⁠⁠Building elite culture without one-on-ones or values on the wall | Ben Pfisterer, Zeller

Building a company is messy. Most of it never makes the highlight reel. Imperfect Company is a podcast from Glitch Capital where Leigh Jasper and Sam Kroonenburg, two founders who've built billion-dollar exits before and are going again, sit down with founders to talk about the strategic decisions nobody puts on the pitch deck: the false starts, the bad hires, the pivots that needed to be made, and the unglamorous calls that built something real. In this episode, Leigh and Sam sit down with Ben Pfisterer, CEO and co-founder of Zeller, the Melbourne fintech behind the payment terminals, business accounts and cards you've probably tapped at your local café. Ben didn't go into Square Peg's office to pitch. He walked out with Zeller's first cheque about ten days later, before a single line of code had been written. Ben takes us from running one of the world's first mobile payments pilots inside NAB, to the uphill battle of brining Square to Australia, to building Zeller's payments, accounts and cards in 14 months during Melbourne's lockdowns. Why Zeller launched three products at once instead of one, and why the team treats "every dollar we take in" as their last and how he's attracted top talent. They also cover why Zeller has no values on the wall, how the founding team has stayed together without a single fight, and Ben's worst day in the office. Plus, how Zeller uses AI when it can't afford to get things wrong, how it grew to around 110,000 businesses in just over five years, and why it chose the UK before the US. New episodes coming soon. Follow / subscribe so you don't miss an episode. → Subscribe to the Imperfect Company Newsletter: https://platform.glitchcap.com/ → Follow Glitch Capital on LinkedIn:   / glitch-capital   → Subscribe to Imperfect Company on YouTube → Connect with Leigh:   / leighjasper   → Connect with Sam:   / skroonenburg   → Got a question for Leigh & Sam, or a founder story we should cover? Send it to them on LinkedIn, and we'll answer listener questions on the show with our guests.