Hiten Patel: Thank you for joining us on the Innovators’ Exchange today. I am co-hosting with my colleague, Marcus Hoddinott, who leads our work in the commodities data space, and we are delighted to welcome Francois Cazor, the chairman of Kpler. Welcome to the show both.
Francois Cazor: Thank you. Thank you for having me. Marcus, nice to see you.
Hiten: So, let's just start, Francois, with you explaining Kpler. What's the company? What does it do? And I guess the pretext I'd give would be; it's a darling child of the space that it's in. Five, six years ago we hadn't really heard of it, and sort of put it on our radar, and since then you're a kind of name that's on everybody's lips and has been an incredible success story over the last couple of years. But in your own words, what does the company do? And where does it come from?
Francois: Thank you. Well, I don't know how much time we have. But look, where it comes from, it's our backgrounds and my background. We have two co-founders, myself and Jean Maynier. We are both coming from what I would describe as mature market. Jean was more on the equity side, the tech side. I was a fixing contractor, that was like almost 20 years ago, and in these lives, we had Bloomberg Terminal. So just like this almighty platform that has everything in real time. And it's a single source of truth for everything you do. Everything is out there. Whether it is pricing, analytics, news, everything is in, it's connected and works well. And so, we've had with Jean a kind of entrepreneur journey where 15 years ago, we started with the first company on the kind of adjacent market.
We were focused on carbon credits and we were trying to bring transparency back then to this market, and this didn't really work as we expected, kind of went stagnant, or like the most horrible place in the fail startup area, which is, you don't make money, but you make enough not to die. And so, you can just pay the invoices, and just very, very miserable salary to yourself. You can hire very, very low-paid interns, and that's it. But I think by doing that on the carbon markets we realized that actually, there were other markets next to us. So, where we pivoted 10 years ago that had more needs.
To answer your initial question, Hiten, Kpler is bringing transparency to physical markets. So essentially, you could describe us as a Bloomberg Terminal for shipping and commodities where we have a mix of real time information about the physical world, where are these assets, who's behind, is there anything in the ship, who's the owner, who's the seller, who's the buyer, where it's coming from, where it’s going to. Something very micro level that can be elevated bottom up, and to having a macro view about, what is your back export this month? Or month to date. And these are the kind of questions actually, before we started, I think were kind of a bit more difficult to answer. You were relying on lagged official reports from certain countries. Not everybody is accounting things the same way. So, you had a lot of questions about what is really happening. And Kpler is answering most of these questions.
Hiten: We'll come on to a moment in more detail about the market that Kpler plays in. But before we go there, just want to probe a little bit more about what you just hinted there about your journey to get there. I think right now, everyone's going to project onto you this crazy success story, everything that you're doing, and you’re understanding and knowing. But I'm more interested in the learning journey. And when you started out all the way back from the HSBC years to the company that you mentioned, you founded. Talk to us a little bit about the bits that people will have seen less about you, understand less about you, those earlier stages. What went on? What did you learn? What's enabled the success that everyone can visibly see today?
Francois: It's true, we are much more visible now. So, we see a lot of inbound. And people feel like we've just started. But it's been 15 years. So, it's a long time. So, look, if I go back from the beginning, I'm an engineer, a computer science engineer. And that's where I met Jean, my co-founder. We graduated in 2003. So back then there were no startups, you know. I mean, just like Facebook wasn't even started. So, there was not really a kind of startup scene. And if you are a tech guy, a computer science engineer, essentially, you would work for a bank. That's what would happen to most of us. So that’s what happened to us. Jean became a software architect for banks. So, Jean is my co-founder, and he was the CTO of the company. Now we both took a step back. I'll talk about this a bit later.
But Jean started as a software architect in Northern America, and I started as a junior trader in Europe, based in London actually, for HSBC, where I was trading short term interest rates. On my side, I spent 7 years doing these jobs for market making. So I mean, you provide liquidity to customers, and I feel like I learned more about tech and software than a lot about markets, because, you know, just like your job is to end up with such a volume of transactions that what makes you good is your ability to process a large amount of information quickly rather than just having a formidable view on what is going to be that the market move the next 2 hours.
And look, what else I could say, we've done this big corporate job out of school. I think I realized on my side that just as an employee I was not great. I was not too much a fan of authority, and like having someone around me, above me, telling me what to do. And in big banks that's what it is, you're going to have like 15 guys, you know, above you, telling you the way you should do things. And look, what can I say? I was not very happy in this kind of setup, so I found my way out of it, and I felt like the only way for me to be happy is to build. Actually, when I was working for HSBC, I spent a lot of time building things to automate my day to day. It was basic stuff on Excel and VBA [Visual Basic for Applications] but I would build this nice little system where the price was built on my behalf. I could send the confirmation automatically. It would make my life easier, and I realized that that was the happiest part of my day, building things.
So, it got me thinking about, maybe I can find something else, maybe I can leave. And at least get into, let's say a bit more mature view. And I ended up deciding, okay, I should leave, create a company. I was still super close to Jean, and he was kind of like in the same phase of his corporate life. And so, we both decided to leave our jobs. It was early 2009. By the time all of that was done it was roughly a year after, we were out, we had a bit of money by leaving these jobs which we invested in the company. And initially, we started saying, okay, let's find a market that is next to what we know, where there's no real, let's say big players, because these are new markets, and we're going to go with these markets.
And so, in hindsight, we clearly have not done enough research on what are these markets. Because, you know, that was 2010, and Obama was just freshly elected, and the world was in a very, very different place where it is now. Everybody was buzzing about the potential of environmental finance and carbon markets. So, we said okay, let’s do carbon markets.
Francois: And so, we started a journey that lasted 4 years, where essentially, we started to build. So, what is Kpler now, which is like a real time platform where you can track these assets and have enough detail about what happened, what's happened before. But I think the fundamental thing we missed is that carbon markets are totally artificial. Like, you know, people are buying carbon credit because they have to most of the time. And so, I think it's kind of fundamentally flawed, and a lot of participants were forced to be in these markets. It changes a lot the dynamic about how willing they are to make the market evolve, to just get new tools and be better at what they do.
So, we've started to build tools for a market that was in hindsight way too small, and with a very bumpy road ahead of it. So that was in 2010. It took us a while to get the basics right. Which is, you know, you are just out of a big corporate, where I feel like we were babysitted. The keyboard doesn't work, someone will come and fix your keyboard. Everything is taken care of. And so, you start, you have to build your own company. You're in your kitchen with your buddy from school. And like, okay, where do I start? What do I do? That's where we were.
So, it took us a while to get our things together. We launched a new product maybe a year after starting. We could sign clients. So, I remember 2011, 2012, we felt, okay, that's it. We've made it, which is, we have people paying for what we built. And honestly, even till now, even talking to you about that, gives me goosebumps. This very single thing about, you came with your idea, you built something, and someone is paying for that. That's beautiful. That's beautiful. And I think that's what we got addicted to. That's why we tagged along. That's why we kept trying, and we pivoted until eventually it worked. Because the market was too small, so we kind of plateaued on 150K, 200K of yearly revenues. Which, as I said, is enough not to die. That's it.
But we couldn't grow. And so eventually, after 3, 4 years we realized that, you know, we're tired. We've invested all our money into this company. By the way, we couldn't raise capital, so it was bootstrapped. That was a hard life, and life keeps going on. So, all the guys who were with me on trading floor were making fortunes.
Hiten: Yeah, yeah.
Francois: And I said, what have I done? That was 2012, 2013. And then we decided with Jean that we wanted to pivot. So, we started to look for other markets. And that's where we got. I think, first one who told us about LNG [Liquefied natural gas], must have been 2012, and he said, well, this market is booming like crazy, because on the back of Fukushima, the Japanese became the biggest buyer overnight. They shut down all the new power plants and replaced them with gas power plants. Essentially, everybody needs LNG carriers, and the market has a big shortage of everything, which is people who understand this market, trading desk, forex desk, shipping desk. Data, tools, there is not enough. And we realized that actually, a lot of things we've learned in the carbon market could be adapted for the LNG market, because essentially there was not regulated, not transparent nor organized. And we had built a kind of like skill set to build kind of a real time monitor.
So, we started late 2013 to build a prototype. Within 2, 3 months it was ready. Just Jean and myself, back to survival mode, nothing. And then the first time we showed the product, we could see proper traction. Actually, we could see things we've not seen before, which is, you show the product. It's not about being good at selling it. Or that the guy really needs what you have in your hands, you know, like he needs that to do his job day to day. And then budgeting is not a problem. Negotiating is not a problem. So you say, okay, that's it. That's traction. You know. You don't have to force things.
Hiten: Thank you for sharing, and there's a lot to unpick there. But let me go back to what you said at the start around, it's 2003, you’re sat on the trading floor, and for many at that point in time. It's a similar time to when I started working. That was the pinnacle, right? The Holy Grail was that you were on the trading floor, trading markets. This was before tech and data were a thing. Talk to me a little bit through more about that. What was it inside you that said I'm not going to satisfy here. A lot of people could have just stayed traders, and they were the, you know, the apex predators back in the day or on the social scene, that's what you wanted to be. But you were like, no, actually, I want something more, something different. And not something that you probably could have pointed to, because you didn't see a lot of the technology entrepreneurs back then. And if I may also, you alluded to it in your point, almost that technology was viewed as a bit of a back-office function in the banks back then. Right? So, what was it that kind of made you be quite contrarian and be like, actually, I'm going to be more inward about what I want versus the world thinks you've kind of made it because you're on a bank trading desk as your opening job.
Francois: It's a good point. Tech was not sexy at all, like that was back office, you know. That's it. I mean the career in essentially building something and becoming an engineer. Now I feel like that's something you can be super proud of, and it was not the case. And look, I mean, I've started on a big British bank in Paris and London, and at first that was fun, I really loved it. You know, I think the trading floor is a very lively environment. It is very stimulating, you know, there's a lot of things happening. The kind of cliche we have about a lot of super excited young guys shouting, that's quite correct, that's what it is. And that was fun for a time.
But after a few years, so first, getting all the info was difficult. I started actually on the tech side, building pricing tools for the trading floor, and I managed to get a job on the trading floor, and that was good. I mean you make very decent money, good money actually. So no, I mean, you are totally good. It's just that, I mean, as I said, you know, when I started to, nobody asked me to, I started to build tools because I felt, well, I'm behaving like a robot, which is like the phone rings, the guy tells me something, and they just repeat over the same thing and same thing. It's like I could see patterns. So maybe that's what it is to have a proper engineering brain, which is when you see something that can be automated, you want to build a tool to make it, because it's just simpler.
And I think I've read something about Bill Gates, who was saying that he was surrounding himself with lazy people because lazy people find a way to make things easier. There's a lot of this. At the end of the day I became very lazy on the trading floor, which is there was kind of a repetitive day-to-day that got me very bored, and I realized that the bit of the journey that I enjoyed the most was actually just being a bit disconnected and building these tools and thinking about what is needed, what can be challenged over there? What is the value that a human versus a machine can take care of. And so that, I think, was the first moment.
And the second one was, I would say, just normal things that happen in big banks. There is an element of politics at play, which is, it's not too much about being good at what you do. It's probably as much or even more being good at perception, which is, people have to see you good more than just like you printing the results. And I was definitely not good at that politics. So, I ended up in a position where I thought, okay, I mean, I'm going to have this life where I'm not super happy. My wife was pregnant with the first kid, and I felt, well, then, I'm going to have a kid, and I'm going to be trapped. So, I have to escape and do something I enjoy before I don't have the choice anymore, because I have too many responsibilities. There were all of that happening at the same time.
Hiten: Bringing it back to your story, you've arrived at the point of Kpler. Talk to me about the early years of Kpler before you were getting crazily noticed. And then how does that transition? When suddenly it feels like there's an inflection point where you've probably stopped pushing to get noticed. And suddenly, you're probably, just as you said, managing the inbound and maybe practicing your autograph.
Francois: I'm not sure we ever try to be noticed. What I mean is, we know when we've done the first process 3 years ago, when Five Arrows and Insight Partners joined us, during the management transition, one of the investors, told me, well, you guys have a weird, a very weird, and a rare combination of extreme ambition and extreme humility. And I really like this sentence. I keep coming back to that. I think it's very accurate. That's the way I think actually. If we've been noticed lately, I'd like to think it's because of our results, and the fact that we've delivered, more than us trying to engineer all of that by doing PR, or marketing, or what else. But getting back to your question on early days at Kpler. So, you know, Kpler is just the same legal entity as ECO2 market. ECO2 market was the first company on carbon. So, we kept the legal entity because we had fiscal losses, you know. That's it. That's good to have fiscal losses. I said one day I'm going to cherish fiscal losses.
And so, we kept the company, and we just renamed it. And it was the same guys. It was Jean, myself, and so we pivoted, which is the two of us. We built the prototype, and we could sell it very quickly, and then we felt, okay, now we don't have anything to lose. We spent all the money we have already. So, let's just give it the best we can. If it doesn't work, we're going to have to do something else, because, at some point, you have to pay the rent. And it worked, I think, because we could use all the hard learned lessons from the first 4 years, which is product market fit, choosing your market, and then go to market.
All of this, I think, is so important and we learned it just on the ground, which is essentially making mistakes after mistakes, and mistakes, and like this doesn't work, this doesn't work. And so, when we started on LNG, that was the first market we opened with Kpler. We had all of this experience with us that guided us.
Essentially, the first year we finished the year almost at 800K ARR [Annual Recurring Revenue] The first deal was signed in March, and it must have been something like 15 clients, 15-20 clients, and every single deal was signed by me. We were just working the product with Jean, and I was the only one selling. And then eventually we could hire someone. We got lucky. We hired someone very talented as well, but the first few years were, you know, we've done, I remember I still have the spreadsheet. We had a very simple spreadsheet, but what's the TAM [Total Addressable Market]? I didn't know what was TAM back then, but what we've done by then was just trying to measure TAM. So how many pople can we sell these things to? So, LNG tracking, LNG power tracking? And the answer was 2 million dollars. We felt, okay, the maximum we can get is 2 million dollars. But if you look at the spreadhseet, the interesting thing I see, which is something we drafted like 12 years ago. It's that we said, okay, the maximum that we can get is 2 million. And we're going to go for this 2 million. Which is, we've said, okay, it's a niche market. You don't have that many people in the world who are.
Hiten: Conquer it. 100% market share.
Francois: Okay, but all these guys must be so geeky about these things that what we're building must be just like p*rn for them. They would love it immediately. And so that was the goal, we're going to sell to every one of them. And actually, we did. I think we had this kind of very particular mentality about being bootstrapped where you eat what you kill. So, if the guy says no to you, well, f*ck it. I'm going to have to come back in 6 months and be better. Because, I mean, you just have one BP in the world.
Francois: There is no other BP, you know.
Hiten: Yeah.
Francois: BP was a particularly difficult client to get, because they had their internal solution, and so it took us a while to get all these logos, but we were kind of obsessed saying, we want all of them, you know, and the quality is good. And then with Jean I think we started a healthy, I would say, iteration, where every single client meeting was just religiously followed up with, okay, what's the feedback. What do they like? What do they need? What's not working? What's missing?
And it was this constant race against ourselves, saying, okay, how can we make it better, and better, and better, so that at some point it's not about being good at selling. It's just a product that is so good that you have to take it.
Marcus Hoddinott: And I suppose that it goes back to the early days of Bloomberg as well in terms of their product managers who sat side by side, fixed income traders exactly the same way, but it's all about feedback coming back into the product and how to go to market better next time.
Francois: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's the way we've seen it. And again, because the first product, the carbon one was built totally in a cave, which is, we built it, you know, in stealth mode. We felt someone's going to steal our idea. It's going to leave our life. It’s ridiculous. And so, we ended up building some things for people who just didn't care. So we've done it totally different for energy. We've not allowed ourselves to spend any dollar into building anything until we have proper volition, which is, will you pay for that? How much would you pay? Is it nice to have? Are you just trying to be nice to me? Do you need this thing? We're just trying into very detailed questioning, because again, we had no money left, we were not allowed to make mistakes, if not the company just shuts down. And so, yeah, we had this, again, very influenced by what Bloomberg later became, which is this thing works perfectly. It's plug and play. You have to have it.
Hiten: I think the bit that strikes me most in your storytelling there, Francois, is almost the benefits of having a smaller TAM or smaller addressable market. Sometimes I see all these companies like, wow, we have a billion-dollar TAM, 1,000 customers to go for, which basically means, if you don't land one, you go to the next, you go to the next, you go to the next. But what you described was having such a focus group that you just have to force it to work. And you know where you're focused. And looking at that that almost is a benefit. And it's almost counterintuitive because a lot of investors are out there saying, oh, I need a big TAM, right? I need it to be something that can be really fungible and really broad.
Francois: Yeah, actually, it's true. There is this book from Peter Thiel, ‘Zero to One’. I've read it like a few years ago. So, way before, after all that. But I think this is exactly what we've done, which is we focused on niche, because that's what we had in front of us. And we felt okay, let's be the big player over there. Let's be the best one. The number one. The undistributed leader. And then we'll move to another niche next to it, and we'll make it bigger and bigger.
And it's way simpler to win in this niche you can control rather than trying to go for a big market where you're going to compete with the smartest guys from all around the world who all want to go for the big thing. And that worked well for us to be able to replicate that. And there was this element as well on product management, which is what we started initially, which is cargo tracking so essentially like having several layers of information that you can pinpoint every single commercial ship with what's on board, who's behind, and tie it to the bigger commercial story. Where this thing existed before us.
There was an IHS [Information Handling Services] that has something called IHS MINT [Market Intelligence Network]. That was really the very first cargo tracking solution. But IHS built it for every single commercial vessel. So you had, like gas carriers, LPG [Liquefied petroleum gas], crude, dirty products, clean products, dry bulk, major bulks. It's like you're talking about 40,000 ships. Even to date now, we are now, the last one we launched is dry bulks, and we're getting there. But I think the product needed time as well to mature, so in hindsight we started with the easiest niche which is LNG. Back then it was less than 500 ships. And so, we could learn the ropes on this, let's say, tiny market and then expand. Then we've done crude and dirty products and other stuff. And the team became better. The algorithms became better. We had more sources. We had more know-how. But no, that worked well for us actually to just like started on niche. It's not only the go to market. It's as well the product development lifecycle where you get better.
And so if you start immediately by something very difficult, you are just going to stop. You know, you're going to have a solution that is, there's no wow effect, which is okay, it's good enough. A good try, all right, and give it a go, but like there's no, you know, you don't remember. And given that we want, we needed to have these revenues immediately generated. We needed to have a wow effect. So that was good that we could start with these niches.
Hiten: And I guess Marcus, just bringing you here. I guess your own consulting career has kind of followed a bit of the arc of Kpler, the journey that Francois described over that period, we suddenly had never ending stream of interest suddenly, in commodities, data, and workflows. I just want to invite you to just exchange a few perspectives with Francois around the market as we see it today. Where's it headed? It's clearly a hotspot and got a lot of interest from many.
Marcus: Yeah, it'd be great to get your views, Francois. I suppose, if we take a step back to sort of the early 2000s, the slithers of transparency that existed in commodities markets were purely the domain, the very largest players and trading houses that existed. You mentioned BP there for having their own in-house system. I suppose what we've seen over the past sort of 20, now, going forward as well is really democratization of that story for commodities, and just listening to you there it is so interesting to hear the nuts and bolts within it. But I suppose, how do you look back in the past 20 years as commodities, as an asset class and transparency, and I suppose projecting yourself forward a little bit. What do you think next 10,15 years holds in that same question, as well.
Francois: So, 20 years ago, I had no idea what was commodities. Really. like, not a single idea. So, I can’t say from the beginning. What I can comment is when we started. Essentially, the big players, so, BP, Shell, the large trading houses like Vitols, Trafiguras, had something built internally. And I think it was probably part of the secret sauce for them. Which is like, you know, because they had so much resources they could spend the money and make sense of all the amount of data that their desk is observing each day, and funnel all that into a tool that I think, yielded unfair advantages because they were seeing more than the others. And so when we came in with the first version, and was successful, we received some, not complaints, but like, let's say comments on “woah, woah, but you guys are doing my job”. You know, we realized that a part of the commodity trading back then was not necessarily, you know, when you said trading, you imagine people taking risk.
And I think on the commodities market you have some people who essentially were doing information, asymmetry, arbitrage every day, which is like they know more than the other, so it's not too much that they are buying something because they think it's going to be more valuable in the future. They're buying something now at this price, because they know that it's poorly priced, or that there is this specific arbitrage that is available, and they can tag it to another show they have elsewhere.
You know, essentially because they had been able to build a global and holistic market mapping, they could see inefficiencies much better than the others. And with our tool, by making this kind of thing available to everyone we use this arbitrage. And so some were not happy, saying, like, my job is to know more than the others, so you are competing with me, with your data solution. So, we had actually, one player say, okay, I'll buy from you, and you don't sell to anyone else. And so, how do you price that?
Marcus: I think that the quote which we've heard a lot from your customers is, I have to use Kpler, because it's what the market knows. In order to know what the market knows, I use Kpler. Essentially so, and I suppose, just on a personal. Do you take, I suppose pride in some ways leveling that playing field overall, or is it?
Francois: Yeah, look I think the team is really very humbled by the impact we have now on the industry. The fact that so many people are using the screen every day, and like we became in a lot of markets, kind of like the main tool where you see the market. I was tempted to say that with your first question we do that we just we make the market visible, because before that I was kind of like, okay, I received a report from a broker who's biased because he's trying to get me to trade with him and I have this intel from the ship agent, and I'm seeing the OPEC official figures and then the customs official numbers from the countries. But, you know, it's very, very scattered and there's nothing that makes sense. So, I think that's what Kpler did, which is, make all of that visible. And I think I would say, kind of a level playing field, which is, that's what the market does. So, we know we are asked very often about our view on the prices evolution, what will happen?
Now we have a team doing insights, and we have a view. But most of the time I had to answer, look, I don't know, and it's not my job, which is that we are here to deliver transparency. And if the market goes up or down it's another sport. And I think, in hindsight in our industry, most of the new companies that were created were created by people who had a pre-existing expertise on something. You know. You look at PIRA, that's Gary Ross, you know. I mean, everybody was coming from somewhere and had a specific market they were very intimate with where they had a view.
We're coming out of nowhere. Literally when the first carbon client mentioned LNG, I had to Google it. I'd never heard LNG before. I said, what is LNG? And then we got it. And I think, but even to this day, now, we still think this way with Jean and the exec team, which is, you know, I think, fundamentally, we're good execution. We are data company. What you described about the fact that people have to have Kpler. For me, that's kind of like it means you've reached the mature phase of a successful data provider, which is, you know, at some point we're doing our best to deliver good data. We're obsessed with equity.
But sometimes we make mistakes, and at some point, these mistakes actually are part of the market, and because everybody is seeing the same mistakes, it will have an impact on the market. And so, you need to see the mistakes, because if you don't, you might miss a move that can happen because everybody's looking at that. So, there is this thing about having everybody in the same market looking at the same thing, and I think the same could be said about many.
Before we started there was this company called Genscape that was super successful. And actually, one of the Genscape early employees told me, you know, we don't have the weekly numbers. They were very good, for example, on the on the caching or Cloud mass storage numbers and the guy told me, look, sometimes we make mistakes. But it doesn't matter, because everybody's looking at it now. And actually, the mistakes we make are actually a core part of the price action, you know. And it's okay. So, there is this element with the way the data providers are growing in respectability in the market, where at some point you become a must have, yes. And so, if I'm proud, like what I said, I am super proud to have built a company where people are happy to work, and the clients are happy, I think. You know, we are trying to just remain a team of people that are very down to earth, not trying to take us too seriously and just say, okay, we're good at data, we can do more.
What is your pain points? Tell us. I think, as well what's good is that at our scale now we are still founder owned so essentially Jean, myself and the employees, we still control more than half percent, more than half of the company. So, it allows us to have a lot of freedom in the way we hire, the way we grow the company, what kind of product we develop. And that's pretty cool. Yeah, I'm very happy with that.
Hiten: There's a beautiful arc to your story, Francois. If I just reflect what you talked about earlier around, back in the early 2000s when you were trading. And all these people are making tons of money. It's almost projected onto them that they have this, you know, godlike wisdom to be able to make those calls. And really what you've observed was, as you said, the information asymmetry, and that the joy of building the systems you described meant, you effectively went and just shone a massive spotlight on a really dark part of the market, which makes it more efficient. And suddenly what was viewed as genius in the 2000s that people had this information asymmetry to come changing geniuses. Now, two decades later, people better understand it as actually, it's the data that enables a lot of those markets. You democratize the access to that data. Then you know, you level it out. There's like a, there's an arc to that must feel kind of when you look back. Everything kind of happened for a reason.
Francois: Clearly, there's more volumes being traded every day of these cargos, and there's less margins. But I like to think that we participate in all that, which is because there's more visibility as well, you have a better way to manage your risk. The compliance officer is a bit happier because there's transparency. Lately, I think we've seen a growing use case on non-commercial users, which is, from day one it has been about, let's make more money, which is whether you are buying or selling. You want to know more, and if you know more about your competition, your market, the product you're buying, the end customers or the end producers. You're going to have a better ability to make a good transaction. That was that simple. And I think a couple of years ago, we've seen a lot of new needs arising around compliance, which is just like, you know, there's so many sanctions now, so many things that you cannot do that people are being worried about.
Just like, you know, entering to something that is illegal without even knowing it. Look, I chartered this vessel to move this cargo from A to B, happens to be that this vessel did something wrong before, so, without knowing I'm in a dirty chain. These are the kind of topics we have to solve now. We have a lot of demand around that as well.
And so not everything is about making more money. It's as well about just having a bit more transparency about who's involved, what's behind? And what is the impact. There is the same thing could be said on the environmental footprint. It's almost like getting back to our early journey. Now we have a lot of questions about the CO2 emissions linked to this specific logistic movements, whether it is a cargo being transferred, a cargo being stored, being moved, like, what is the impact of that in terms of CO2. What is the fuel that were used in the ship? How long was the ship running for? These are questions that are now arising more and more often and again, it's not linked to the trading desk. It's more just the company itself, having a wider view of what is the impact of my activities.
Marcus: You touched on something quite interesting. Within your core area now, commodities and maritime, structural trends driving new value pools that, to be honest, didn't exist sort of 5, 10, 15 years ago, that you see now, and I suppose our sort of macro bird's eye view is now you've ended up with quite in some places quite fragmented sort of landscapes. We have lots of leaders, often of small boxes, especially, let's say, take maritime, for example. Now, just sort of maybe a tough question. But just how do you see that playing out over the next 5, 10, 15 years in terms of the state maritime and that sort of landscape? I mean you often use sort of Bloomberg of commodities, and obviously you said at the beginning, yourself, Bloomberg has everything. Do you see sort of 1 or 2 big winners or will sort of that fragmented landscape continue to persist.
Francois: Bloomberg is, I mean, that's it, it is the Apple of financial data essentially. So, of course, that's the kind of expectation we have. We are a very ambitious company, and for us, like the main metrics, is the number of users, which is, how many eyeballs do we have behind our screens every day? That's the most important one. We want to make sure they are very loyal and that essentially, we don't disappoint. And so the tool is almighty when it comes to “I need to do something”. You know a lot of our users; we measure the way they use it. Now there is a screen that is dedicated to Kpler. It's always open, and they check things that we like it. Now, in terms of the broader market and the competition landscape. I think 10 years ago, when we started, actually, there was a lot of other people, who started at the same time, roughly, between 2014, 2016, 2017, a lot of people started. It was a different landscape. There was a lot of capital being available, a lot of venture capital that was invested in the market. And I think now it's another phase that has started, which is the guys who were just like series A or seed in 2014, 2015 to 16. Now they are almost 8, 9, 10 years.
So, you cannot tell any more story about how we are a young company, we're getting there, you know. After 10 years of VC funding, you have to have a very solid top line going, and ideally a bottom line. And that's where you see as well the limit of this model, which is, we became bootstrapped because we couldn't raise capital. It's not that we were the founders obsessed, with just like remaining in control of the business. It's just that we couldn't raise capital. Maybe we're bad at raising. I don't know but we couldn't so forget it. We have to make it, anyway. But if you think about it for a minute, this market was again, you selling data. Everybody's comparing to Bloomberg like, just talk to the procurement guy. Bloomberg is 24K a year. What's your price? That's how they think. 24K per year per user. That's Bloomberg terminal price. So, you know, that's the benchmark. And Bloomberg charges a lot of the time a year upfront. So, you're going to have to pay your 12 months invoice right now. So, for me, that's where we could make it as well, because, people are giving you 12 months of cash up front, and you are not delivering 12 months of service up front. So, they give you more money than you need and so that's why we could grow. And I feel that these are data providers.
We are all living in this kind of world. So, if you need a ton of external capital on top of that, either you are making something very complicated, and hope at the time that it is gigantic, and there's something really big, or you're deleting yourself unnecessarily, and which can have, I think, a very vicious effect, which is, if you grow a company by hiring people and spending dollars that you have not made yourself. I'm not sure you're building the right culture. Which is, our culture is, I think we have an amazing team, but it's quite intense.
But it's intense, because, like I remember wiring money from my joint account with my wife to the company, so that I can pay taxes, for just the social tax of the salaries of people who are building a product I cannot sell. You know, when you do this kind of stuff, it wires your brain. I mean, you got to make sure it's going to work, you know. It's not fun. It's not fun at all. And so, you know where I'm coming to answer is that I think, after 10 years of venture capital investing into space now people are looking for scale. That's why you see a lot of PE investing.
So, we have Five Arrows and Insight Partners, Energy Aspects has investment from Summit. I've heard yesterday that FGE was acquired by TA Associates. So, and you have Maritime intelligence was now with Montague. So essentially, you have a lot of companies now who have a PE backer. And now I think keyword is scale and profitability. And so, if you look at it as well from the user point of view, I think it's not sustainable for them to have to have 5 or 6 screens to do the day-to-day workflow about pre-trade transaction, post trade, it's not sustainable. So yeah, I mean clearly, I think there will be 1 or 2 pre-trades, one to post trade, at least for the physical cargoes and that would make sense for the clients. Actually, the market is asking for that which, it's time for them to have to evaluate different providers very often, and now that everything is plug with an API [Application Programming Interface] to reinstall everything I think the market is moving on to, okay, who's a winner? And let's build on top.
Marcus: I just have a final question before I hand back to Hiten. So, you talk about scale now. But my question is, how do you and how are you sort of continuing to embed that sort of laser focus on product market fit and product innovation, as you scale. I mean, as you said, it's a very different company than when you sat on your kitchen table with Jean all those years ago.
Francois: We had a management transition. That was a quarter ago. So, I was CEO until September. Now it's Mark who became our CEO, and I'm the Exec chair. And Jean, who was a CTO, he became president. Essentially, we made these changes precisely for that which is running a company of 650 employees with a lot of EBITDA [stands for earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization], a lot of growth, It's a full time job. And it's not necessarily the same skill set as what it is to build a product and find a product market fit. And so, I think it was the relation on our side that okay, we have people in the team who would do a better job than I would. So, I step down and Mark took this job, and I think he has the right skill set to just execute at best at this scale, and it gives me more time to spend time with the product, with the big clients. Just understand what's the pain point. And I think that's what’s important. You know. One thing you asked me about like, am I proud? Early on. So, we have a board. Now, you know, we're doing this quarterly thing. We have a big PEFf. And we talk at length about that.
One metric I'm very proud of is the fact that, so we're growing 40% organically, so without M&A. And we do that 50/50 by new logos or expansion. So, it's not price increase. You have a lot of people delivering growth at scale, but just essentially abusing the market position. We don't do that. We focus on making sure the product is very sticky, that they like it, that they need more of it, and that we can build other verticals, other adjacent markets where there would be the same kind of need. And what if you do that? You have to make sure; you know, you bring new cool stuff to the table every year, and in order to do that you have to be focused. So, it's not compatible with running a budget for 650 employees, and a pipeline for 220 sales people. That big numbers, you need someone else. So that's why we've made this distinction and look, I see a lot of people.
I live in Switzerland now for a few months, so it's a bit of different crowd that you would have in Central London, and you have a lot of successful entrepreneurs. Let's say who've done exits, and something I've noticed about a lot of them is that, so overnight you become super rich, and you become super useless, like, nobody cares about you anymore. Because that's it. You're done. You've sold it. And actually, founders’ depression is a real topic. And this thing happened, and it exists.
And so, I'm happy because I think we found the right path with Jean, which is like we're still in the business. We're still bringing value where we matter, because, you know, there is this thing about what they call the loudest voice in the room, which is when you create something successful, a lot of people believe that you know more, and that you have this kind of magic touch on things. And a lot of the time it's not true. So being able to take a step down and say, okay, I don't know how to collect finance and invoicing, what the problem of that is, like, I have no idea at all. So just like, I don't know, just make your best, but being able to just spend time where I feel like, okay, product market fit. How you get the early adopters of a data product to just, you know, cement around the product and then expand. I've done that. I've done that for the last 10 years. Now I know this thing, that's my sport and I can do more of this. And that's why we took different roles were able to focus on this one particular thing which is product market fit. Because I think we have a lot of cool metrics but growing 40% organically at 100 plus million. That's a cool metric. That's a very cool metric.
Hiten: Wow! There's so much that's in there that struck me, and the humility you show as well just to say, you know, that loudest voice in the room, and not to have your ego trapped in with that success story is remarkable. I guess the one thing I would like you to elaborate on if you're open to, is just a little bit more about that emotional journey of transitioning as the company succeeds from CEO to chairman, I guess, talk to me in yours about the emotional journey that these final stages felt like.
Francois: So, when we announced it internally, I think a lot, and we were not great at communicating, I think, as a lot of chaotic founders. So, we just have something to say and boom, we say it, and we move on. And so, we had a lot of people from the team calling us, saying, okay, so that's it. Goodbye. Like, you're retiring, not seeing you anymore. And so, they thought that we were selling. We were just going elsewhere. And that's it, was done, you know. And so, we had to say, whoa, we're staying there but just with a different role. We had this amazing off-site last week in Barcelona, we brought the 650 employees to Barcelona for a week together. That was really good, lots of good moments. And so, Mark, who's CEO, I mean, did the intro speech and the big first day chat. And so that's, I mean I'm not going to lie to you, it felt weird a bit, because you know, it used to be us. And now it's not me.
I was just listening, but at the same time as I said, you know, when you asked me about the early years at the bank, I left as well, because I was just not having fun. And after a while I don't want to feel I have to go to work, and that every Monday was like, oh, f*uck, I mean, I have to come back, and I don't want to do that, you know. I don't want to do that.
And so, I'm glad we could move to another world before this happened, which is, because at 600 plus employees this thing is so big that there's a lot of things to do where you need to have a certain skill set, need to be wired in a certain way. For example, I have a very short attention span. So, after 2 min, if I'm not really into the chat, I do something else, especially now that we are all remote based, you have a call, and you do something else. And so, plenty of time I've done that but after a while it’s wrong. I mean, I should be paying attention. The guy needs me, and I'm just doing something else. And so, I'm aware of my limitations, and I'm aware of what I can do, what I cannot.
As well like, I just have a big family. So, someone told me the sentence about you know, he was helping people that are in terminal illness phase in the hospital, and say, I've never seen anyone telling me I wish I had done more meetings. But everyone said I should have spent more time with the kids, you know. So, I see there's some basic wisdom in that which is okay. Find a way to make it work. And for me the change was all about this as well, which is finding a balance where I can see a bit more my family while I'm still young, relatively young, but still being part of Kpler. But yeah, for sure when you start you are founder and CEO, and it's just you and your mate and the 2 co-founders look at you. And then, when you move to another role, people don't look at you anymore. You know, Mark said that ever since he became CEO his jokes are funnier. Mine are less funny now.
Hiten: Final thing. We covered a lot of ground. We just invite guests to throw the spotlight, share the spotlight that you've earned, so I don't know if there is an individual or a company that's impressing you right now that you would like listeners to pay attention or go look up and learn more about.
Francois: So, you shared the question yesterday. So, I had time to look. But it didn't take me much, because so it's not in my space. It's a company called Odoo. I think it's in Brussels as well. We are headquartered in Brussels. And these guys are an ERP for SME and bootstrapped 650 million dollars. Bootstrapped. 5 billion EV. What I like is, nobody knows about them, and they are just like a proper giant, which is, you have a lot of people who are coming with a unique card and have a big volition, but 650 million of dollars in revenues that's just enormous, you know, at the heart of Europe. Not many people know about them. For me, that's the kind of things that excites me. The fact that if you just set aside for a minute all the bells and whistles, and the press that are always impressed with how much you've raised. You know, how much you're supposedly worth, but just guys that don't make noise, and just pick a very good product, and sell it, and scale it, and scale it, and scale it, and keep going.
Actually, there is a podcast from the founder and CEO, who's saying that he's buying shares, he's not selling. He's buying shares. So, he's himself buying the shares from the guy that has the options I want to sell, and he says I'm never going to sell. I'm never going to IPO. We just love what we do, and that's so much fun. There's a lot of things that resonates with me and the team and what we've built. And so yeah, I'm very impressed with this company.
Hiten: Great example, and if we had time, I probably could do a whole other episode on your views on European growth companies and European champions. Just hearing you talk about like that the hype and the PR and the story, something that the Americans seem to do so well, and we need to close the gap in Europe, right? There's so many success stories like yours and the others you share out that we kind of need to do a better job of drumming the beat. But that's probably another episode, another show, and it's all right. But I'm going to have to wrap it up there. But, Francois, thank you so much. Given everything you've got going on, and everything you've achieved for coming on being so open and candid with your thoughts. It's been a real pleasure. So, thank you for coming on.
Francois: My pleasure. Thank you very much. Bye, bye, have a good day.
This transcript has been edited for clarity purposes.
