So I'm trying to find a way how we can get out of the water and had the opportunity to become a skipper and try to drive around sailboats all around the world, get paid for it.

So perhaps it's unsurprising that entrepreneurship, not a fancy corporate job was Rennes calling some of these things are indeed transferable in the same way how you might involve your crew in figuring out what you do today and how I go about education.

You still also want to bring your team on board inside the company.

But the industry that rendering is co founders are trying revolutionized sits at the center of all business human resources or HR for sure.

And clearly they're onto something Perso Neo.

Their HR software startup is already valued at more than $6 billion, making it one of Europe's most valuable startups.

Hanno Renner fan episodio in 2015 with three friends.

The four met while studying at the Center for Digital Technology and Management, a joint institution from two of the main universities in Munich Germany.

The idea for piso Neo came from the experience of one of Rhonda's friends who wanted a software solution for organizing payroll and recruitment processes while working as a chief technology officer at another company.

Where did the idea of a person eO come from HR in small, mid sized organization is oftentimes managed based on multiples of spreadsheets.

And we'll usually spreadsheets can be an effective way of managing people and data.

It's different with HR data because there's so many people inside the organization that needs to access these shortcomings were particularly apparent that small and medium sized companies, most existing human resource information systems were created with larger corporations in mind.

And we are too complicated or too expensive for these small businesses.

We are focused exclusively on the space of 10 to 2000 employees.

So that's a big differentiator with the vision clear they got to work but it wasn't easy for the 1st 12 months per.

So Neo was founded out of the founders pockets.

What was the first year like are there any fun stories you have talking about funding it on our own pocket.

Sounds like we had money, which we didn't.

So we were students, we started working at the university just in random room sitting together.

We're working on the product.

One story that came about just before our first round of funding, when you raise a round of money, you're kind of certifying that you've paid all your invited.

So we had to pay everything.

It was outstanding.

It was literally, I still have a screenshot from the bank account.

We had a couple of €100 left in the bank account in July 2016.

They raised €2.1 million Facebook.

Since then, persona has raised more than $500 million through several rounds of funding from investors, including North Zone, which has also invested in Spotify and cloner.

Its most recent round saw Persona raised $270 million valuing the company at $6.3 billion.

The funding is set to be used for a new category of software called people workflow automation.

The aim here is to help HR remove barriers between company departments using PISO Neo software so I can go in my dashboard and I can just request maybe an absence and automatically it will end up here the same way.

Also I can do it from slack focus on people and HR has definitely improved and gotten a lot bigger.

So people have understood that with the pandemic has increased importance of that function but also accelerated the need for people work for automation because with so many different tools being implemented with slack Microsoft teams and others, you want these tools to be talking to each other and you want them to work together to avoid delays while the company isn't profitable yet.

So Neo says turnover doubled last year and then doubled once again this year, the software business has grown from 350 employees in 2020 to over 1000 in 2021.

It now operates out five offices in Munich Madrid London Dublin and Amsterdam.

It's like growing older yourself, you look in your mirror every day and therefore you don't realize that you get some wrinkles or maybe some gray hairs.

And it's the same with the business zoomed out.

There's a lot has changed over the past five years, of course, being day today into the business.

It's not that we come from three people, 2060 people in a few days, but it was essentially with every day, month quarter, there's been development and there's been changed.

It's an impressive story for sure.

But what do the industry experts say?

Can that growth continue the kind of expectations employees have nowadays off their software have really moved forward, whether it's from benefits management, whether it's sort of software supporting remote work, whether it's software that allows you to manage your career better.

I think there's all kinds of areas of uh of HR software opening up and and and really doing justice to the fact that the biggest assets companies have, are there people but with tech giants like Salesforce and S.

A.

P also operating in the space, can startups like persona?

No breakthrough.

We saw with perso Neo that they are truly becoming a system of record.

Right.

And so once you're embedded like that in the day to day, HR life of uh of a company, there's some very natural extensions, right?

So the initial extension that they chose was to do payroll as well.

And then recently announced that they want to take this to the next level and do automation.

So where does rela cp?

So Neo?

In another six years time, we're still at the very, very early innings.

We're now having 5000 customers in Europe, which represents less than .3% of the market.

So we can grow plentiful more because all of these companies need to digitize all of these companies should receive the support in managing their people more effectively.

The other part that we really care about our culture here, Pizzonia and the core fundamentals when it comes to our Core values are operating principles.

They should retain the same and those they should be able to scale even as we get to five or 10,000 employees.