Founders Stories: Meet the former CFO re-wiring how companies spend
Welcome to the latest edition of Founders Stories, a video series where we sit down with our portfolio co-founders to talk about how they became entrepreneurs, what problem they’re solving and why it matters.
Jeppe Rindom is the CEO and co-founder of Pleo: a company payment card solution that automates expense reports and simplifies spending.
Previously working as a consultant and in M&A, he met his co-founder Niccolo Perra in San Francisco, while they were working at Danish fintech company Tradeshift.
In their roles as CFO and engineering manager, daily frustration with the complexity of old-school centralised company spending culture planted the seed for what is today Pleo: a team on a mission to bring transparency, trust and delegation to company spending.
“We always wanted to run our businesses in a modern way where we make people efficient and trust them,” says Jeppe.
“We felt heavily restricted when we had to control spending in the old way. It conflicted with the way we wanted to run the organisation.”
They decided to join forces and build the financial product they wish they themselves had had access to.
Pleo enables managers to distribute spending to their employees, making them feel trusted and efficient, whilst still keeping transparency and control for the business.
Companies can issue personal Pleo cards with spending limits to employees with one click [no more sharing the manager’s card], expenses are automated with on-the-go receipt uploads [no more holding onto receipts, managers have a real-time overview of spending and Pleo integrates with accounting systems [no more book keeping nightmares].
Today the company is growing at a fast clip, recently moving into a big new Copenhagen HQ to make room for a rapidly expanding international team of people who share his and Nicco’s vision for what finance should look like in the future of work, workplaces, teams and organisations.
Watch our video interview [or read the transcript below] as we talk to Jeppe about his route into entrepreneurship, the culture he and Nicco are building at Pleo and his take on the biggest trends shaping the industry.
Q&A with Jeppe
Could you describe what Pleo does in one line?
Pleo simplifies your expensing processes.
What is Pleo?
Pleo is a new way of spending for businesses that allows employees to be much more efficient when they need to buy things. It empowers employees by giving them a card, while maintaining control and transparency for the company.
We also automise all the tedious accounting steps that need to be done, like receipt collection, categorisation and so forth.
What is your background?
My background is from a completely different space. I started out as a consultant. I spent seven or eight years in consulting and M&A. I also worked with a large corporate and eventually realised that I could not do that for the rest of my life. At that time I joined another startup which became quite successful, Tradeshift, as CFO, but really doing a lot of different stuff. I also moved to San Francisco, where I met Niccolo my co-founder. So that’s what led me from corporate to entrepreneurship.
What specific problem is Pleo solving?
It starts with organisations behaving in a different way today: the whole concept of future workplaces where you really want to make your employees efficient and feel trusted. You might also be working a bit more with flexible work forces and so forth. The old way of dealing with spending, trying to keep control of everything and only allowing managers to buy stuff, really conflicts with this new way of running a business.
That’s exactly what we’re doing with Pleo: providing a product that enables you to delegate and distribute spending to your employees. It makes them feel trusted and efficient, whilst still keeping transparency and some degree of control for the business. So that’s the problem that we’re trying to solve.
What’s the day-to-day pain you’re eliminating with Pleo?
A lot of businesses are trying to drive their spending through cards. Today cards are really much more than just travel costs, it’s also your marketing spend, it’s your servers, your office space.
The old process was to keep the cards quite centralised with managers who would then share them with the rest of the team. Suddenly you’ve lost track of who is actually responsible for each item and subscription. It’s been a huge pain across most businesses because then it also became an accounting complexity later on.
We flip that upside down and ask, how could we make the employee who needs to buy stuff much more trusted and efficient, while knowing the starting point of each transaction and being able to automise the whole accounting flow?
Why do you personally care about this problem?
We’ve really felt the pain before ourselves. Me as a CFO but not really an accounting CFO, who always wanted to cut corners and just ended up with lots of complexity. Niccolo also needing to buy things like GitHub, servers, and not being able to do it. Both of us as managers, sharing our cards with the teams. We really felt the complexity first hand.
We’ve always wanted to run our businesses in a modern way where we try to make people efficient and trust them. We felt heavily restricted when we had to control stuff in the old way, which conflicted with the way we wanted to run the organisation. That’s why we feel strongly about this.
What’s the size of the market you’re addressing?
We believe it’s a big market opportunity. You could say banking as a whole - which has included these kinds of services previously, but which has included a large range of other services too —is going to go through a tremendous change. Each experience in banking is going to be much much deeper.
That is what we are now doing. We’re taking spending but making it much deeper with account automation and other services around it. But then we have the opportunity to take it international, where banks have traditionally operated more locally. So we’re making this niche thing very very deep and then going across many markets.
What makes Pleo ‘Pleo’?
The kind of culture that Niccolo and I have tried to nurture has been a culture of building a company. We tend to say when we recruit — and we are quite sort of religious about it — you are 80% an account manager but you are 20% an entrepreneur. And we expect you to use those 20% to automise and make yourself more efficient and streamline and build processes and stuff like that.
Another thing is that we try to share what different teams are doing to bring you on a journey of building a company. People are very passionate about that, they really feel that they’re contributing to building something. That goes across the entire team.
We are also very international. People are here because of Pleo and many of them are very invested in the project and I think that’s great.
Is there something about you that people would not know? Something that people would not expect.
About Pleo? We built a company in Denmark but I was the only Dane until we were fifteen.
What about you as a person?
I’m probably a little bit of a latecomer to the space of entrepreneurship. I started for real when I was 38, so I had a different sort of traction into entrepreneurship.
What are the three biggest trends in your industry right now?
Let’s say our industry is banking. One, banking is going to be much more specialised within certain services with much deeper experiences and much more requirements for the user experience around a specific service. Two, banking in those niches is going to be much more international. Three, we are going to use our data for a lot more. The way we leverage data in Pleo is to automise stuff but also to get a deal with your vendors. It is a big theme.
About Pleo
Pleo is a fundamentally new way to manage company expenses. Offering smart payment cards to employees, Pleo enables everyone to buy whatever they need for work, all the while making sure the company remains in full control of spending. With the help of breakthrough technology, Pleo reduces the administrative complexity, eliminates expense reports and simplifies bookkeeping.
Want to join the mission? Check out open roles at Pleo.
About Founders
Founders is a company builder and early-stage investor. Together with exceptional entrepreneurs we build products and companies that radically improve how people and organisations work. Our portfolio includes Pleo, Duuoo, Kontist, Son of a Tailor, Maguru, LifeX, Reach, Wonderwerk, Headlight & Donna.
