In
2015
, the student
Hanno Renner
(31) was not really
sure where all this would lead
. With his fellow students
Roman Schumacher
(29),
Arseniy Vershinin
(31) and
Ignaz Forstmeier
(32) he worked on an idea for a new software
offer
in Munich. However, initially no investors joined the start-up, instead there were rejections. Today it looks different: According to information from manager magazin, Personio had sales of around 30 million euros in 2020 and, according to Renner, continues to grow in three digits. Renowned venture investors such as Accel and Lightspeed value his Munich company at $ 1.7 billion.
Renner and his co-founders develop software for medium-sized companies that is supposed to digitize their human resources.
Personio now has around 4,000 customers, and according to Renner there should be many more.
"
In Europe alone there are 1.7 million companies between 10 and 2000 employees," says the founder in the manager magazin Podcast.
"You can see that there is still about 1200-fold growth possible. If at some point we only had roughly 10 to 15 percent of the market, then we would probably be Europe's largest software company."
Renner says that when it comes to growth, there is no target point for Personio.
"At the same time, it doesn't mean that if we just sit there and wait, we will eventually become as big as SAP. That will continue to be a lot of hard work. We first have to prove that we can grow just as quickly and well in other markets as we do in Germany."
Hanno Renner explains in the podcast how Personio's expansion should succeed.
He talks about how he resisted bad investor advice, why the search for a Chief People Officer took two years and why he is unlikely to start a second company after Personio.
