Ben Perez

About

I build the operational DNA that helps startups scale: the people, culture, financial discipline, structures and systems that turn your ambition into consistent high-quality delivery.

Through my company, Catalyst Systems, I work with founders to build organisations that can grow across countries, functions and distributed teams. I’ve established legal entities, shaped organisational culture, built operating functions and led the resource and capital planning that supports growth, especially when you are working across borders.

I’m currently a fractional COO to the Livepeer Foundation, bringing together cross-border and virtual teams supporting the Livepeer GPU compute network and its video media agent. My background also includes global HR projects at TikTok and strategic workforce planning at EY.

My work connects business strategy to how the organisation actually runs: where capital and people are allocated, who owns decisions, how teams coordinate, and how progress is measured. I design the operating model, bring the people together and stay involved to lead execution.

Finance is part of that operating responsibility. I bring practical experience in treasury management, budgeting and resource planning, connecting cash visibility, payment controls and financial reporting to decisions about spending, hiring and growth. I help founders understand their commitments and direct resources towards the priorities that matter.

Through Catalyst Systems, I put those designs into operation with delivery across finance operations, payroll, legal entity arrangements and contract management. Our legal operations capability brings structure to contract review, approvals, obligations and coordination with external counsel. You work directly with me on priorities and leadership, with specialist delivery capacity built around the engagement. We deliver outcomes, not just advice.

At Livepeer, I created an AI-native operating system that turns organisational conversations and information into a connected knowledge graph. It supports the team’s decisions and outputs, then feeds new evidence back into the system to refine its understanding. I also built its risk and privacy policy, coaching intelligence and a new evidence-based approach to goals and performance. I can go into why all this is important more if we talk, but much of it is listed on my linkedin or our company blog which is all around operating intelligence: https://catalystsystems.com.au/blog

I’m most useful when a startup is looking to get a strong backbone or core established that can allow it to grow across borders, building distributed teams or start to lift an increasingly heavy dependency finding its way back to the founder to hold everything together.

I love to get my hands dirty. Tell me what you’re building and I’d love to see where I can help

Big wins

• EY: Built a strategic workforce planning model that scaled the Asia consulting business. We grew from about 50 people to 7,500 in my time there. We won awards for internal innovation and I joined the global Talent executive board for the Consulting practice.
• TikTok: Led global HR projects during rapid international growth, including architecture for HR Foundations, the Mission and Vision statements, and delivery leadership for the FUEL leadership programme. We grew TikTok by over 1000 people during that time.
• Livepeer Foundation: Created an AI-native operating system with a connected knowledge graph and an iterative feedback process supporting team decisions, work and outputs, alongside its risk and privacy policy.