43-year-old Jeppe Rindom's extreme drive has led him to companies like Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, Tradeshift, and made him a co-founder of the rapidly growing fintech adventure Pleo. His drive stems from a childhood where attention was a competition.

Both girls and boys gather at the front of the school bus as it parks in front of Usserød School in Hørsholm on an August day in 1983.

In the crowd, a freckled boy stands out. He is tall, has chalk-white hair, and is a bit shy. But when the doors open, and the teacher who greets them points towards the door to the kindergarten class, he and the group of children start running. At the front, the six-year-old boy sprints with his Piolet backpack on his back.

Jeppe Rindom clearly remembers his first day of school. 

“In my mind, it was about who ran fastest to the school door. I was so eager to perform, for better or worse. And I think it's still a part of me today.”

He recalls many other similar episodes in school. Wanting to be the fastest to finish a task, wanting to solve it the best, wanting to get the best grades.

But it wasn't until he was 26 years old and underwent a personality test as part of the introduction at McKinsey that he became aware of the box people like him are often put in. He was tagged as an “Insecure overachiever.” And he is not the only one. He finds himself among a select group of people like him, namely people with an unusually high drive to perform, driven by an inner insecurity.

Impressive Resume

The mental attitude and extreme drive may be the best explanation for 43-year-old Jeppe Rindom's extraordinary achievements.

As a student, he interned at Goldman Sachs. After graduation, he was headhunted to McKinsey. Then a two-year stint at Chr. Hansen, where he was one of the key figures in the company's IPO, before joining the Danish-born but now Silicon Valley-based unicorn Tradeshift as CFO.

In 2015, he founded the fintech company Pleo with his partner Niccolo Perra, and together they have raised half a billion DKK to make their intelligent corporate card solution a leading global player.

Jeppe Rindom is open about where the seed of his drive was planted.

“I grew up somewhat unconventionally with my father and my two older sisters. It was a safe environment on a farm on the outskirts of Hørsholm, but when you are three children sharing a father who also runs his own business, there is a struggle for words and competition for attention. The fact that we didn't have much time for affirmation quickly flipped to the idea that the way I could get attention was by performing and achieving something.”

The drive in Jeppe Rindom is so strong that he has never had difficulty choosing to focus on the task at hand.

“I have a creative urge. I get personal satisfaction from seeing progress, so I am often willing to invest a lot to make it happen,” he says when Barons visits him at Pleo's headquarters on Sortedams Dossering in Copenhagen.

The first thing a guest encounters is a high-ceilinged industrial lounge area with sofas and an open bar kitchen. There is an international vibe, and the majority of Pleo's rapidly growing team of now 250 employees are foreigners. One might think that the company could just as well, or perhaps should, move to San Francisco, New York, or another place with a larger talent pool.

“Honestly, it's not necessarily the best for our company to be here at home, but we try to go against the flow and show that you can scale out of Copenhagen. As a Dane, I find it sad to see that we can create the winners of the future but not keep them. I believe our welfare society is at risk if we can't create the jobs of the future. Right now, it's still Novo Nordisk, Danske Bank, Carlsberg, and Maersk that produce the jobs, and they are 125 years old. If you look at the USA, it's Amazon, Alphabet, and Facebook, which are 25 years old. We really want to be one of the pioneers to show that it is possible to stay.”

The Difficult Art of Letting Go

The inner self-criticism fills less in Jeppe Rindom as he has grown older. You could say he has turned his insecurity into a strength and a prerequisite for his work.

But it also comes with a price. Thoughts revolve around Pleo most of the waking hours. For Jeppe Rindom, there is a lot at stake.

“The hardest thing for me is to let it go. I feel I have a lot at stake emotionally here. Everything means a lot to me. Not necessarily because I have to be involved in everything, but it genuinely hits me in the gut when I see a small bug in the product on a Thursday morning when I'm out, and I feel genuine irritation. There are many emotions and brainpower that go into all sorts of things that I find hard to distance myself from.”

What do you do to try to manage your thoughts and feelings in those cases?

“I can prioritize my time because it's a rational process, but I'm not good at prioritizing my feelings. So you might say, can't you work on distancing yourself? Well.., you can. But do I want to? Many times, it's also what gives me energy. My first feeling is “oh, it's annoying,” but then I go through a process where I often turn it into energy to improve it. So I don't want to completely distance myself. It's a balance.”

Leading Real People

The shift from consulting and industry to the entrepreneurial world has been the feeling of finding the shelf where you can also see yourself in 10 years. But it has also been a meeting with a different universe.

From being in a world where everyone is extremely ambitious, thinks the same way, and is basically set to be led, to coming out into a “real” company where there are many more different kinds of people.

“There, people don't necessarily follow you just because you work hard, are smart, or because you say they should. Some need there to be humility, respect, and recognition of what they contribute. It's far more interpersonally complex to navigate. When it hit me, I had to practice.”

“Today, I experience with my colleagues at Pleo that there isn't a work person and a private person. There is one person who happens to be working here. It means that as a leader, I have to relate to a whole lot of people and not just a lot of colleagues or resources, and then I have to figure out what drives these people. I think that's a paradigm shift from consulting, and it's also the development I've been on.”

The Balance Between Praise and Ambition

What remains is the big and difficult question that ties back to Jeppe Rindom's own experiences from a busy family where there was rarely time for much care and attention.

So how does Jeppe Rindom, who is himself a father of two boys, try to influence his children? 

“One of the things I'm aware of is giving our children attention and love regardless of what they achieve. Maybe tone down the interest in what they achieve and try to recognize what they stand for more than what they accomplish.”

And yet there is a but, he adds shortly after with a smile.

“There are two sides to that. I don't want to pass on the insecure overachiever gene to my children, but I don't want to take the ambition out of them completely, and it has also given me something really good. It has given me focus and determination. It has brought me to a place where I am happy.” 

 Jeppe Rindom in The Founder

MAN IN THE SHIRT “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood” - quote by Theodore Roosevelt in Paris, 1910. In the portrait series “Man in the Shirt,” BARONS meets business people who have put themselves on the line. Where do they find courage? What is the most important thing they have learned along the way? And what can the rest of us learn from them?