Dan Westgarth Interview

COO at Deel. Hyper-scaling, EOR and the future of global teams. 🌎

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LEADER OF THE WEEK 🎙

Dan is COO of one of the fastest unicorns in history, the $12B HR platform, Deel. Deel helps thousands of companies expand globally with unmatched speed and flexibility. Global hiring, HR and payroll in just one system.

20,000+ businesses from small startups to household names like Zapier, Reddit, Shopify, Revolut, Intercom and more, use Deel to simplify their HR stack.

Before Deel, Dan played a key part in the growth of UK fintech Revolut. Dan also founded Expansion Capital in 2020 to deploy capital into early stage companies.

Chief Operating Office of decacorn. Not bad.

What does a day in the life of a COO look like?

I feel like building a successful business is a little bit like making a movie. If you look at a movie production, it’s typically done on a fixed and short time schedule — there typically is a deadline when they want it to get into cinemas, and there are various preceding dates that represent different stages in that process. So, I view my job as a movie: it requires a lot of sacrifices, commitment, working long hours, but also making sure to hire and retain good people. I think it's not only the front-office people, the ‘actors’, but also the back-office people who are doing the behind-the-scenes stuff, like the ‘special effects’ team, who are crucial as well.

Day-to-day though, we move incredibly quickly at Deel. It’s one of the things that we pride ourselves on. This means we practice a highly iterative work method, so the day always starts with me checking what problems are out there and picking the highest impact one. Then we’ll concentrate on around two to five different problems and solve them in order of priority.

What does Deel do? Tell us about the problem you are trying to solve?

The founders of Deel were originally looking to build a fintech platform to help contractors get paid seamlessly, from anywhere in the world), but we quickly realized that there are thousands of companies in this area, and we're not solving a new problem.

Then we thought, if we combine payments and HR, we can solve a new problem.

We decided to add human resources, tax, and labor services to payments. We realized that when company A pays person B, there's another challenge: you have to prove that B is a sole proprietor and has a contractual relationship with A.

Shuo & Alex, Deel’s founders.

You have to have a contract, receipts, and other documentation to comply with regulations, otherwise it could be misinterpreted that A is paying a company employee.

What is your north star metric inside of your company and how are you trying to improve it?

Customer retention, we aren’t anything without our customers. Right now we are investing more into customer experience by improving our support and success functions, and optimizing SLAs across the product and operations.

Who is your target market today? How do you sell to them?

Earlier on when we were kind of post-product market fit, we saw pretty interesting cases. We had startups coming to us who wanted to hire very, very quickly. We had some big companies come to us that wanted to check us out. Since then, we just see everything and anything. Some of the biggest companies in the world are currently in the diligence stage with us, but then we still have the scrappy startups, which have got the pre-seed or micro seed and haven't even finished the company incorporation. Like, ‘Hey, how do I fill out your KYC form?’ … ‘Well, you need to incorporate first, buddy.’ We see a whole range.

The who’s of who of Deel’s customers.

And I don't think that's entirely true that the motion has mainly been bottom-up, product led growth. I think that the founders have really acted as sales people in some respect. They've also really driven this. I think they've found problems that Deel solves and they've approached those clients.

What are the key challenges you’re facing today?

We are in operationally intensive business. If you look at the fintech space, managing payments, card issuing, lending, that’s all operationally intensive. When you couple that with payroll and people compliance, managing legal documents across more than 100 countries, it’s very difficult.

However, the way you manage that is through automation and technology, which is what we’re good at. That’s who we are. We design workflows that scale. The things we build work not just for one customer but also ten customers or even bigger companies.

Ultimately, everything we're building is very scalable. You can think of us as the Amazon in our space. Amazon took the bookshop, which has been around for centuries and deployed technology to build something that really scales.

What is the impact of global hiring on local communities?

It creates a great network effect because their peers, which see them earning, say, a base pay, which is a multiple higher than someone that’s engaged locally. And having the option to get paid in another currency just makes it so much more attractive. I think that that’s really going to help the local economy… because those people are going to spend more locally.

Companies which are hiring domestically are going to realize that they have to pay more to secure good talent, which is going to create more demand on venture capital and technology.

One of the interesting parts of hiring globally.

I think overall, it’s a net positive thing for the country and the economy itself. It’s not just something which is going to be consumed by a small, close community. Yes, it started off as small, but there's potential for much larger impact.

How do you build culture? What does it feel like day to day?

I think the biggest opportunity lies in our flat management structure. We don’t have that many layers. This prevents politics, prevents BS, frankly. And we want to be really kind of direct and collaborative. A flat management structure means that a team can have a lot of impact because they’re not hiding behind a hierarchy.

Then, if you combine that with our really fast growth… the opportunity for promotion is there… We need to promote people to managers… and generally speaking, we are big advocates of promotion rather than hire. I’ve seen a lot of people be promoted within the organization as opposed to hiring external talent to come in.

Detail your recruitment strategy. How do you hire all-star talent?

The hiring process, especially when it comes to tech, is rarely done well. It’s honestly mind-boggling, given tech companies are the ones with unlimited access to software designed to make the process seamless.

It’s never been easier for applicants to find positions due to increased unfettered access to professional social platforms along with sophisticated job market ad-tech. As a result, increased candidate flow has shifted a company’s focus to data and operational efficiency. However, the candidate experience hasn’t kept up. Instead, it’s rapidly deteriorating.

Candidate experience matters. Potential hires are real people who will use their experiences to form views on the company, its products, and its people. Word of mouth conversations resulting from the hiring process is often more vital than the general user experience.

At Deel, we approach the candidate experience a bit differently. First, it starts with a meaningful job description that succinctly summarizes the company mission, explicitly states the expectations for the role, and lists qualification parameters. Candidates revisit and reference job descriptions several times, so we took the time iterating on a structure to make them digestible and ensure they accurately reflect the culture at Deel.

Pickleball in Toronto.

Meme culture is good culture.

We want to make sure prospective hires know how we think about them. To us, it’s essential to illustrate what people mean to the team and the hiring process we use through proactive messaging. Most importantly, we set expectations by giving clear timelines around each step of the process and what purpose it serves. The steps are data-centric and created to maximize operational efficiency for the candidate and hiring manager.

Internally, we have set service level agreements between our hiring stakeholders. What does this mean? Well, it means that we measure the time between each action in the hiring process and ensure promises get kept. Doing this helps manage and ensure candidates aren’t left hanging or have an unpleasant experience outside of our expectations set.

One of the critical results of the hiring function at Deel isn’t just bringing on great people. It’s turning all applicants into advocates through a well thought out process that manages prospective hire’s expectations and shows candidate appreciation.

How does Deel think about remote work internally?

The key benefit is flexibility. I’m able to walk my dog any time of the day, attend a family event, and travel to any location around the world whenever I like. I believe that respect coupled with flexibility is really powerful; it can change the way you live your life. Especially in more junior positions, where a lot of juniors feel the obligation to sit at their desk until 8 - 10pm, just to get face-time with senior management. I’m very proud to work in a culture where people work really hard, but don’t do unnecessary political tactics — and remote work is really a catalyst for that.

We are Deel.

It's all rooted in respect really, like not expecting someone to take a call at 6:00am and not expecting someone to do some horrible task that is meaningless.

I think that we've also done a good job of clustering teams. Most of our fintech team is either in the Americas or Western Europe, like London to the Americas. For the R&D team we have Ukraine, Israel, the Americas. We've always designed this business with a global footprint. It becomes problematic where you have outliers. If you have 80% of your team in the US, but 20% in Europe, that can become tough. If you try and keep it evenly distributed, that's much more powerful.

I believe that we’ve built something really special at Deel where people are working really hard while also being really happy with what they’re doing.

What sort of new benefits do you think remote work will bring?

We’re seeing that a lot of the big tech companies are now investing heavily into remote benefits because those real estate-centric benefits are not being consumed. And what I mean by that is, I can think of various companies in the San Francisco Bay Area which served breakfast, lunch, dinner, on-premises gym or yoga.

You know those benefits can no longer be utilized, and incoming talent… they’re remote. They’re looking for remote types of benefits. Can I actually get furniture which supports my body as I’m working? Can I get access to online communities? Can I get access to the real estate, but can I only do it for a couple of days a week?

What do you think remote work will look like in the future? What will change?

I don’t really think of remote work in that way. I don’t think the office is dead. We’re not trying to remove people from the office. We’re just here to connect talent and make that easy. Remote work is a buzzword right now. A lot of people identify with it, but I think the phrase ‘remote work’ will eventually morph into just ‘work.’ Companies will naturally have people working remotely, in different countries.

I think the days where we restricted hiring people to that 50-mile radius of London or Berlin are gone. It's all about flexibility now.

State of Global Hiring - Download here.

Any tips for companies looking to hiring remotely?

Be open-minded about the countries in which you can hire and the quality of talent you can find. I have been overwhelmed at how good remote talent has been in some countries that I had only heard ever about in a geography lesson during high school but haven’t heard about in recent years! We have found amazing talent from less well-traveled and less well-known countries — of course, I highly recommend checking out Deel to make growing remote and international teams effortless.

And that's it! You can also learn more about Deel through their website, and check out Dan on LinkedIn.

TWEET OF THE WEEK 🐣 

All the tweets this week go to Sora by OpenAI. Remarkable.

Feel sorry for this guy by the way. He might be right. For about the next three weeks.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

This week I read an interesting piece on the Text Wrap by Equals newsletter; On naming new product. If you are currently building something unique and want to know whether it’s an AI speech assistant or Siri, this is a good one.

“Ladies and gents, meet Greg the phone”.

In a totally unrelated thought, Equals itself, looks awesome!

Query, analyze, and report on live data from the comfort of your spreadsheet. V-cool.

Spreadsheets but cool.

TOOLS WE USE 🛠️

Every week we highlight tools we actually use inside of our business and give them an honest review. Today we are highlighting Notion. We use Notion for everything. Literally everything. It’s most important tool in our stack.

Apollo: We use Apollo to automate a large part of our 1.2M weekly outbound emails.
PandaDoc: We use PandaDoc to make very boring contracts look beautiful.
Taplio: We use Taplio to grow and manage my online presence.

Our everything tool.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳

Here are the options I have for us to work together. If any of them are interesting to you - hit me up!

🌏 Hiring global talent: Check out my startup Athyna.
🧰 Want to outperform the competition: See our suite of tools & resources.
👀 Reach thousands of tech leaders: Advertise with us here.

And that’s it! See you next time. ✌️

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