Pack: Why we invested
Vision, charisma, obstinance, exquisite technology timing and an underestimated market.
An opportunity across the other side of the Alps and the Pyrenees
Work is distributed around the world, yet the “global” players have not been particularly successful in Italy, Spain and to a lesser extent France. The relative complexity of the administrative HR is a barrier to entry for the global suites, and the specialised talent management players haven’t built local sales capability or considered local cultural differences.
Administrative HR is often done with venerable local players, and these solutions have tended to have relatively weak talent management capabilities. This makes for a gap.
Work and HR itself face their biggest challenge and opportunity of the last 30 years. The assumptions of even a year ago face scrutiny. This creates a new urgency.
At the same time how we building software is changing. There is an opportunity to rethink talent management category from the ground up. The talent management solutions that emerged 10 years ago as “native SaaS” are now vulnerable. The enterprise suites have other battles on their hands.
Today, building a relatively broad set of talent management capabilities that natively leverage AI is both viable and feasible. We’d argue that rethinking talent management, development and coaching from the ground up is easier than trying to retrofit AI into a decade old SaaS products.
It needs the right founder and founding team
Earlier this year, Jeroen, the one of the founders from Techwolf pinged me about Pack and Pietro. He was considering doing an angel investment, and wanted my opinion, also Pietro had asked for an intro. We had a couple of calls with him and we found his energy and determination to be off the scale. He has a robust and coherent vision for the future of employee development, bringing HR closer to the business yet placing the employee in central focus.
I drove to Milan on the way back from France to meet with him, and Giacomo, the CPO co-founder and that confirmed our initial perception. Giacomo brings deep technical and product chops, which gives us confidence that they can execute on the ambition.
We spent some time on due diligence, Audrey spoke with customers and other folks that knew the founders, and scrutinised the business model. We connected Pietro with Luca Saracino, who was the COO at Strada. He was so impressed that decided to invest himself and join the team. We asked Steve Hunt, who I worked with SAP, and is a leading expert in talent technologies to have a look, and he came on board too. David Clarke, our Venture partner spends a lot of time in Italy also invested. He is active investor in the Italian scene, having also invested in Jet, a next generation Italian payroll. We are also pleased to be co-investing with Rialto.
There is a small but rapidly growing tech ecosystem in Milan. Additionally, part of the Pack team is in Barcelona, which is an excellent engineering hub.
There is a lot about Pack that reminds us of the early days of SuccessFactors, and Cornerstone. Lars and Adam walked through walls, and Pietro has that same obstinance, conviction of vision, charisma and grit to build a mighty business.
The early customer growth is off the charts, and they are just getting started. Sifted ranked Pack as #13 on the Future 50 ranking, which the hipsters tell me is impressive. The opportunity to dominate Italy, France and Spain and expand across europe and even beyond is tantalising.
A massive thanks to Jeroen for the introduction. I’m confident that you will help us return our fund with Techwolf, and the signs are strong for Pack too. My deepest gratitude also to Jason for dealing with the Italian closing process. It was easier for Hannibal to cross the Alps on an elephant that it is to formally close a funding process in Italy.
To Pietro, Giacomo and all the Pack team, we are thrilled to have you join the Acadian Ventures portfolio. Welcome. Here’s Pietro’s post.
As I almost always do, I’ll end with a song or two. This is a recent multilingual cover of an important and ever more relevant old Italian song. Bella Ciao. It features in the Netflix series Money Heist, which is a Spanish series. Kinda fits…
For those more classically minded.