Shuo Wang, Founder of Deel, discusses the success and growth of Deel, an all-in-one HR platform for global teams. The interview covers their journey from friends at MIT to building Deel, their focus on compliance and international payments for remote workers, substantial revenue growth, emerging trends in remote work, and challenges and opportunities in global operations and international treasury.
Deel has experienced significant growth, with revenue skyrocketing from around $60 million to $300 million in just 12 months, indicating the increasing demand for their international payment platform in the era of remote work.
Deel's success can be attributed to their emphasis on speed, executing quickly and delivering fast, which has allowed them to adapt their strategies, develop new products, and scale their sales organization to cater to the needs of larger enterprises.
Deep dives
The Growth of DEAL: From YC to Scaling Impressive Revenue
DEAL, the all-in-one HR platform for global teams, has experienced significant growth, expanding from a small team to one of the fastest-growing companies in the history of A16Z. With the rise of remote work as a trend and then accelerated by the pandemic, DEAL's services, which allow companies to pay people around the world in a compliant manner, have become not just a nice-to-have, but a necessity. Their revenue has skyrocketed from around $60 million to $300 million in just 12 months, and they have paid out over $5 billion to individuals worldwide.
Building a Global Payroll Platform: From Idea to Implementation
DEAL's journey started with the founders, Shuo and Alex, recognizing the need for an international payment platform to support global teams. They began by integrating with popular payment providers like PayPal and Transferwise, focusing on independent contractors. They expanded their product to include compliance, ensuring that contracts in various countries were legally compliant. With a global sales team and continuous product iterations, they gradually shifted to serving larger enterprises and catering to their specific needs, such as complex integrations and customizable contract templates.
Scaling and Challenges of Going Global
As DEAL grew, they faced different challenges and had to adapt their strategies and teams. Scaling the sales organization required building separate teams for sales, sales engineering, and customer success. They transitioned from primarily serving SMBs to targeting enterprise clients, requiring tailored account strategies and addressing complex requirements. Additionally, they developed products like employer of record and global payroll to support a wider range of employees. DEAL's emphasis on speed, executing quickly and delivering fast, has contributed to their remarkable success.
In this episode, I talk to Shuo Wang, the founder of Deel. Deel is an all-in-one HR platform for global teams. They help companies of all sizes, anywhere from a two person startup to publicly traded companies, manage contractors and full-time employees in 150 plus companies or countries around the world.
I first met the founders of Shuo and Alex in 2019, shortly after they had graduated YC's winter batch, when they were a small scrappy team, but clearly onto something big.
In the 4 years since they have gone on to pay out over $5 billion to 250,000 individuals around the world. So really great team operating a critical piece of infrastructure at scale.
In this interview, I cover how Shuo and Alex went from being friends at MIT to scrappy startup founders in YC to eventually building one of the most important companies powering the future of remote work.
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