Podcast Junkies - Storytelling Interviews & Conversations with Podcasters Podcasting Passionately · Harry Duran

363: How Eytan Bensoussan Built NorthOne for Small Business Banking

·51 min·3 clips

North One was built around right-sizing bank accounts, cutting fees, and automating small-business money management.

1. Podcast Junkies episode 363 centers on Eitan Bensoussan and North One, with Harry Duran framing the conversation around small business banking and fintech. 2. Eitan Bensoussan is the CEO of North One and the host of This Week in Small Business, which matters because he speaks as both builder and interviewer. 3. The episode asks how a science student who avoided banking ended up building a company around small business financial pain points. 4. Eitan says he deliberately avoided finance and banking for a long time and was drawn instead to the challenge of difficult problems. 5. He says curiosity and an attraction to things that “don’t look possible” showed up early, including his childhood obsession with becoming a baseball player. 6. He describes tutoring in high school, first for about $20 an hour and later in group sessions where 15 people each paid $100 for a three-hour crash course. 7. Eitan says both grandfathers were small business owners and his father was an engineer who turned inventions into companies. 8. He also notes the “dark side of entrepreneurship,” including how hard it was for his father to manage the ledger and count every penny. 9. Eitan explains that he applied to Charlie Rose three times and was initially rejected because he was studying biochemistry and math. 10. He says he added media experience, a poli-sci minor, and a business minor before taking an overnight Greyhound to the interview and getting in. 11. He describes Charlie Rose as a place where a “small army of incredibly bright people” produced a 60-minute show. 12. Eitan says the research culture there involved hundreds of pages per guest and an almost “Wikipedia level” absorption of information. 13. He says his early podcast experiments taught him that surface-level questioning felt unsatisfying and that disagreement created the most interesting moments. 14. He describes building a mental engine that looks for points of disagreement so ideas can be reshaped instead of merely affirmed. 15. Eitan says McKinsey became an “applied human engineering” environment where he could use all the knowledge he had built up. 16. He says McKinsey taught him to work very hard, stress-test assumptions, and seek the “right answer” before worrying about emotions or politics. 17. He also says he learned that being kind and empathetic can coexist with being fast, demanding, and rigorous. 18. A doctor friend taught him the difference between empathy and compassion, which he uses to separate emotional understanding from the need to act. 19. The conversation has an interview style built around long-form reflection, with Harry Duran pressing on childhood, education, and company-building decisions. 20. Listeners who like entrepreneurship, fintech, and small-business operations will get the most from it, while people looking for light banter or short answers may not.

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