Marcin Cichon and the value of showing up in red shoes

Marcin Cichon had remembered the customer meeting. He had remembered the suit. The respectable shoes, however, had stayed behind. During Pricefx’s early years, he and fellow founder Martin Wricke drove around Europe looking for business, and on one trip Cichon arrived with only his bright red sneakers. He went into the meeting anyway. The shoes broke the ice. Eventually, they became a uniform.

It is a pleasingly untidy beginning for a personal brand. Nobody needed to commission a positioning exercise. A packing mistake did the work. Cichon later described red shoes becoming his signature around 2013; colleagues came to know him simply as Red. Wricke became Yellow. Together, the two commercial founders were nicknamed the M&Ms. Enterprise software had acquired a small confectionery department.

The shoes are an easy detail to remember. The more interesting question is why an experienced software executive was spending so much time in a car, trying to persuade companies to trust a young pricing business. Cichon had already worked inside established enterprise vendors. He knew the sales pitch, the implementation process and the gap that could open between the two. Pricefx grew out of his impatience with that gap.

Before the spreadsheet, a fresh start

Cichon was born and grew up in Poland. His account of leaving is stark: he and his brother fled as refugees, seeking a different future. He was accepted to study in Switzerland, but described spending six months homeless while waiting for admission to the country. A night job, some money and somewhere to live eventually gave him a foothold. This part of his story precedes the founder’s vocabulary of growth and scale. The immediate task was to establish a life.

He would later connect those early experiences to his optimism. That connection matters because optimism can sound cheap when it comes from somebody whose difficulties have always been optional. In Cichon’s telling, believing that circumstances could change was something he had practised well before he had a company. The account is personal, and it does not need embellishing to carry weight.

His first intended career was creative. He has described studying marketing in Zurich and photography at ETH Zurich, then taking his first job at Coopers & Lybrand, which later became part of PwC. A friend in software sales persuaded him to change direction. Years later, that same friend became Pricefx’s first chief revenue officer. A conversation that redirected one career eventually helped staff a company.

From 1999 to 2006, Cichon worked on Ariba’s European services business. From 2006 to 2010, he led Vendavo’s European operation. These were years spent learning how enterprise software actually reaches customers: through teams, implementation work, commercial relationships and promises someone has to fulfil. By the time he became a founder, he had seen the machinery from inside.

An irritation worth building around

Pricefx was established in Germany in 2011 by Cichon, Christian Tratz and Martin Wricke. The proposition addressed a familiar complaint among buyers of pricing software: getting a system running could demand too much money, too much time and too much patience. Cichon wanted a service that could be implemented more quickly and adjusted as a business changed. Cloud software was central to that ambition.

His critique was practical. A company buys pricing software because it needs to make better commercial decisions. If the installation absorbs its attention for years, the remedy begins to resemble another problem. Cichon’s objection was to the effort customers had to expend before they could get useful work done. He believed there was room for a different bargain.

He recalled a moment in 2012 when Tratz demonstrated technology that allowed the PriceAnalyzer module to be implemented in less than forty minutes, working with hundreds of thousands of rows of transactional data. This was a particular early demonstration, rather than a promise that every deployment would take forty minutes. For Cichon, it was evidence that the technical obstacles he had lived with could be reduced.

The commercial test followed. In 2013, Pricefx won Robert Bosch and MediaMarktSaturn in Germany. Cichon later singled out those customers as milestones. Recognisable names gave the fledgling business more than something to put on a slide. They meant that large organisations were prepared to entrust real work to the founders’ approach. A theory about making software easier had begun to acquire customers.

Give the customer an exit

Cichon credits his grandmother with three principles: be different, pursue excellence and bring passion to the work. The family origin is charming; the commercial consequence is more demanding. At Pricefx, he argued that customers should stay because they were satisfied. He described subscriptions without long-term ties and a product roadmap shaped by customer needs. Loyalty, in that account, had to be earned repeatedly.

This creates an awkward assignment for a software seller. A signature cannot be treated as the finish line. The product has to remain useful after the celebratory email and the first invoice. For a customer, the freedom to leave changes the conversation. For the vendor, it makes the experience after the sale part of the commercial proposition.

He also admitted to having oversold and underdelivered earlier in his career. His deliberately blunt phrase for the alternative was a “bullshit-free zone.” It is a vivid slogan, particularly in a business fond of polished euphemisms. Its value depends on whether the organisation can tolerate an inconvenient answer before a deal closes. Honesty is inexpensive as a poster and more costly when a customer is ready to sign.

The less provocative shorthand was fast, flexible and friendly. Those words described implementation, configuration and the experience of using the product and doing business with the company. They also gave colleagues something ordinary to argue about. Is this change useful? Is this process fair? Will the customer understand it? Such questions are harder to hide behind than a grand statement about transformation.

“But it’s actually my grandma’s fault.”

Marcin Cichon, on his founding principles

The years that tested the promise

The road to a larger company included a dispute that enthusiasm could not settle. Vendavo filed a complaint in California in December 2017. Litigation expanded to include counterclaims and other proceedings. In September 2019, the companies announced a settlement of all outstanding worldwide litigation. Both could return their attention to commercial competition. A settlement is a settlement; the interesting biographical fact is how much of a young company’s attention the conflict consumed.

Cichon described the dispute as a burden on the business and on himself. When announcing its resolution, he returned to the way Pricefx treated its people, the spaces they worked in and the product they were building. His response kept the company’s internal life in the picture. Customers and investors were part of the story, but so were the colleagues whose work continued while lawyers dealt with the conflict.

In July 2020, Pricefx announced a $65 million Series C led by Apax Digital, with participation from Digital+ Partners. The announcement put total venture funding at $130 million. Those numbers describe financing, rather than Cichon’s personal wealth or the company’s revenue. They marked a new capacity to invest in products and expansion, with the corresponding obligation to make the additional resources count.

His letter announcing the round addressed customers, partners, friends and the Pricefx family. It thanked a network of investors that included Bain & Company, Credo Ventures and Talis Capital. The funding milestone was public and numerical. His language around it remained personal. By then, the business had become much larger than the small group travelling between customer meetings, yet he was still addressing it as a community.

An apron belongs in this story

Pricefx publicly shared another view of its CEO in 2020: Cichon putting on an apron and cooking for the office. A colleague’s comment hoped the Prague team had enjoyed the soup. The photograph and the thanks are a modest detail, but a useful one. A CEO can talk about serving people for a very long time without ever serving lunch.

Cichon has also spoken about cooking and interior design as interests. His personal history includes competitive ballroom dancing, begun in Poland in his teenage years. He explained that he enjoyed the competition, the theatre, the music and the emotion. The dancing shoes were black. Evidently, the later devotion to red footwear had not yet become a constitutional requirement.

These details give some texture to a career that might otherwise be reduced to titles and funding rounds. They also fit his preference for a workplace with a recognisable personality. An account of Pricefx’s Czech office in 2016 described flexibility, trust and responsibility, with people able to work away from the office and expected to deliver good work on time. Freedom came with an assignment attached.

His advice on punctuality is similarly plain. Being on time, he said, shows respect for the people you work or live with. It sits comfortably beside the more expansive talk of passion and excellence. A founder can have an ambitious idea and still keep somebody waiting. Cichon’s version of professional courtesy includes both the idea and the clock.

Learning to leave the driving seat

By September 2022, Pricefx reported more than 150 customers and over 500 employees. Ronak Sheth, who had joined as president and chief revenue officer in May 2021, became CEO. Cichon stayed as founder and co-CEO, with a remit covering customer relationships, culture, strategy and the operational transition. He would report to Sheth. The arrangement made the transfer of authority explicit.

There is a revealing change of scale here. In an early company, a founder often does whatever job has been left undone. As Pricefx grew, Cichon described moving toward strategy, relationships and orchestration. Eventually, that meant trusting somebody else with the chief executive’s job. The skills required to start a company do not automatically make every subsequent management decision simple.

In November 2023, Pricefx announced that he would retire from executive work at the end of the year and continue as a board observer and advisor. Cichon said he had begun the leadership transition in early 2021, aiming to move from a founder-led startup to a professionally managed scale-up. His work included arranging for the company to function with a different person at its centre.

The next public chapter arrived in March 2026, when Competera announced him as a strategic advisor. His brief included market positioning and the organisational obstacles to adopting advanced pricing technology. The announcement also mentioned organic farming among his personal interests. The field had changed, but the recurring professional question remained familiar: how do useful ideas get past the friction that prevents people from using them?

Cichon’s career leaves plenty of room for the shoes. They make the story memorable because they began as an ordinary mistake, then travelled with him through a business built on reducing ordinary frustrations. The later handover adds another human detail. After years of persuading customers to try something different, he had to do it himself: accept a different role, trust a successor and let the next meeting belong to somebody else.