Gunter Pfau sold Stuzo. Then he bought it back.

Gunter Pfau had just sold Stuzo in a deal valued at $190 million, and he already had another name on his mind. “Next, we want Wawa!” he said in March 2024. There are many ways to celebrate a transaction. Hunting for the next customer has the advantage of keeping the champagne bill in perspective.

The Philadelphia software company had become part of PAR Technology. Its business was helping convenience stores and fuel retailers turn occasional customers into more valuable regulars. For Pfau, the deal belonged to a much longer story of changing direction, finding partners and occasionally returning to a business he had already sold.

He founded Stuzo in 2007. It was acquired in 2010. He and the original management team bought it back in January 2013. A private equity partnership followed in 2021, then PAR in 2024. The familiar founder’s journey usually comes with an exit sign. Pfau’s had a revolving door.

A second chance, before the first company

Long before those transactions, his family left communist Romania and spent time in Austria as political refugees. He arrived in Philadelphia at 11. His education took its own detour: expulsion from Northeast High School, a GED, then Community College of Philadelphia. He graduated from the college in 2002 and went on to study finance and entrepreneurship at Temple.

He has credited the community college with giving him confidence to move forward. His initial ambition was to open a gym. “I never thought I’d end up in technology,” he recalled in 2015. The contrast is pleasing: the future software founder originally imagined a business where customers would put down their phones and pick up weights.

One classroom memory lasted particularly well. In a calculus course, Pfau spotted mistakes in the answers supplied by professor Jose Mason and challenged them. The lesson he carried away concerned authority as much as mathematics: being in charge does not make a person infallible. A correction can be a contribution.

An economics class also caught his attention. Reading the book and applying himself gave him a new sense of what he could manage. The recollections are modest in scale, which makes them useful. A career can change course in a classroom without anyone announcing that a career is changing course.

The family bet becomes a Facebook business

Stuzo’s first opportunity came with Facebook’s opening of its developer platform in 2007. Pfau and his colleagues began building for it, anticipating a change in how businesses connected with customers. Facebook paid Stuzo to create a promotions platform for advertisers and introduced the firm to some of them. The young company found itself working close to an expanding market.

Pfau described the initial financing as $60,000 in credit card cash advances and another $60,000 from his parents. For all the airy language that accompanies digital businesses, that beginning was concrete: borrowed money, family money and work that needed to become a business.

After the buyback, Stuzo explored mobile marketing through a separate development team. Its Mobile Engagement Gateway, MEG, was intended to let smaller businesses manage mobile marketing without hiring a programmer or designer. Pfau kept the established service business working while the new venture developed. An idea could have room to grow without requisitioning the entire company.

The unromantic appeal of another visit

By 2020, Stuzo’s work centered on a practical retail problem. Online shops could use purchase history to shape recommendations. Physical retailers needed better ways to bring that kind of relevance into their own customer relationships. Pfau’s company worked on personalized commerce and customer activation, with clients including Sunoco and Dave & Buster’s.

His explanation was refreshingly domestic. Someone might buy fuel weekly but stop for breakfast more often. Someone else might have no interest in coffee, however enthusiastically a retailer promoted it. The point was to understand the customer’s habits well enough to make the next offer relevant. A discount on something you do not want is a peculiarly tedious form of generosity.

“Customer loyalty is an outcome and not an input”

Gunter Pfau, 2020

That observation leaves the retailer with work to do. The product, price and service still have to justify a return visit. Software can help a business recognize preferences and act on them; the coffee must survive the encounter with the customer.

Buying the part that fits

Stuzo’s acquisition of Hatch brought another set of capabilities into its Open Commerce platform. Announced in June 2020, the deal had become official the previous October, according to Pfau. Hatch’s ten employees joined Stuzo, its Chicago office remained, and former Hatch chief executive Jake Kiser became Stuzo’s chief customer officer.

The transaction came during a period of expansion. From early 2019 to the announcement, Stuzo grew from about 40 employees to about 100. Pfau said the companies had similar cultures. Adding technology also meant adding people who would have to build things together after the transaction’s paperwork had lost its novelty.

His approach to investment had a sorting mechanism. Capabilities belonged in three groups: strategic, necessary to compete, or commodity. The strategic work deserved depth. Other needs might be met through partners. It is a less glamorous exercise than declaring every product feature indispensable, and considerably more helpful when somebody must allocate the budget.

He also connected the company’s financial discipline to a teenage lesson. At 15, his father gave him a credit card and expected him to get a job, manage money and pay his way. By 2020, Pfau was arguing for a business that could support customers over the long term, with services and expertise alongside its software.

Give the nerds a way to work together

Pfau made team chemistry an explicit part of running Stuzo. In a December 2021 conversation with consultant Tish Squillaro, he described making it a strategic priority. The emphasis was on understanding colleagues’ patterns of thought and behavior, recognizing their strengths and supporting the work they found harder.

There is a practical demand inside that language. People must know enough about one another to change how they collaborate. Declaring that everyone is talented is easy. Working out which person should handle which difficulty takes attention, and sometimes a surrender of managerial vanity.

He returned to the subject publicly in 2023, sharing a video about Stuzo’s approach and announcing a search for a director of team chemistry and performance. Giving the idea a dedicated job made it more substantial than a pleasant phrase at a company meeting. It required someone’s time.

Recognition came from outside the office, too. Community College of Philadelphia honored him with its Alumni Achievement Award in 2023. The former student whose academic route began with a GED had become someone his college wanted other people to meet.

When the team needed a safe address

In 2022, the employees behind Stuzo’s software became the focus of urgent, practical decisions. As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine intensified, Pfau and director of operations Julia Gurelya coordinated moves for roughly 100 Ukrainian colleagues. Gurelya was managing relocations while moving her own family away from danger.

By March 2, Pfau said about half the employees had temporarily moved with their families. Some had reached Poland; others were sharing or exchanging apartments as conditions changed. The effort involved a sequence of places, journeys and decisions, coordinated between the United States and Ukraine.

His own childhood as a refugee gave that work a personal connection. Yet the most telling details are logistical. A company’s care for its people acquired addresses and travel arrangements. Team chemistry had become the task of helping colleagues find somewhere safer to go.

A bigger partner, an unfinished customer list

The Longshore Capital Partners investment, announced in May 2021, backed Stuzo’s concentration on convenience and fuel retail. In an open letter, Pfau laid out plans for more products, additional people and expansion over time into adjacent everyday spending categories. Loyalty, payments and customer experience were being brought into a more unified business.

PAR’s acquisition announcement in March 2024 supplied a different measure of the distance traveled. The headline price was $190 million, structured as approximately $170 million in cash and $20 million in stock. PAR’s transaction materials described Stuzo with more than $40 million in annual recurring revenue as of October 2023. The figure measures the acquired business, rather than Pfau’s personal wealth.

At the announcement, all 215 employees were expected to remain, and Pfau’s planned focus covered strategic initiatives, acquisitions and product. Kiser was to lead PAR Stuzo. These were the terms of that particular transition: a larger owner, a continuing team and a founder moving away from the chief executive’s chair.

Pfau’s public interests also reach beyond the transaction. He enjoys cooking for friends, traveling with his wife and tending gardens and animals at their farm. Those details suit a career concerned with the quality of relationships. A meal, at least, offers a clear answer to whether people would like to come back.

His Wawa remark remains a useful closing image. After years of building, selling, returning and changing the company, he was talking about a prospective customer. The deal was large. The next conversation could still begin with coffee.