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Founder's story : Scaling Factorial from 1 to 100M, and becoming a Unicorn
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00:00All right. Hi everybody. Good to be here. Thanks for coming. My name is Luca and I'm a partner at
00:07Atomico, where I co-head the growth fund based out of London, where we invest 20 to 50 million dollars
00:13to lead Series B to pre-IPO rounds and partner with game-changing founders. I got one of those game
00:19-changing founders here with me.
00:22I'm pleased to welcome Jordi Romero, co-founder and CEO of Factorial HR based in Barcelona. I was fortunate enough
00:29to lead his Series C about three years ago and join his board and today we're talking about a scaling
00:35journey to becoming a unicorn, zero to 100 million. Jordi, thanks for being here and for those unfamiliar, maybe tell
00:42us a little bit about what you're building at Factorial.
00:45Well, thank you, Luca. Great being here. First time at VivaTech, very impressive event. So, yeah, we became a unicorn
00:53three years ago, but I think the funny thing is most of our growth happened after that round.
00:58I think we all knew it was coming, which is probably, hopefully, what got you excited, but what gets me
01:03excited is to see what's coming now, what's the next five years of Factorial.
01:07We have, like, insanely ambitious goals. What we do is very simple. We look at all the organizations around the
01:12world, companies between 10 employees and a few thousand employees.
01:15And we look at how they run their business and how little and terrible technology to use to make decisions,
01:21to run the company, to do their HR, their finance workflows.
01:24And we, as engineers, the founding team realized that that didn't make any sense. We imagine the world where all
01:30the administration, all the paperwork, all the compliance would happen in autopilot.
01:34And then by automating all of these workflows, we would start gathering a lot of data that SMEs never had.
01:39Big companies have products like SAP or Oracle or Workday where they have databases of a lot of information that
01:45they can use to run reports and then create PowerPoints and hire McKinsey and do all these fancy analysis on
01:51what's going on in their business and in their industry.
01:53But companies with 100 employees, 400 employees cannot afford that. So we realize that if we build a very intuitive,
01:59easy-to-use software that takes care of all of the compliance, all of the administration can start focusing on
02:06the goals of the company, the development of the talent, and the growth of the organization ecosystems around them.
02:12And we started doing this nine years ago with a very simple time tracking and vacations management, mostly in Spain,
02:18and today with an all-in-one business management platform with over 13,000 customers, a million people using the
02:25platform, 100 million in annual revenues, and operating all over Europe and some of America as well.
02:30Super exciting. What a story. Talk us through the early days. What was the exact moment, if you remember it,
02:37that pushed you guys to start?
02:39So three founders, all engineers. I like to see ourselves like a hammer looking for nails. So I see the
02:47world, and I see software problems everywhere. And they don't need to be a problem that is today a software
02:51problem, but I like to imagine how software can make that part of the world better.
02:55And as engineers that became leaders, we started running teams, hiring executives, growing our companies. We just were too frustrated
03:04by how we were running our business.
03:06And then we had this moment of realization where we were trying to implement ERPs, which is like an ugly
03:12word almost, but this software to manage your invoicing, your taxes, your administration in the finance department mostly.
03:19And we looked at our CRM, which was HubSpot, which was intuitive, easy to use. Everybody enjoyed using it, and
03:26it grew a lot inside the company.
03:27And we wondered, what if there existed something that looked like HubSpot that was affordable and fun to use and
03:34worked and grew with the company, but it solved these other problems, these ugly, scary, intimidating problems?
03:39And we said, yeah, it doesn't exist. We started asking people why they thought this didn't exist, and the answer
03:46that they gave was the right one to get us started.
03:48They said, it's impossible. So we said, okay, that's exactly what we wanted to hear. It is impossible, which means
03:54it's not impossible. It means it's probably very, very hard.
03:56But we thought we had the skills to build an intuitive UI and a scalable software platform, and then go
04:02to market to SMBs.
04:04Super interesting. And you already hit on it a little bit in the point before. If you compare factorial today
04:09to that original hypothesis, how close are you? How far away are you?
04:14There is a quote from, I think it was Bill Gates, or at least it's attributed to Bill Gates, that
04:18said that most people overestimate what they can do in a year, but underestimate what they can do in a
04:23decade.
04:23We're nine years old now, and kind of doing a lot of reflection, looking back. I think vision-wise, we're
04:30exactly where we said we were going to be, but the vision is very blurry.
04:33So it's very easy to follow that vision. The detail is impossible to predict. Scale-wise, I wouldn't have guessed
04:40we would be where we are right now, to be honest.
04:42You know, we dreamt of getting to five million very fast, but getting to 100 was like this distant dream
04:48that, you know, somebody will take care of after me.
04:49And the reality now is we're thinking how to get to one billion and how to do it fast.
04:54And I'm very excited about that. Maybe let's go back to initial product market fit.
04:59You know, 100 million is incredible, but the first customers finding product market fit, how long did that take you?
05:06And, you know, what were some of the key signals that you saw where you said, yeah, we have it
05:10now?
05:12Those first customers are heroes, and we, startup founders, owe a lot to them.
05:17We're very optimistic people, most founders, at least all the founders I know.
05:21So we tend to sell what we believe we're going to be able to do.
05:26Now, that is optimism, and these people chose to believe in our optimism.
05:31I remember talking to these people and showing them a live demo that barely did anything, and it was mostly
05:36broken,
05:36and then showing them a figma or a sketch back in the day and say, this is what we're going
05:41to build in the next couple of weeks or in the next few weeks.
05:43And they'd say, I want that, no?
05:46And then you start saying, okay, do you trust me?
05:47Do you believe that I'll be able to deliver that?
05:49And then you go back three weeks later, and you'll show something completely different that was much better than what
05:53you showed them the first time around.
05:55And then they start believing that what they're buying as an early-stage customer is not necessarily the product that
06:00exists today,
06:01but our ability as a founding team, as an early-stage team, to process very fast what the pain is,
06:07what the problems are in the world, and how we can solve them with a user experience that has never
06:11been envisioned before.
06:13So we owe a lot to these customers.
06:15Many of them are still with us, and it means a lot.
06:17And they grew, and we grow, and it's amazing to see them.
06:21Now, that doesn't scale, because that takes a lot of promising and commitment.
06:26And I don't want to say custom development, but very active listening to their pains and having a lot of
06:31transparency to our roadmap.
06:32Right now, we have more than 250 people in our product organization.
06:36We cannot commit to our roadmap, because there's so much going on that, you know, I don't even know what
06:40their whole roadmap is.
06:41It's too big to fit in a slide.
06:43So we needed to change the way we operate.
06:45But in those early days, it was a lot about, you know, gaining the trust of these people,
06:49also being very cheap.
06:51We started being free, so talk about cheap.
06:54And then delivering on our promises always.
06:57Nice.
06:58Were there any missteps that you made back then that in hindsight actually accelerated your process?
07:05Well, there was the biggest, most stupid decision we ever took.
07:11It's possibly the reason we're here today.
07:13We decided to give away our software for free, actually.
07:17So we thought, back in the time, there was a startup in San Francisco that was growing like insane.
07:23And they were offering a software for free, and they were making money through, you know, brokerage fees and commissions
07:30from some services that were contracted through the platform.
07:33And we thought that's brilliant, because we can help people.
07:35We don't need to charge them, and somebody else will pay us.
07:38That was not a good idea, you know, economically, because the fees we would make were tiny.
07:43And if you compare to a B2B SaaS, the CAC, the cost of acquiring customers, compared to the lifetime fees
07:49that you would make, didn't make any sense.
07:51And we stuck to that idea for way too long to have any meaningful revenues, which made our early days
07:57very, very tough.
07:58Our first three years of operation were very miserable.
08:00We had no revenue, which means fundraising was very tough.
08:03And it took, like, crazy believers to raise some money to continue going.
08:08But at the same time, we had a ton of users and a ton of companies that gave us a
08:13lot of feedback, that worked with us, and that allowed us to build a brand and a reputation, a micro
08:18-brand and a micro-reputation.
08:19But that allowed us that once we realized that free was not sustainable, and we started charging for our software,
08:25then our numbers did like this.
08:27And, you know, they skyrocketed, and then the next six years, basically, have been insane growth since that point, which
08:33happened to be right before the pandemic and right before I became a father.
08:36So that was a very intense time of my life.
08:38I bet.
08:39In that early scaling journey where there's, you know, less data to backup recommendation, I'm sure you got a ton
08:46of advice.
08:47What are some of the worst advice you've gotten in that time period?
08:51Oh, my God.
08:51I don't have time for this.
08:53I've got so much advice.
08:54VCs love to give advice.
08:56So, yeah, we got a lot of advice.
08:5990-plus percent of it was totally wrong.
09:01Some was right, actually.
09:02So I'm going to give you one of the right advices that we got as well.
09:06I want to be fair.
09:07And then I'll tell you one that was very wrong and that would have totally destroyed our growth trajectory.
09:12One that was right is when I think we were raising a Series A.
09:15I was in San Francisco.
09:16meeting one of the most well-known investors out of San Francisco.
09:20And we had incredible unit economics.
09:22We had beautiful numbers.
09:24Everything was growing, like, almost vertically.
09:26And we were, like, 40 people in the team.
09:29And this investor, very famous general partner from a very famous fund, looks at me and says,
09:34yeah, the numbers look great, but why are you so many people?
09:37And then he says something that pissed me off.
09:38He's like, ah, it's European companies.
09:40You're always hiding too many people.
09:42And then my European pride showed up.
09:44And I'm like, shut up.
09:45You know nothing.
09:46And I said, look at the numbers.
09:47The numbers are great.
09:48And he's like, yes, but there is a hidden cost to being too many people.
09:51And you're being lazy or you're getting used to being too many people.
09:55And maybe now you don't see it, but you'll pay the price.
09:57I got to say, three years later, we're 700 people.
10:01And the numbers are still amazing.
10:03And we're growing.
10:04But we start feeling the pain of the culture, the communication, the agility, the speed,
10:10the amount of middle management layers that we need that were really, you know, hurting us.
10:14And they were not seen in the spreadsheet.
10:16But he was totally right on that one.
10:19So I'll give credit to that guy that gave me the right feedback.
10:22Now there is 1,000 wrong feedbacks after that.
10:25But one that could have killed us totally is when we had a board meeting.
10:29And we were also fundraising at the same time.
10:31And we went to investors and said, you know what?
10:33Spain is going great.
10:34France is going great.
10:35We're going to open now.
10:37You know, we're going to internationalize.
10:38And they're like, which country?
10:40And we're like, Germany, Italy, Portugal, UK, Mexico, and Brazil.
10:46And they're like, no, no, but which of those you're going to open next?
10:49And we're like, all of those.
10:50Actually, we might try the US at the same time as well.
10:53But that was not a fan board meeting because they thought we were completely nuts.
10:57We took their feedback.
10:58We digested it.
10:59We decided to do it anyway.
11:01And obviously, if it was wrong, we would iterate.
11:05And obviously, they trusted us.
11:06They'd been in the company for a while.
11:08And they knew that, you know, we were not completely stupid.
11:10But that totally transformed the business.
11:12Because the compounding acceleration of planting the seeds in many geos.
11:16And not all the countries worked at once.
11:18Actually, some didn't work for a year.
11:20But we planted the seed.
11:21And when the time was right, we were already in the market.
11:24And then we started compounding and growing.
11:25And we could compound all these layers of growth at the same time.
11:30And we would get ahead of the competition starting in these markets.
11:34And today, we are the only player that is truly internationalized in HR and business management software.
11:40All of our competitors are mostly in one geography.
11:4390% of their revenues comes from their native countries.
11:46We are less than half of our revenue comes from our native country.
11:49So, that was a very potentially bad advice from our investors that luckily we decided to listen to.
11:56But not necessarily act on.
11:57It's good to hear.
11:58Thanks for that.
12:00You were not there in the company yet.
12:01I know.
12:02So, I'm happy to ask you that question.
12:05Let's stick with the topic of VCs.
12:07You've raised over $200 million.
12:11Tell us some war stories, near-death experiences.
12:15So, I mean, plenty.
12:17But, I mean, near-death experiences, potentially that one.
12:21If we had listened to them and then our growth rate would have stalled early in the sub-100%.
12:27Instead of doing a 3x and 3x again in the following years.
12:32Once, we were raising our seed round, actually.
12:35And we had three weeks of runway, which I don't recommend.
12:39It's totally irresponsible.
12:40But it's just what happens when you don't have a revenue model.
12:42So, we were running out of cash desperately.
12:46And in that time, for example, I remember most seed investors, we considered that a seed round, were obsessed with
12:53our unit economics.
12:54And they were trying to analyze the CAC2LTV.
12:57And I'm like, we have free software.
12:58What LTV?
12:59We don't even know what our business model is yet.
13:01Why are you analyzing the CAC2LTV to, like, two decimal points?
13:05So, that was very, very annoying.
13:07Luckily, you know, we found some brave investors that started looking at the market.
13:10And I remember we pitched the business saying, we think we can get to 200 million revenues.
13:16And they're like, you know, next year?
13:18And I'm like, no, no.
13:18Total.
13:19You know, period.
13:20We think there is a market for 200 million.
13:22And then they came back to us and they said, no, I think there's a market for at least 1
13:25billion.
13:25And I'm like, okay, that's better than 200 million.
13:27Then the next round, we would go pitch and we said, hey, we think there is a market for, like,
13:301 billion.
13:31And they would come back, you would come back to us and you would say, no, there is at least
13:34a market for 5 billion.
13:35And actually, yesterday, I was hitting, I think there is a market for 7 billion.
13:38So, like, I think this really understanding the size of the market can totally make or break your business.
13:44Because a 100 million revenue company is great.
13:48But a 100 million revenue company that's growing fast, that's sustainable, that doesn't require more funding in a multi-billion
13:54or tens of billions of dollars market,
13:56that's a totally different story.
13:58And I'm old enough where I've seen a lot of SaaS companies grow like this and then plateau and basically
14:04find their market share and stay there.
14:06Because the market isn't that big and it's not growing.
14:09So, understanding in which market you're operating totally changed, you know, our trajectory of growth,
14:14but also our ability to raise from great investors and, you know, great amounts.
14:18Yeah, really interesting.
14:20How did investor perceptions between your seed round and your Series C, which is the last one that you raised,
14:26how has that changed?
14:27And follow-up question to that, have you adjusted your fundraising strategies accordingly?
14:34Well, I mean, totally, massively, starting with the last part of the question.
14:38So, we started raising our seed round in 2018.
14:40So, that was before the world will complete in us.
14:44And that was a small Spanish company with almost no revenue and most of our employees and users out of
14:50Spain.
14:50So, that was a completely different story than being a fully internationalized business with tons of metrics,
14:57tons of revenue and a lot of trajectories to kind of extrapolate.
15:00I would say being a Spanish company, early stage, without a clear business model and a clear path to internationalization
15:08to our business model,
15:09it was pretty tough.
15:11So, the reason why, in that case, Creandum decided to lead our seed round is that they fell in love
15:17with the product.
15:18We had built a product that everybody that saw it fell in love with.
15:22And they understood the market, I think, better than we did at the time.
15:25Or they were as crazy as we were.
15:27And they really trusted us.
15:28We also had some references, I really believe, in the importance of, you know, karma or, you know,
15:33the long-term consequences of your day-to-day decisions.
15:36So, us at Factoria, we have a very strong culture and very strong values and we take them extremely seriously.
15:41And I know everybody says that, but what I mean is I always think of what the consequences of everyday
15:46decisions are going to be the day I die.
15:48And I should be proud of whatever happens all the way there.
15:51And we had amazing references from other founders and other investors that had known us from our previous company and
15:56from our previous life.
15:57So, that was the Series A, Series C.
16:00Then the Series A was a big pivotal moment.
16:03We had some early numbers and the numbers were like this, but there was no historic.
16:07So, we based the entire fund race on two months of data, which is a big risk because you don't
16:12know if they're going to do this and this.
16:14Like now with AI, we're seeing some companies go from zero to 100 and from 100 to zero.
16:18In literally six months, they go both ways, which is pretty insane.
16:21As an investor, that's a tough position to be in.
16:23In our case, we only had two months of numbers and they looked amazing.
16:26But, again, they liked the product.
16:28They liked what they heard about us.
16:29And they understood the market really well.
16:31In that case, that was CRV.
16:33It really understood the market.
16:34That was the first round where we left Europe.
16:38With those early numbers, European investors back at the time didn't really believe in the value of the company.
16:46And then I spent a couple of days in New York and four days in San Francisco and the Bay
16:51Area of San Francisco and it changed everything.
16:53We got like a rain of term sheets.
16:55And that was 2020 right before COVID.
16:56So, January, February, 2020.
16:58Then 21 kind of doesn't count because everybody was raising rounds every day.
17:03You know, tens of millions, hundreds of millions, billions of valuations with like PowerPoints and a little bit of traction.
17:08We had amazing traction, great market.
17:11We raised an incredible round in the middle of 2021.
17:15And then the music stopped at the end of 21.
17:17Public markets totally crashed.
17:19If you follow the stock prices of all the big tech companies in November, December, they started crashing.
17:25Then they continued crashing in January, February, March.
17:28And then in May, we said, okay, this shit's going down like massively.
17:31We had amazing numbers, like best that we ever did.
17:34And we said, okay, we don't think we need to raise money now.
17:38But if there is still some activity in the growth stage, we're going to go now and do a round.
17:43And with that, we're done.
17:44Because we didn't need money, but we could have been tied in a year or two.
17:49And if we raised a Series C, then we would be set for life.
17:52So, we decided to go raise a round.
17:54And that was a much more numbers-driven round.
17:57The market was extremely important because you need to look at the upside.
18:01There are not that many $50 billion companies out there.
18:04So, we are believing that we can be a $50 billion software company.
18:08So, we really needed to understand the market, our position, all the numbers, all the unit economics.
18:13Now, yes, the growth rates, the gross margins, the payback periods, et cetera, et cetera.
18:19And that was the last round that we raised.
18:21So, completely different environments.
18:22We went from here's a pretty face to here's a pretty product to here's a pretty market to here are
18:27pretty numbers.
18:28Totally changed the story.
18:29And if we continue going to investors and you start dealing with public market investors or private equities, they don't
18:35care what's your name.
18:36They don't care what your product looks like at all.
18:38They just want to see the numbers.
18:40They discount half of them and they still want to see a good story that they can sell for two
18:44or three times the money in a few years.
18:46So, we didn't do that.
18:47But that's what I think is in the future for us at some point.
18:50Thank you, Jordi.
18:51How do you think about dilution control and investor relationships with all the money that you've raised?
18:59It's funny you ask that.
19:00So, we're very fortunate to have found a huge market and have found an incredible team that helped us build
19:08this great business that we're leading today.
19:10We, you know, my team and I, we care a lot about delivering returns to our investors.
19:16But what we really want to protect, my co-founder and I and the management team of the company, is
19:21the freedom to make our own decisions.
19:23We are very weird.
19:27We kind of go against, I know you know, but they don't.
19:30So, we kind of take all the playbooks and all the rules of thumb and all the typical good practices
19:36of a software startup and we do the exact opposite.
19:39And we can't do that because, first of all, investors trust us and we've shown that we can deliver in
19:46the past.
19:46But also because we fought like crazy to keep autonomy and freedom in decision-making power.
19:53So, when it came to fundraising, dilution in terms of, you know, how much upside is there for me in
19:59the day of an IPO or something like that is important, but it's definitely secondary.
20:04What we really cared about was being able to make our own decisions.
20:07So, things like what goes through the board, what goes through a general shareholders meeting, what is decided in the
20:12management of the company, how many board seats there are, how many board seats my co-founder and I, you
20:17know, get to vote with, what happens in case of a tie, who decides what.
20:21This, we fought a lot harder than the dilution and the actual kind of raise amount or valuation of the
20:28company.
20:29And I think we did the right thing because, you know, long-term in the future, there is a liquidity
20:34in the company.
20:35Who cares if you own, you know, X percent or X times 1.5?
20:40Like, does your life change?
20:41Probably not.
20:42It's pretty binary.
20:42But if you were able to be free and make your own decisions, then you're proud of what you did.
20:48That matters massively.
20:50If you're pushed out of your own company over some bullshit, that would make me very, very sad.
20:55I'm not going to do that.
20:56Please don't do that.
20:58I commit here publicly and I've committed to you privately too.
21:02Let's talk about scaling from 1 million to 100 million.
21:06What were some of the key inflection points on that journey?
21:10You have hit on a few of them already.
21:11Any others that come to mind?
21:13So, a lot.
21:14So, obviously, we talked about the 0 to 1.
21:16Literally, 0 to 1 million was just charging for the product.
21:19I recommend if you want to make money, don't offer a free product.
21:21Once we started charging for the product, we were in Spain.
21:24We didn't really know how much the product was worth.
21:26So, the first thing we did was test.
21:30Test everything.
21:31So, product cycles are longer and you want them to be longer.
21:36You want to be making bold bets and move fast but still make bold enough bets.
21:40In everything else, we would test weekly.
21:42So, for example, we would test with the pricing.
21:45We would test with the packaging.
21:46We would test in countries.
21:48We would test industries, segments, partnerships.
21:51So, we would try a lot of things out and most didn't work.
21:55But, for example, one of the things that worked out for us is instead of charging one euro per employee
21:59per month,
22:00which is what we started, we charged two.
22:02And then we charged four.
22:03And then we charged six.
22:04And now we're charging 15 to some of our customers and even 20-something.
22:08So, experimenting with pricing was a great way to find where was the value perception.
22:13We know our product is worth a lot more than that.
22:15But we don't want to be so expensive that people spend a lot of time thinking about if it's the
22:19right price or not.
22:20We want it to be a no-brainer.
22:21But we also want to return, you know, the investment we do in go-to-market.
22:25So, experimenting very, very fast in go-to-market was one.
22:28The second thing that was pretty insane for us is when we started seeing in our spreadsheets,
22:33and everything starts with the numbers, actually in a whiteboard,
22:35where we know we put 100 euros to Meta, to Facebook ads.
22:40We have one SDR that costs this.
22:42We have one account executive that costs this.
22:44And then we do the whole funnel.
22:45And it generates, whatever, 3,000 euros of monthly recurring revenue.
22:49Like, okay, what happens if we 10x that?
22:51We do that in the whiteboard.
22:52It looks great.
22:53Then we go ahead and we do it.
22:55Next day, we hire 10 SDRs.
22:57We hire 10 account executives.
22:59And then we 10x the investment in Meta.
23:02Don't spend money in Meta.
23:03That one didn't work for us.
23:04But the SDRs and the account executives work.
23:06So we went from 40 people when we raised our CDSA to 120 people in a few months,
23:10to 300 people in a few months, to 700 people.
23:13And now we're 1,300 people.
23:15So, like, we're very aggressive when we see something works.
23:17We're not afraid of it looking or feeling insane.
23:21If we think it makes sense or it might make sense, we go ahead and try it.
23:24And then we react as fast as we can.
23:27Yeah, I still remember the board meeting a few months ago
23:30when there were, what, 400 new joiners in a few weeks.
23:34It was pretty amazing.
23:35We just did that, by the way.
23:37We just hired more than 400 people in the first few months of the year.
23:41Speaking of team systems leadership,
23:44how has that evolved through the stage,
23:46and specifically your personal leadership style?
23:49So this is one of the things that we've had a really hard time with.
23:53We're based in Barcelona, and we go to the office.
23:55So there is, like, more than 1,000 people that five days a week
23:58go to the office in Barcelona.
23:59And then we have a few other offices around Europe, in Germany, Spain,
24:03and in Latin America as well.
24:05But we want our leadership to be in Barcelona.
24:09And Barcelona is an amazing city,
24:11but sometimes when you're looking for experienced people,
24:14they have families and spouses with jobs and kids with schools,
24:17so it's hard to relocate them to Barcelona.
24:19So, first of all, it's been challenging to find this senior leadership on paper.
24:25But then we went ahead and did it anyway and tried to find these people,
24:30and we did manage to find a few of these people.
24:32And then we realized that it's really, really hard to just buy your way
24:38into a different company's growth trajectory and culture.
24:42So we've had a few exceptions of very experienced leaders that joined Factorial
24:47and succeeded massively with us, but we unfortunately had plenty failures there
24:54where we hired somebody that did amazing at an amazing company
24:58that we thought would do amazing with us and just didn't match because we are so weird.
25:03We do so many things our own way that we ended up clashing,
25:07and we believe in ourselves.
25:08We believe in our own style and our own differentiation.
25:12I believe if you do what everybody else does,
25:14you're going to, at best, land moderate results.
25:17And we want outstanding results,
25:20so we need to do crazy things that nobody else did.
25:22So we realized that for us what worked most often was developing talent internally.
25:27If you look at our leadership now,
25:28the vast majority of our leaders are people that joined the company
25:32as individual contributors, some even as interns, which is insane,
25:35but most as like a sales rep or marketing manager or something like that with no team.
25:39And then they grew to manager, director, VP, even C-level.
25:43And these people are more factorial than I am.
25:47And these people breathe our culture insanely intensively.
25:52They know who to hire.
25:53They know who to promote.
25:54They know who to let go.
25:56And they communicate the essence of our business amazingly.
25:59The problem is this is a unicorn.
26:02Like it's very, I mean, these people, not us.
26:04Like these profiles are very, very, very hard to spot and then grow.
26:09And if you're lucky and the company grows very fast, this growth is insane.
26:13I mean, I haven't been to space,
26:14but I imagine when you're like breaking gravity,
26:16you know, the intensity on your body needs to be insane.
26:21And that's how I feel at Factoria.
26:22Like we're growing so fast that everything hurts a lot.
26:25And, you know, I'm the CEO of the company.
26:27I did it in the past.
26:28I have some experience, but a lot of these people,
26:30they just came here.
26:31They have no experience.
26:32And now they're like growing inside a very fast growing company.
26:36Some of them don't make it.
26:37And that's painful because you see somebody with insane potential,
26:41you make a bet on them and you say,
26:43you can be the great leader of the future.
26:45I'm going to give you a challenge that's four steps ahead of what you're ready to do right now.
26:50If you succeed, it's going to be insane, but it's very hard.
26:54And the ones that make it, it's incredible.
26:56We're extremely proud of, but unfortunately, some people don't make it.
26:59And that makes for, you know, intense culture, very resilient people after they make it,
27:06but some traumas along the way as well, which, you know, you've seen for the last three years with us.
27:10So that is a big learning in terms of leadership and culture and talent.
27:15At the end of the day, I believe talent is equally distributed around the world.
27:20So, you know, in Barcelona, in Paris, in San Francisco, and in any town in the middle of Asia,
27:24we have the same talent potential.
27:27We don't all have the same opportunities.
27:28So we can give incredible opportunities to people that wouldn't have them otherwise.
27:32And that's what we think is our advantage in terms of talent.
27:34Love that.
27:36Let's stay on your leadership style for a bit.
27:38What's one decision you made at 10 million that's not going to scale at 100 million?
27:44So what's one decision we made at 10 million that's not going to scale at 100 million?
27:50I think we tried, we love getting down to the, I don't know if I want to say that.
27:57So one thing that worked up to 10 million is we could fit the entire business inside the mind of
28:05the entire leadership of the company.
28:07You can get all the way down to the cent, you know, to the euro, to the headcount, to the
28:14first name, last name of the person.
28:16And then we would be able to move extremely fast because when you can load the entire model to memory
28:22using an AI or computer analogy,
28:25then it's very fast to make operations on that structure.
28:29Unfortunately, I'm not smart enough to do that anymore.
28:31And neither are the leadership team members that I work with.
28:35It's too much.
28:36So I think one of the challenges we have now is we can only load the entire business with a
28:42lower resolution.
28:43And then we can, we still need to load the entire depth of the business for a part of it.
28:49So for example, if there is a challenge in one go-to-market motion, like inbound sales or outbound sales
28:55or partners or self-service,
28:57then we can go all the way down with that, but we cannot do it with the entire company.
29:00So the mistake or the decision we made at 10 million that we cannot make at 100 million is try
29:06to do that.
29:07And they get extremely frustrated because by the time you're done on this side, you started forgetting the other side.
29:12What we needed to do instead is have a team that you can fully trust.
29:17They have the entire picture with the entire level of detail.
29:20And then you need to do sampling and try to go deep in different random parts of the business.
29:25Not necessarily the ones that go well, not necessarily the ones that don't go well, just purely random part of
29:30the businesses.
29:30Go deep.
29:31Make sure there's a health check.
29:33Everything makes sense.
29:34You would have done most of the decisions that were, that were done.
29:37Or you can have a great conversation with the people that made those decisions and have a chat about why
29:41they did them and how it's going.
29:43So that is a big change in my mind in how we run the business.
29:47Thank you for that transparency.
29:49And let's talk about, on a personal level, you've been through incredible hyper growth.
29:56The business is still in hyper growth.
29:591,300 whatever people at this point in time.
30:03What did you have to change personally to keep up with that incredible growth as a CEO?
30:10I mean, when we started the company, I said to people that we would be in it for a long
30:18time and we would change the world.
30:20But in my mind, long time was five, six years.
30:22I didn't know that long time was 50 years or whatever it takes.
30:27So I think there was a very critical point in the growth story of the company and my personal evolution
30:33as a leader in understanding, okay, this is it.
30:37Like, we managed to start a company that has the potential to impact many millions of people and completely change
30:43a category.
30:44But it's going to take time.
30:46I don't believe in quick wins.
30:48I don't believe in, you know, long-hanging fruit or hacks.
30:51Yeah, these are tactics that you do to get somewhere.
30:53But you really need to look long-term and be willing to make brave investments, make mistakes, and wait for
30:59the payoff.
31:00So I think personally, I realized that, funny enough, at the same time I became a dad.
31:07And I think that gave me a massively different perspective.
31:10I think we're all humans are selfish.
31:12We have some instincts to survive ourselves before other people.
31:15But at the same time, we have a massive instinct of reproduction.
31:18And when I reproduced and I suddenly had a human that I was responsible for, I started thinking a lot
31:23about what's going to happen with our planet.
31:25You know, and things like climate change and ecology started making a lot more sense to me when I started
31:31to think, you know, it's not YOLO.
31:32I'm going to be gone and nobody cares about me anymore.
31:35It's like, no, no, I'm responsible for a human that's going to hopefully outlive me.
31:38And I want to make sure that I live, you know, a better planet.
31:42I want to live a better society, a better economy, and start worrying a lot about the Earth in the
31:48year 3000.
31:49And, you know, the first step to the year 3000 is year 2100.
31:54And then, you know, we started kind of looking, you know, decades ahead instead of months and quarters ahead.
32:00So that was a bit, sorry, metaphysical.
32:03But I think it did change a little bit how I think about it.
32:07And then a lot of conversations with my co-founder, Bernat Anayu, you know him well.
32:11We spend hours and hours talking about all sorts of random topics.
32:17And this intensity and depth of conversations make us reach conclusions like, for example, you know, this is a very,
32:26very long-term project,
32:28which means, first of all, I need to be committed to it.
32:31Second of all, I need to look after myself.
32:32So start doing vacations, start working out, start eating, you know, more healthy, you know, drop some bad habits.
32:40And also take care of yourself because you hear all these stories of there was a session now about mental
32:44health.
32:44I don't know if you were here and in founders and there is burnout and there is depression.
32:48Like there's very serious problems that happen if you don't look after yourself.
32:51And as a founder, nobody really looks after yourself.
32:55Like, yeah, you have investors, you have a board, you have co-founders, you have your team, but they don't
33:00see you every day.
33:01So if you're lucky like I am, I have a spouse that, you know, helps me look after myself.
33:05But, you know, I need to be responsible for myself.
33:08And if I maintain the lifestyle I had 10 years ago, I don't know if I'd be here today.
33:12So, yeah.
33:13Thanks, Jordi.
33:14That was a long answer, sorry.
33:15It was a great answer.
33:16And I think it resonates with everybody listening.
33:19We have a minute and 39 seconds left.
33:22So, last question.
33:24Sorry, I'm German.
33:25I do it that way.
33:26This is a recommendation.
33:30Jordi, what's the next big milestone for Factorial?
33:33What's your personal endgame?
33:35So, as you can imagine from my previous answer, personal endgame is seeing how far we can take this.
33:42And we feel the compounding force of the business.
33:46This is magic.
33:47Once you start having a brand, you start having, you know, a real volume of customers that use your product,
33:52that really get benefits from your product, start recommending it.
33:55You know how to hire.
33:56You know how to raise money.
33:57You know how to deploy this money for growth.
33:59Why stop now?
34:00So, I feel like we're just getting started into seriously operating Factorial.
34:05I see millions of companies out there that need help desperately.
34:09We only have 13,000 customers.
34:11I see hundreds of millions of people that work for these companies with shitty management, with terrible decision making.
34:17They're not being looked after.
34:18Their organizations are working in the past.
34:20And we can help them work in the future.
34:22So, I feel the responsibility to do that.
34:24Then you can translate that into, you know, tens of millions of employees on the platform, billions in revenue, whatever
34:30valuations.
34:31I know we care about that as well.
34:33But in my mind, it's staying alive and kicking and growing and doing stupid, crazy bets that if we're right,
34:41we'll change the world.
34:42And if we're wrong, then try to survive to make a couple extra bets.
34:46So, I'm very excited.
34:48Jordi, thank you for this conversation.
34:49And thank you all for listening in.
34:52Thank you.
34:52Thank you.
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