Today on BILLIONS, I'm sitting down with Wilfried Juncker.

He's the Managing Director for Odoo's Americas a Belgian software unicorn that just hit a €8 billion valuation.

Under Wilfried's watch, Odoo's Americas operation exploded from 35 people in 2016 to over 950 in America only.

In this episode, we're digging into how Wilfried built Odoo's American war machine, what it takes to conquer a new market from scratch, and how he's fighting high SMB churn while scaling at breakneck speed.

While SAP and Oracle charge millions for ERP, Odoo's open-source model is democratizing enterprise software and Wilfried built the Americas war machine that's making it happen.

Wilfried, thanks a lot for being here!

TIMELINE :

00:00:00 - 00:01:05 : Odoo's explosive growth from 70 to 2,000 employees

00:01:05 - 00:02:30 : The early days and Wilfried's journey at Odoo

00:02:30 - 00:05:25 : Entering the US market with channel partners strategy

00:05:25 - 00:09:25 : Open source model and freemium conversion tactics

00:09:25 - 00:14:20 : Building the partner ecosystem and revenue sharing

00:14:20 - 00:18:07 : Scaling partner relationships and management approach

00:18:07 - 00:24:12 : Hiring and retention philosophy - promote from within only

00:24:12 - 00:27:14 : Industry specialization vs size-based team structure

00:27:14 - 00:34:32 : Managing SMB churn while maintaining growth

00:34:32 - 00:42:17 : Demo-first culture and bottom-up sales approach

00:42:17 - 00:48:20 : Resource allocation and offline marketing strategy

00:48:20 - 00:52:27 : Unconventional customer acquisition tactics

00:52:27 - 00:54:29 : Building local ecosystems and final thoughts

REFERENCES :

- Oracle NetSuite

- Microsoft Dynamics

- SAP

- Acumatica

- Sage

- Epicor

- Infor

- QuickBooks

- HubSpot

- GitHub

- Lemlist

- Clay

- Lucia

- NPR

- NASA