Know Fabien Pinckaers, the CEO of OpenERP SA

He who has an Inspiring journey, attitude, gratitude, patience and leading skills !

I might be wrong, but only he can correct…Fabien Pinckaers completes 11 years of Journey with OpenERP!!!





He always introduced to us(all colleagues in a similar manner):“Hi, this is Fabien, CEO of Tiny sprl”.

I remember when I first talked to Fabien Sir (In India, every senior is addressed as Sir), I guess I still have that chat saved. It was 17 September 2007 or so. I was given a task and Dhara Shah helped me accomplish it. When he visited India, He was surprised to see it and asked me “is that only 2 months have you joined?”

I am not sure, but he started in March 2002 I suppose. He started working on Auction project probably for his Father’s business. Later on he realized he should make it bigger, an ERP and it started as TinyERP. (I’m writing here based on what I’ve heard, but seems True).

Not to miss, Fabien sir never made anyone touch ‘Auction’ module doing more changes…!!!

Fabien Pinckaers make programs for businesses since the age of 13. Now at the age of 30, he developed his company, Tiny Sprl. It was established in 2002 while pursuing his studies in civil engineering at UCL (Louvain-la-Neuve). The story is beautiful and has only just begun. The history of this company is making on the cover page of the magazine “Trends Tendances” titled as “New Bill Gates is Belgian”, dated Thursday 16 June 09.

He has said:
“
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 naïve 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 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 terrorises 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.
“

If you have more information, feel free to add!
Thanks, Have a great journey ahead!