20VC: Four Traits of the Most Successful Founders | How to Hunt and Close Talent Like a Pro and Where All Founders Go Wrong | Lessons Raising $397M From the Best Investors in the World with Eléonore Crespo @ Pigment
Summary
In this episode of The Twenty Minute VC, Eléonore Crespo, co-founder and CEO of Pigment, shares deep insights into founding and scaling one of Europe’s fastest-growing companies. Her personal journey into entrepreneurship was triggered by significant health challenges that made her reevaluate her purpose and ambition, leading her to found Pigment with a long-term vision of building a company that can last for decades. A major theme is the meticulous and strategic approach she took to hiring, especially in finding her co-founder through a detailed 'CIA-style' scouting process that leveraged network insights and personality compatibility. Eléonore underscores that hiring talent who challenge and complement leadership is the most critical activity in building a scalable organization. She advocates for a co-CEO model, which, while controversial, works well for Pigment due to complementary roles and frequent, candid communication. Another important topic is the traits of legendary founders as outlined by Yuri Milner—relentlessness, aggression, ambition, perseverance, and insight—along with the significance of storytelling and psychological understanding for leadership success. Eléonore also offers nuanced perspectives on board governance, emphasizing the real power boards hold, including the ability to remove CEOs, and stresses the importance of strong founder-board relationships. Strategic talent acquisition is framed as an ongoing process that mimics sports scouting, with a focus on early identification, timing around ‘trigger moments,’ and precise definition of role requirements, sometimes augmented with AI tools. The episode addresses challenges and controversies related to startup scaling, such as balancing process with agility, the role of titles, timing fundraising and valuation, and penetrating US markets. Finally, Eléonore shares her ambitious vision for Pigment aiming beyond $200 billion valuation, the role of AI integration in product strategy, and personal leadership reflections on happiness and work-life balance, providing a holistic blueprint for founders building enduring, impactful companies.
Key Takeaways
- 1Eléonore Crespo illustrates that profound personal experiences, such as overcoming serious health challenges, can act as pivotal catalysts for entrepreneurial ambition. Her decision to become a founder was deeply rooted in a desire to create a legacy through building a scalable and enduring company, not merely focused on financial gains. This approach highlights the need for founders to anchor their ventures in purpose and long-term impact rather than short-term monetization.
- 2A rigorous, data-driven approach to selecting co-founders can dramatically reduce founder friction and increase startup success probabilities. Eléonore adopted an extraordinary 'CIA-style' method by creating a target list based on network recommendations, personal research, and compatibility assessments to find her ideal co-founder. This strategic sourcing process went beyond surface skills to include cultural fit and personality alignment, providing a solid foundation for collaboration.
- 3The co-CEO leadership model, typically discouraged by venture capitalists, can be a powerful structure if there is clear role differentiation and frequent communication. At Pigment, Eléonore and her co-founder Romain split responsibilities between product and business aspects, holding frequent syncs—up to three times daily—to maintain alignment. This model doubles leadership bandwidth and customer engagement time, providing strategic agility and resilience.
- 4Hiring is the foundational activity that dictates startup success, and it requires continuous, strategic effort similar to elite sports scouting. Eléonore treats talent acquisition as a proactive, patient process involving building pipelines of candidates over time, understanding ‘trigger moments’ such as leadership changes, and filtering rigorously for cultural fit and growth mindset. This comprehensive hiring discipline avoids pitfalls like political hires or title-chasers and ensures the creation of a high-performance culture.
- 5Founder and executive traits critical to scaling include authenticity, balance under pressure, perseverance, and a commitment to continuous learning. Eléonore warns against succumbing to the ‘celebrity virus’ and emphasizes staying true to one’s values during both success and adversity. The ability to give and receive candid feedback, exemplified by her partnership with her co-founder, promotes resilience and accelerates decision-making.
- 6Seasoned executives with ‘seen the movie’ experience—those who have navigated hyper-growth and scaling their companies to billions in annual recurring revenue—are invaluable hires. Eléonore specifically prefers executives who have demonstrated longevity and could handle the unique growth challenges piggybacking the current company context, rather than hiring stars from unrelated growth stages or business models. Understanding your company’s stage and culture is crucial to executive fit.
- 7Storytelling and psychological insight are essential soft skills for founders, impacting fundraising, hiring, marketing, and internal leadership. Eléonore stresses that beyond technical capability, the ability to craft and communicate compelling narratives and understand human motivations distinguishes legendary founders. Effective storytelling attracts talent and investors, while psychology aids in recruitment and conflict resolution, though some companies may succeed with different emphases.
- 8Understanding and navigating board dynamics is critical for founder control and company governance. Eléonore warns that boards have substantial power, including the ability to fire CEOs. Founders must therefore build respectful and transparent relationships with their boards, carefully select board members, and maintain governance awareness. Mismanagement of this relationship can jeopardize leadership continuity and strategic control.
- 9The adoption of AI in recruitment processes is evolving, offering tools to refine hiring criteria and decision-making but still requiring substantial human expertise and contextual judgment. Eléonore references AI platforms as means to complement extensive consultations with domain experts to develop precise role definitions and interview rubrics. This hybrid approach reflects a trend toward augmenting traditional recruiting with technology.
Notable Quotes
""I would say I'm not being doing this money for money, first of all. So do I care that my financial outcome is X, Y, Z? I don't care at all. OK, I'm here to build a big company, a massive business. I want to build a company that scales for the next 30 years. And I want the best people around the table.""
""I literally made a target list like CIA-style. I was listening to my network, scouring for the best school founders, the best CTOs. Romain was number one on that list in terms of who people truly recommended. Then I did my own work understanding their personality traits and whether they would work with someone like me. It was a massive sourcing exercise.""
""When you see that people have stayed at the same company for 8 years, 10 years, and that people love working with them, that tells you something. You would not do that if the person was impossible to work with. When you thought about the complementary elements, that's the incredible experience of taking a company public, being this incredible technology leader.""
""When I hire my executive today, I always try to find people that have seen the movie one time, at least. That, you know, have scaled from where I am in terms of AR to like multiple billion, if possible, because they will have learned things in the journey of building.""
""What makes us so strong is that we talk at least three times a day and we spend, you have no idea the number of time, the number of hours we spend on strategy, on product strategy. I talk to customer all the time and I come back to him and I say, that's what we need to do.""
""The power of the board is bigger than you think. If the board wants to fire you one day, probably they can.""
""I'm hiring people that I don't know about that can bring things that I don't know. And in VC, something that I think is critical is to find people that can challenge you every day. The best founders challenge me. They push me and they're like, no, we can do more. And they are just so maniacal in their thinking.""
""And the reality is that you can see the power of many US companies out there is a power of marketing. How much they have understood the importance of marketing and storytelling. And that's what I've learned at Index. The importance of storytelling.""
""Everyone fucks up hiring, if we're honest. I mean, I don't know if I've had any company that's just nailed hiring. What's your hiring process? And how has it changed? My hiring process is very complex. So starting with sourcing, I'm always sourcing.""
"But think about when you want to hire the best football player in the game. Like imagine you are the best football club in the US or the best soccer club in Europe. What will they do? They will go on the field. They will go look at, you know, like 16 years old. They will see how they play and they will try to source them very early. I try to do the same every day."
"I lose a deal against another company. I always ask the name of the rep. I do something, you know, where I hear that there is... We had the Olympic Games in Paris last year. And I met the other day the CFO of the Olympic Games, the one that organized that. And obviously he has to fire his entire team now that the Olympics are over. So I asked him, I said, who was the best person in your team? This guy. Okay. I went to him and I said, I want to hire you now."
"A great CRO for a company, maybe for HubSpot, is not the great CRO for Pigment and HubSpot at the time of Pigment. Or a great CRO for Figma tomorrow is not the great CRO for Pigment. We are very different companies. Some are more product-led. Some are more sales-led. That's probably what a lot of people get wrong is that they don't know what they are looking for."
"And I also think most are hiring for roles that they don't know what great is. Say it's a sales-led founder and they don't know what a great CTO actually looks like. So the advice is to talk to 20 people in the field, 50 people, and ask them for what are the best questions. But guess what? Now, the thing is even I think with AI platforms out there, you can refine so much what you are looking for as well."
"People always want to be paid more. Going back to the football analogy, you should think about if you want the best player, you will have to pay. So you will have to pay and you will do it because you know maybe it will be transformative or you want Antoine Dubon for rugby. So you will pay, but you cannot do that for every role. So you have to decide where do you absolutely need the superstar and where are roles that are maybe a little bit less critical. But my philosophy is always being generous with every hire because the difference they will make on the field is more than you can imagine."
"“I do wonder, can you truly scale an organization to 400 A players? And in which case, where is it OK to have a B player versus it has to be an A style player? If you apply very strong principles, I think you can really keep the pace of A player still at that size. I think we are not at a size where we can afford actually B or C player.”"