Growing Deel to $300M+ ARR in Four Years with Co-founder and CEO Alex Bouaziz

The Peel with Turner Novak

Alex Bouaziz is the Co-founder and CEO of Deel, a full stack global HR and payroll platform. But the company didn’t start that way, and we’ll talk through Alex and his co-founder Shuo’s journey from zero to one, starting with a product that helped startups hire international employees.

Alex and Shuo launched the company one week before YC Demo day in 2019, and have since scaled to 20,000+ customers and raised over $685 million. They’re supported by investors like YC, a16z, Spark Capital, Weekend Fund, Coatue, SV Angel, Soma Capital, Quiet Capital, and angels like Lachy Groom, Nat Friedman, Ryan Petersen, Alexis Ohanian, John Zimmer, Dara Khosrowshahi, Rex Salisbury, Justin Mateen, and more.

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In this episode, we discuss:

• The initial insight around remote work that started Deel in 2019

• How they initially built the wrong solution

• Pivoting one week before YC demo day

• Listening to customers to build a better product

• Growing 20% every month for a year

• Being a default optimist

• Dealing with the emotional ups and downs of building a startup

• Moving at “Deel Speed”, and how the team operates so fast

• Deel’s remote-first approach and its “WeWork Squads”

• His advice to other leaders building remote teams

• Why founders shouldn’t share too much information with early investors

• How Alex’s approach to fundraising changed through his Seed to Series D rounds

• Why founders should always be selling their product

• How picking board members is a form of marriage, and what founders should prioritize when picking them

• Why Deel raised a Series A and B in a three month span despite only burning $300k since closing its Seed round

• How deep pocketed investors unlock optionality as a company scales

• The benefits to taking on lots of angel investors

• How Deel prioritized international expansion as it grew

• Deel’s new Visa / immigration and HR AI products

• Two things Alex would do differently if he could start over

• The founders he most looks up to

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Read the transcript: https://www.thespl.it/p/growing-deel-to-300m-arr-in-four

Where to find Alex:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Bouazizalex
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexbouaziz/

Where to find Turner:
Newsletter: https://www.thespl.it
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak

Production and distribution by: https://www.supermix.io

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