Building Global Tech from Europe: The VC Playbook

What does it take to turn a two-person startup in Paris into a $6.8 billion exit, and then do it all over again for 200 other founders?

In this episode of Decoded, Dr. Jurgi Camblong speaks with Bernard Liautaud, co-founder of BusinessObjects and Managing Partner at Balderton Capital, one of Europe's leading venture capital firms backing category-defining companies like Revolut, Wayve, and Quantum Systems.

Bernard didn't just build a company. He built a category. Starting with two people in Paris in 1990, he helped define what business intelligence could be, took the company to NASDAQ, and sold it to SAP for $6.8 billion. Then he turned that experience into fuel for the next generation of European founders.

You'll hear why Europe's VC returns have quietly outperformed the US, how Balderton evaluates founders and the one trait they call "insurgency," what the story of Revolut reveals about the power of execution, why Bernard believes Europe has not just the talent but the values to build AI responsibly, and the philosophy behind his most personal insight: as a VC, you have many shots. As a founder, you have one.

This episode is about what happens when ambition meets experience, and why Europe's most exciting chapter may still be ahead of us.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Welcome to Decoded, the podcast where we explore how data, technology, and human insights are reshaping patient care worldwide. I'm Yogi Kamblong, biologist, dreamer, and founder at Sophia Genetics. In each episode, we decode ideas with pioneers who have helped shape the way industries think, build, and move forward. Today I'm excited to welcome one of the architects of European technology. Long before AI became the headline of every conference, Bernard Liotto was working on a very practical question. How do you make complex data actually usable for people? He co-founded Business Objects in 1919, helped define the business intelligence category, took the company to Nasdaq in 1994 in a European first for software, and later saw it acquired by SAP for$6.8 billion. Today, as managing partner at Baltereton Capital, he backs ambitious founders building the next generation of technology companies in Europe. This is a conversation about building from Europe with global ambition, about what great founders understand early, and about where AI may create real value beyond the noise. Bernard, welcome. Thank you, Jörgi. Thanks for inviting me. So, Bernard, it's great having you. Obviously, you being a very famous founder. But before we get there, today you are the managing director of Baldureton Capital, and Baldureton has invested in hundreds of companies, among which one that strikes today, which is Revolute. I understand that you led the first ever funding round in 2015, investing$1.5 million and made an incredible return, which is worth probably around$2 billion today. So, what motivated you personally to become a venture capitalist?

SPEAKER_00 1:52

Well, that's a that's a great question. And at the time, certainly not the idea that we could do Revolute. I think we didn't know that it was possible, but it was really where I had been. Like if I think back about business objects, my first experience, it had been in Europe the first unicorn, it had been the first tech company to go public on Nasdaq, the largest acquisition in the software industry. So it was a great, great story. But it I really wanted it not to be an isolated story. I wanted to pass what I had learned to others, ensure that others could have that experience and the story to become an example and for hundreds of business objects to emerge in Europe as well. So that was the first motivation. I think the second motivation was to prove that it was possible to build a high-performance venture capital firm in Europe and to make it the best. Because in 2008, the venture capital industry in Europe was very small, no renowned firms, fairly mediocre financial returns. Whereas in the US, you already had like Excel, Sequoia, and Kleiner Perkins, and they had been behind Apple, Yahoo, Google, Cisco, and others. It was not at all the case in Europe. Now, obviously it's changed a lot, but at that time that was my two motivations.

SPEAKER_01 3:09

And if now you would compare, and you probably know this data, the returns of the venture capital firms in the US versus Europe, is it even? Is Europe better or worse than the US?

SPEAKER_00 3:20

You know, it's a bit of a secret, but Europe actually has better returns than the US, both on a five-year, 10-year, and 15-year period. That's quite amazing.

SPEAKER_01 3:31

Very happy to hear that. So before Baldurton, you've been, as you said, a very successful entrepreneur funding Business Object in 1990 and selling it for$6.8 billion to ACP in 27. What was Business Object's initial business thesis and how this business thesis evolved over time?

SPEAKER_00 3:53

Yeah, initially, Business Object was a very, very simple product. And it helped business users to query data and the company's databases to make decisions. But it had a very novel concept which enabled the users to search for information, but using terms of their daily business vocabulary, as opposed to complex columns and tables that they couldn't understand. So hence the name of the company business objects. You query the data using the objects of your own business. But so finally, people could make decisions based on data and not on gut feel. And so that was the original idea. Very simple tech, but that worked really, really well. And from there, we expanded the product to not only do queries, but also reporting and multi-dimensional analysis, as well as data quality, extraction management. And we ended up pioneering the business intelligence industry. And we became the world leader in that space. So actually, the great part of our story is that by luck, we we were on the right track from the very beginning. We didn't have to pivot. We just had to extend the product line to other adjacent areas. We had to go from France to the US to the rest of Europe to Asia, everywhere in the world, and to expand the target customer from small businesses to large enterprises. But in the end, it enabled us to grow from a two-person organization to a 7,000-person global leader.

SPEAKER_01 5:19

Very impressive. And of course, you know, as time flies, some people forget that. But indeed, as you said, first ever real big success in Europe as a software company. Who was the competition? What was the unmet need back then?

SPEAKER_00 5:33

Yeah, at that time, we had uh originally one main competitor. It was a Canadian company called Cognos. And actually, uh, going and looking back at this journey, having them as a competitor was a great motivator. Like we were constantly trying to win over them. And I think they were constantly trying to win over us. And then we grew more or less at a similar pace, and we became the two main companies. Later on, there were other smaller businesses coming in, but the big rivalry between the two of us made us better. I think in the end, we won the battle. We were the bigger company of the two, where uh about a billion and a half in revenue, they were about a billion. We both got acquired more or less at the same time. It sort of marked an end of uh the first era of BI before other companies like Click and Tableau, and then later on, other companies came on board.

SPEAKER_01 6:28

Over your career, first as a founder and CEO at Business Objects, but then as well as a venture capitalist and board member in big companies like SAP, you've seen markets evolve as well as technologies evolved. What have been the companies that impressed you the most and how they did change the paradigm of software and business?

SPEAKER_00 6:49

Yeah, it's a great question because when you think about the big disruptions, they are usually led by one iconic company. So the first, certainly after we got started with business objects, was the software as a service revolution. And clearly Salesforce was a pioneer. It changed not only the technology, but also the way to do business, moving from in a world where companies would purchase a software to a product to a world where companies would subscribe to a service. And it was a profound change that completely transformed the software industry. I'm not sure Salesforce completely grafted actually the enormity of the change, but they were the pioneer. Afterwards, I would say it was the rise of the public cloud, and it was pioneered by Amazon, which democratized access to computing resources and data for very, very little amount of money. And now the entire world functions on these public cloud, these hyperscalers, and that has been extraordinarily important in democratizing the development of software, because suddenly from the day to the next, everybody could have the access to large or small, to medium, to large computing resources to program in a very free environment. Finally, now, of course, it's the emergence of Gen AI, the explosion of the LLM models and open AI, which was the front runner. Now there's a lot of other companies pursuing it, obviously Anthropic, but also Google, Meta, and Microsoft. So yeah, these are some of them, to me, the big transformation in the major iconic companies that drove them.

SPEAKER_01 8:34

Great. And you didn't mention internet while in 1990, at least myself, I wasn't using internet in Europe.

SPEAKER_00 8:41

Yeah, no, it's true. I didn't mention it because it was pre-business objects in a way, but actually it's yeah, the dot-com was after. It was quite incredible. And obviously, today, without the internet, we wouldn't do we'd be able to do anything. It's incredible how when you think about these revolutions, they're they usually are being enabled by a combination of a few things. Like the broadband, you know, the ability to actually pass information at a very, very fast speed is critical. The ability to compute at a much, much faster clock speed than before, the availability of all these resources, the capacity with the mobile and then laptops and so on to basically connect from everywhere. When you combine all these different things, then the cloud emerges, then the software as a service emerges, then the internet, and all this enables very different kinds of services. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 9:36

And I would add in my domain of expertise, which is healthcare and biology, this plus digitalization of information, because before healthcare data not being digitalized, you know, we couldn't leverage on the cloud, on AI, and so on. And today is 30% of data that humans produced yearly that are healthcare data. So hopefully, as it happened in other industries in healthcare, we will see as well a bigger impact of cloud, AI, and digital technologies. For sure. When you think about your journey, you've been backing many founders over years. Which ones are the most exciting companies and entrepreneurs you've ever supported?

SPEAKER_00 10:17

Well, uh, you, of course. Well, you're very kind.

SPEAKER_01 10:21

You're not forced to say that.

SPEAKER_00 10:23

I remember the first meetings, and it was very exciting because you've had and you still have continued to have a great vision. And I think what you have managed to do in health and digitalization of health and personalized medicine, I think has been a really important step towards making health available and a lot more modern to lots and lots of people. So I think you played a really exciting role in there. Beyond you, of course, we've supported about 200 entrepreneurs. So in there, of course, Revolute is an extraordinary success. And Nick and Vlad, the two co-founders, have created an impressive business which is transforming the world of finance and the world of banking. I think what has impressed the most about them was the clarity of their vision, but also the extraordinary speed and quality of the execution. They were not the only startup at the time that tried to become a neo bank, but they clearly won over everybody. And as you said at the beginning, we invested in a company when there was basically a handful of engineers, fairly, who put a couple million in it. Now the company is worth 100 million or close. So, but more importantly, the underlying operational performance is incredible. So you have Revolute, but you have many others, like WAVE, which is a company that transformed autonomous driving in Europe, the exploration company that also is trying to redefine space exploration, uh, Proxima, who does work on nuclear fusion, but also many, many software companies, fintech companies, software companies, some in health, so some in others. But yeah, we're we're very, very lucky to be alongside some of the most exciting entrepreneurs in Europe and in the world today.

SPEAKER_01 12:12

What is special from uh CEOs and founders? And you explained me one time, as well, that you have kind of a framework at Ballerton as well to kind of assess maybe the characters and maybe as well what might be the potential of a specific company led by specific individuals. Can you elaborate on that?

SPEAKER_00 12:31

Yeah, we see many founders, and it's very difficult to figure out like who is gonna succeed, who is not. So at the end of the day, the core character of the founder or the founder team is critical because the journey is going to be long. There are going to be ups and downs. And so we have to evaluate if this founder or this team do they have the audacity, do they have the vision, do they have the passion, do they have the drive, the resilience to go all the way, to go through these difficulties, to navigate, to pivot, to onboard a lot of amazing people next to them. So we do have a framework to try to evaluate that. It's hard because when you look at the personality of successful founders, they come in many different forms, right? They don't fit a given pattern. But we see still some traits of character, the passion, like the resilience, like the product obsession. Like there is also the desire to make their product really the best and going to the details of it. So that's really important for them to be to be really good and to go through these. There's a there's one trait of character that we like, which we call insurgency, which is really some people who don't accept the status quo, who, when they see something that they feel is wrong, they're gonna go at it, even if it defies a conventional wisdom. And also, I think what's special is that it's that dedication, like they're gonna make this project their life mission. It's all about how they define themselves is gonna be in the success of that project. And they know that they will come with hardships, and so they accept failure as a step in the journey and not as a part of their identity. And so I think that's really important because they have to transcend failure. And so some people are able to do that, some people have a hard time dealing with it, and that's an important trait of character that makes them a successful entrepreneur over the long run.

SPEAKER_01 14:37

And I know that while obviously you're demanding, you have a lot of empathy for founders. I heard you recently in one of your Baldurton big anniversaries mention to all the ones, the limited partners, the entrepreneurs that were there, that basically as a VC, you have multiple shots, and as a founder, you have only one shot. And I thought this was very inspiring as well.

SPEAKER_00 15:03

Yeah, but you're you're absolutely right. I think we we have to be aware that as venture capitalists, we're in a much more envious and comfortable position than our entrepreneurs, because yes, as I mentioned, over the past 20 years we've supported 200 entrepreneurs, if not more, 300 probably. And so we have a portfolio. So our success is defined not by uh the success of every line, but the success of a few. You mentioned Revolute. There's a few of those, but it's not all of them. Whereas the entrepreneur has just one shot, at least he or she, they're gonna dedicate all their energy to one shot, and that's much harder. And one of the things that we said also, I or I mentioned in my speech at the 25th anniversary, is to really have a thought for all the ones who didn't make it, who didn't quite fulfill their objectives. And but they put all their energy, it's not because they were lazy, it was because a number of things didn't quite happen the way they were hoping for. Like the market maybe has turned, their the finance didn't come exactly as they wanted. But uh so I wanted to just have a thing for them because it's been hard, they haven't enjoyed the success. But what gave me like optimism is that most of them will get back to it, they will bounce back, they will try a second time, a third time, and many of them will be immensely successful at some point.

SPEAKER_01 16:34

Absolutely. I can't agree more. Bernard, you've been a super successful entrepreneur and CEO, you're being super successful VC, following uh a lot of companies, to your point as well, seeing some not succeed. Today, if you would start again a startup, how would you leverage on your experience?

SPEAKER_00 16:57

Yeah, there's several things that I think I learned. But first of all, I think you I think in general, you have to have, as an entrepreneur, you have to have really faith in your vision. But at the same time, you need to confront the brutal facts, right? The reality of the market, the reality of the situation you're in. And so you have to be a brutal realist. Like if you're running out of money, you're running out of money. You can't just dismiss it, right? Or if the product doesn't have the resonance in the market that you're you were hoping for, you have to deal with it. You have to potentially pivot, or so on. So I think one element which is really important is that do you actually get market pull or no? Are you pushing? Are you pushing on the market or is the market pulling you? And it makes a world of difference, right? So you you have to see like, are you is the product that you imagine, does it really correspond to a need in the market that is really acute, meaning that when customers see it, they say, wow, this is what I was really hoping for. This is solved like a huge problem. Because it's so hard right now, everything moves so fast, but also corporations are under a lot of solicitation. So you have to have something that is hopefully a must-have. So that's really important. If you don't get the resonance, just move on, pivot. And then the other thing is like even if you do have it, vision is important, but execution is also super critical. And in order to execute, you need to surround yourself with great people. So that's one thing that when I was running business objects, I had a couple mentors on the board and they pushed that to me. And I always followed their advice. And I was blessed to have amazing people who join me, people who were clearly better than me in every single function. And that actually having a team of great people in your team and in your organization, it pushes you up as a CEO, as a founder. Because most of us we start these things when we are very young. I started when I was 27. I didn't know anything about running a business. But having people under me and a team that pushed me up enabled me to stay the leader of the firm for like 18 years.

SPEAKER_01 19:11

Great. A lot of wise experience sharing. I have a final question for you. I know you are bullish on AI, but you also speak about building it with integrity, responsibility, and long-term stress, not just speed. What excites you most about AI right now?

SPEAKER_00 19:31

Yeah, I would say there's a number of things that excite me enormously, and there are things that worry me. On the exciting part, of course, like I see the incredible transformation in productivity, in knowledge access, in automation. And so this, you could see it in many areas where it helps on elements like healthcare that are fundamental to make the world better and to make the life of people better. So that's what excites me is that how AI really transforms our lives for the better. But at the same time, I think when we see the power of AI and when you see how much it's transforming everything, I think it's more important than ever to define what makes us human, to decide the direction AI should take in order to be positive for humanity and not simply leave it to a few big tech leaders, which not all of them, but certain of them, in my opinion, are driven primarily by financial motivations. And we can't let them just create, even accidentally, a world that is dystopian, where machines decide our future, where populations are under mass surveillance, and the power potentially could become totalitarian. So I think this is really important to define what AI should be. And regulation is not going to solve everything, right? Regulation is always a bit too late, it's actually not well adapted. But to me, what excites me is also how Europe can be a great player here because I think we have not only the talent to create a good AI, but we also have the culture and the values that allows us to develop AI in a more ethical and more responsible way. And for that, we need to be like leaning forward, investing uh for us as an investor. We cannot just stay on the sideline saying, well, it's too expensive or it's too crazy or whatever. We have to go in it with optimism. We have to encourage entrepreneurs to also take the slightly harder road to build good and responsible AI. But I think we can develop out of Europe, we can develop a form of intelligence that we like better and that corresponds more to our values.

SPEAKER_01 21:52

This just reminds me what today I was reading on LinkedIn about UK having conversations as well with Anthropic to try to basically. Convince them on investing more in Europe because, yes, as we heard recently, from my understanding, quite sensitive as well on the use cases of their AI. And we know indeed that there are being a series of people who are being involved in the initial technologies that end up being social media, and that some of them then regretted as well some of the toxicity effects, right, of the social media. So I hope that to your point, you know, we will get the benefit of AI. And in the meantime, although hard, we will minimize as well the risks for humanity.

SPEAKER_00 22:35

No, exactly. I mean, I think technology is great and it makes the world move forward, but sometimes if it's not checked, it has collateral damage that is quite substantial. And and in AI is the damage potentially is large. So we have to do it well. And it's good to see, like, I think there are there are some really important leaders out there. Like, I think Anthropic is much more aware of the pitfalls. I think someone like Demis Sabi also is like he knows about this very well, he talks about it a lot. So I think, but we have to we have to work with those leaders, the ones who have a conscience.

SPEAKER_01 23:15

Absolutely. Bernard, it was amazing having you today. Thank you so much for joining me on Decode It. What I loved most from this conversation is the idea that great technologies can positively contribute to the world. From business objects to Baldurton, your journey has actually been about helping people make better decisions from data and helping Europe build with more ambition on the global stage. I really enjoyed this conversation and I hope you did as well. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe to Decode It. We'll continue meeting the leaders and builders shaping the future of healthcare, technology, and AI. I'm Yuri Camlong. Thank you for listening and let's keep moving forward. Thank you.