Full Transcript

Darren [00:00:02]:
Hi everyone. Welcome back to another episode of One of one. I’m your host, Darren Gold, CEO of the Trium Group. My guest today is Hannah Renner, co founder and CEO of the Munich, Germany based company Personio, a people software platform focused on small and mid sized companies and widely regarded as one of the most successful technology companies founded in Europe over the past decade. In our conversation we explore how much Hanno’s willingness to put himself in uncomfortable situations has contributed to his success and we discuss his passions and daily rituals that have helped him cultivate this unique trait. We also talk about how Hanno’s desire to level the technology playing field between Europe and the US serves as a fundamental driver of his discipline and motivation as a leader. Please enjoy this wonderful conversation with Hanno Renner.

Darren [00:01:00]:
Hanno, it’s so great to see you and so thankful for you being on the show and I’m really looking forward to our conversation together.

Hanno Renner [00:01:07]:
Thank you for having me, Darren.

Darren [00:01:09]:
You’re very welcome. You are the founder and CEO of Personio, which many regard as one of the most important and significant technology companies in the last decade founded in Europe. And so I’m really curious to start with this incredible company that you lead and you could describe for those who aren’t familiar with the company or aren’t users of the company, what exactly Personio does. And we’ll start there.

Hanno Renner [00:01:33]:
Yeah, Personio is we call the Intelligent HR platform. It’s a holistic people platform that helps digitize the entire employee lifecycle. It’s specifically focused for small and mid sized companies, up to 5,000 employees and helping them from recruiting, paying their employees, performance management and pretty much really all people processes based on a strong and robust foundation in the system of record. Our mission is unlock the power of people for organizations around the world. So really help them get the most out of their people and make it a fulfilling workplace for the people.

Darren [00:02:05]:
Great. Yeah. And so there’s obviously big established companies in this space. Workday is one that comes to mind and we know Carl Eschenbach, the CEO of that really great company. I imagine you’re competing with big companies like that. You’re competing with other newer entrants into the space. How do you position yourself relative to the the other companies in this space of kind of providing the software system of record for people function?

Hanno Renner [00:02:33]:
So it’s greater to call out a workday because ultimately you can think of pzone like a combination of workday and servicenow for the SME. So really making sure that people data and people workflows gets democratized to this population that so far doesn’t have the access and the benefit from these enterprise grade solutions. And the reason why? Well, workday might work great for a 15, 20,000 employee company. A company with hundreds of people, a few hundreds of people, or even tens of people won’t have the resources neither in house to implement and to adapt those kind of solutions, but also not to pay an Accenture and others a lot of implementation fields. Instead we needed to build a platform that’s much more user friendly and easy to use for non technical users, like a regular HR manager that needs to be able to establish an onboarding workflow or change the absence policies just with a matter of a couple of clicks rather than requiring internal implementation teams. And that’s where we really helped those teams. And the other thing that is different on the enterprise, a lot of companies choose a lot of best of breed solutions for different areas because think about a company with 10,000 employees, they have an entire department just focused on recruiting, entire department just focused on compensation. And a company with 300 people has one HR team that’s responsible for the entire employee lifecycle. So there’s a real benefit for them, not just from a cost and ease of use perspective, but also from a benefit of deep integration, of having all of these tools come out of one platform and thereby being deeply interconnected and benefiting from someone that you have in your workforce, planning in Persona, you directly go into recruiting, directly go into the payroll and then go through the performance cycle without having to switch systems.

Darren [00:04:12]:
Got it? Yeah. So you mentioned SME, and for those of listeners who aren’t familiar with that acronym, Small and midsize enterprises. Right. So you’ve made a specific choice to target a segment of the market that probably wasn’t being, you know, adequately served by the large players. You also founded this company in Europe, in Munich. Talk a little bit about the European focus, how you’ve expanded within Europe. And I’m guessing there’s something about the complexity of operating in a multi language multicultural continent like Europe that was attractive to you and you’ve somehow figured out how to do. Well, I’d love to hear a little bit about that.

Hanno Renner [00:04:53]:
Yeah, all great questions. Let me start with just our European roots in nature. And I think I never characterize myself as very patriotic being German, but I’m quite patriotic about Europe. I think the European project is an amazing peace project first and foremost. But also the economic integration of these countries and the culture here is fantastic and I like that. But I do believe when I Think about the economic impact globally. While Europe has many fantastic companies in many industries, when it comes to technology, Europe has been historically lacking behind we have one major Software player, that’s SAP, but they’ve been celebrating their 50th anniversary this year. So you can tell that there’s not as much, at least on the B2B software side, not as many great companies evolving out of Europe. And I think that’s a real gap and a real opportunity to build the next generation of globally leading software companies building out of Europe. And that’s one part of our mission of what we’re trying to do, but then particular to our space. Indeed, I think the part that’s attractive for us serving SMEs with HR in Europe is that it’s also a highly, a pretty large space. Oftentimes you are disregarded as okay, large enterprise companies need to go to the US because that’s where the big enterprises are. And that is true. But for small and mid sized companies, the European market is actually just as large as the US market, given how many of them there are here. And helping these companies across multiple geographies is a real, really exciting mission which we are going after. And thereby, as you said, helping them understand all the nuances of how your vacation is calculated in Spain versus the Netherlands and how you ensure that you, you can help them hire compliantly across these countries. And all these things are really exciting and they make it not easier compared to operating in just one country, but it makes it interesting. And having to solve that from the beginning, because many of our customers, even in Germany obviously are multinational, allowed us to then be able to build for other countries as well and expand to those.

Darren [00:06:50]:
Yeah. One note I want to just make sure I articulate is you’ve made a, what sounds like a series of really smart strategic choices about where to play and where not to play. And maybe we come back to that theme. But I think it’s important for listeners who are thinking about founding companies or building existing companies, the choices you make about where to play can be really, really critical and a critical component of your strategy. You also talked a little bit about Europe and the importance of Europe to you as a founder. And I want to come back to that because I think it’s particularly relevant given the world we’re living in right now. So let’s put a pin in that and we’ll come back to it for sure. And maybe where I’d like to go is like back to the origin story and I believe 2015, if I’m correct. But if you could take us back a decade or so to the founding of this company, the idea itself, like where it came from and what motivated you and your co founders to start the company, that would be great.

Hanno Renner [00:07:47]:
Yeah. So back nine years ago, we were still students at university and obviously a lot of companies, a couple of people since have told us, oh, but how do you come up with an HR company when you’re still a student? And in fact it’s partially luck and partially choice by choice. We decided from the beginning we didn’t want to look for problems that we as students had because typically those are not relevant problems that you can then solve and impact a bunch of people. So we really wanted to find something that is a truly important problem that we can solve for many, many people. And then the luck part was a friend of mine that was CTO of 100 person company telling me about their challenges with having all their people data in spreadsheets and not being able to manage them effectively and compliant and the data and so on. And then together with him we started building a first version. But then that was still why we were students. What then ultimately made us decide that this is a really interesting space to start a company in and worthwhile our time as well was essentially two core beliefs. The core belief number one is that people are the most important success factor of any organization around the world and that alone makes it interesting to be in that space. And then to the where to play. Core belief number two was that small and mid sized organizations are the backbone of economies and societies around the world. And I purposefully always talk about organization, not businesses, and also societies, not just economies, because there’s many of our customers that are NGOs, that are universities, that are even soccer associations, and other things that are not traditional businesses, but they still have people and still for them, people are the most important success factor. And when we combine these two core beliefs, it was pretty obvious that this is an important problem to solve and an interesting space to go after and one we could build a really great company in. And the one thing maybe to add to this was that at the time when we started the company, we were bootstrapped for the first year. So we didn’t really have any investors, but we did speak to a couple and many of them early on advised us against actually what we were trying to do. And being students, we were also trying to figure should we then maybe follow the advice of the investor? Because at the time every software company was supposed to be the playbook was solve One problem really deep, then go up market and build for the enterprise and then you end up with all of these point solutions that have been created over time. But what we realized early on, and not because we were smart or smarter than those investors or we didn’t even have any experience, but we listening to our customers, what we did learn is what I said before. A small midsize companies actually want one HR solution that’s integrated. They don’t want five different tools that they don’t know how to connect with and then have to change interfaces and so on. And therefore we decided that we wanted to go really help these companies in a holistic way, build across the entire employee lifecycle and thereby pretty quickly start to build what today is called a multi product platform. And it’s pretty sexy nowadays. And we are lucky that we were a little bit ahead of that trend. But ultimately there was something that came from listening to our customers, building those different products early on and investing into much broader suite of tools for our customers than we might have otherwise have done.

Darren [00:10:49]:
Was it clear that you were going to be the CEO of the company? And if not like why? Why you? What was it about you that made that a natural and I think very smart choice?

Hanno Renner [00:11:00]:
So I think we started, we were four co founders and we initially divided up a little bit. I mean initially you do everything anyway, right? But we had, it was clear there were two people that two of my co founders really focused on building the product. They had an engineering background and then me and my other co founders a bit more focused on our customers and on understanding their needs and essentially being a little bit of interface to those customers. But then once we sort of started to first define roles, we pretty quickly kind of made clear okay, there was one being the cto, one being sort of chief product officer or product responsible, let’s call it. Not that I think that the title so met at that age at that time, but then one was sort of focused on marketing and then I was sort of on sales, finance and running the company. And that pretty naturally meant that I was responsible for a bit of a broader function, not just one part of the company and then also obviously doing a bunch of external work, press and so on. And some of these things we didn’t really discuss who should do them, but it was natural that those were things that I find doing was reasonably good at. And that evolved in that way. I think we then for a while still operated as four co founders. We had these titles assigned, CEO, CPO and so on, but we didn’t have real reporting lines. And that was done at some point. Once I had several people reporting to me from different functions and my co founders were sort of separate functions next to me. It was more of an ask almost from them to say, hey, this doesn’t feel like a balanced setup. Now you’re spending much more time with these other topics, but then these things also should also be important to you. And so it’s almost a suggestion from them to change that setup. And that’s where we then changed the reporting line, I think at the end of the first year or something into me not just having a CEO title, but actually having everyone reporting to me from an informal perspective.

Darren [00:12:54]:
Got it. So that’s maybe an interesting jumping off point to go even further back in time. We can’t go that far because you were young when you founded the company. But I’m interested in kind of early experiences. And were there one or two early experiences that were really particularly formative for you, helped shape how you think about your leading, how you are in the world, and if you could maybe mention one or two of those, that would be great.

Hanno Renner [00:13:22]:
So I do think one of the things that prepared me, if anything can prepare you for an entrepreneurial journey anyway. But one thing that did prepare me was that I oftentimes put myself early in my life into situations where I wasn’t fully comfortable or in control with that situation. So for example, growing up, my parents never did any winter sports. I never really got early into skiing or snowboarding. But then time I did want to do it. I then quickly signed up to become a snowboard instructor. And obviously all the other people had snowboarded all their youth with their parents and so on. And I was sort of really trying to still be make it, but obviously being much more uncomfortable in that and equally a little bit at a later point when I decided to become a skipper of sailing boats. I had done some sailing before during my studies, but I’d never. That was actually at the skipper license training. It was the first time there was sailing a boat of that size with the actual big steering wheel. And obviously didn’t tell anyone that, but it was many of these moments where I chose to do things that I wasn’t fully prepared in. And I think that’s just that training, which I often compare founding a company is like being dropped into cold water and except the water never gets warm and you just keep being comfortable in that. By the time you figured out something, you’re again in the stage where you probably didn’t know what to do. And I think those were some of the experience I had in my life that put me into situations that then I think helped me be fine with that ambiguity and that uncertainty of running a company that I’ve never done before.

Darren [00:14:53]:
So this quality of confidence, comfort with ambiguity, willingness, and maybe even desire to put yourself into uncomfortable situations and quickly adapt and learn and figure things out and be good at them, can you trace that back to anything, any particular either moment in time or event in your life, or was that always sort of a part of who you were?

Hanno Renner [00:15:18]:
It’s a good question. I think if there’s something really underlying to that that drew me into those kind of situations, I think maybe it was just growing up generally and that I was just not always in a place where my parents could enable me everything and provide me everything and had a protected and a good childhood. But it was in a way that I always had to a little bit fight for things. And it wasn’t as comfortably available to me to either work for it myself or convince my parents and argue very hard with them. And I think that created a little bit of a, I guess, drive and robustness into trying to really get to those points and then also knowing, okay, sometimes when I push for something that I really want, you, you almost maybe push a little bit further and put yourself into, not just the easy one. I want this, what I could have. But you push a bit further and then you end up in a situation where maybe you weren’t really ready for, and then you try to figure it out as you’re in that situation. And I think that’s a little bit similar with a startup. You always want to be growing faster, you want to be more successful than actually what you could comfortably do. And then once you’re in that situation, you have to figure out how to manage and lead yourself and the company in that situation.

Darren [00:16:29]:
Yeah, it sounds like almost the perfect trait for a founder CEO. And so maybe we can go back to 2015, 16, you’re CEO of this company. I oftentimes hear from founders that the journey over the first 10 years or so can be divided into. Into chapters. Do you think about your journey in that way? If so, like, how would you describe, like, what’s the. What are the chapter titles or the phases of the last 10 years? And if they fall into distinct phases, it’d be great to hear. And like, what did it ask of you? I imagine you were stepping into the next version of your leadership constantly.

Hanno Renner [00:17:10]:
So, yeah, so I think one phase that we didn’t have as much that many startups search for much longer and probably was a bit of luck quite frankly, is that we pretty much from the get go had product market fit, which was good and bad in many ways. Good for sure, because you want product market fit bad because then we didn’t have time to experience and build a foundation and do things ourselves. But we had customers very, very quickly paying customers that were wanting to use our product and were demanding us to build a product further. And especially as I mentioned, because we started with such a broad offering very quickly they were like one customer wanted something here and one over here and that made it really challenging to keep up with the demands of customers. And then I think in particular the challenge with then growing quickly in the beginning is that obviously you’re not, maybe it’s probably the messiness of an earlier stage startup anyway, but you’re not as strategic. Okay, this is in that sequence. We’re doing it, but a little bit you’re learning from your customers and then you’re opening up things that you afterwards have to fulfill. And I still remember early on when we had a period of our product being a bit unstable and having downtime. Sometimes our customers then calling us and screaming at us for not being able to do that. And that was on the one hand a very painful phase. On the other hand, I remember also standing up at an odd team meeting during that phase and telling people, look, this is really painful. But it also shows that what we’re doing really matters. So customers, if we can’t, if our product is down, customers can’t run their payroll, they can’t access CVs for an interview they’re about to prepare, they can’t request a vacation or check who’s out today. There’s so many jobs to be done that they have to do in a day to day and that really stops their business if they haven’t. And as painful as it was, it also was validating that we had product market fit and we had something that customers really cared about and was important to their life. But to your point, so on different phases, so we didn’t really have a product market fit search phase. We started right into building for customers and scaling with them. But obviously there was this, there’s still this phase in the very beginning as a founder where you still do everything from. You’re selling all the time, you’re selling to customers, you’re selling to investors, you’re selling to candidates, you’re trying to convince people of this company that you’re trying to build. And you’re equally doing all the back office stuff from solving customer tickets to buying new toilet brushes for the bathrooms because those are order whatever. You’re just responsible for everything. And that’s obviously a phase in the beginning where you’re just literally the person running behind everything that needs to be done. And then I think the next phase starts when you start for the first time to create a little bit of structure. And that can become quite a messy phase in itself as well, because you might have some teams and parts of the org that are a bit more mature. Maybe you hired a first person that’s a bit more senior and then you lead them in a different way. But on the other hand, you still have maybe even a working student running a higher function or some really junior person. And I think that creates. But at least I think it’s a bit of an easier transition as a founder because you instill a lot of those in between phase. And then I think the next phase that I remember well was when we for the first time started hiring a real bench of management. And not yet we didn’t call it C level, but sort of a BP layer of people that had done that before. And I think that was an interesting one because I remember being quite intimidated by hiring these much more senior people coming in and then believing, okay, they’ve done all of this before, they would know much better. And what I learned from that phase and crucially today, and I still probably have a version of this because the execs you hire later always get always more mature and you hire great people, but you’re also then a little bit intimidated as they come in. But then what I did learn at some point was that as much as they have a lot of really valuable things to bring to you and to your business, they don’t have all that equally valuable context as you have about the business and the customer. And the real magic only happens if you bring these two things together and if you then jointly benefit from their learnings and trust on this, but also trust your gut and trust the things that you know about the business. I think I’ve often learned over time that even the most senior executives come in with a level of insecurity because they don’t know your business and they rely on you to also so give some guidance there and then jointly create the next version of the company. That I think was a big learning for me during that phase of hiring more senior executives.

Darren [00:21:18]:
Yeah, there’s a phase I think maybe you’ve experienced certainly a lot of founders have experienced over the last, call it three or four years, where we’ve returned to what I would call maybe more normal market rates of growth. And it’s called upon founders to rethink how they lead. And I’m wondering if that’s been true for you and what that phase has looked like. What are the big questions you’ve wrestled with?

Hanno Renner [00:21:47]:
Yeah, I think that definitely, I mean, the phase where capital was cheap and everyone growing gangbusters and Covid while we all were scared initially, everyone quickly realized especially also for technologies like ours went through the roof and there’s such a phase and we’ll come to the other phase in a second. But I think such a phase, as much as they look like on the outside and feel on the inside like the most successful phases because you’re growing so crazy, they’re actually the ones where you create the most amount of debt and the most amount of issues that you then later have to cope and deal with as well. From partially new product, potentially as well from technical depth, but really certainly new processes and systems that you set up in leadership structures and organizational design. And we think that was something which since now where both the economy has slowed down a little bit and certainly that zero interest rate period has changed and the public market expectations changed. It did. Also then it’s coming off a drug almost a little bit and then having to realize, oh no, we have to run this company differently. And we ultimately want to be a business that makes from €1, €1, 20 or at some point €2. And that really creates profits. And I think that’s where we then had to change a lot of of the way we’ve done things before. And that’s obviously not always painful, especially inside a company. It leads to a lot of change. And I think what changed for me in the leadership there as well was then to really try to go 12 layers deeper into each organization to understand what the real problems are and where they came from. Because if you talk to execs of the functions, everyone notices this, but mostly because they’re accustomed and it’s fully normal. I would probably be in the same position there. And then they’re noticing this for other areas, but within there, they of course have all these reasons why their organization looks the way they are and why this is the way it is. And it’s really hard to kind of really have. You have to go a few levels deeper into each of these organizations and to then point people towards the other. I think this part also in your organization maybe is not set up in the way it should be. And yeah, actually we’re slowing ourselves down because we don’t have the collaboration in the way or we actually have too many people in some roles or the wrong functions, or they’re not even knowing about other parts in the business. So I think that has become an area both to then restructure part of the business to understand where we need to make those changes. And then I think since I’ve just tried to continue to be a bit closer to some of these areas, to also keep learning myself to how can we avoid such decisions again and how can we be making them together in the right way?

Darren [00:24:18]:
Yeah. So for you in particular, I’m curious, obviously the word founder mode is being thrown around pretty liberally over the last six to 12 months as a way of describing, I think what’s being asked of a founder is to bring a level of inspection and introspection and sense of urgency and demand for accountability. And I’m just wondering, what has it been like for you? What’s been the challenge? What have you found easy? What are some of the lessons in this particularly interesting time over the last, call it, year or two?

Hanno Renner [00:24:54]:
Yeah. So I think one thing I would say on founder mode more broadly is that I would definitely think it’s a trait that we should not limit to founders, but we should demand it from everyone in the organization to go deep to know the details and to not. You can delegate tasks, but you can’t delegate responsibility. And the responsibility also of knowing what is the real problem we’re trying to solve here and why are we solving it in a certain way and is this the right way? Not just back off and say, oh yeah, I don’t know. And I’ve realized about myself that I’ve been becoming much more allergic to such kind of feedbacks of yeah, you have to talk to this person. It’s like, no, this is a really important problem. If I want to know about this, then it’s certainly an important topic and you should know that as well and you should be on top of it and you should at least know why we took which decisions. So I think that’s the. On a like, broader level for me personally, I do think it’s been the struggle of sometimes where do I. I initially was allowing myself to go deep and to really inspect and demand for these areas. I think I’ve overcome that. Now it’s a bit more of the how do you then still make sure that you’re not afterwards when you go deep in Something you keep the threat that it’s always then dependent on you and then people, because as much as you want to introspect and as much as you want to push for the really high quality buy and for the right outcomes and to ensure it’s done the right way, you want to avoid that. Then these people are paralyzed afterwards and with every next decision come back to you to ensure that it’s done how you want. And for some areas you might want that, and then you’re just very explicit and hey, let’s check in here again, or we do a weekly cadence or whatever. But for other areas, you just want to really be clear what you want in terms of outcome, but then still have them run that area completely independent of you. And I think that’s been an area where I had to. You also realize sometimes just going in with founder mode and pushing for some things leads you to then actually end up ending up managing these topics directly. And then you’re also not scaling yourself in an effective way.

Darren [00:26:54]:
And I imagine you’re still figuring that out, right? That’s a hard thing to get right. Is that right?

Hanno Renner [00:27:00]:
Yeah, I think it’s probably a continuous thing that you want an organization that scales for itself and you need to be in the details and finding that balance. Where to go deep and how to do that is something that I continue to learn and sometimes get really right. And then it accelerates some areas or can help with something. I think that was one permission I gave myself in realizing that because as a founder, all of the threads of information end up with you eventually. In some areas you just have better intuition and better information than anyone else in the company can have. And therefore it would be stupid then not to go in and not to allow yourself to say, hey, I think we can shortcut this. We don’t have to discuss all the things. I just know this from all the things I noticed the right way. And then some other areas, it’s completely different because while I have all the information at the top, there’s people closer to the problem that know so much about that problem that their local subject matter expertise is more relevant than my overarching sense. And I think figuring out in which cases my founder intuition and knowledge of all the history of everything that bubbles up to me is more relevant than the local knowledge. That’s, I think, the piece that is to be figured out for me constantly.

Darren [00:28:15]:
That’s a great distinction. I think really helpful to people that are trying to figure this out for themselves. I’m also curious, I imagine you get asked for advice from people that are thinking about founding a company or in the early stages of founding a company. Do you have a sort of single piece of advice that you give founders that is particularly unique to your experience and if so, what is it?

Hanno Renner [00:28:40]:
So if one piece of leadership advice, but we might come to that later because I think it’s less relevant to really early stage, early stage founding. But I do think when it comes to early stage founding, I think there is, I mean the obvious one is similar to what we were a little bit lucky and a little bit intentional about that. Is it really a relevant problem that you’re solving? I still see a lot of companies go, especially now where they are. You can build all kinds of things, but is it really a problem that will make a big portion of people happier, more successful in their work or in their daily life or whatever? And is that something you’re looking to solve? But then I think the other related one that was less of a problem when we were started because capital wasn’t as readily available as it is today is wait as long as possible with raising money is one I think maybe controversial. But one advice I always give founders because I do feel not for the effect. I think if you raise money from the right investors, they won’t try to influence what you’re doing. I think you still have all the freedoms to do it. But I do think once you take on capital there’s a different dynamic of how you run the business and what you’re trying to do. And it gives you maybe a little bit at least perceived less flexibility to also change the course because you maybe have pitched that you want to go here and now that’s on this pitch deck and this is what your investors believe in and now you realize something along the way. So I think that’s one. And the second reason for why I would raise capital later is just it gives you that frugality. For us, being bootstrapped for a year just made us run the business much differently in the beginning than if we had all that capital in the early days. And especially if you’re a first time founder like I was, I think you make many more costly and stupid mistakes having a lot of money in the beginning. That might be different if I went out to found again or other founders that done this before because they know exactly where to push and what to do with the money. But I think for an early stage founder it’s really helpful to have that period of very small team, extremely fast execution, listening to customers all the Time not having to worry about investors, not having to worry about what to do with all that money and keeping yourself very focused on what you need to actually solve.

Darren [00:30:44]:
You mentioned more general leadership advice. I’d love to go there and hear what you have to offer.

Hanno Renner [00:30:50]:
Yeah, so I think it’s almost, it’s not just a leadership, but it’s probably a company running advice for everyone. I think it’s one advice and one of my mentors, Lars Dalgard, the founder of SuccessFactors, once gave me. And it sounds very simple, but it so often reminded me and it’s about not lying to yourself. And I remember telling it to some people that said, oh, but why would I lie to herself? And you don’t realize how often we are lying to ourselves to telling ourselves something in our day to day private life, but certainly also in the company. We look at a certain graph part of the business and yes, it’s trending down but then, yeah, but now this part of the business already looks good and yeah, probably if we turn it a little bit like this, it actually we can tell ourselves that there’s momentum in there because the last two weeks were looking better, but effectively the last three months went down. So it’s just an issue. And I think just being truly honest with yourself about everything that’s an issue in the business and talking about it in very blunt terms, both to yourself but then also to everyone else in the company is such a crucial piece of advice. And despite having feeling I’ve so deeply integrated this belief and this understanding, I still think I sometimes do it. And we enjoy it in the company. So we even have it now as a leadership principle for us in the executive team where we have it. One of the things that someone can call out like are we lying to ourselves here to make sure we’re reminding ourselves? And when do we paint something a bit more rosy or when do we actually ignore something that’s right in front of us? Maybe because it makes us feel better or because we think it’s an excuse to do something a different way. And I think that’s such an important piece.

Darren [00:32:31]:
Yeah, I love that that’s an explicit principle for you and your leadership team and I imagine more broadly within the organization. And I’m wondering if there are other unique practices in how you run the company, whether it’s structures or rituals or practices, anything else that comes to mind that are particularly unique to you and to personio.

Hanno Renner [00:32:51]:
So I think one thing that just relates because we were just talking about principles we use in the Management or leadership team. Another one we implemented at a similar time as the one with the not lying to ourself with also something we called roll call. Because sometimes you have these discussions and then there’s two people that have really strong opinions and then they go really up on the other and the one builds on the other and so on without noticing. There’s three people, four people, five people in a room that don’t say anything. And then we oftentimes sometimes they’re intimidated because there’s such a heated discussion from others or they just don’t really know where now to add into. And we try to use that to then step back and whoever notice it call a roll call. And then everyone has to without reacting to each other has to go around the table and react to the issue that’s on the table to give an efficient way of okay, everyone has to show up everyone to as a first team mentality, voice their view. And then from there we can then see what decisions we take or where we go deeper.

Darren [00:33:46]:
Okay. So we spent a lot of time talking about you, your leadership, the company. I’d love to step outside a little bit. I know it’s an all consuming endeavor to found and lead a company, particularly one like Personio, but you obviously spend time outside of the company and I’d love to understand your personal pursuits. What is the, you know, what’s the day in the life of Hano look like? Are there practices or rituals that, that you engage in to keep yourself fit for this big endeavor? And I also want to make sure we cover your fascination with sailing and so we can maybe get into that as well.

Hanno Renner [00:34:28]:
Yeah, maybe we’ll start with sort of the more channel part and come to the sailing part. So I think, I think more generally. I know, I mean I’m preaching to the choir here because that’s a lot of things I learned from you. But I’m just going to repeat for everyone listening, something we spend a lot of time talking about is this how important it is to manage yourself and manage your own state. And that’s something that really helped me integrate. Okay. I can only be as good as a leader to personio if I’m integrated with myself and if I’m in the right state. And that comes with all kinds of sort of practices I’m trying to do as many people probably these days gotten really interested in cold exposure and ice bath and cold showers as I really feel it’s a nice way for me to just done it this morning again, calm myself down, expose yourself into something that feels uncomfortable. But again, similar as I said before, then the water doesn’t get warm, but you get comfortable with that situation. And then you go out and you just feel so amazing. You feel like, hey, what else can come today that rattles me in that way? Or even more powerful is something with breathwork that I have integrated not just as a morning routine to start a day, but even in between meetings, 3 minutes breathwork to center myself, to get myself focused on whatever is up next. So I think those are some of the practices that I’ve really enjoyed implementing in my life and believe I’m benefiting a lot. And then you see the bike in the background. But obviously given that a lot of people say, how do you manage to fit all that sports into your schedule? I think the cheat code here is that I don’t yet have family or kids. So it gives me a lot of flexibility before work or after weekends to then pursue things like triathlon, like tennis, like beach volleyball. And all of these things are stuff that also physically challenges my body and thereby gives me an outlet of stress, gives me an outlet of energy that from a physical perspective. And that I think helps me to be more centered in my day to day life.

Darren [00:36:27]:
Okay, sailing, let’s go there. Tell us a little bit about your history with this incredible passion of yours and what it’s taught you. Really is what I’m, I’m really interested in as well.

Hanno Renner [00:36:37]:
Yeah. So I mean the beauty about sailing is that it’s such a broad hobby like I have with friends competed in racing. So it’s a very, if you raise, it’s a very highly competitive sport, but also extremely compact. You have all the, the tactical stuff like how you, you manage your crew on the board, how all the, the movements, who is doing what at what point in the exact order. And that’s a lot of process power seven powers would call it. Probably to run the boat in the right way, then you need to make sure you understand the weather and the shapes of the wind pattern around you. You need to equally then have a strategy and a tactic against other boats. When do you have right of way and where are you in a position where you get bad air from a person in front of you? And when is it better to maybe then do more weigh because you’ll be faster. And so there’s so many facets just to racing alone. But then on the other hand, of course, sailing can equally be just a beautiful place to just calm down, to go on a vacation, go into beautiful bays, be connected with nature, wake up, jump through the water, go swimming, and then you can use it to explore places at the extreme pleasure with some friends to sail the Atlantic Ocean at some point. And that has been enormous adventure regarding literally being exposed for 14 days to nothing else than wind and waves and storms and all of that, and feeling so incredibly small, but also also building up a ton of resilience because at some point after the 10th day of waking up and while you’re brushing your teeth, you get thrown against the wall is one thing that you definitely then realize that as much as it’s beautiful, it’s also just like running a business, something that can be taxing. And then, as I mentioned before, I didn’t grow up sailing. My parents didn’t have a boat, so I had to teach a lot myself. And then I had a. The opportunity actually to learn a lot about sailing during becoming a skipper during my university studies and being able to drive other people around the world. And that, I think, from a leadership perspective, is maybe one of the most interesting lessons, because we were in this interesting position that there were people on the boat that have paid for vacation and that wanted to have the vacation the way they wanted it. But on the other hand, while you’re paid by them, you’re also at the same time, sort of their boss, because if there’s a critical situation, you have to ensure that they do exactly what you need them to do for their own safety. And oftentimes these are people who have no idea about sailing. They can’t judge how dangerous the situation might be at this very moment or not at all. And I think then. So it teaches you a lot about servant leadership, of making sure these people enjoy the vacation and feel like they’re in full control and they have the best time ever, while still ensuring they exactly do the things that you need them to do at any given point in time to keep them safe, the boat safe, and to make sure that you fulfill your responsibility as a leader of that boat. And I think that’s one thing we have probably drawn a few learnings of some interesting people.

Darren [00:39:30]:
Yeah, so many interesting metaphors. I think we can pull from your experience, and I think it’s becoming clear through this conversation exactly what shaped you and why you’re the incredible leader that you are. I wanted to maybe return to what we promised to return to is this pride in having founded and leading a European company and the importance of that to you and maybe to contextualize it in what’s going on in today’s world. How do you think about that your responsibility, the privileged opportunity you have to be building a company like Personia?

Hanno Renner [00:40:09]:
Yeah. So I think one of the things that makes me passionate about Europe is besides I think it’s a very diverse, culturally interesting place to be and to meet people, is that it also has a lot of very important core values that I think at least broadly in the western world we tend to believe in around human rights, about justice, about certain aspects. And I think it’s obviously Europe as a continent for hundreds of years has been used to being able to exporting their ideas and their values and their beliefs, sometimes in bad ways and many times in good ways. But I think what I’ve come to understand is how important in order to have any say and any impact on how you can export any of these values and beliefs is that you have an economy and relevance in the world both as a buyer of many goods, which, which it’s still a fairly large domestic market, but also as a distributor and as an exporter of goods and services that others are reliant on. And for again many hundreds of years, if not at least the last many decades, cars or spirits or other technology was really built and exported from Europe and invented here. But if you think about the last 25, 30, 40 years, the big companies that have been created in the technology space, both in really software consumer but also hardware, have majority been either created in the US or created in China. And I think Europe really has missed out on this economic value creation. There’s very few companies like Spotify or Edyon that have been created in the last 20 years that have really reached global significance and scale out of Europe. And that is something that in order to combine those two things, the belief in the European ideals and values and the impact we can have in the world by exporting and sharing them, we also need the economic power. And economic power these days comes a lot from also having technology leadership and being at least it’s not about winning against everyone else as a continent, but it’s at least being on eye level too and having certain technologies in certain areas where you are leading so you can then use them to trade with other parts. As long as these are the other parts, of course want to trade with you and don’t lift up too many trade barriers. But still I think it’s relevant because if you have the leading technologies, people will want to trade with you. ASML from Amsterdam still makes all the machines and no one else can make them. So as long as you have these kind of companies and these kind of technologies, people will want to buy them from you. And now going full circle back to Basonio, we believe we’re in a really important space that is relevant for many, many companies around the entire world and and helping build a company here that is relevant as leading that’s world class software in that space is something where we hope we can not just fulfill value to our customers and our employees, but also have an economic impact more broadly.

Darren [00:43:06]:
It’s an incredible vision. I really admire it and applaud you for it and wish you all the success in fulfilling it and being a part of that vision and playing an important role in it. And maybe a great way to bring our conversation to an end. But before we do so, I just wanted to give you an opportunity. Anything that we haven’t chatted about that you wanted to make sure we include or that you wanted to emphasize if we already have covered it, Maybe the.

Hanno Renner [00:43:32]:
One thing we haven’t really spoken about, which I think is an obvious one but still overlooked, is the criticality of hiring. And one specific concept that I always like to refer to also here internally is what I call an urgency bias. And it’s completely normal that everyone, especially in a fast pacing environment where at a point you open a role, typically you have just realized that you should have had that role three months ago. And it’s super critical to fill that role incredibly quickly. And at the same time, we all know how painful it is to hire the wrong person in that role. And therefore I’ve seen many times that the best managers and leaders fall into this trap of an urgent debias if they don’t have a corrective part in the organization that avoids them from hiring the best candidate out of a pool rather than a really great candidate that is there. And therefore I’ve played that role a lot myself. For the first, probably up to a thousand employees, I’ve interviewed pretty much every single candidate. In the final stage, the end, it was 10 minutes quick interviews, but I still, even just my presence in the hiring process, held managers accountable to not send over candidates where they knew Honeywood would reject anyway, but still during that time, I had a rejection rate of 30 to 40% at that stage still. And that just showed. Again, not that I’m. I mean, yes, I’ve done a ton of interviews. I know the company really well, so obviously you have a certain head start in that. But it’s not that I’m much smarter than them. It was just that I was two, three, four layers removed from that particular role. And Therefore, while I also want every role to be filled quickly because I care about the company, but I didn’t feel that pain so immediately like that specific manager that I was comfortable say, no, sorry, this person is just not great. And either we’re going to then deal with a mediocre setup for a long period of time or we’re going to change it in a few months and then we’ll go through the pain of rehiring, change and so on. So I think for a long time I played it myself. By now we have bar raisers and other concepts to ensure that we have these unbiased people that don’t have that urgency bias of being too close to the role that needs to be filled. But I think that’s a very critical one and in easy one, both to create great culture and a great company, but also the easiest one to it up if you do too many wrong highs.

Darren [00:45:51]:
Yeah, really glad we added that. Such a great point. It’s been a great conversation, Hannah. I really, really appreciate you being in it. And thanks again for, for being on the show.

Hanno Renner [00:46:01]:
No worries. Thank you for having me, Darren. It was a pleasure.

Darren [00:46:10]:
What I loved about this conversation is how much it illuminated the source of Hanno’s extraordinary drive as a CEO and.

Darren [00:46:18]:
His vision for founding and building one.

Darren [00:46:20]:
Of Europe’s most promising technology companies.

Darren [00:46:24]:
I look forward to being with you.

Darren [00:46:25]:
On the next episode of one of One. And until then, I hope you live and lead with courage, wisdom, and above all, with love.