There are countless parallels to be drawn between sailing and running a company. Navigating choppy waters, finding the right direction, understanding which ropes to pull. Hanno Renner understands this more intuitively than anyone.
A lifelong love of the ocean saw Hanno qualify as a yacht skipper, where he spent three and a half years captaining sailing expeditions and leading yacht crews. The responsibility and accountability that came with the role has, unsurprisingly, had a huge impact on his approach to leadership.
For one, it’s taught him to embrace a sort of “servant leadership”, in which you lead from the front and by example. This also shone a light on a natural tension between authority and service. He explains: "You're doing something for your passengers and crew, but at the same time you need to ensure they do what you need them to do to keep the boat safe."
But even more importantly, it taught him valuable lessons about how to motivate and energize people: not just those under his own supervision, but also those 1M+ employees that his HR platform Personio serves on a daily basis. "You have to make people feel really excited about the journey and about the work they’re doing."
Bias towards risk
Hanno’s unconventional background speaks less to a mid-career pivot than it does to the options available to him. It wasn’t a case of finding startups unappealing; he didn’t even see them as an option, growing up in a house where both of his parents were teachers.
"If you don't come from an entrepreneurial background, you don't even know that it's possible to start a company,” Hanno remembers.
Attending TUM in Munich (one of Europe’s top schools for entrepreneurship and engineering) was a breakthrough moment, where he was suddenly surrounded by peers with innovation and creativity in their bones. Classmates were starting their own businesses, and Hanno’s interest was piqued.
It suited his personality and his risk appetite. “I really like putting myself into situations I've never been in before, doing things where I have a lot of agency." Big companies offered stable, steady career paths; startups offered freedom and chaos. Crucially he saw it as the easiest area to have a major impact, a chance to solve problems for many people versus being a “small cog”.
Suddenly, the barrier to entry was removed. “Once you see someone like you start a company, it stops feeling impossible,” he says. “It's really hard to scale it, but it's actually easy to start."
But before diving straight in, Hanno had another adventure in mind: his aforementioned experience as a yacht skipper. Years at sea taught him a great deal about leadership, but also a great deal about people. Every person on the boat had a critical role to play, from the crew to the customers, all instrumental to each other’s safety and security. When this community thrived, so did the safe course of the boat.
When he eventually returned back to land, he reflected on that notion. "People are the most important success factor for any organization.” They’re the lifeblood of company growth and the heart of company culture. If he could build something that would help maximize this as a resource, it would be better than any productivity or efficiency software on the market.
Building a People Operating System
Hanno spent his post-skippering days exploring the current human resources landscape in Europe. While large companies had sophisticated offerings, SMEs were notably underserved and under-digitized, relying on outdated, clunky offerings. How could this segment, the very backbone of the European economy, have been so badly left behind?
His starting point was data: namely, digitizing employee data. People data is both highly sensitive (few people at an organization can see everything) and highly democratized (everyone needs access to at least some part). So they faced this challenge of granting appropriate access and workflows without exposing sensitive data to wrong people.
“Through that combination of granting people access to the respective data without deploying it to others, we realised that would allow us to build something very different."
Users loved it, and they wanted more. So digitization proved to be wedge to a bigger product, where they looked to build an end-to-end digitized employee lifecycle. Or as Personio describes itself today, a People Operating System.
New avenues opened themselves up to Hanno and his team all the time. But remaining focused was critical. One of the most vindicated decisions, Hanno says, is remaining focused on the mid-market of SMEs, rather than chasing the upmarket of bigger companies. Niche-but-instrumental trumped one-size-fits-all.
Success took many forms for Personio. An early acquisition of Spanish payroll startup Rollbox, and the 25-person team that came with it, was validation of their ambition. He also reflects on their decisions to build AI into their early product, including the Personio Assistant, a chatbot that can answer routine administrative questions, or their AI recruiting tool for automated resume screening and filtering. Fundraising has been another major source of success: since their $12M Series A led by Northzone in 2017, they’ve gone on to raise over $700M from the likes of Accel, Index Ventures, and Lightspeed. At last count, their valuation sits at $8.5BN (making it Germany’s fourth most valuable startup of all time).
Hanno is aware that success brings rising expectations. But rather than being driven by them, he’s learned to redefine what success means at each stage of an entrepreneurial journey. “The definition of success changes as a company matures,” he says, pointing to Personio’s recent shift toward sustainable profitability as proof that long-term discipline is now his measure of success. This makes the timing especially notable: Germany, Personio’s core market, has been navigating one of its most challenging economic periods in decades, making disciplined, profitable growth all more significant.
At the forefront of Europe’s transformation
From the captain of a 30-person ship to the leader of a 1500-person organization, Hanno’s adeptness as a leader has been put to the test. He remains highly biased towards risk, constantly looking for new ways to stretch Personio’s ambition.
His view of success has certainly changed considerably: from the early days, where hitting high growth is all that matters, to the maturer stages of a company, where the long view is crucial. And yet despite the size and ambitions of the company, Hanno remains close to the details, and crucially, to the customer. This runs counter to dominant belief: "Conventional wisdom says hire very senior people and delegate, then just work on the vision. For me, I still always need to be deep in the organisation."
"I can only be good at making strategic decisions if I understand what the customer says and how they talk about the specific problem.”
This is also a great credit to the culture he’s built at the company. He espouses an “elevate one another” operating principle, where employees are ambitious but also care about helping each other to succeed.
The success of this approach is self-evident to Hanno. “Customers vote with their wallet”, he says, pointing not only to profitability itself, but to what made it possible: an ability to keep adapting the value proposition as customer needs evolved. It’s not a goal he ever would have had in mind as an early founder, but it speaks volumes to the longevity of what they’re building.
More importantly, it sits at the core of who Hanno is as a leader. If the captain of the ship spots danger, they don’t delegate: they grab the wheel and steers towards safety. As for spotting clearer waters and opportunity, that’s where the really exciting stuff lies for Hanno.
Hanno believes that AI poses a generational opportunity to businesses looking to embrace it, and an existential threat to those who don’t. Personio’s biggest competition today, he says, is not its current competitors but rather the rapid development of AI.
"The competition is with ourselves—how do we figure out what new value we can give customers in new ways."
As companies are increasingly digitized and accelerated with AI, Hanno sees HR playing a pivotal role in organizational transformation over the next five years, to ensure that the balance of humans and automations is finely struck. Europe’s transformation and its future rely on this balance—and on companies like Personio.
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