All-In-One Zelt Solution: Chris Priebe with Michael Barone
Chris Priebe, founder of Zelt, chats with Michael Barone, investment analyst at Everywhere Ventures on episode 110: All-In-One Zelt Solution.
In episode 110 of Venture Everywhere, Michael Barone, analyst at Everywhere Ventures, talks with Chris Priebe, founder and CEO of Zelt — an all-in-one workforce management platform consolidating the fragmented tools companies rely on to manage their people. Chris shares how years in private equity watching acquired companies struggle to untangle messy, unintegrated employee systems revealed a gap no modern vendor was solving. He discusses how Zelt challenges the industry consensus that fragmented HR stacks are simply the cost of doing business, instead unifying employee data into one system where org chart logic, payroll, and expenses all speak the same language.
In this episode, you will hear:
Replacing fragmented HR, payroll, and IT stacks with a single workforce management platform.
Scaling go-to-market with a focused geo strategy after expanding to 40+ countries.
Balancing product depth and ease of use across growing markets and customer segments.
Embedding AI into Zelt to simplify access to a feature-rich platform.
Overcoming change management when introducing a new system to resistant teams.
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TRANSCRIPT
00:00:04 VO: Everywhere Podcast Network.
00:00:14 Jenny Fielding: Hi, and welcome to the Everywhere podcast. We’re a global community of founders and operators who’ve come together to support the next generation of builders. So the premise of the podcast is just that, founders interviewing other founders about the trials and tribulations of building a company. Hope you enjoy the episode.
00:00:33 Michael: Hi everyone. Welcome to the Venture Everywhere podcast. I’m Michael Barone, an analyst on the Everywhere team. I have the pleasure of being joined by one of our portfolio CEOs, Chris Priebe from Zelt. Welcome to the Venture Everywhere podcast, Chris.
00:00:47 Chris: Hi, Michael. Hi, everyone. It’s great to be here.
00:00:49 Michael: Awesome. So for people who aren’t familiar with Zelt yet, maybe you can explain what you’re building.
00:00:54 Chris: Zelt is an all-in-one HR platform. Actually, it’s more like a workforce management platform. That means that you can manage your employees and contractors from onboarding to offboarding in one place.
00:01:05 Chris: That means things like holiday management, tracking, performance management, payroll, benefits, all those kinds of things that you need to do when you have employees, whether you like it or not.
00:01:15 Michael: Absolutely. And maybe to rewind a little bit, I want to ask about your entrepreneurial journey to Zelt from TA Associates to then venture investing. What prompted your shift from more in the investor seat to then being an operator?
00:01:29 Chris: Just a quick overview of my journey in general. I was more of an engineer scientist before I went into finance. I studied physics in Germany. Always was more of like a builder, nerdy type of person. Was never really interested in like economics and that kind of stuff. And I realized at university, I did some lab work that I definitely want to stay very far away from any lab when I graduate.
00:01:49 Chris: And that’s how I went into more general business type. I did an MBA in Cambridge and then was recruited by an investment bank. That’s how I fell into finance and that led me to investing.
00:01:59 Chris: I spent some time at Global Founders Capital and TA Associates and there you get exposure to a lot of different software markets. So that’s where I learned about HR software and payroll software and everything that is in that space.
00:02:12 Chris: I’ll say generally, so my entire memory, my parents never had a job. My dad was quite old and my mom was a housewife since having children. And so I never actually was tied to the idea of, okay, you need to have a job or like that career is important.
00:02:25 Chris: My dad was always more of a builder, buying houses and then flipping them, developing them, always did our own thing. And then that also always just resonated to me more. Climbing a career ladder wasn’t really that appealing to me.
00:02:36 Chris: The combination of that kind of background, the idea that I’m not so interested in, let’s say, traditional career progression. I’m more of a builder type myself in terms of what interests me.
00:02:48 Chris: And then COVID also happened where a lot of people took a step back to just reassess where do you want to position yourself. I took a decision that I think there’ll be something that I’d like to dedicate my time to in the next 5 to 10 years or maybe 10 to 15 years, hopefully.
00:03:01 Michael: I definitely resonate. I started off as an engineer and then I segued to finding the intersection of engineering, finance, working with startups. So I definitely understand where your head was there.
00:03:12 Michael: Was there anything specifically in your previous roles that inspired you or you really identified there is a pain point maybe on the intersection or the siloed systems for HR software, payroll and IT?
00:03:24 Chris: It’s mainly two points. One is, if you look at employee data, it’s probably one of the most scattered within the company. In your customer space, you also have quite a lot of tools. You have maybe CRM and an email system, advertising systems.
00:03:37 Chris: But if you counted up all the CRM related really core systems and all the workforce related systems, they’re actually a lot more employee facing systems, a good dozen system that a mature midsize company would have. And most of them are very much unintegrated.
00:03:52 Chris: In private equity and at TA would usually acquire companies and you want to drive efficiency when we grow the company, we don’t want to also hire a bunch of ops teams to do things manually. We’d usually re-platform companies because all these systems that they accumulate over the years would almost never be properly integrated.
00:04:09 Chris: I felt like in the HR space, that was a particularly interesting opportunity because the general vendors in the space are quite aging. There’s not a lot of investment that has gone into that in the last 20 years. There’s some great companies in the CRM space like Salesforce and maybe Workday on the HR side, but even that is a very aging system now.
00:04:28 Chris: A combination of a very aging tech stack and very old school, aging legacy vendors with the problem of a really scattered data landscape and being able to bring those things together, I built a new system that is nicer to use, but then also helps you solve this data mess that was a problem that was big enough and also difficult enough. It’s a very difficult product to build.
00:04:51 Chris: In hindsight, would I want to pick a very difficult product again? That’s debatable, but I am an engineer by mindset and nature. I want to pick something that’s hard to build, not easy to build. So that felt exciting to me.
00:05:01 Michael: It’s just an ever so relevant trend of, even with AI, all these data silos, whether it’s across HR or other verticals, it’s finding a way to integrate in a cohesive way. That’s exactly what you’ve built at Zelt. It feels like a true command center. Simple, clean, but so incredibly rich. Is there anything you can talk about around the perfect customer experience inside of Zelt?
00:05:24 Chris: Actually, you can have a whole debate of who’s actually a customer. So obviously there’s the people that pay us, which is usually one person, a company that signs an order form and wires the money. But actually there’s a lot of different stakeholders involved even within the admin side of a system.
00:05:37 Chris: There’s the HR team, there’s the payroll team, there’s people focusing on onboarding and people doing expense management. There’s even more people on the employee side.
00:05:46 Chris: By the way, the interests are not always aligned either. So there’s even little conflicts of interest even within the platform sometimes. When you think about anonymous surveys, for example, the ideal experience is that it’s easy to use, which is more difficult to be done than said.
00:06:02 Chris: Because the downside of an all-in-one system is there’s so much stuff in it, how are we even supposed to know what is in it? So it’s more of a pull system where as an employee, you need to do something it kind of tells you. You’ve been paid. Here’s a pay slip, a little push notification.
00:06:15 Chris: From the administrator side to this, it’s ideally easy to understand and self-service. If you get those two things right, you are doing very well. That’s harder to be implemented than to be said.
00:06:25 Chris: Of course, we’re adding more and more features, so balancing the ability to add more configurations and more features and more settings, which is required as you want to serve a wide customer base across different markets and sizes, but then also making that usable. Those are really the two. It’s like a scale. It’s very hard to keep those things in balance.
00:06:41 Michael: And so as you try to find that balance of the plug-and-wait and pulling from different data sources and resources, how are you positioned against these legacy HR systems that, like you said, a company might have been using something like this for years, but Zelt comes in and can provide something more efficient and just easier to use in general?
00:06:58 Chris: Think of it as like your iPhone. Most of the interactions happen on that first screen. I don’t know how many apps it fits. I think 12, maybe. I think three by four grid and maybe if you have like a little widget there, then you only have nine.
00:07:08 Chris: For B2B software, it’s similar. There’s only so many apps that are front of mind that you can use without forgetting about them. If you have too many tools, people just don’t know what’s what, and they all have their different names.
00:07:20 Chris: With Expensify, maybe you know that that’s expenses. It’s obvious. But if it’s called then Pleo, for example, which is also an expense tool, it’s not obvious that your expenses are happening there.
00:07:30 Chris: There’s a lot of communication and education needed for employees to even understand what’s where and to get people to actually adopt it. And to download all these apps and sign in, that’s pretty annoying. So if you bring that all into one place, the whole adoption and onboarding issue, is much simplified.
00:07:45 Chris: And then the other thing is there’s usually quite a heavy reliance or dependency in the back end between those apps. An example of expenses, I make an expense request, even who should approve, it usually depends on where you sit in the organization. Let’s say a client entertainment expense, it should be maybe approved by the head of sales. And maybe if it’s below a certain value, maybe the other person below them.
00:08:05 Chris: These are all org chart related logics. Usually these tools don’t have the concept of org charts, certainly not in the level of detail that an HR platform would have. But that’s on the user level.
00:08:16 Chris: But then if you think about paying this out, expenses you may want to payroll so they could automatically add to a payslip, that means somehow this information has to get into your payroll system. Ultimately, all this has to go in your accounting system.
00:08:28 Chris: Without these being integrated, it’s really quite painful and a very manual process that you have to do over and over again. And once you bring that together, things just natively integrate, it just ripples through.
00:08:39 Chris: Login expense, the relevant person auto approved it by quickly clicking a button on the app. They already have the app because when you onboard somebody on Zelt, it’s usually on the mobile phone. By default, people are already on the system and they can receive push notifications.
00:08:52 Chris: If your head of finance or head of payroll later runs payroll, they don’t even need to know what happens now with the approvals and who did what expense. It just shows up as a pay item on the payroll.
00:09:02 Chris: It removes a lot of the manual processes that otherwise exist between the systems between what normally you would have separately in an HR software and a performance management software and payroll software. And it just becomes one and it simplifies a lot of things.
00:09:17 Michael: It’s becoming the nervous system of a company. You’re describing as integrating across org charts, removing the tedious, I would say, manual tasks that are required for cross departmental work. As AI reshapes teams and tool stacks, how has that maybe repositioned Zelt with your customer base as teams get leaner, as maybe more tools are being used?
00:09:40 Chris: The dependency of functional teams, an HR team or finance team, for example, on IT, in my view, is going down. Even in very formal procurement processes, IT is just sitting there making sure that you have a GDPR compliance and ISO compliance. They’re not really involved anymore.
00:09:56 Chris: I feel like teams have accumulated the expertise and experience over the last decade or two to really be able to make good decisions of what tools they want to use and adopt it and make the most out of them.
00:10:08 Chris: I think AI is another enabler to use tools. In that example that I mentioned earlier, there’s a ton of functionality in Zelt. How do you even know what’s in it? Of course, AI is great for this, because then I can just ask it, “Hey, what can I all do in Zelt?” It will just list it for you. You can use it as an interface to do things.
00:10:23 Chris: Things like question answer type communications are much simplified once the AI has access to the database. There’s a whole debate now to be had how much access should it have, etc. But in theory, it’s not that difficult to solve.
00:10:36 Chris: Keep in mind, the ratio between an HR professional and employees in the company is anything between 1 to 50 to 1 to 200. Any percentage of friction reduction, so much that you free up time that you can use on either being more lean or just spend time on more value adding things.
00:10:53 Chris: There’s a lot of time that you can spend on things that maybe are not automatable. And the things that are very manual, they suck time that you can invest on those more important things.
00:11:02 Michael: That’s the real benefit of what a platform like Zelt can provide is automating not only these cross departmental processes, but the manual workflows that now allow employees and departments to focus on something that’s more important.
00:11:15 Michael: One of the most remarkable shifts we’re seeing is how AI is democratizing access to tools and new companies are being formed in geographies that didn’t have the same infrastructure resources. As Zelt expands internationally, are you seeing that dynamic play out with your customer base?
00:11:32 Chris: I would say that the adoption of AI or the availability of AI has increased the interest in doing things in a smarter way or even just having data accessible. Previously, you could argue having the data in the database, it’s a nice-to-have. If you have it stuck in PDFs, that’s fine. You can just look it up when you need it to.
00:11:50 Chris: I think that is a wrong view on looking at things. But you could argue, if when you have AI, it does make sense to invest in your data more and keep your data clean and centralize it so that you can then leverage the benefits that you have from putting an AI lever on top of that.
00:12:05 Chris: That does increase the systems-based thinking. Any new technology that forces people to think about technology increases the level of, let’s say, not being scared of adopting technology, that is something not to underestimate. It can be a blocker of adopting HR system in the first place, because there’s still companies running on paper these days, believe it or not.
00:12:23 Chris: It’s helping with the adoption. Of course, the AI company is now born in all kinds of verticals and markets, the ones maybe that are built as a top layer to read out the data, particularly in the Middle East and the Gulf region. A big interest in investing into enterprise technology, particularly on the HR side, also on the CRM and ERP side.
00:12:40 Chris: So there we actually see ourselves coming up to more like the SAP and Oracle type, more enterprise-y, larger vendors. In those more up and coming or less mature markets, you would compete against a very different set of vendors.
00:12:53 Michael: That’s also true in most industries. But maybe specific to the human capital management, HR software, payroll, how do you see that evolving over the next five years? And is there a contrarian opinion or hot take you might have around the subject?
00:13:07 Chris: There’s two different views. Are there going to be now AI-native systems that are completely rebuilt and you don’t need SaaS anymore? Or somebody could just write an HR system in 24 hours with some vibe coding?
00:13:18 Chris: I saw a video from David Sachs, yesterday or two days ago. I think he summarized it quite well. With Salesforce, for example, it’s really an incredibly complicated system that’s been built over 20 years. There’s probably a million bug reports from customers or little feedbacks that were implemented from engineers over time.
00:13:35 Chris: An AI that just writes code based on something that makes sense is never going to be as close in terms of the quality of the product that’s built based on real people’s feedback, on real problems rather than hypothetical, probable outcomes.
00:13:47 Chris: There’s a lower risk of someone just vibe coding the HR system. There’s just so much logic that goes into it. Oftentimes the logic is very specific. It has to work in a certain way based on your country’s requirements or payroll requirements. So just approximating it isn’t good enough. In maybe other applications that would be. In anything HR and payroll, it isn’t.
00:14:07 Chris: The other thing is how do you now access that data. Should we, in Zelt, we be the AI layer that accesses the Zelt’s data or should you access it by Claude or OpenAI and use another tool that now sucks in the data from Zelt into your global AI model?
00:14:22 Chris: Both are possible outcomes. We, of course, are investing in our own AI layer. Ultimately, this tool is something that does need to be used by people. Users do live in that system. It’s not just a information gathering system. There’s processes that are running inside of it. So that is not being replaced by AI or can’t actually be replaced by AI. That’s kind of the point that people are subject to it.
00:14:43 Chris: But who will be able to cross sell on that AI add-on? Is it going to be the HR vendor or maybe Claude? That is still up for debate. But I think it also depends on the quality of AI that is available in the tool.
00:14:54 Chris: If it’s a really crappy one, then maybe you prefer that you access it by Claude. If it’s a really good one that maybe is specifically trained on that particular use case, context aware of what’s happening there, then it’s better to run it within the boundary of the HR system.
00:15:06 Michael: I think just how you’re describing it shows that you obviously come from an engineering background and think through these intricate systems and how that’s going to play out in the future. But how has your mindset changed from originally an engineering school, then being in finance and now an operator?
00:15:21 Chris: I used to think that things like physics and math are hard and difficult. Turns out people are way more difficult. Engineers may be underappreciated. And you can see that also when you think about the difference of when we started, we thought, hey, why do we even have a designer and a front-end engineer as separate people? Let’s just hire one that can do both.
00:15:36 Chris: Probably you’ll find some people in the world that can do both things very well but they are so rare because they’re just such different skills and such different mentalities. Understanding people and empathy and like things like change management, I never understood. What does change management actually mean?
00:15:49 Chris: As an engineer, you’d write that off as something trivial and stupid and why does it even exist. But it’s actually so difficult to get people to change how they do things. We are confronted with that now because when we introduce a new system, when we sell Zelt, maybe the HR director and the finance director really loved what they were seeing, in theory that all makes sense. But there’s a group of people that really doesn’t agree with this at all for good reason or bad reason.
00:16:13 Chris: But if they do disagree with it, that’s a fact. You have to somehow deal with that. Being able to get people on your side and get their buy-in and to change, that’s something that I didn’t really appreciate before actually being confronted with it. And maybe also something that the average engineer doesn’t quite understand until you actually have to deal with real users in the open wild rather than in a code base.
00:16:32 Michael: I think people are the real enigma, maybe not so much the processes that appear to be complex on the engineering side. But if you’re willing to share, it’d be great to hear what’s on the horizon for Zelt in the near future.
00:16:42 Chris: Right now, building out our go-to-market function. We’re hiring a bunch of salespeople. Kind of have an SDR, kind of AE two-level setup that seems to be working very well.
00:16:52 Chris: Then in terms of geos, we used to go super wide in the first few days to just collect a lot of feedback from lots of different countries and markets. We have customers in 40 or 45 or so different countries. We are now focusing a bit more on a select few because the market is just so huge. There’s no real need to be selling everywhere.
00:17:10 Chris: Also as you mature, you kind of gain that confidence to understand what is actually our market and being able to focus on that is a good thing rather than having to feel like you need to sell everywhere and to everyone. A bit more focus on that end.
00:17:22 Chris: And then just making the product better. Part of that is just listening to customers. Of course, we have more and more customers, it gets more difficult over time, being able to filter out noise and the things that are really valuable.
00:17:32 Chris: And then also, as we build out the team, instill that also into the team to understand what is the really important stuff and the somewhat important and not important at all.
00:17:40 Chris: We want to, of course, be also at the forefront of AI and being able to apply that and invest in both the traditional part of the platform, making sure that the core processes and the core systems, payroll calculation, that just works.
00:17:53 Chris: But then also adding this new type of AI based query on top of that for ease of access and ease of use. Then also just to automate some of the processes that aren’t just the output of a formula, but for interpreting a performance review based on peer feedback from 10,000 responses.
00:18:10 Chris: HR folks don’t have that time to read through that. So using that where AI really is placed to help better than maybe some algorithm that you would have had to use in the past, identifying those use cases where AI is really best placed and then embedding them in a smart way into the system.
00:18:25 Michael: Amazing. And to wrap up, I do have a few speed round questions to ask. I’ll start off with if you want to share a superpower that you have or something you’re known for.
00:18:36 Chris: I can zoom in to the lowest level of detail into a thousand levels. It’s also a weakness. I have problems going very broad, very quickly. So I think my superpower is more super narrow, super detailed, super deep.
00:18:47 Michael: Is there a book, newsletter, podcast, piece of media you’ve been enjoying recently?
00:18:52 Chris: There’s very few newsletters that I actually read. One maybe is Matt Lerner. That’s a great one. Then I have the JooBee’s newsletter. She’s an HR influencer in the space. I think those two.
00:19:02 Michael: It’s hard, even as an investor to focus and block out the noise of some things, but pick your sources that you really love. At least internally at Everywhere, we’re continuously tinkering and being exposed to new workflows. I’m just curious, have you discovered a productivity hack in this age where every day there seems to be a new platform rolled out?
00:19:20 Chris: As I mentioned, my superpower is zooming in on the things that are important. For me, the most important thing is filtering out the stuff that don’t matter. Structuring my inbox has been super important.
00:19:30 Chris: I have multiple email aliases, for example. Most of these sales databases, they guess the email based on your name. I have all those and they all go into a certain folder. That’s just one example so I can actually do the things that I need to do.
00:19:42 Chris: And of course I use Claude. We recently switched from ChatGPT to Claude. I’m not sure yet what’s better. But I leverage quite a lot for writing texts, but also some easy coding when I need to change something on the website and I don’t have an engineer right now that can help me.
00:19:54 Chris: Just being able to focus on the things that I really want to do rather than getting pulled into 15 different directions. I think it’s the case for most people. As a CEO, it holds the same.
00:20:02 Michael: That’s such a skill of identifying which platform or which product is going to be the most useful because there’s so much out there and so much information that’s being flooded into our inboxes. So it’s such a great skill to have. And so Chris, for our listeners, where can we find you?
00:20:16 Chris: On LinkedIn. If you want to reach out there, feel free to connect with me, Chris Priebe. There are not that many so you should find me there and send me an email. I’ll give you my real one now. It’s ckp@zelt.app, (not chris@zelt.app, straight to the bin). Probably Everywhere Ventures’ community as well. So you can drop me a message there as well.
00:20:34 Michael: Thank you so much, Chris. It was such a pleasure chatting and learning more about what you’ve built and accomplished in Zelt.
00:20:39 Chris: Thank you. It was great to be here.
00:20:42 Scott Hartley: Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today’s episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn more about Everywhere. We’re a first check pre-seed fund that does exactly that, invests everywhere. We’re a community of 500 founders and operators, and we’ve invested in over 250 companies around the globe. Find us at our website, everywhere.vc, on LinkedIn, and through our regular founder spotlights on Substack. Be sure to subscribe and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
Read more from Chris Priebe in Founders Everywhere.