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 actually built something real.

In this episode, Leigh and Sam sit down with Didier Elzinga, co-founder of Culture Amp. Didier spent 13 years in Hollywood visual effects — working on Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and Superman, rising from sysadmin to CEO of Rising Sun Pictures by 26 — and then walked away from it all to build a SaaS company in, of all things, people and culture.

They go deep on the decisions that don't make the deck: splitting company equity four ways, the two failed pivots before employee engagement stuck, why Culture Amp refused to pay sales commission until $100M in revenue, and the hiring "heresies" Didier still swears by.

It's a candid conversation about the worst days too. What actually holds a team together: storytelling, conviction over correctness, and a leader's job to absorb fear rather than project it. They close by noting where AI is taking work now and the "imagination asymmetry" Didier thinks is the real gap for most companies.

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