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HOUSEKEEPING 📨

I came across a short passage of life advice from Scott Galloway—one of the leaders I respect most today—and it really resonated with me. I work remotely, with a team that lives halfway across the globe, and go full days inside, sitting at my desk, only venturing outside to walk my dog and go to the gym.

For me, I think this means getting out more, working from a co-working space, and generally trying to say yes to more things. More coffees, lunches, events, and the like. Anywho, just wanted to share that little note with you. Enjoy today’s piece!

DEEP DIVE 🕵🏻

Deel, EOR & The Future Of Global Teams

If you switch on ESPN today, you will see a lot of noise about a young French phenom, Victor Wembanyama, the first pick of the 2023 NBA draft. People are touting the 7’5 Frenchman ‘the future of the NBA’ and ’the next face of the league.’ A generational, if not once-in-a-lifetime talent. A year later, another phenom, Caitlin Clark, was being mentioned as the future of women's basketball.

If you look culturally, one can look to the rise of influencers, the ‘Hawk Tuah Girl,’ for example. Virtually unknown less than 12 months ago, and now grown large enough to facilitate her own crypto scams. Phenom is derived from phenomenon: a remarkable person or thing. The company we are covering today, Deel, is nothing short of a phenomenon. And one that is moving at ‘Deel Speed.’

And just like the best startups of previous generations, they are aggressive. They are relentless in pursuing market share while also being at the forefront of innovation for their customers. Deel is quickly becoming the infrastructure for how businesses operate. “Full-stack HR & payroll for global teams,” as co-founder Alex calls it.

And it’s been a joy to watch. But it didn’t start as an instant success. No one does. It started with an idea, a pivot, a scrappy deck, and a few people willing to follow along for the ride. Let’s dive in. This is the story of Deel.

Y Combinator batch

It’s 2018, in a pre-COVID era, and two college friends, Shuo Wang and Alex Bouaziz, have come up with a plan. The plan is to build a tool to facilitate easier payments to global freelancers. “When the task is fulfilled, it gets paid automatically,” Bouaziz would say, recalling the idea. It was blockchain, but not blockchain. Smart contracts-esque.

The idea had traction. Traction enough to get Shuo, Alex, and their budding startup Deel into the prestigious Winter 2019 batch at Y Combinator. Y Combinator, or YC for short, was famous for turning Silicon Valley’s best and brightest into the next leaders on the global technology scene.

If you live on planet Earth, you probably do business with a YC alum on a daily basis. Listen to this for a list of names: Airbnb, Coinbase, Stripe, DoorDash, Dropbox, Reddit, Twitch, Brex, Gusto, the list goes on. I lived in Argentina until a few months ago and ordered ramen on Rappi (YC 2016) a few times a week.

However, just getting into YC doesn’t guarantee success. It’s really a place for rapid idea validation. Or in some cases, invalidation. The latter was true for Deel, as highlighted by their last-minute pitch on the Friday before Demo Day.

“The essence of the product today is the same,” Alex would say. ”Originally, it was about enabling people to get paid in other countries. What happened, though, is we realized there was more to the problem than that. It involved compliance, various types of employment, and different global structures, among other factors. We just saw that the entire suite of tools was not built for global teams.“

And it proved to be right. Looking at Deel’s original vision on its YC profile page, you can see there were many ways to go about building the future of global teams.

So they did just that. They pitched EOR—an easier, more compliant way to hire globally—on the stage at their YC Demo Day. And the VC landscape went for it. They closed their Seed Round quickly in April 2019, and shortly after, their Series A, which was led by a16z, who “had a market thesis at the time,” as Alex recalled.

Little did they know the world was about to be turned on its head. Deel completed the raise ~three weeks before COVID-19 struck. A once-in-a-hundred-year event that would force the entire world into remote work.

Reimagining EOR & global collaboration

You could consider the first ‘global teams’ to be merchants and traders throughout history, from the Silk Road to the Phoenicians, dating as far back as 500 BC. The next wave of global collaboration was during the Scientific Revolution.

EOR, or Employer of Record, is not a new idea either. Quite the contrary. EOR providers have been available to companies for decades, enabling them to manage their global workforce effectively. The problem, though, was twofold.

Firstly, they were expensive, charging between 10 and 50% of an employee’s salary, and secondly, they sucked. They had a terrible product experience. Deel, on the other hand, was setting out to make global hiring easy. Not only that, but they wanted to create more equal opportunities across the globe.

Any new-to-market product typically competes on either price or quality. Deel was of the opinion they could beat the incumbents on both. So, the stage was set. Now, all they needed to do was one thing: execute.

A very COVID blessing

Coming out of their YC batch, Deel was able to gain traction from friends, family, and the YC community. There was traction—enough to be excited about—but things were steady, stable, and under control. “We were not looking for hyper growth,” says Alex. “We were looking for consistent growth. Are we consistently bringing customers who are excited about the product?”

And, like a number of other remote-work-focussed startups—my startup, Athyna, included—a huge part of the process was educating people on the fact that great talent could be found on every corner of the globe. That hurdle was removed the moment Patient One sank their teeth into some deep-fried pangolin in the night markets of Wuhan, China, in late 2019.

Deel went, almost overnight, from a new and novel idea for most companies to an absolute no-brainer. The world was forced into remote work, and its biggest objection was banished to the past.

If the aim in March 2020 was consistent growth, by June, it was just to keep up with demand. “We were getting to a point where we were moving from too many inbound and too many demos,” Alex recalled.

“The pandemic definitely accelerated the need for Deel, and it helped us find a product-market fit much faster. I think we didn’t expect our company to scale so fast,” Shou would go on to say of the period. And the VC community was watching. Deel would go on to raise its Series B around three short months later, from a single DM on Twitter.

The frothiness of 2021

Everybody talks about the last VC hype cycle as spanning 2020-2023, but it was actually a 12 to 15-month stretch that did the trick. The 2021 boom will be forever remembered for the metaverse, Web3, embedded finance, and the area people had begun calling the ‘future of work.’

This ‘future’ had been pushed to the forefront thanks to COVID, and anything with a global employment element was running hot. Especially the class of EOR startups, of which Deel, Remote, Oyster, and several others led the charge.

It made sense. While every cryptonaut VC was out there buying up blocks of land in the metaverse, and celebrities were burning piles of cash on JPEGs of monkeys, the EOR batch was building sticky, real-world businesses. Genuine use cases, solving serious pain points for big enterprise accounts.

Startups, scaleups, and enterprises alike were going to Deel to help build their global team. For the early-stage company, it might mean managing 10-20 contractors and a few EOR employees. For the enterprise, it involved taking on a large headcount and transferring them to be managed through Deel. And as they grew, so did the solutions for their customers.

With all the fervor and excitement of the 2021 market, many companies were raising at a 100x revenue multiple, Deel included. It was easy to think that the good times would always roll. They don't. The market today is very different from what it was in 2021. There was startup blood in the streets through 2022 and 2023—over 400,000 tech workers laid off, countless down rounds, and zombie unicorns wandering with no path to exit. But by late 2024, something shifted. The survivors emerged stronger, leaner, and actually profitable. The market came roaring back, though now it demanded something the ZIRP era never did: real unit economics.

In the 90s, the last time you could raise at a triple-figure multiple, we had the dot-com crash. But we had survivors of that cycle. Survivors that include Amazon, eBay, PayPal, Google, and Salesforce.

You’d have thought we’d need to flash forward 8-12 years to know who will be the winners of the ZIRP class. Just four years later, the picture is actually getting a lot clearer. Ramp has exploded to $22.5B, making it the biggest private winner from this cohort so far. Fireblocks was an early leader but has plateaued at $8B since 2022. If I had to put my money on one company to come through and be the most successful over the next decades, I'm betting on Deel. So far, at $17.3B with over a billion in ARR and sustained profitability, that bet looks as if it might pay off.

_{*Note: Google acquisition, Wiz, actually falls within this cohort, and has probably had the greatest success to this point with their $32 billion dollar sale. A phenomenal result.}

The State of Global Hiring today

Today, more than at any other time in history, companies are set up to thrive in a remote environment. Consider the tools we have today: Slack, Notion, Loom, Figma. All are designed to make collaboration between teams easier.

And now, founders and executives know that they can hire locally and fight tooth and nail for A-grade talent, or they can hire globally, where the entire world is their talent pool. Not to mention, the obvious economic benefits of hiring globally, where in some cases, you can hire four engineers for the price of one. All because of remote work.

Deel, being the amazing stewards of global hiring that they are, recently released their latest annual State of Global Hiring Report. The report showed that globally, Software engineers and developers remain the most in-demand roles on Deel, followed by customer support, sales, product management, and project management.

More interesting data: The United States, Philippines, Argentina, India, and Great Britain were the top countries for workers in 2024, while Buenos Aires, London, Bogotá, Lahore, and São Paulo ranked as the top cities for workers.

Although there has been a lot of noise made about return-to-office mandates across the globe, this genie is not going back in the bottle; remote work is here to stay. 

Side note: How Deel expands via acquisition

Deel has also impressed on the acquisition side. The company has a strong track record of acquiring new functionality and market share through strategic acquisitions. Last month, they announced their acquisition of Omnipresent. Earlier this year, they added Safeguard Global to their portfolio.

The Omnipresent deal eliminates a competitor while expanding Deel's coverage to over 160 countries. Meanwhile, Safeguard Global (Payroll Division) added 2.4M annual payslips and hundreds of payroll experts to Deel's operations.

"Deel is all about helping companies get the best out of their global teams, and these strategic acquisitions allow us to offer unparalleled global coverage. It's a perfect fit," Alex would say. Take a look at Deel's acquisitive streak in the table below.

When examining the pattern over the past two years, it’s clear to see the dual strategy. Acquisitions such as Zavvy, an AI-powered people development, and Hofy, an IT equipment management, added functionality that Deel was lacking. Deals like PaySpace, an African payroll provider with over 14,000 customers, and PayGroup, an APAC payroll provider, focused on market share and geographic expansion. New functionality, expanded market share.

Competition, lawsuits & espionage

The story of Deel is incomplete without mention of the controversies. In March, I wrote a story on the history of corporate espionage, following the allegations by Rippling CEO Parker Conrad that Deel has an embedded spy inside Rippling.

For a company that had such a halo around it since its inception, it was wild to see this fight playing live, in the bowels of tech Twitter. My two cents: Parker seemed upset that he had been outsmarted by Deel. Yes, Deel broke the law, and double yes, breaking the law is bad, but geez, I bet Alex Bouaziz also won a lot of fans by attempting such a brazen corporate hijack like this.

Even if you are the most buttoned-up operator in technology, we all know spies are unequivocally cool. And Deel created its own internal spy force. In August, a court would dismiss the fraud and RICO claims against Deel, freeing them up to continue their march towards the upper echelons of technology.

The next Salesforce (GOAT level SaaS)

Why do I believe in Deel? Well, it's simple, not only are they great acquirers, but they ship products and features incredibly fast. Let's examine how they've developed a comprehensive, global HR platform in just six years.

Today, Deel offers a comprehensive suite of services, including global payroll, immigration services, equity management, equipment logistics, and even compensation planning and a full HRIS.

A little birdie even told me that Deel, now—through its API—is powering the entire backend of some of the world's largest talent marketplaces.

Another reason Deel has grown so quickly is that it is tackling compliance head-on. In times past, companies like Shopify, Reddit, Nike, Intercom, and Red Bull would have to go to painstaking lengths to set up their own entities in the geographies they were expanding into.

Either that or they would: a) hire non-compliantly or b) use an old school, barnacles-rusted-on provider, who lacks their trust or customer experience required to do business at the highest levels. Today, over 35,000 customers, ranging from small businesses to enterprises, trust Deel as their full-stack, global HR platform.

The Deel playbook

• Build infrastructure that creates high switching costs: SaaS businesses succeed through retention. Deel became core operational infra for customers, making it costly and complex for them to switch.

• Scale your product alongside customer needs: Listen actively to high-value customers and build products they need. Maintain clear communication between leadership, product teams, and operations to identify these gaps.

• Acquire strategically for functionality and geographic expansion: Add missing capabilities with acquisitions like Zavvy and Hofy. Expand market share and geographic reach through deals like PaySpace and PayGroup.

• Tackle compliance as your competitive moat: While competitors avoided complexity, Deel made global compliance easy. This removed the biggest barrier for companies wanting to hire internationally.

• Hire intentionally and stay involved: Alex participated in every interview for the first 500 to 700 hires. People follow people who believe in them and share their vision of the world.

• Pivot quickly when assumptions are wrong: Deel changed their pitch from payment automation to EOR compliance days before Demo Day. They recognized the real problem and adapted immediately.

• Execute across business functions simultaneously: Blitzscale with foot on the gas from day zero. Be aggressive in raising capital, product development, and winning market share.

• Create sticky products by becoming the source of truth: Start with contractors, expand to international employees, add payroll, then become the HR system of record. Build solutions so good that customers can't leave.

• Time market entry with secular shifts when possible: COVID forced the world into remote work overnight, eliminating Deel's biggest objection. They were positioned perfectly to capitalize on the shift.

• Move at Deel Speed: One of Deel's core values is speed. Solve customer issues within 30 minutes to an hour. Fast response times create competitive advantage and build loyalty.

The future belongs to Deel

With a casual tweet, Deel Co-Founder Alex Bouaziz announced they had crossed $1 billion in ARR—just six years after launch. That’s faster than Stripe, Salesforce, and Palantir. And they did it while being 100% remote.

The future looks bright for Deel. With a commanding share of mind in their space and an expanding product ecosystem, they’re building something durable. If the last decade belonged to the payments giants, the next might belong to the companies powering work without borders.

Extra reading & listening

• The COO Helping To Hyperscale Deel - February, 2024

• Deel, Rippling & The History Of Corporate Espionage - March, 2025

• How Deel Does Global Compensation - September, 2025

And that’s it! You can find out more about Deel here to start your global hiring journey.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

TOOLS WE RECOMMEND 🛠️

Every week, we highlight tools we like and those we actually use inside our business and give them an honest review. Today, we are highlighting Superpower*—a tool used by founders, leaders, athletes, and more to optimize their health using AI.

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

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