A certain level of chaos is healthy: Franz Faerber on fighting bureaucracy and the importance of deep domain knowledge in AI
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What is Franz Faerber’s “healthy chaos” philosophy and why does he believe it’s essential for innovation?
I'm a big believer in a certain level of chaos. Is healthy. I don't want to re to eliminate that chaos. At at some point in time you have to reduce it and look at. But chaos at some point in time is creating innov innovation, it's creating energy, it's creating uh create um uh creating things and I want to really let um give the people the chance to create some chaos. Of course we have to eliminate it uh at that point in time, being very, very, very Careful of introducing purecracy. My learning is if you have introduced something, it is so hard to remove it again.
Welcome to Orbit, HG's podcast series where we talk to business leaders who build some of the most successful and sector-defining software companies around the world. I'm Sebastian Zureich, a director in HG's Munich office, and today I'm joined by Franz Ferber, co-founder and CEO of Everest Systems. Franz, super excited to have you here. You actually were many many years with SAP as a senior technical leader. You were actually responsible for building SAP HANA and now you decided to found your own company a few years ago, Everest Systems, to take on those very giants like SAP and Oracle and actually set yourself to go to build A really modern and sector-defining EIP system. I think this conversation will be super insightful because you bring a rare dual insight.
On the one hand, you know what happens in the big incumbents. On the other hand, you made the decision to leave and start up on your own. And I'm really much looking forward to learning from you what it means to build such a software company, how you think about building it. in an AI age and also how AI informs building that company. Thank you for being here.
Thanks uh thanks for having having me here. It's an honor to to be here and I'm really excited uh to discuss with you about Um what we are doing in Everest, also the future of AI and um and the topics.
Actually the first thing Also for for our guests here is Can you tell us a bit more about Everest and specifically also the USP you're building towards too? Um you took off on a big challenge to compete with giants like SIP or also Oracle. What is it that you're trying to build for customers and the USPs you're trying to generate that you think this is actually a viable goal?
Yeah, um you know in in our journey when we started in twenty twenty, um things changed a little bit uh as of uh there's the big AI revolution which uh came in between. When we started our journey, right, the motivation for me was mainly there must be a different approach. To build such a business system which users like, which are easy to use, which is fast, which is which is comfortable, which is not super expensive, and that was uh initial. thought and over the time right um the um when we looked into architecture and uh looking at the changes then of course we saw that with ai you can really think the business needs for a company completely different. And then now we see that it's the first time in my life what I'm seeing in software that it's possible to really innovate the big giants out.
Normally when when we started in in our journey, right? We thought It takes at least ten, fifteen, twenty years until we really can compete against a an Oracle or an SAP. Now it's much, much faster, right? First time in ERP, since ERP was founded, it is possible right to to innovate them out much, much faster. And there we are looking into how can we make it simpler? How can we give it more control to the customers? How can we make it cheaper and how can we make it that really users really like to to use it? I think th that's our motivation.
Okay. Yeah. Can you give us um one or two examples of where you now see a real opportunity to do this differently, also particularly from a product perspective?
Yeah now first of all when you look into the landscape of an SAP system, right? You always have a huge landscape, right? It's not that it's just one system where you go productive, you have a quality system, a test system, a development system, many, many copies of that.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is Franz Faerber’s “healthy chaos” philosophy and why does he believe it’s essential for innovation?
0:01–7:44
2
How did Everest’s “live sandboxing” technology simplify the traditional multi‑system ERP landscape?
7:44–15:11
3
Why does Franz argue that deep domain knowledge, not just features, is the new competitive edge in the AI era?
15:11–22:10
4
What does it mean to assume AI costs zero and how does that reshape product development at Everest?
22:10–27:29
5
Why does Franz believe Germany (and not Silicon Valley) is the optimal place to build next‑generation enterprise software?
27:29–33:51
6
How can SaaS leaders prioritize AI‑driven personalization while keeping software stable for users?
33:51–39:43
7
What are the biggest challenges and opportunities when moving from legacy ERP platforms to AI‑native solutions?
39:43–45:35
8
What practical advice does Franz give to traditional ERP executives looking to thrive in the fast‑changing AI landscape?
45:35–52:05
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