Fabien Pinckaers was the guest of RTL info Signatures. Belgium’s youngest billionaire is the founder of the company Oodo. The Walloon company valued at 5 billion euros is offering an entry bonus of €10,000 to attract new developers and support its growth.
Fabien Pinckaers founded Odoo at just 23 years old. Today, the company has grown significantly, so much so that it is now valued at 5 billion euros and employs 2,800 people around the world. This Walloon pearl is software intended to facilitate business management regarding accounting, sales, customer and inventory management.
A bonus of €10,000 to attract developers
However, the Odoo company could not have been what it is today without its developers. Fabien Pinckaers still needs it and is offering, moreover, an entry bonus of €10,000 to developers who start at Odoo. Is this a profession that is so lacking in Wallonia? “Ah yes we really miss it“, he confirms in RTL info Signatures. “We are recruiting several hundred. If you look at UCLouvain, which is the large university near us, as one of the largest, they graduate 80 developers per year. It’s nothing at all. While we alone hire several hundred. And we are not the only ones, there are a lot of companies recruiting, So there is a real problem of supply and demand“, he believes.
A school system to rethink
So, how can we create more vocations among us? Fabian Pinckaers lived in India for a year with his family and discovered a completely different school system. “My children had computer science classes, development in Python (a programming language, editor’s note) at school. They were quite young, 10 and 12 years old. They also had entrepreneurship courses, they had leadership courses, so learning how to speak well in public, defining objectives, and economics courses but without the formulas. Just if I increase the price, what happens, etc. So it’s really a discovery of entrepreneurship from a very young age.“.
The entrepreneur would like to see this type of course with us. “We do math, French, science, and then when it comes to going to university and choosing what we do, we’re going to choose from what we know. So I know if I like math, I know if I like science, I know if I like French, I don’t know computer science. And so no one does this kind of study“.
“Developers, the biggest value creation in the world”
Fabien Pinckaers reminds us: “Seven of the largest companies in the world were started by developers. It’s not nothing, it’s the biggest creation of value in the world today, it’s the developers“.
When we ask Belgium’s youngest billionaire what advice he would give to young people who want to be successful, he doesn’t hesitate: “One, you have to work, a lot. We sometimes forget it, but we don’t get anything without anything. It was very hard for me, I spent 7 years on the verge of bankruptcy, I’m there because I worked, worked, worked. And that matters. The second is ‘just do it’, go for it. Because if we wait for the idea, if we wait for the opportunity… I did something that is not innovative. There are plenty of management factories, it’s just that I started, I learned, I launched, I improved. And thanks to that, we grew“.
Founded in 2002, Odoo now boasts 13 million users and acquires 7,000 new ones every month. With constant annual growth of 40%, the unicorn expects a turnover of one billion euros by 2027.
Odoo Fabien Pinckaers developers Wallonia shortage developers Belgium premium developers Odoo software business management Walloon company
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