00:30:58 · Adam Miller, Ben Pfisterer
[00:30:58] S2: How do you think you tread the line between pushing someone to that capacity and then not burning them out? [00:31:03] S0: Yeah. We talk a lot about this, and get quite philosophical when people join, and and and the bad truth of it is, life's life's pretty shit. Like, it... It's the most special thing ever you'll do, obviously, but it's hard. Like, you have ups and downs. You have really tough times, personal and otherwise. You will go through that, and you'll go through that probably when you're working here. So as a company, I absolutely promise you that we will be there for you. And if you if you are giving your all to this company and working as hard as you can, assuming that's what you want from your career, when you turn around and say, I need a break, I need to reach out, I need to unplug, I need a day, I need a week, I need something, we will never say no because you're working as hard as you can to do that. Now when I say work as hard, I do not want people working twenty four hours a day. That's ridiculous. You will burn out. Some people still do it because that's the way they're built and they love it. But every person has their own limit. So I always encourage people, know what your limit is. And you might know it until you hit it, but if you're working towards that and you hit it, again, we'll be there for you as much as we can. But if I tell you [00:32:06] S2: my limits four hours a day
00:32:08 · Ben Pfisterer
[00:32:08] S0: Then you're not right for Zeller. No. That's the thing. Upfront and scaring people off in interviews, like, I I just say it direct every time. We work hard. Like, like, there's no great company in the world that has achieved what they had without working hard. If you think you can gamer or you can be lucky or you can drift through, it doesn't happen. Now a great thing about everyone we hire in Australia in tech, there are limitless opportunities out there. We're not like a limited sector where this is the one bank you can work in, the one town or whatever. Like, is so many job opportunities. Find something that you love. And we've done this with people where we're realizing it's not clicking. We have honest conversations with them and say, hey. Are you sure this is what you want? And if it's not, how about we cut a deal? How about we give you the opportunity to go looking for a new job? And in the next whatever weeks you need to get that new job, you just give everything you've got. Like, you check us deliver between now and one, two, three, four, five, six weeks or whatever. We'll let you go to job interviews. We'll let you have a nice exit. You have good farewell and work both ways. Because, yeah, if Zeller's an office, don't want them working there. I couldn't think of anything worse than someone works a few years at Zeller, looks back and goes, I hated that. Like, that would be awful. So I want people to be there. I want them to be passionate about being there. But if they're not, that's okay. We are not the company forever, and that's okay. And as diverse as humans are, companies cannot be right forever. I can't build a company right forever. It's impossible.
00:33:32 · Sachin
[00:33:32] S1: Wow. I really love that speech. I think that's one of the best speeches about sort of hiring and culture I've heard in quite a long time. So you made a big launch, just last week about Zeller for Startups, and, you know, financial services aren't the thing to get everyone sort of excited with the new launch, but I actually got excited because I have to do the finances at our company, and it's shit. It sucks. Like, big banks suck. You're stitching together, like you said, lots of different solutions, and a lot of founders are always looking for new things in Startups. So what is special about Zeller for Startups? What what are you offering there?
00:34:03 · Ben Pfisterer, Adam Miller
[00:34:03] S0: Yeah. I think for us, the weirdest thing was we were out to build a version of a business bank and payment system, but we still had to get a bank account. So we got an early investment, obviously. So we had to... We're gonna put this money. So we, like every other startup, had to go through the process of opening a bank account with one of the big fours. And it was absurd. It was absolutely absurd. They had these front... These websites that say, you know, sign up in minutes. The second you click, you're not a current customer or you're not a sole trader. Good luck. You're off the branch. You're in the queues. You're only gonna get one product. Product's gonna be bad. Ours was horrific experience. It took weeks to open a bank account. You had to witness documents. You had to, you know, go into the branch to be eyeballed by the by the branch manager. At one point, someone have to find a fax. I don't... Still cannot believe that's a thing. Hopefully, it's not. [00:34:48] S2: We're a venture backed startup that's, like, doing decent revenue, and we still don't have a credit card. We're not allowed to get one.
00:34:53 · Ben Pfisterer
[00:34:53] S0: This is this is the thing. No one talks about it because our startup community is smaller than something like The US. Right? But we in the startup community get treated like crap. We absolutely... We're like... You think about it. It is a high risk industry, so they kinda ride. But we just get treated like that despite the fact that technology and entrepreneurship is the future of this country. Yeah. We get treated terrible with that. So the the thing that we realized are like, wow. We got validation of what we're building at the very, very start. And then we just promised to keep building the product, building the segment as much as we could. Then we got to relatively recently, and we had this sort of moments like, we hadn't actually turned around and solved it for the other startups yet. Like, we know they can use our products now. Everyone thinks of us as cartoons, but you can actually sign up and use us for a full suite of financial services now. Then the what can we do to actually make them better? Start leaning into startups because we wanna get more vertical specific, but if we did it for health or beauty, for example, we're disingenuous. I I I know nothing about that industry right, but we know everything about startups. We're in the industry. We love it. We have all our friends and... Not all of them, but many of our friends are in that. So how about we do a two way deal here? We launch a product, which is Zeller for Startups. We tailor a lot of features and functionality for them, but in return, we ask for their feedback. Now we're not gonna get everything right, but probably... They're probably... Obviously, that that... At soft, fast paced environments that I'm talking about, they'll want us to do more and go faster, but I couldn't think of a better sector to start working with. And the idea is if we get that right, we can start extrapolating into new sectors. But, yeah, just thinking about banking and transaction services and how how it can be different. So for example, the the classic account. You open an account now, and that's it. You don't get anything with it. It's just there sitting there. So our concept is you might want different people to look at it at different times. Like, you as an admin or financial controller, you want full full rate, but someone else in your team, you might want lesser.
00:36:39 · Ben Pfisterer, Sachin
So you give them a lesser access. They can look at it and do certain things all the way through to view only. You might wanna be giving your investors the ability to look at your bank account at any time as nervous as that might... Everyone makes everyone feel. But that'd be a fantastic functionality where I don't have to build you financial reports every week, month, quarter. Here's my bank details. You log in. You look at what we've got. My account, and if they're a third party account and you log in, you can't transact. You can't do anything, but you can see it. You can download my expenses. You can do that for me. So we started looking at that sort of stuff to make sure we can do it a lot better. The whole ecosystem play is perfect. So you sign up once and you get everything you want to run your business. Yeah, a lot of different functions that we're gonna be doing, a lot of different feature we're bringing. So [00:37:21] S1: So for Zeller for Startups, what you just said sounds perfect. Like, I wanna go and sign up, like, straight after this. Like, it sounds like in a few years' time, that is gonna be its own billion dollar company in its own right. What do you have to get right to make that sort of a massive function for Zeller?