Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz：以170亿美元以上估值融资超3亿美元

I feel pretty confident that, the same way we’ve been winning in the marketplace, we’ll win in the court of law. We just need to play it out.

I think I’m in constant wartime, sadly. September was our first $100 million revenue month, which is a very exciting milestone for the business. This round, these new investors, and the fact that our board has always been with us kind of show where we stand as a company with regard to this type of litigation.

Ready to go?

Alex, dude, it has been like 3 years. It’s been a while since we last sat down and chatted on the show. You’ve been actually working really hard instead of talking to podcasters like me. But thank you for agreeing to do this, man.

Well, thank you for having me. We actually did a stage together not too long ago, right? In Paris or something like that.

I was actually pissed about that. You know why? Because you were so good, and we didn’t have it recorded. I actually wanted to use it for a podcast, and the team were like, “No, this wasn’t a podcast session, Harry.” I’m like, “Damn it, we missed a chance to put some great ads in. Fuck that.”

I’m very excited to do this with you. It’s been a while, and thank you for being a great friend and amazing.

Dude, you’ve got some exciting news, so I’m going to start with the exciting news. What’s the exciting news that we’ve got today?

It’s actually been a while since we’ve raised primary money. We did a small round, I think, in 2023, but since then, the last time we raised significant primary capital was in 2021.

The big news for us is that we’re going to announce a round of over $300 million at a valuation of more than $17 billion. It’s going to be a big deal for us, and we’re super excited to share that with the rest of the world and with the company, because you’re getting this a bit early.

Dude, I’m thrilled and honored. I was so touched when you said we could do this. Over $300 million at a valuation of more than $17 billion—who’s doing the round, dude?

I’m genuinely so excited about our investors. It’s co-led by 3 investors. The first one is Ribbit Capital, which is our new investor. It’s actually the first time they’ve invested in Deel. Maybe we’ll talk about this later, but I’ve loved the team there. I’ve been trying to get them to invest in Deel since our Series A, I think.

The round is also being co-led by our amazing, long-standing investors Andreessen Horowitz and Coatue. All 3 of them are co-leading this round.

I love Ribbit. Clearly, Nick and Micky are some of my favorites. They’re 3 great investors. Massive congrats, dude. Why was now the time to do it?

It’s quite interesting because Deel has been a profitable company for 3 years now. We’ve been generating cash, which is always a great thing to do, and we haven’t needed investment for quite a long time.

There are a couple of things that were very critical for us. First, we’ve been pretty aggressive on the M&A front. I think we’ve done about 13 acquisitions, which really helped us grow very fast, build new products, bring amazing founders in, and take over a big part of the global payroll market share.

Bringing in fresh capital and resetting the valuation is also important to the actual value of the company. The second part is that, as I was telling you, I think Micky and Nick are some of the best investors in the world, and I wanted them involved in the business for a very long time. Them wanting to invest alongside the Coatue team and the a16z team was a great opportunity, and it just made sense to go for it when they came with the offer.

Dude, I’d be in trouble from the Twittersphere if I didn’t progress this conversation and say there was obviously a lot of publicity around the Rippling story. What’s the latest with the long-standing litigation with Rippling?

Obviously, I can’t talk about ongoing litigation. I think it’s unfortunate that the way they’re trying to compete is through media, headlines, and things like that.

The thing that really matters is how the business has been growing. We’re also going to announce that September was our first $100 million revenue month, which is a very exciting milestone for the business.

I think this round, these new investors, and the fact that our board has always been with us kind of show where we stand as a company with regard to this type of litigation. We’re looking forward to building for our customers and focusing on delivering.

It’s so hard, dude, because I just have questions that come up mid-conversation, and I’m like, “Ah, they’re going to get in trouble for this.”

Do you ever feel like you are chastised for not being a Valley company? What I mean by that is that Rippling has the Silicon Valley Illuminati around them. In the same way, for me, there are some media companies—which I’m not going to name because they’ll hate me for it—but they just have Silicon Valley, the Collisons, and Y Combinator around them, which anoint them.

I feel chastised for not being there and not being in those circles. Do you feel like there’s a Rippling inner circle and Deel is outside of it?

I can’t really comment on Rippling. I would say that we’re kind of in the middle. I’m not a Silicon Valley-based founder, but we do have Y Combinator as an investor. They were one of our early backers.

There are advantages to being in the Valley. Seeing a lot of people and having them understand the business very thoroughly is very important.

A good example for us is looking at Deel from outside of the Valley. A lot of people were looking at us thinking, “They’re the hero until they become the villain, and then it’s back to the hero story.” People were thinking, “They’re growing so fast. It’s so amazing. How are they growing so fast?”

If you’re not in the Valley and people don’t understand you, they can have a lot of questions. If you’re not there to answer them or you’re not part of the side conversations, it’s a bit harder.

Not that it matters, to be honest, because it hasn’t mattered to us. I actually think there are pros and cons to it. I’m not 100% sure how I feel about it, but the fact that we haven’t raised money since 2021—if you don’t really count 2023—means that I didn’t spend a lot of time with investors. No one actually knew our numbers apart from our shareholders.

We’ve been buying every single secondary on the market every time we could. A lot of people were looking at us announcing $1 billion in ARR and thinking, “What’s going on there? We don’t really understand it.”

Maybe that would have been a good learning opportunity: spending more time with investors on my side so they really understood how fast we were growing and why we were growing, which is the most important part.

I see it with one of our companies as well, Airwallex, which is an incredible business. I love Jack, too. It’s one of the best businesses that I don’t think people know enough about, but because it’s not in the Valley, I think it’s a mix.

As a founder, you want to be super focused on your business. But if you look at Jack’s growth, it’s outstanding. You’re thinking, “Okay, it’s an Australian founder who’s not based in the Valley. How is this business growing so fast when some similar businesses in the U.S. aren’t growing as fast?”

I think there’s value in spending time educating investors who may be your investors of tomorrow, especially if you eventually go public. I’d say that was maybe a small mistake we made: the fact that we’ve been profitable kind of made us not go out in the market as much.

Can I ask you, in terms of lessons, if we’re honest, what have you learned about playing offense versus defense when going through this public dispute as a CEO?

Again, I didn’t pay too much attention to it because I know where we stand. I know the facts, and having our board behind us has been really helpful.

It’s always interesting—the wartime versus peacetime CEO concept as well. Funnily enough, Ben Horowitz is a board member of mine, and I spend a lot of time with him, so it’s always amazing to learn from him.

There are moments when you need to understand where you’re strong and where you’re not strong: which fields you play in, when you play your hands, and how you do it.

We took an approach that really worked for us, which was to focus on what we know how to do best, focus on navigating the stories in the places that are important for us, and tell our truth. I think that was the best thing to do.

There’s still a lot of work to be done, to be very honest with you. I feel pretty confident that, the same way we’ve been winning in the marketplace, we’ll win in the court of law. We just need to play it out.

I do think one interesting thing, which I was telling you about, is that I’ve learned a lot about the media as well. I’ve never really looked at it from this perspective, but you see these big tech journals making up stories for clicks.

When I was a bit younger, or maybe an early-stage founder, our dream was to get into some of those articles. When you see the things they can publish with unnamed sources that are completely false, with no retractions and things like that, you start thinking that, in many ways, there’s something fundamentally broken about the media. I’m looking forward to someone solving that problem, really.

Did you flee to Dubai?

No. I'm very happy living in Tel Aviv, and I've been living here for the last 5 years. You can come visit.

You said you don't really think about it. Do you really not? And you said you go through hero, villain, hero. When you're the villain, do you really not? It hurts me when I have [?] about me, and it's nothing compared to what you've got.

No, of course. The person who gets a bit more pissed is maybe my wife, because she reads some of the stories and she's like, “I know that's not true. I know that's not true,” which is kind of funny. On my side, I try my best not to think about it, right?

That's because there are so many things happening in the business. Our customers give us their trust, and they understand where we're going. I think a lot of the facts also make it a lot easier to explain many of the things that are being said and are not true, so I don't think about it.

I definitely don't think about it as much as maybe in March, when I had to deal with the early stage of the litigation. By now, it's old school, old news for us, until we really can beat it in a court of law. I think I'm being rigorous enough where I try to focus on my customers, because that's the only way, right?

If anything, I think it's proven to be the right way of dealing with it. We've been able to really grow in the last 2 quarters, which actually shows an amazing resilience of the business as well.

I think you actually mastered a comms strategy in a very different world. I'm sure it was deliberate and thought through, but when you think about the cadence of comms today, when OpenAI gets a $100 billion investment from Nvidia, it's super interesting for 30 minutes, and then it's like, “What next?”

The speed of news cycles is so fast. The best way to get over something is to say nothing. The worst thing to do is to start a response, and then it becomes something. That's a desperately bad mistake.

Yeah, it is difficult dealing with this in general. I think my stance is, when I feel right in my shoes and I know what I'm doing and where we're going, there's no point in trying to fight useless battles. Let's win in the court of law and put this behind us.

I don't know if you saw, but we had a similar lawsuit in January. We believe it came from a similar company, and putting that to bed was the best way of showing that we know what we're doing and we're doing great.

I spoke to many of your ambassadors before. Yasmine was honestly super lovely, because I know most of them already. But Yasmine and Nish, and many more, all said that you're the most hands-on CEO they work with.

Dude, I introduced you to a Project Europe company. For context, this is like 2 or 3 teenagers building an amazing business, and I'm like, “Who should I introduce them to on your team?” And you're like, “Me.” And I'm like, “No, no, this is like a junior AE's job.” No disrespect to junior AEs, but you're the only CEO who would be that hands-on.

They said you're the most hands-on CEO they work with. How do you respond when you think about how hands-on you are and your approach?

I think being hands-on is very critical for the business as you grow. The worst mistake you can make as the company scales is to be too far away from the business to really know what the problems are.

I think this is a cultural point for Deel. Top-down, all of my leaders are hands-on. If my leaders are hands-on, middle management is hands-on, and ICs see it the exact same way. Culturally, it's always been very important for us as a business and for me, and it really helped me navigate different paths of growth, new products, or even spotting gaps in the organization.

I think every company, once it gets to more than 50 or 100 people, starts having flaws in its design and organization in terms of response time and how things are happening. If you're 10,000 feet above, looking down at the organization and hoping to figure out what's wrong, it just doesn't really work.

Being seen by our customers and our investors also helps. From my customers, I get people pinging me directly about, “Hey, I have a problem with this,” and so on. That really does help me have a better view of what's wrong in the organization on an everyday basis.

When you're growing at the pace where we are—billions in our profitable business, acquisitions, 7,000 people around the world today—it's very easy to lose sight of what's going on if you're not really hands-on and focused.

Dude, how many direct reports do you have, speaking of being hands-on?

Not that many. I'm not Jensen at all. I have 20 or a little over 20.

The thing is, my direct reports are really strong, so I've never had one-on-ones with them. I've never truly had performance reviews with them. I can give them continuous feedback all the time, and we talk all the time. We work all the time.

I think that is a much better setup from a hierarchy perspective than the traditional, “I only have a few reports and I talk to them on a day-to-day, one-on-one cadence every week,” or whatever that is.

If you don't have a one-on-one cadence every week, how do you think about building that continuous information flow, especially when you're not in the office? How do you have that tight feedback loop together?

I speak to them all the time. Literally, if you take any of my reports, they get messages from me or they send me messages every day.

My job, the way I view my job, is that I'm here to enable. What's broken? What's not working? Why is it not working? What can I do to make it better for you? Is it resources? Is it prioritization? Is it reorging?

My job is to look at the different parts of the organization and be present for you to be your best self and do your best work. Being hands-on with them in the problems they see every day really enables me to do that.

996 and hustle culture are more pronounced than ever before. You said something about that work ethic and hunger. How do you feel about the 996 obsession today?

I wish I worked a 996. I think I work a little harder than that personally, and I think most of my leadership does too, but I just don't think it works at scale, really.

There are moments in the company where you need to push hard, and there are moments where things are a bit more in control. I actually like to break this down by different organizations. Not everybody needs to be going at 1,000 miles per hour all the time.

Some parts of the organization, at this very specific moment, need to. As long as you're in control and you're pushing in the right places at the right time, you're not going to burn through amazing talent.

Being hands-on is very helpful there. When you're able to say, “Okay, you know what? That product is not good enough. Open the war room. Everybody is going to work more than 996 for a couple of weeks to get it ready,” that makes a lot of sense to me.

If you're just pushing the pedal all the time, you're not going to do yourself a favor, and your team is just not going to work out.

Does being rich help you be a better leader?

I've done fewer secondaries than you think, actually.

But I think being rich as an ambassador makes you a better ambassador. You see upside, not downside. You're able to align more with founders because your career is not on the line. You've already got enough money, so it's fine. And you're much more level.

I'm torn on this. I do think—and I'm not going to name anyone—that a lot of my friends who have built amazing businesses go through this awkward phase where they've made enough money not to work as much anymore.

A lot of things happen in their lives because they get pulled by so many different external topics that want their attention. The business starts stagnating a little bit because I do think founders create a lot of momentum within an organization until they actually get pulled back, when they see the business is not growing anymore and they start having maybe some troubles with their board and things like that.

I actually do think it has a form of a negative impact if you're not thoughtful about how you're going to manage this at scale and how it's going to impact your day-to-day work.

How does it have a negative impact?

It's just very pragmatic. If you never had money and you suddenly have a lot of money in your bank account, and you start spending it on a lot of different things, your mind is just somewhere else.

Yeah, but I would say that's just a B-tier founder, and I'm being direct with that.

No. Okay, no, no, it's your founders as well. I've seen it happen with amazing founders. It's easy to get lost.

Eventually, you get a big reminder of why you're here and get your ass kicked, because no matter how much money they've made, it can be a lot of money, but it's not as much as the potential money they could make over time. There are a lot of people eventually on your cap table who are here to remind you that they've trusted you with a lot of money and they want you to deliver on the promises you have.

I'm pretty fair, again. If you're very thoughtful about what it means to you, how you're going to manage this, and how it's going to affect your life over time, then it's fine, because it is going to affect your life.

I've seen that trap happen to a few of my friends, but thankfully they've turned it around big time.

Did you ever get high on your own supply? We mentioned both being young, and I was a little bit younger than you.

I definitely got high on my own supply at 21 or 22, thinking I was the shit, maybe. I think there’s a moment where you’re hot shit, everybody wants to invest, and you’re getting term sheets left and right, where you start being inconsiderate. But I’ve gone through enough cycles now, although it hasn’t been exactly a long time, that I actually regret not having been slightly nicer or more considerate than I was during some of those times. I see it with some of my friends or some people who are raising crazy rounds right now, where my take is that at some point, everything that goes up must go down.

At that point in time, you start thinking, “Yeah, maybe I shouldn’t have done this or that,” right? I don’t think I was that intense about this. I’m sure some people might think I was. If I was, it was never intentional, so I’m sorry. But I do think that, over time, it happens to founders who build companies that have significant traction in a short amount of time.

Dude, what’s the craziest VC story you have of term sheets flying to see you? You were and are one of the hottest companies in the world, but also during the—

Still hot, thank you.

Yeah, just scaled. What’s one of the craziest stories?

I have some crazy stories that are not good stories, so I can’t really share those. One of our investors at our Series A called me about COVID and told me, “You guys need to fire everyone and stop doing whatever you’re doing, because COVID is going to kill the company.” I answered them, “No, we’re doing okay. We’re actually going to raise a Series A.”

Then I got back-channel messages saying, “Yeah, the guy thinks you’re a carpet seller. He thinks that you’re bullshitting your way through your Series A and that nothing is going to happen.” Two weeks later, I went back with a term sheet from Andreessen Horowitz and told them, “Look, this is my Series A, but you weren’t very nice to me, so you’re not getting your pro rata.” That was a funny story, for sure.

I would say, look, if you wanted a crazy story, we did raise $700 million from my living room in Tel Aviv, on Zoom, without meeting any of our investors.

What? Well, tell me this story. When was that?

You mean every single round we raised was during COVID: 2020, 2021, and 2022. I was in Tel Aviv, so I raised most of the capital we had at the company without meeting our investors. Actually, you know what? The Ribbit guy flew in to see me, and I flew—we kind of met halfway in a country—and that was the first time I ever had a closing dinner in my life.

No way. Did you not want that? Before I make an investment, rule number one from my 2021 mistakes is that I will not invest unless I meet a founder in person. It just led to bad investment decisions. So much is learned from me seeing you. Dude, I love you as a person. When I see you, I feel your energy and your charisma. You need to be in person.

Yeah, but I agree with you 100%. In 2020 and 2021, I couldn’t be in person, and that’s when we raised most of our money. We didn’t do any big fundraise until this one, right? So that was my experience: fundraising without actually meeting people.

Dude, do you think pro rata should be an actual right?

No, I think pro rata should be earned.

Do you advise founders to always raise at the highest price?

No, because I think there’s a very valuable option, and I think that the higher you are, the harder it is to get done. It depends what you want in life, and it depends how big your business is actually going to be. Trying to go for the home run, I’m very glad I did. In terms of the ambition, we still have a lot of work to do, but I’m very glad that we went for the billion-dollar valuation and all of those things.

It could have backfired as well. I think that was much more naive on my part, which worked out okay. But I do think there’s some optimization where you need to think about the future of the company, and the highest valuation does not always mean the best outcome for the business and the people.

Do you think venture investors actually add value?

I think Andreessen Horowitz has been adding tremendous value, and I’m not saying that just because they helped me find board members. They helped me place amazing people in the business. I think General Catalyst—

Who’s been the best?

Andreessen has been top tier by far, and they’ve always been super supportive through rainbows and unicorns, all the way to shitstorms. They stood by us like no investor ever did. I think, in a journey, if you can get investors who are value-aligned with you and who truly care about the business, not just the return, then you can make good friends that you can like and trust. It’s a long and tough journey.

The hard thing is that, dude, today—and this is fundraising on the ground in venture today—founders run a more transactional process than ever. I meet you today, and you say, “Hey, Harry, the round’s moving fast. I need a decision by Friday.” It’s Wednesday—

It means you didn’t spend time with me before. You’re coming in at the last minute to jump on a round that’s already more or less done.

No, because they’ve been told by their prior-round investors, “Do not take an investor meeting until you’re fundraising. Don’t build relationships.”

Yeah, that’s the thing. No, that’s a mistake. I think building a relationship with great people is helpful, and I think there are a lot of ways for founders to make those meetings useful. For example, I would have never taken a meeting with an investor to build up the relationship if the outcome of that meeting wouldn’t be, for example, 2 or 3 business introductions to potential customers, right? So there’s value for you, there’s value for me. If I can get a bit more value, it’s even better.

Do you share numbers in those meetings?

I share high-level numbers. Why not? Most of your numbers are available if someone really wants to figure them out, right? It doesn’t truly matter. I don’t believe in hiding numbers.

The way I think about venture capital transactions is that, sure, very early on, they’re giving you money to try to build something, knowing it’s going to fail. But as you grow as a company, and there’s a brighter future and a clearer vision of where it’s going, I see this much more as a transaction where you’re selling them a part of your business in exchange for them bringing you value, which goes beyond money.

Do you know what Micky taught me? He said, “Harry, you’ve never won or lost. This is an infinite game. Remember that.” It was especially about relationships and the value of long-term relationships, and not being here for the quick win or getting something—

I’m not getting into the Yoda advice from Micky just yet, but I’m excited about it.

Dude, it was fucking great. How important is investor brand? You have big brands behind you now, with Andreessen Horowitz, Ribbit Capital, and Coatue. Does investor brand really make a difference?

I think so. I think if you want to assemble the best team in the world, you’re going to have the best investors in the world. In many different ways, they can help you attract talent, they can help you attract more capital, and they can help you navigate complex situations that they’ve lived through before, right?

Every time I talk to Ben, it’s crazy—the amount of knowledge that he has. It’s crazy, the amount of pattern matching that he has in terms of how the—

What’s your Yoda knowledge from Ben? I gave you mine from Micky. Come on.

Oof. Yoda knowledge. I hope he doesn’t get mad at me for saying this one. In his mind, most chief marketing officers are not good. The truth is, I actually agree with him. For a while, I was looking for a CMO with this experience, that experience, and that experience.

What I realized is that the best CMOs I’ve encountered over the last few years are the ones who are able to think much more from first principles, understand what’s going on, and go really deep into the data instead of being super superficial. You don’t usually get that from a traditional CMO background. So the contrarian stance that he and I have developed is that your CMO should be an engineer.

Do you know what’s so funny? The best CMO in the world to me is Alex Schultz from Meta. He’s also the VP of Analytics at Meta. He has an engineering mind, and he’s a physicist, but he’s also incredibly creative. He’s this unicorn: an artist, visionary, and creative with an engineer’s analytical growth engine.

That’s not the classic CMO background. There are amazing people in brand and amazing people in lots of different areas. I think if you want to efficiently drive marketing strategy at a high-intent growth company, you’ve got to have much more of an engineering background.

I was sitting with the CMO of Wiz, who is, I think, one of the strongest CMOs I’ve met in a long time. You should probably interview her. She’s Assaf’s magic weapon.

I’m writing it down now. Yes.

The way she thought through some things that are just accepted in marketing was incredible. “We’re spending X amount of money on paid ads, and that’s returning X.” She took over the role, went back, and said, “Okay, that’s a lot of money. Let’s go back. Let’s understand. Let’s deeply understand how this works.”

I think being able to cut spend by half while increasing the number of leads by half, just by going really deep into understanding the problem.

Only people who care about truly understanding how the system works deeply can get it done. That's what I found to be the right people for all roles, but specifically for marketing, given how much money goes there. Insane amounts of money. It's the hardest thing.

This is an age-old statement: 50% of my marketing is spent very efficiently, and 50% is totally wasted. I just have no idea which is which.

You know, 50% for me is a lot of money, right? So I actually want to make sure I'm optimized on this. Yeah, don't be so tight, dude. Listen, Revolut—I interviewed Nik, and he said the biggest mindset change he's had is in the value of brand marketing. Do you think brand marketing is as valuable as people say it is?

Yes, and this is new to me. By the way, Nik is my favorite founder, probably the person I look up to the most in many different ways. He knows that, so it's aligned. Yes, 1,000%, but not before.

When I look at Deel and growth over the next few years, the only way for us to be what I think we can be—which is a $100 billion-plus company that truly changes how HR and payroll are perceived and really disrupts this whole market—is for the brand to be aligned and for the brand to be much more known, right? That didn't actually matter to me 2 or 3 years ago, but today, when I see the path to get to the numbers we want, which is not insane, by the way, what I love to tell investors is, “Okay, today we have—”

Have you done any consumer deals, or are you anti-consumer?

No, I've done consumer deals.

Okay. What would you say if I were a company coming to you and telling you, “Today, we have 1.5 million people getting paid on Deel. We're going to get this to 10 million people”? Would you think that's crazy?

No.

Okay. So, 10 million people, given that today we're over $1 billion in ARR, would mean quite a bit more revenue, right? Basically, you need to get to $10 billion in ARR to be the $100 billion company you want to be.

You can also push that even further. Again, consumer investors: if I were telling you that we would do payroll for 100 million people over the next few years, it's not that crazy.

Well, it's quite crazy. That's actually harder to believe. When you look at TAM and when you look at—

You mean? Everyone needs payroll. Every single person in the world gets payrolled, almost, right? Maybe not every single person in the world, but most people in the world get payrolled, right?

I mean, your TAM isn't every single worker in the world.

Well, yes and no. I don't think it works for all parts of all companies, one. It doesn't work for all geographies, two.

You're not working in Japanese agriculture, my friend. You're not working—

We do payroll for oil and gas, for agriculture companies, for airlines. You're wrong. We do payroll for a lot of people.

And then you actually look at assumptions on market take. There's always going to be—

Okay, let's do this. In 5 years' time, what does the market map look like? Is there one winner who gets 80%, or is this a 25/25/25/25?

It depends how much I spend on brand awareness.

No, really?

No, no, it doesn't. I think we can be very aggressively winning most of the market. I actually think the gap between 10 million and 100 million over the next 5 to 10 years is not that big if the brand is known and if we build infrastructure that really changes—

Where would you most like to spend on brand marketing that you haven't yet? Do you want to do an F1 car?

We'll do some of those, actually, so you'll see some of them coming. They're already in the works.

The thing about brand marketing is that I don't know the subject well enough. You're going to have to give me a little bit of time to get educated in terms of how this works properly, and we'll probably make a bunch of mistakes in the meantime, but we're going to try really hard.

I do think there's value in F1, in football, in golf, and things like that. For us, it's an interesting thing to navigate because I want to be able to make both sides of the equation happy. If we own B2B assets that we can bring customers to at events and things like that, it's great for investing in our customers and getting them excited about the company. But at the same time, if I can get the end users and the funds excited, I think there's a long-term value in the brand here as well.

Where would you most like to cut spend that you haven't cut spend or can't cut spend?

At Deel, I would love to cut spend on the pure paid marketing side. I think that'd be cool, right? I think that comes from brand awareness. The bigger your brand, the less you need to pay for leads, so that's very aligned with where we want to go.

Obviously, Deel is a very operations-heavy business because we have maybe a couple of thousand people in operations around the world. Over time, with AI and a lot of the infrastructure we're building, we'll be able to have the best performers in the business and reshuffle that a little bit.

Where has AI impacted Deel most? We spoke before about the future. When you look forward, where do you think AI will impact Deel most, function-wise?

Pure operations, right? Automating through agents tasks 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 that are being done manually today until they're fully automated through tech. Being able to bring in a Manus AI-type of software would have a huge, game-changing impact for us.

Do you use Manus today?

We use a competitor to them until one of them becomes good enough for our solution. But I really like the Manus guys, so I think they might be it. They're not good enough today.

No, because it's so early. Do you have AI customer-service tools?

Yeah, we built a lot of AI stuff. One super-interesting thing at Deel that has probably been the best investment we've made at the company is that we built our own knowledge base.

Two or 3 years ago, I was talking to one of my board members and telling them how we have this very unique knowledge: global employment, global benefits, global payroll—a very detailed mini-encyclopedia at Deel, with 20,000 articles and 70,000 different data points changing every year. I was talking to my board member, who was keeping this in Google Docs and Notion, and I said, “I think this is going to be one of the biggest things at Deel. If we can actually know our knowledge and own it, it's going to make such a big difference in how we operate.”

I was jamming at night with Sebastian from Klarna, who is thinking about AI 24/7 and is probably one of the sharpest minds in terms of integrating AI into your business. I said, “Sebastian, I need to do something about this.” He came to me and said, “I'm actually building our own knowledge base inside Wiki.js internally, and it's working really well.” I was like, “That's actually brilliant,” because you can build parameters, build your own infrastructure, and then layer AI on top of your own data. You're in full control, and there is no hallucination. You actually own the data itself.

We did that over the last 2 years, and it's probably one of the best investments we could ever have made. Every single time you come and talk to us, we're able to get the right data almost straight away about a very specific use case we're talking about, which is impossible for most other people to get.

What have you not invested in internally that, with the benefit of hindsight, you would have liked to have done?

I think you learn lessons from mistakes. We underinvested in our internal tools and processes.

I told you I look up to Nik a lot. Nik's mantra is, “Build everything.” If you own everything, you do everything well. I don't know if you know, but Revolut builds everything. I think he's right. In many ways, software—a lot of SaaS—is not tailored enough to the different applications that we want to build, and owning most of the software makes a significant difference in many different places.

Let me give you a very small project that we're very excited about—a strong example. Over the last year, we built our own Jira-like product internally, basically for ticket management at scale. Being able to route the right tickets to the right person is critical. Let's say you have a problem with your customer: you want to talk to payroll, HR, finance, or whatever it is. Being able to write your own tickets is very critical, right? No software was really agile enough to be able to do this.

What we're launching internally this week is the ability for a salesperson, a CSM, or someone in whatever role within the company to type in their problem and, with AI, automatically create the right ticket, automatically route it to the right person, and cut resolution time by 90%.

That only comes from being able to build a lot of your internal infrastructure. It's the dumbest thing to do when you're small, but it's the smartest thing to do as you scale. The moment at which we should have started should have been much earlier, because once we knew we were on the path—we knew where we were going—we could start making longer investments and longer bets. We should have started transitioning a little bit earlier.

What is the sign that you should transition to building your own?

I think a couple hundred percent year-on-year growth plus profitability is a good sign.

When we started, here's another example: building your own payroll engine, like I was geeking to you about earlier, is a very bold move. It's something that makes you go, “Why would you do this?” PayFit is a unicorn in France just doing payroll in France. Gusto is a decacorn in the US just doing payroll in the US. So, building our own internal infrastructure from the ground up with the ambition of rolling out to 100-plus countries is something that most people would look at and go, “You're a little crazy.”

And that's true. It's a very crazy play, actually. But when you're 4 years into the business, you're profitable, and you're on a path to grow really fast, you have some decisions to make. How big of a company do you really want to build? Can you make a lot of those long-term plays that you think are going to be significant for the value of the company and for your customers?

That's where we got to a place where we were like, “Okay, do we want to be an acquisition outcome with a great $1-to-$3-billion outcome, or do we want to actually own the rails, be as close to the metal as possible, in a way that no one has ever done before?” I think you can only start making those plays when you're truly profitable and truly growing at the pace where it's okay to take a couple of hundred people and build the infrastructure that's going to serve you tomorrow.

I think my biggest takeaway from Nik Storonsky is how he treats Revolut, in some ways, like an incubation unit for new product testing. He has 26 or 27 new product bets where he gives people $2 million a year and then really measures cadence and how they progress. Are you there yet?

I'm not there yet. I think, for me, what's most important is that we've gone through an interesting phase at the company today. We've gone from having 2 amazing products to having 10. For me, the most important thing is making that system work amazingly well together.

I'm not really looking to launch 10 new products next year. That's not really my thing. It's more about how we give the best end-to-end HR and payroll experience to our customers. Then, when I get to a place where I'm like, “Okay, we've kind of killed the market in the same way we did with our global payroll or EOR,” that's when we might make more new bets.

How do you do sales teams there? When you have 10 products, you think verticalization is great: they can really know the product and really know the problem. But then it's really hard to do the cross-sell well and sell a suite. What's the winning solution?

Here's an interesting data point for you. I know you love data. 60% of our revenue actually comes from cross-sell today. Cross-selling is a big part of what we do—expansion and cross-selling for customers. We do well when they want to open new countries or they just hire more people and things like that.

The way we've done this is pretty similar to a couple of other big organizations, like Oracle and others, but it works pretty well for us. We basically have what we call our core salespeople. They sell the products that we feel are fully mastered inside the company. From an enablement perspective, from an experience perspective, and from an end-to-end perspective, we feel like we're in full control.

Our core AEs will quickly ramp up and quickly become the best in the market at selling these products. Then we have what we call overlay teams. It's like our IT business. We acquired Hofy, for example, a company you invested in, which is doing amazing for us. It's growing almost 100% year-on-year. It's very specialized, and we're building a lot of IT products.

You have an overlay team that's brought in by the core AE team when a product is interesting for the customer. At the same time, it's a standalone land product. You can actually have leads that are only interested in that product, and they will be the ones selling it before moving into a core AE. We do this across all the different products—immigration, global payroll, and some of those other products.

An interesting thing is that, over time, some of your products become material enough in your organization, and your data and knowledge become material enough, that you can bring some of those products into the core team. That's our holy grail: for things to be so smooth that I can bring one of those products into the core team rather than having overlay AEs on that front.

Totally get you. Can I ask you, when you think about building out the sales team, what's been the biggest lesson for you in how you've done it successfully? It's a freaking hard part to scale.

One thing I always tell early-stage founders is that we did this really well, and it really helped us. If you think about Deel's revenue split today, 50% comes from the US, a little over 35% comes from Europe, and the rest comes from the rest of the world. We're growing in all parts of the business.

One move we made pretty early on was to hire salespeople in different geographies, just to understand the market. Instead of having a lot of salespeople in one country, hiring a few salespeople in other countries and saying, “Go and figure it out,” was really helpful for us. It helped us ramp up across all markets really fast and develop a strong understanding of what was and wasn't going to work, and how we should reshape our strategy.

For example, we launched Japan 2 years into the business, and it didn't work for the first year and a half. Eventually, we changed the country lead with all of the learnings from the first one, and now it's doing really well.

All of this happens in parallel, while a lot of people are saying, “It's going to defocus you. You shouldn't be doing that.” I'm like, “Hire salespeople. See if he sells or if she sells. If they do, amazing—you can ramp up and hire more of them. If they don't, it's fine. You let them go and change them.”

I get you, but how do you think about defocusing?

I don't think having one person running around when you're 10 or 20 people, trying to sell something, is defocusing. The only thing that can be defocusing is if they come and start telling you, “For Brazil, I need this specific thing. For this country, I need that.” Here you just say, “No. Sell what you have.”

I really don't think having salespeople in different places is defocusing. That really helped us move very fast in shaping our go-to-market.

Listen, it clearly worked. This is a hilarious debate because I know nothing and you know everything, having lived it. But I don't agree. If it works, they need more time and more resources. If it doesn't, you need to do something about it. So, it does objectively defocus you.

I think of this with our media companies today. We could do new shows. We could do different types of shows. We could do politics, consumer, fashion, and food. We can defocus what we do.

When it comes to sales, I don't think there is any defocus, because if they sell, it works. If it works, you'll be the happiest person in the world to give them more resources. If it doesn't work, it's okay. You tried.

You said 50% US, 35% Europe, and 15% the rest of the world.

Yeah, maybe it's 30% Europe, but it's in that ballpark.

Kind of ballpark, yeah. We'll circle back. When you're at a $100 billion market cap and $10 billion in revenue, what are those numbers then?

I think they'll be more or less the same.

More or less?

It hasn't changed from $1 million ARR to this stage, so I don't think it will change.

That's fascinating. You mentioned Hofy. One really interesting element is 13 acquisitions in 6 years. It's a lot. All of your board members told me I have to touch on this. They're really successful, which is also a surprise.

They're really successful, but we've made the most of them. Let's put it that way. Hofy is really successful.

Hofy is very successful. This is why you backed them in the first place.

Yeah, I actually think it can be a $10 billion company. I think what we do with acquisitions is we have quite an interesting playbook. I think that's what most of the investors were mentioning to you.

What we do is 2 types of acquisitions. We either do acquisitions that are core to our market, and then we, in a way, buy the team, buy the revenue, bring them in-house, and rip and replace their infrastructure with ours pretty fast. We're pretty good at this, actually.

Or we buy smaller companies that are in adjacent domains that we want to get into. What we usually do is we don't try to patch things together. We take the founders and rebuild the full infrastructure from the ground up.

The way we do this is interesting because it really worked for us. In theory, most salespeople take 9 months to a year to become comfortable selling a product. In that process, you're going to have a couple of early adopters, who are actually the best people in your organization. They're willing to try to sell something new because they're curious and they want to.

What happens with acquisitions, and the way we operate, is that we basically bring in the product and rebuild all of the front end inside Deel while connecting it to the back end of the current company. That happens in 2 months.

We can basically launch the product we've just acquired in the space of 2 months, and then put it in the hands of our sales organization so they can start learning how to sell it.

In parallel, we're rebuilding the full back end of the product inside Deel natively. Depending on how complex the product is, it takes us 3 to 12 months to rebuild the full back end and migrate all the customers and everything else in parallel.

At the same time, your sales organization starts selling the product. The early adopters see Deel IT and start selling it. It doesn't work as well sometimes, and it takes time to ramp up and fix bugs. They hate you for having sold this, but over time, you learn so much that you can quickly close the gap and build the best product really fast.

When the organization decides that it's ready, which is usually 9 months later, you can start ramping it up and selling it much more aggressively because it's amazing and it really works. If we weren't doing this, you would spend 12 months integrating and then start selling, with another 12-month delta before you could really reach the scale your go-to-market team needs.

That very interesting playbook of integrating the front end, giving it to your sales organization, and migrating all the customers in parallel on the back end has really paid dividends for us. All of the acquisitions we've made have grown by hundreds, if not thousands, of percent over the last few years.

After 13 acquisitions, you do build a real nose for deal-making. You're a deal-maker. I love you for many reasons, but you're a brilliant deal-maker. What have been your big lessons on how to price a company when you're buying it, and how to incentivize founders with re-ups, stock, or cash compensation? What are those lessons?

I have one fundamental principle on this that came to me from my father. In his past life, my father did more than 50 M&A deals. That's actually how he grew his business.

One thing he taught me about deal-making was that the only way to get a great deal done is if both parties come out of the equation 5 years later saying, “We're happy this deal actually happened.” Structuring the deal in a way that's fair for both sides is the most important part. Even if you have the upper hand, you should structure it so that you can look back on it and say, “As the founder of the other business, I'm so happy this deal went through.”

Whether it's the retention package, how many people from the team you keep, or how aggressive you are about the integration, a lot of things need to be aligned so that you're optimizing for both sides to be really happy about the deal. It isn't obvious because, transparently, we have the upper hand as the company that's buying. We could be difficult and say, “Whatever, I'll just get the best deal possible.” But sometimes we'll over-optimize for the outcome of the acquisition down the line versus the best deal we could get.

Is now a good time to buy? Are you seeing a lot of companies that aren't in the AI wave, aren't seeing insane, lovable growth, and have fallen out of favor with venture investors, giving you the chance to pick them off at good prices?

Yes, of course. I think this fundraise is definitely going to help on that front and enable us to do more acquisitions. That was one of the reasons we also raised the capital.

As you know, venture capital always comes in the flavor of whatever everybody is looking at at the moment. It comes in circles and cycles. Eventually, things will shift, and I think the companies that are maybe not AI-first or part of that AI hype just need to hold tight, make sure they deliver for their customers, stay close to their customers, and rise above the noise.

If they can do that, I think they'll come out on the stronger hand. If they cannot do that and they're amazing, then we're always looking to buy.

How do you think about founder packages in terms of cash versus stock? More cash, less cash? How do you get those incentive plans right?

It's situational. Sometimes we make acquisitions where we really want the founder to stay, and sometimes we actually don't think the founder is needed. I'm going to assume you're talking about the situations where we do want the founder to stay.

Can you tell them that?

Yeah, why not? It's not a bad thing. When you've worked for 7 or 8 years on your business, there are 2 ways to behave. The first is to act like you're going to be there for the next 5 years and then leave after 1 year, which I've seen many people do. The other is to be honest: “Is this what you want to do for the rest of your life? Is this where you want to work? If we give you the resources and the infrastructure, do you want to be here for a long time?”

You can't always measure those conversations, and you're not always going to get the right, honest answer, but I think it's important to have frank and honest conversations here.

For example, going back to Hofy, when we acquired Hofy, I was not going to run the IT. It's so far outside my scope in terms of truly understanding the business, the buyer profile, what we need to build, and so on. If you remove Sammy and Michael, it's going to be very tough. The alignment here has to be very equity-oriented, and it has to be clear that they're going to be here for a long time and are here to really build.

With some other companies, it's a bit different. Even if I don't need the founder, I may just want the customers, the infrastructure, and a few of the things they have. Being very upfront about what we're going to need sets you up for a better relationship.

As I told you before, it's about keeping people happy. I've made the mistake of keeping a founder in a business for 1 or 2 years when they weren't needed anymore, and it's sad. They lose their drive and their effectiveness, and it just doesn't work out. Having this conversation is part of creating a deal where both sides of the equation come out happy.

The beautiful thing about venture is that it's the most forgiving business in terms of your buy price because the upside is exponential. It's very different from private equity, where you have a 2 to 3x bounded upside in most cases. If you spend 50% more than you should, you're screwed. If you buy Hofy—or some other company—at 75 instead of 50, and you do it well, it doesn't make a difference. How price-sensitive are you on the buy?

I like to pay fair market value. We look at revenue, growth, quality of the team, gross margins, and the potential of the business. Depending on those factors—and in that case, adding a full new line of business to Deel, which is very critical, not just a core product—we'll pay the right price.

We won't overpay, and we won't underpay. We're known to pay a fair price. If the range was between 50 and 100, I'd probably go in at 75.

Let's stack-rank them. You and I are in review: what's the number-one acquisition you've made, the best-performing one?

In terms of what: infrastructure, the long-term impact on the business, or revenue?

It could be either. It could be impact through revenue or impact through infrastructure.

PaySpace. PaySpace is an amazing company that we acquired a little over a year ago. It was a 15-year-old business founded by 3 brothers and one brother from another mother, as they like to talk about themselves, in South Africa.

They had been building the payroll infrastructure we wanted to build for the last few years. We looked at every company in the market—and I have a very aggressive corporate development team, as you may realize—and nothing was good. Most of the infrastructure, technology, and teams were very weak.

We stumbled upon this team in South Africa that not only understood payroll really well, but had been forced to build global payroll. South Africa was such a tiny market that they had to expand to all the countries in Africa in order to create a real business that could scale to their ambitions.

Without realizing it, they had built payroll infrastructure that could scale across multiple countries because they had been forced into it from the get-go. We met them, looked at the product, and said, “That's probably one of the best products we've ever seen. We're just going to bring it in-house, give them the resources, and start building all of the infrastructure we really need on top of this.”

A year into this, we've got infrastructure in Singapore, Canada, Australia, India, and Malaysia, and we're building 10 to 15 new engines per year. That's giving our customers such an incredible experience.

If I had gone into building payroll engines and infrastructure on my own, it would have taken me 5 to 10 years to get it right. This fast-tracked everything. It literally shortened our timeline by more than 5 years in terms of getting it right.

How much did you pay for it?

Over $100 million. Let's put it that way.

It's a nice rule, which is that you can say “over X.”

Yeah, over $100 million. A bit more than that. But look, I think the long-term strategy of the company, the quality of the founders, the people, the product, and how much it helps from an infrastructure, gross-margin, and experience perspective is probably the Instagram to our Facebook.

That’s fascinating. Okay, on the flip side, you humbly said not all have worked. I’m not expecting you to name a company.

No, I won’t name them.

I’m not expecting you to name the company. Name the founder.

No.

But take me to one that didn’t work. What were the lessons for you from that that impacted how you think about the playbook?

I think the ones that didn’t work were mainly the ones where we said, “Why not?” instead of “Hell yeah.” They come to us and they’re at the end of the line. They have some revenue and they have something that’s adjacent enough for it to be relevant, but not in scope enough for me to truly care. It’s there, so you’re like, “Why not?”

I’ve learned a lot from this. We get a decent amount of acquisition inbound, and if it’s not a “hell yeah,” I just don’t go for it anymore. That was a big lesson for me. We always managed to make the best out of all of those acquisitions, though. Even if it wasn’t a “hell yeah,” most of the time we still got really great talent out of it that shaped the company in many different ways.

But now I won’t go through the struggle as much. I’ll just hire the person if I like them.

I totally agree with you. How quickly do you know if it’s not great?

Pretty quickly. We’re pretty aggressive on integration. I think integration—we didn’t talk about this—is the most important part of doing M&A really well. We’ve got a team that’s really good at it. Combining our HR team with our dev, corp dev, and operations teams, I think we can execute really fast on acquisitions and integrations.

If there’s reluctance from many parts of the business to integrate, it probably means that it was a bad acquisition.

Thirteen acquisitions in 6 years. With the new round, you obviously reset the price and have more opportunity to buy. What does that look like in 24 months?

We could have raised even more, and at a higher price, too.

You could have done that? How much could you have raised?

I could have raised it at a higher price, but not with the people I wanted.

There we go. What does 13 acquisitions look like in 24 months?

We’re very opportunistic. I want the best founders to join us. If we can acqui-hire them and they’re really talented, I’m interested. We’ve been doing that, and there’ll be some news about this pretty soon, actually.

We’re starting to see a lot of companies that raised a lot of money in our space wanting to join forces. We’ve actually acquired a very well-known company in the UK in our space, and you’ll know about it pretty soon.

I’d say there’s a decent chance that we’ll do a bunch of them. I wouldn’t put a specific number on this, but in the next 24 months, probably between 5 and 10, most likely.

Okay.

We’ve already done one, so, you know, 9 to go.

I can’t wait to get offline, then you can tell me what this is. I don’t know if it’s one of mine. Is it one of mine?

No, it’s not one of yours. It’s already done, so you would know.

I’m going to be honest: you did acquire another one of mine, I think, and I didn’t realize until I saw the list of acquisitions.

Which one?

I think Atlantic Money.

Oh, yeah, we did. Great example. They’re a great team, and they brought us licenses in payments. We’re building our payroll infrastructure, and we’re also building our payment infrastructure. They made us win 2 years in terms of how fast we could get our infrastructure.

You’re profitable. Is that a strategic decision? Other players in the space are not.

I think our principle—I told you this before, but maybe you can ask Anish about this—is that when we raised our Series A, we had raised $4.3 million in our seed round. We showed up to our Series A pitch meeting with Andreessen’s team having burned, I think, $400,000 a year and a half later.

What I’m trying to say here is that, as a funding principle, we’ve always favored sustainable growth. What’s important for me is for the business to be sustainable over growth. If we can grow as well, amazing.

The reason for that is, if I’m a company in HR and I’m burning $300 million a year, I really wouldn’t want to put my team on that platform as a customer, because the uncertainty behind it is pretty big. For me, what’s most important is to have a long-term partner that can really scale with me.

One thing that’s interesting in our go-to-market is that, as we grew, we started signing 4- or 5-year deals, or even 7-year deals. Payroll is something super stable, something you invest in, not something you change every year. It’s not the type of software that you want to change on a yearly basis.

Being able to show super-strong financials—“Hey, we’re at 15% to 17% EBITDA. We’re generating profit. We’ve been generating profit for 3 years”—is such a strong signal that you can build with us in the future and for the long term. It made sense for us.

If you look at Y Combinator, it’s a very valuable source of getting in early. Who gets more Y Combinator companies, you or Rippling?

I have no idea. I think Y Combinator founders are more and more international, and they move to the Bay Area. By design, I think a lot of them understand the value of Deel straight away and want to hire from back home.

The truth is that now we do everything. We do US payroll, we do HR, and we’re kind of the full-stack solution for early-stage founders as well. I think our market share there is pretty high.

If you had to IPO in the next 12 months, what would you most need to change about Deel?

Twelve months is a bit short. Give me a bit more time.

Why is 12 months short? Seriously, genuinely, at $1 billion in revenue, profitable, and growing the way you are, at this stage it’s a personal choice.

No, it’s more than that. There’s SOX compliance infrastructure, and there are some leadership hires we need to have in place in order to be able to go out. There are things to be done there.

My take is that you want to have 4 or 5 clean quarters with your executive team before you go public as well. There are a couple of different things at play here.

What would need to change most significantly for you to go public?

I think it’s just about being ready. If our infrastructure is ready, if our compliance is ready, and if our leadership team is ready—which I’m just reiterating from my last answer—then we’ll consider going out. That’s kind of our plan.

Totally get it. Do you want to be a public company CEO?

As long as I’m the best person to run this business, no matter whether it’s public or private, I would like to be the one running it.

What’s the best and worst thing about working with your dad?

I love working with my dad. Honestly, there aren’t a lot of negative things about working with my dad. I think the best thing is that I wholeheartedly trust him, and he’s able to drive a lot of decisions in a way that comes with experience that I don’t have.

If you want to say one negative thing, a lot of people have a strong misconception about working with family, at least in the United States, which was a little weird to me. Most of the people who know us very well understand the dynamics between the 2 of us and how we work. The closer you are to us, the more you understand how valuable the relationship really is.

I work with my brother, and I actually think that the trust you have with a brother, a father, or whatever family member it is, is so special. The only lesson I have is that there has to be a hierarchy. A co-CEO-ship does not work.

Thankfully, there is a hierarchy. My dad looks at the business and understands that I’m leading it. He allows me to make the mistakes that I want to make, despite sometimes having very strong opinions.

Where has he had the strongest opinion that you’ve disagreed with him on?

Many times, actually. We disagree all the time. I think he hates that story, but the biggest thing he disagreed with me on—which was actually the best decision we ever made as a company—was building up our infrastructure for our employer-of-record product.

Basically, the way employer of record works is that we enable you, as a company, to hire anyone anywhere without having a local entity. We have local entities all around the world, and we employ people on your behalf.

As a more risk-averse person and the acting CFO at the time, he looked at the business and told us, “Hey, if you actually own the infrastructure, you take on so much liability. Let’s work with partners.” That was how the old-school model worked.

At the beginning, I pushed back and said, “Partners work on Windows Vista. They don’t have the same care for customers, and they don’t understand service the way I think about service, the way you think about service, which is service of today. It’s not going to work.”

When your CFO says, “Too much risk,” you’re like, “Okay, we’ll try.” We tried for 2 months, and then I came back and said, “Open the entities.” He pushed back on that until he decided not to.

Today, our employer-of-record product generates, I think, over $25 million to $30 million a month. It was the best decision for the business ever.

Yeah, Dad. I love the way he chose—

He’s not—The good thing is that everybody is super aligned. We just want the best for the business, the best for our shareholders, and the best for our employees.

Having people that you can look in the eye and tell the truth to, because you trust each other anyway, is a huge advantage.

And by the way, people don't realize, but Shuo, my co-founder, is like my sister. I have 3 sisters, so I wouldn't say the sister I never had, but she's my 4th sister in many ways. I think a lot of people like to think about founding companies with people as marriage. I think about it a bit more as family, for the sake of my wife being happy.

These types of relationships are super critical, and the more trust you can establish, the better. If it's trust that was given by nature, even better. If not, you need to build that type of trust over time.

I want to do a quick-fire round with you. I'll say a short statement, and you give me your immediate thoughts. What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months?

Being much more prepared across different topics. We had policy situations, litigations, and PR, and a lot of those things showed and exposed things in the company that we hadn't thought about. I don't exactly wake up thinking, “We need to be really strong at policy,” or, “We need to be really strong at litigation.”

So we're much more prepared, and we're consistently thinking about where we need to reinforce ourselves externally to product and customer experience, which maybe we didn't do as much before.

Are you a wartime or a peacetime CEO?

I think I'm in constant wartime, sadly.

Do you enjoy the fight? Is there a masochistic enjoyment?

I like fighting people in product and go-to-market. I want you to kick my ass because you've built a better product, but I'm going to give you a run for your money because I'm pretty decent at building good products.

I love the fight when it comes to fighting through who is going to serve our customer better. I think there are some amazing companies in our space building that way. All of the money that flew into this space and the quality of the people that we have just makes it a super, super interesting fight. Other fights are just not my style. I'm not a very litigious person.

How would you have liked for Rippling to have behaved?

Well, I think you should read our lawsuit in Delaware. It's 3 years of a poor way of competing in the market. You should have a read.

Again, I think a lot of those things are tied to old stories and old demons, and we're at a crossroads, but it's okay. It's not deterring us, and we're able to perform for our customers. That's all that matters.

Which founder do you think is most underrated today?

I would have said Tariq from Calixa a year ago.

Dude, you introduced me to him 3 or 4 years ago.

Yes, he was one of the most underrated founders I ever knew. Then the guy just turned the heat around like fucking crazy, and he's now one of the most hyped founders in the world.

I've actually come to love 2 founders that I think are some of the most underrated founders in the world. I think their companies are amazing, and everything they'll touch in the future will be just as amazing.

I don't know if you know them, but the first one is Johannes from Kry.

Dude, he's in Project Europe.

I met him through Project Europe. He invested in it. What a dude. He's one of the most underrated founders I've met.

He's a very clear thinker. I think he's the right mix of a clear thinker, first principles, and relentless drive. He's got that hands-on fire that someone who has built a 4,000-plus-person company usually loses.

In the same spirit, I don't know if you know Fred from Voi. I've been falling in love with Swedish tech recently. I think a lot of people have, but I've been falling in love with it for the last few years.

Those are 2 of the people I've met who I know are going to either take those companies to huge numbers or build new businesses that are going to be significant.

Why have you been falling in love with Swedish tech?

I think the mentality of the founders there is really good. I think they're good, honest people who truly care about building great companies and great products. They're tall giants, but they're sweet at the same time.

They're in an ecosystem that reminds me in many ways of the Israeli ecosystem, where it's a very tight-knit community. If you look at the successful Swedish founders as well—the Klarnas of the world or the Spotifys of the world, like Daniel and Sebastian—they paved the way for those founders to be able to build great companies, and I think they really capitalized on this in a way that no one has before.

How do you feel when I say this? I love Fred and Johannes too, but I think they're both in really shitty markets.

I bet on the founder, not on the business. Remember?

I do, but dude, at scale, you've got to add in some market.

Sure, but I think they're going to have very long careers.

Oh, I agree. If they're listening, let me do the seed round of your next company.

Who do you not have on the board that you'd most like to have on the board?

Well, he's going to love this. I really, really love Alfred Lin from Sequoia. He's going to be sad about that one. He passed on my seed round when I had no idea what I was doing. Shuo and I met him in a coffee shop during or right after YC.

I've just gotten to know him over the years, and I actually think he's one of the best investors in the world. He cares about founders in a way that's very rare, and he understands businesses a lot more deeply than a lot of board members want to.

I saw that firsthand. Alfred is on the board of Causely, and Tariq is a very close friend. I think the impact Alfred has had on the business is very significant. Same thing for DoorDash and others.

I think he's the right mix of sweet, sharp, and well-advised—a person who has seen things before. I think he was an operator before as well.

Can I ask you why you don't have Sequoia on the cap table then?

Ask him, not me. Sadly, they invested in every competitor you can think of. I have a great relationship with the team, honestly.

Do you mind investors doing competitive investing?

Not as much as I used to. Obviously, if you're investing in a competitor that I care about, then I cannot share as much as I used to share with you. But I've grown to care less.

In that specific case, I just have a great relationship with the Sequoia team. I think Roelof, Shaun, Julian—all of those guys are amazing, and I get to work with them in different ways.

But if you ask me who I would have wanted on the cap table that I don't have today, it's definitely them, and it's probably definitely Alfred.

Final one. When you look forward, I like to end on a tone of optimism. What are you most excited for over the next 5 to 10 years? What gives you fucking energy?

Look, the way I think about our business, which a lot of people find super boring—I actually think this is why you passed. Not because you don't think there's a lot of potential in payroll, but because you think it's a boring business.

I don't think it's boring, because the way I think about this—and this is what really drives me—when I think about payroll and HR, I think about such significant moments in the lives of people. It's where you get your paycheck, your payslips, your mortgage letter, your business visa, and your payments. It's where you submit your expenses.

It's a place that you interact with all the time, in very unique, key moments and events in your life, and it's super disregarded. I've never had someone come up to me and tell me, “I fucking love my payroll software. It's the best thing I've ever used,” right?

When you're in such critical moments in the life cycle of people—new jobs, uncertainty—you can build such a strong relationship with your end users if you actually care to invest in the relationship you have there.

You can create, going back to brand awareness, a very, very strong brand where hopefully one day people will tell you, “Well, I fucking love my payroll software. Deel is the place I want to be hired on. It's the place I want to be paid in.”

That gets me excited. Building the first truly global brand that you love as an end user to get paid on, and that really shares your values and understands your moments, is what really gets me excited about the business in the long term.

I've got to ask one more. You said critical moments in life. I've just become an uncle, and I love—

Into the dad direction, yeah.

I just want to ask, for my brother, what's your single biggest piece of advice on what it takes to be a great papa? She's like 6 months old.

Oh, I think—well, she's older than mine, so it's a bit tougher to say. Mine's maybe 3 months old.

You've only got one?

Yeah, we've only got one. It's my first baby, so it's been a very fun year, as you can realize.

Have you got help?

No, not yet. My parents and my wife's parents are super helpful. She's so little, and I want to spend time with her. That's the perk of remote work. I've been seeing her truly grow up, which is very unique, and I value this in a way that most people can't understand, but—

Do you do secondary so you can have a night nanny? That's why secondary exists.

Maybe, without jinxing it, I think my daughter realized the nanny thing wasn't going to happen for now, so she decided to sleep through the night.

But no, look, we’re very lucky that my wife has a nice maternity leave policy, and we’re able to be with her. She’s 3 months old, and she’s changed the whole world in many different ways. She’s definitely a very life-changing moment.

I never realized what people really meant by this, but the small moments you’re going to get to spend with her are a big deal. I think your brother would probably have tips for me more than the opposite, but the one thing I would say is: this is where remote work actually shines, right? You get to see her every day, and a lot more, I think, than the average dad.

Dude, I so appreciate the friendship. I so appreciate you. Thank you so much for this. This has been fantastic, dude.

Well, thank you so much for taking the time. By the way, I think you’re the first podcast I’ve done in a while, so I don’t know if that means I’m back to less work, but I don’t think so.