompts as broad as "I am a new CFO, tell me everything I should know for 2026", starting the year end audit and performing the full Equity cycle checks, and calls the capability "just astonishing" [10]. Transparency of reasoning is part of the design: Odoo AI now explains its thinking process through a "Steps taken" button [7]. Alongside these, the shipping cadence continues to be published in the open through release notes such as Odoo 19.4 [9].

On wealth, taxes and Belgium

He is consistent that his wealth is not liquid. Odoo is valued at over 5 billion dollars, but he manages a valuable company rather than holding cash [17]. Faced with a proposed tax on the rich, he spells out the arithmetic: 0.6% annually on his shares, a little over 50% of Odoo valued around 10 billion euros, meaning more than 30m€ of tax per year against roughly 10k€ of net monthly income [14]. Selling shares to American shareholders to cover it would mean losing control of the company, which he rules out entirely, leaving departure from Belgium as the only option [14]. The broader argument is that we should stop stigmatising the rich, because the wealth of the wealthiest is not money in an account for holidays, it is shares in companies, assets that include intellectual property, bank accounts, buildings and employees [14]. That position sits alongside genuine attachment: "The reality is that life in Belgium is incredible." [19]

On origins, naming and how builders are trained

The beginnings are early and iterative: a first business at 13 building management software for friends, then e-commerce, a Linux t-shirt company, and an art marketplace selling 15,000 items a month, before Odoo [18]. He is equally candid that the polished origin myth is invented. The story fed to the press about a graph of O's in top company names is a fabricated PR story; the name was chosen precisely because it means nothing, arrived at after two failures, TinyERP sounding too small and OpenERP sounding like SAP [19].

On education he is comparative and pointed: the top 30% of Indian schools train entrepreneurs and builders far better than Belgian schools, and his own children learned twice as fast in India and skipped a year when they returned to Belgium [19]. The instinct to seed entrepreneurship early shows in programming too, with a Future Entrepreneurs track for over-16s featuring speakers on going from content creator to entrepreneur and on how to get a "yes", plus hands-on workshops in website creation and business management [3].

On community as a distribution machine

Events have grown into something close to a second business. Registrations to Odoo events, counting business shows, trainings and Odoo Experience, run at 120k per month, prompting the observation that the company now sounds like an event company too [2]. Odoo Experience itself runs across five countries, in Mexico, the United States of America, Kenya, India and Belgium, free to attend, built around discovering the new version, inspiring business and IT speakers, community networking, hundreds of exhibitors, parties and food, with the morning keynotes singled out as the most important track in each [1]. The Odoo 20 launch is tied directly to that calendar [6].

Third-party validation is treated as worth amplifying rather than manufacturing: an AVP piece breaking down the "Odoo Exceptionalism" [11], a StackGuide review of Odoo for a services company alongside a full sales flow demo [8], a long-form account of the Odoo adventure [12], and a Carrefour success story [13]. The underlying product claim stays simple, a suite of over 40,000 apps covering accounting, inventory, retail and restaurants [17].

Takeaways

• Treat survival as the strategy, not a fallback: "The difference between the very successful companies and the others is the very successful ones just survived." [19]
• Compounding beats breakouts. Twenty years of 50% annual growth came from execution, with no explosive year [19].
• Under-capitalisation can be an asset. Seven near-bankrupt years produced a culture of efficiency "that you cannot build if you raise too much money." [19]
• In a downturn, act against your optimism: be transparent, cut once, cut hard, and be safe for the next round [19].
• Cutting prices to €20 for all apps while competitors raised theirs multiplied new clients per month by 2.8 [19].
• Never recruit external managers, because experienced directors import their own culture; promote from within, write a culture book, grow organically without acquisitions [19].
• Skip stock options entirely, since they either overpay, retain the unmotivated through vesting, or expire worthless; borrow against your own shares to fund higher salaries instead [19].
• In mature ERP the differentiator is user experience rather than AI, because every serious product already handles the workflows [19].
• Founder wealth is shares, not cash: a 0.6% annual wealth tax on a ~10 billion euro company against ~10k€ monthly net income forces either exile or loss of control [14][17].