CEO at Outcome
Antoine Merour
Scaled Riot Games operations in Europe. VP of Strategy & BD at Philips. Student of complex adaptive systems, in nature (think ant colonies), in military history, and in business.
Questions & Answers
What's the story behind your company?
At Riot Games, I saw the company grow from 800 to 3,500 people. We had world-class talent, but we couldn’t adapt fast enough. Our informal coordination networks broke down and our processes didn’t scale. We were getting slower and overwhelmed as complexity exploded, and we didn’t know how to fix it. Companies today still waste millions on consultants and managers who sit in endless meetings, drown in spreadsheets, and try to push reorgs and 'best practices' that often don’t solve anything. ERPs transformed how manufacturing companies continuously got better by giving everyone access to a real-time picture of of how work gets done and where are the bottlenecks. The intuition behind Outcome was to create the ERP for knowledge work, seeing in real time how works flows through teams and what to change in the company's operating model and the ways teams collaborate to eliminate bottlenecks as they scale.
How is your team uniquely positioned to solve the problem you're tackling?
We have all experienced and tried to solve the same problem from different angles. In my case, when leading and transforming organizations at Riot Games and Philips; Gudrun, when developing products at Tempo; Sveinn, when building and running the search infrastructure for 500M users at Spotify; and Vignir, when running operations for Eve Online at CCP Games.
What's a memorable 'aha' moment you've had while building your startup?
There is a missing data to be able to understand how work actually flows across teams, and where it gets stuck. That data currently exists in Slack channels, email communications, or meeting notes, not in existing project management tools like Jira, Asana or Linear. What's missing isn't data about "the work" it's what people say and do to "unblock the work". But it's unstructured, and therefore unusable. We learned that to capture that data we need to assist teams with cross-team coordination inside those channels, starting with Slack, and use AI to structure it, quantify it, and turn it into actionable insights for teams and leaders alike.
What inspired you to start your business?
I've seen the same problem everywhere I worked, and it physically pains me to see how much effort and creativity gets lost because the environment people work in, meaning the team structure, processes, operating models, etc. are making it hard for people to do their best work. I've been a gamer my entire life. In video games, game designers know better than to blame the player if they don't find the game fun. It should be the same for companies, leaders need tools to understand what it's like for teams to work inside the company, and continuously change it so that people can spend more time building than coordinating.
