My guest for Ep203 of The Startup Playbook Podcast is the Co-founder & CEO of Zeller, Ben Pfisterer.

Ben is a returning guest on the show. Our last interview was in August 2020 when Ben had left his role as Country Manager for Square to launch his new company, Zeller, which had just come out of stealth mode to announce their $6.3M funding round.

Since then Zeller has become the fastest Australian company to a $1B valuation, reaching that milestone in less than 2 years. Zeller has 85,000 customers, 260 staff and to date has raised $180M in funding from leading investors.

In this interview we covered a range of topics including:

• The challenges that come with scale
• How raising capital changes from Seed to Series B stage
• How hiring and company culture evolves as you scale the company
• Why Ben doesn’t do any one-on-ones with any of his direct reports
• And much more!

Timestamps:

• 2:06: Ben’s background
• 7:09: How to find your path in career
• 8:36: The background of Zeller
• 11:05: The storytelling aspect of raising capital
• 15:07: The unexpected challenges that came from taking on the big banks
• 21:05: How transparent should you be with your company and investors?
• 23:22: Hiring talents and maintaining culture as you scale
• 39:19: How he thinks about product at Zeller
• 47:41: How he’s worked with investors as Zeller grows
• 56:50: How he structures his time
• 1:01:21: The horizon theory
• 1:05:07: The mission and objective with Zeller
• 1:06:17: How he’s found his own balance with work and life

Our partners:

A big thank you to Josh McNichol for his with this interview!

Also a big shout out to our partners for the show:

Scendar 

Scendar is the OG startup accounting firm in Australia catering to all stages of your business’ life. If you’re busy running your startup, you don’t have time to do your own books and forecast. Instead, fully outsource your finance function, giving you time and resources back to focus on what you do best in growing your business. Find out more at Scendar.com

Vanta

Vanta helps businesses get — and stay — compliant by automating up to 90% of the work for the most in-demand compliance frameworks. And with over 300 integrations, you can easily monitor and secure the tools your business relies on.
Join over six thousand fast-growing companies that use Vanta to manage risk and prove security in real time.
Startup Playbook Podcast listeners get access to an exclusive offer of USD$1000 off their plans. Head over to vanta.com/playbook to get access to this exclusive discount.

Links mentioned:

Ben’s links:

• Ben’s LinkedIn
• Zeller
• Zeller roles

People mentioned:

• Mark Woodland
• Dominic Yap
• Josh McNicol

Companies mentioned:

• Square
• NAB
• Siemens
• Hewlett-Packard
• Square Peg Capital
• Kismet
• Apex Capital Partners
• Headline
• Spark Capital

Feedback/connect/say hello:

Rohit@startupplaybook.co
@RohitBhargava7 (Twitter)
/rohbhargava (LinkedIn)
@rohit_bhargava (Instagram)
My Youtube Channel

Credits:

Music: Paycheck

Other channels:

Find all of the links for the podcast on Linktree here

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