The Odoo Story

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. My dream was to lead the enterprise management market with a fully open source software. (I also wanted to get 100 employees before 30 years old with a self-financed company but I failed this one by only a few months).

To fuel my motivation, I had to pick someone to fight against. 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.

So, in 2005, I started to develop the TinyERP product, the software that (at least in my mind) would change the enterprise world. While preparing for the "day of the fight" in 2006, I bought the SorrySAP.com domain name. I put it on hold for 6 years, waiting for the right moment to use it. I 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...

To make things happen, I worked hard, very hard. I worked 13 hours a day, 7 days a week, with no vacations for 7 years. I lost friendships and broke up with my girlfriend in the process (fortunately, I found a more valuable wife now. I will explain later why she is worth 1 million EUR :).

Three years later, I discovered you can't change the world if you are "tiny". 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?" So, we renamed TinyERP to OpenERP.

As we worked hard, things started to evolve. We were developing dozens of modules for OpenERP, the open source community was growing and I was even able to pay all employees' salaries at the end of the month without fear (which was a situation I struggled with for 4 years).

In 2010, we had a 100+ employees company selling services on OpenERP and a powerful but ugly product. This is what happens when delivering services to customers distracts you from building an exceptional product. It was time to do a pivot in the business model.

The Pivot

We wanted to switch from a service company to a software publisher company. This would allow to increase our efforts in our research and development activities. As a result, we changed our business model and decided to stop our services for customers and focus on building a strong partner network and maintenance offer. This would cost money, so I had to raise a few million euros.

After a few months of pitching investors, I got roughly 10 LOI from different VCs. We chosed Sofinnova Partners, the biggest European VC, and Xavier Niel the founder of Iliad, the only company in France funded in the past 10 years to have reached the 1 billion EUR valuation.

I signed the LOI. I didn't realize that this contract could have turned me into a homeless person. (I already had a dog, all I needed was to lose a lot of money to become homeless). The fundraising was based on a company valuation but there was a financial mechanism to re-evaluate the company up by 9.8 m€ depending on the turnover of the next 4 years. I should have received warrants convertible into shares if we achieved the turnover targeted in the business plan.

The night before receiving the warrants in front of the notary, my wife checked the contracts. She asked me what would be the taxation on these warrants. I rang the lawyer and guess what? Belgium is probably the only country in the world where you have to pay taxes on warrants when you receive them, even if you never reach the conditions to convert them into shares. If I had accepted these warrants, I would have had to pay a 12.5% tax on 9.8 m€; resulting in a tax of 1.2m€ to pay in 18 months! So, my wife is worth 1.2 million EUR. I would have ended up a homeless person without her, as I still did not have a salary at that time. 

We changed the deal and I got the 3 million EUR. It allowed me to recruit a rocking management team.

Being a Mature Company

With this money in our bank account, we boosted two departments: R&D and Sales. We burned 2 million EUR in 18 months, mostly in salaries. The company started to grow even faster. We developed a partner network of 500 partners in 100 countries and we started to sign contracts with 6 zeros.

Then, things became different. You know, tedious things like handling human resources, board meetings, dealing with big customer contracts, traveling to launch international subsidiaries. We did boring stuff like budgets, career paths, management meetings, etc.

2011 was a complex year. We did not meet our expectations: we only achieved 70% of the forecasted sales budget. Our management meetings were tense. We under performed. We were not satisfied with ourselves. We had a constant feeling that we missed something. It's a strange feeling to build extraordinary things but to not be proud of ourselves.

But one day, someone (I don't remember who, I have a goldfish memory) made a graph of the monthly turnover of the past 2 years. It was like waking up from a nightmare. In fact, it was not that bad, we had multiplied the monthly turnover by 10 over the span of roughly two years! This is when we understood that OpenERP is a marathon, not a sprint. Only 100% growth a year is ok... if you can keep the rhythm for several years. 

The Rise of Odoo

After having disrupted the ERP market, OpenERP moved far beyond the boundaries of traditional ERP players. The integration of business activities is not anymore restricted to sales, accounting, inventory and procurements. In June 2014, we released version 8 with awesome CMS & eCommerce, a Point of Sale, an integrated Business Intelligence engine and much more. (and 3000+ modules)

Our exceptional technology allowed us to move to newer markets (CMS & eCommerce) and propose a product that disrupt existing open source players (Wordpress, Magento, etc). The OpenERP CMS is so good that even top competitors admited it publicly when we released the beta version.

If current open source players have a real technical challenge to follow us, we also have a huge marketing challenge. Wordpress has 22% of all internet websites. We were the leader in management software, but we start with 0% of the website market.

To move forward, we raised USD 10 million in May 2014 in order to boost marketing and sales activities. In order to support our vision, we had to change the name that is not restricted to ERPs functions. We needed a name that allows to support our ambitions; build business solutions like CMS, eCommerce, Business Intelligence and, who knows, even sky rockets or driverless cars in the future...

In May 2014, we renamed the company and product to Odoo. And a new story just started... a few years later, we became the most used management software worldwide.

Fabien Pinckaers
Odoo Founder & CEO