How Alex Bouaziz Built Deel Into a $17B Giant | Alex Bouaziz & Deel

25:28You know, it's like... I'm like exactly like that. I have all my little games in it too. And my last one is so good. It's the Hogwarts one. Have you played this? I played on PlayStation. On PlayStation. Yeah, I played on PlayStation. It's pretty good. I'm still a little more in the... Like, I'm very appealed by the Nintendo graphics. I think that's what appeals me the most. Like, yeah. Maybe it goes back to what you were saying about being happy. It's just like a very happy world. Very happy world, yeah. Actually, you know, on the way here, I was talking to my co-founder and my wife, right, that came with me.

25:55And I was telling them, whenever we have kids, we need to take them to Disneyland because I want to take them to the happiest place on earth. Yeah, exactly. So I think there's kind of a common theme here, for sure. For sure, man. Happy is an important part. Okay, so you got to MIT. How was that experience? I think what MIT helped me in many different ways was freedom. I think the one thing in American universities is they help you be much more creative and free in terms of how you work on things. It's like in Technion, I learned how to work hard, solve hard problems and get really good at making things happen.

26:28In the US, I learned about the possibilities of choosing what I want to be doing. So like a very wannabe entrepreneur is what I did at the time is I took my core classes in engineering, the one I had to take in order to get my degree. but every single other class I did was all over around entrepreneurship, around like finance, around business, just so that I can kind of start grasping a lot of those things and start understanding the other side, which I considered the other side at the time being an engineer. That really helped me there. And I had my first failed startup experience as well. Oh really?

27:02Tell us about that. I mean, I don't think we could even call it a startup to be honest. But I mean, I had one teammate that was really good. I mean, I did, Although I'm an engineer, right? So I know how to code. I learned how to code. Where did you learn how to code? Well, in civil and environmental engineering, you still learn how to code. Really? Yeah, of course. I took like 10 computer science classes. So I definitely learned how to code there. But so my friend was really good at it. He wasn't also in civil, but he was much more of a computer scientist. And we just like, you know, the two college students, they're like, oh, let's build something.

27:36Let's try to build something. and at the time there was i don't know if you've ever seen it the disney accelerator no so tech stars and disney did an accelerator together and we had in our heads that we that it was an amazing opportunity to build a business around so we're like we want to get into that accelerator and build a great business and we created like a very simple product the idea was like hey there's like amazing theme parks we love them um what if you could control the flow of theme parks and people walking into much more optimized ways by having a great solution that helps them navigate it better because i don't know if you've ever been into a theme park or a ski resort even but you can like wander around you don't really know where you're going to go next super unoptimized and you know you can it's getting a little better but at the time you could not really know like what rides you should be doing etc so this came from all your disney aero disney trips i know it's probably like some uh instincts there i mean what that's what's the alternative you know yeah i mean by then i i would know that you're a disney park by heart so you know it's that but like for me was always like hey like if you could quote unquote like control the flow of people to optimize their experience or even to optimize revenue right like i think there's something big there that a lot of those theme parks which are massive revenue generating businesses are missing um and i think it resonated all the way to the final interview which we didn't make it uh so that was but you know i think actually that experience was super interesting What was the idea of the product?

29:03Literally like a mobile app that helps you navigate all thin parts and helps you like directs you towards the right places and optimizes your trip based on that. Okay. But I learned a lot from it. One thing I remember was me cold emailing the CEO at Disney at that time and wrote like some silly email around like, I'm trying to build this. Who can I show it to? Who can I talk to? But to me, that was also like the first early signs of like cold email and like try something, which I think is super important for like a startup and an entrepreneur, right? Like the idea of like, you can just cold email someone and do it, which takes a lot of like courage, quote unquote, but at the end of the day, it's just an email, but not that much.

29:42But that was like the early unlock of like, hey, like the world is not such a big place after all, if you can, you know, very Disney-like. That's another kind of common theme I see of entrepreneurs is this idea of why not cold email someone? Why not cold call someone? You know, why not? We try to do this in our culture very often. Like, people call me and say, hey, I have a problem with this or with this guy or that guy. It's like, hey, just call him. Hop on a call. Try. And, like, I think people tend to overcomplicate a lot of things. Obviously, it doesn't always work out. The number of cold emails that I've sent that never.

30:14But, you know, on the odd chance that it works. You know, it's free to send, right? Exactly. Until your domain gets blocked. But, yes, it's free to send in general. You know, but he probably never responded to that one, right? He did. Who he did? Yeah. that's actually like my experience like he did he forwarded me to like their head of technology or something someone forwarded me that email I'd love to chat and see how I can help and like again like nothing happened out of this apart from a conversation but I kind of like I think you can say it works exactly like it worked it worked right it was interesting because it was a mix of like I always I think you need to be smart in how you do this like how you word it what matters trying to resonate trying to make it short but like the combination of like thinking through how to get it done and seeing it work is like super rewarding it's something like again like 10 years later I'm like still very proud of that silly story but I think it really like guided me a lot on many things I met my co-founder through cold emailing oh really?

31:09yeah I cold emailed Pedro in Stanford? no no we met in Brazil I was in Sao Paulo he was in Rio and he was all over the news because he was famous in Brazil and I was like I'm going to cold email this kid and that worked out? yeah he actually responded but didn't want to be my friend through cold email. He's going to be pissed when he sees this. And then a year later, I cold tweeted at him and then became friends. Oh, nice. I think taking chances is a big part of being an entrepreneur because the, I mean, again, super cliche, but if you don't try, who's going to, in France, if you don't try, who's going to try for you?

31:41In French, we actually have a sentence. I don't know if you have the same in English or Brazilian, but it's like, help yourself, then God will help you. Yeah, I think that's true. So at this time now, you're already into entrepreneurship or try to do a startup. You're an accelerator. Are you reading on TechCrunch about stuff? Are you kind of like in the understanding VC? Not yet. I'm like, I want to build something cool. I have some ideas. I have no idea what I'm doing. Making stupid decks, spending a lot of time on every single pixel of it. Spend some time at the Martin Trust Center at MIT, which is like an entrepreneurship center that ran by a great guy, Bill, who's basically like trying to help some entrepreneurs like have a space where they can build.

32:20met some great guys while taking the business school classes that I'm still friends with today that were in their MBAs, like shifting their career, trying to figure things out. But, you know, I think I really, so the kind of turning point here is I wanted to keep working on that, that idea, but my friend got a big offer from Microsoft, which, you know, he kind of came from, um, you know, somewhere in the UK, um, from, you know, not from money. And it was like a really big offer. He was like, I can't turn this down now. So he went there and I was like, okay, what do I do next? What's next in my life?

32:55How long was the program? Two years? A year and a half. A year and a half. And during there, it's probably like being in the U.S., entrepreneurship felt closer, right? Felt like more realistic? Yeah, it felt more realistic. If it also, it felt like I had grown up towards figuring out a bit more of what I wanted to do with my life. And what was it? I was not 21, so I couldn't go out. I had gone out a lot in Israel but in the US not 21 yet so I couldn't go out which was a funny thing I applied for a PhD and got into a PhD in the UK at Imperial College I spent one year there which was really fun I got my quals the equivalent of the quals and you thought you were going to finish it or you always thought you were not going to finish I didn't know what I wanted to do so PhDs are super lonely in my opinion it's like you're alone you're researching a problem that hasn't really had a solution you read a shit ton of papers you try a shit ton of things in the lab and you're all alone for a year trying to make something work.

33:50Doesn't sound that fun. I mean, that was my experience. But it's the reality. It's like you have an advisor that meets you every month or two to tell you, but you're on the back and say good job or tell you directionally you're in the wrong direction, but you're alone in the office. But you're kind of a grown up, right? Like if you're doing a PhD, you're not 21. You're typically like much older and you have much more control of what you want to do, like you know where you want to be in life. So I was a little lost for sure at the time. But again, I think directionally, I was doing something that would have value in my CV, right?

34:22And so it was okay. I spent a year there. And like during that year, I got my exam, which is what I like the milestone there. And I was like, I don't see myself do this for a few more years. So, okay. So now you're, how did you kind of start looking for ideas? Yeah, exactly. to start looking for ideas through my co-founder who, you know, the quick short version is like, she actually has an amazing story, but like quick short version. I met her at MIT. She comes from China, moved to China with almost nothing, paid her way through school. And she actually went back to China at the time to build a company in the air purifying space.

35:01Sold that business to iRobots. And she was like at the moment where her, she just wanted to leave at the time and wasn't too sure what she wanted to do next. And me and her co-founder were very close friends. So it was like a very open conversation. Okay, what do we do next? So I think we were both in that state of mind where we're like, hey, like, what do we do next? And in parallel, I had built some small products that had made some money as well, right? So like I was in a, like on the side after. Like what? Like we built at the time, the second weekend project with a few of my friends I had made throughout like this two year journey.

35:34and we built like the second or third big NFT crypto project at the time, right after CryptoKitties. So then we kind of started toying around different ideas, like whether it was in the crypto space or in the payment space. And we kind of came up with the idea of deal like, I think two weeks before YC, YC winter 19 obligations. And then how did you get to deal? So that whole process was also through YC actually. who sorry this is during YC during YC we got with YC with the idea of which with the smart contracts thing yeah the freelancing exactly and then we iterated through YC oh interesting yeah similar to Brex yes my sponsor was Aaron Harris so Aaron and I spent a lot of time iterating through the different products and thinking through this I actually remember Aaron at you know the practice demo they pitch where he stood up in the room and said guys they pivoted on Friday and I was like holy shit this is gonna be hard but YC was a very changing experience for us right like if you put things in perspective so like Shrew was in a good space like it took us like a year and a half to years to kind of figure out what we wanted we had made a little bit of cash we tried a lot of different products we kind of went around and wanted to build different things and then we kind of got into YC with like just an application and a very basic version of the product that was kind of not working but it's okay no one asked and then we got into YC 2019 were you surprised you got in or you thought you were going to get in 100 % surprised oh really I was like no way interesting I was surprised we got an interview you watch the videos on YouTube from YC companies that are doing their like demo video like early video and they're like we've grown this amount of time and this time and I'm like yeah you know we have something maybe working I was super surprised to be honest I was also surprised because the way we approach applying into YC was very last minute it was like oh there's the deadline let's try and see again it's the same mentality it's like if you don't try nothing happens right yeah totally but it was definitely worth it and then so during YC you're kind of pivoting going through these iterations so a lot of fast iterations and I was focused on the wrong thing I was trying to impress I was trying to push to get more adoptions on different things well deep down I knew that the way we were building the business was incorrect and I think actually that's what happens to a lot of entrepreneurs it's like of course you have to convince yourself that you're going to build something really great.

38:02But you have to be able to look at things and say, hey, this is not going to work. Let me kind of change things. It's like a very interesting realization for me where at the time I was not, when we went into YC, my mindset went from let's build a great product to like, can I impress my group partners this week? And I think that was definitely the wrong way to go about it. And when we realized this, like I think the company changed from - But was it working? Were you impressing them or were they kind of seeing it through? I think they were seeing it through. Yeah. yeah I think they were seeing it through they were seeing it through it I guess yeah and I think you should ask them I think yeah I would love to know so then like when did that realization come to you and like what do you do about it I think we're sitting at that group of ISA for the first time we had not had a good two weeks and the amount of care they had was exactly the same for when we had the good two weeks so that's when I realized hey like we're building this it's for us it's for our customers it's for no one else we should not be expecting like you're not at school you're not expecting a pat on your back this is not how this works let's recenter in building something that we believe in not something that we think is going to grow this episode of HD and HD is brought to you by a brand that's close to my heart Brex when we started Brex It wasn't just about creating another financial product.

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40:06How did you get to the deal idea? The deal idea. So we had the basic product that we had built around helping freelancers get paid and stuff like that. The good thing about YC is everyone next to us is a potential customer, as you know. Yes, very useful. Very useful. And pretty early on, we realized the crypto thing wasn't really a thing. So we kept the freelance product kind of going and we put it in the hands of a few people at Dale. Do you know Sansama, the productivity tool? It's like they were batchmates of ours. And I gave the CEO of Sansama our product. And for some reason, he started a contract with someone, put in escrow some money on the platform and like freed the money over time when they had completed work.

40:58So that was like what the product was, right? Like you're working with a freelancer and then you're paying them over time. I removed the idea of the trust thing, the automatic release. It was just about like being able to create a contract and like pay someone over time. And I was like, why the fuck are you doing this? Like, why are you putting$8 ,000? I remember the amounts. Like, why are you putting$8 ,000 on this platform in escrow to pay this person. It's like, well, I need to pay her. She's in another country. I don't really understand how that works. It took me a few seconds to set up and everybody's happy.

41:26But I think the realization for me was like, wow, okay, like that is like useful for him. The ability to like create a contract with someone, attach money to this contract, attach rules against this contract and payments so that it works. That was the initial realization of like, hey, there's something interesting there. And we just kind of went all in. We're like, there's something, let's go. Let's cold call as many people as we can. And Shro was doing a ton of cold calls a day. Let's try to get it in the hands of as many people as we can and actually have people pay their teammates through the product.

41:56Again, no yet strong understanding of compliance, global compliance, why this matters. The very early usefulness of this project is tying this contract and this payment together so that you can pay your teammates globally. So it's like, and we're like, okay, we've got something. And we just went all in since then. And did you, like, what were the other solutions you were doing before you existed? Like, what was it? Like, PayPal directs, TransferWise directs, bank transfers. But, like, the missing part here was more the idea of, like, tying rules of engagement to funds being paid. God, it wasn't just the payment itself.

42:32That was solved. It was more the whole process around. Exactly. Interesting. And what was the kind of first use cases? Literally paying some freelancers. Freelancers was still the use case. So like we had created three forms of contracts, fixed amount every month, milestone accomplishments, and like hourly submission in like a very basic UI. And that would create invoices and like very basic, but the whole, and that existed before, by the way. Like you had great businesses like Bonsai or others that are very focused on the freelancer and helping them get paid and setting up their invoice, sending invoice.

43:09But no one had really taken the approach of like, how do I help a company, quote unquote, run payroll for all of their contractors and help them like set up the structure so that they can engage with them in a way that works. So company focus versus freelancing focus. Company focus. And I mean, again, like I got, I think we got really lucky into that guy kind of having the vision of like, hey, I can just pay this person, set the money and put in there. Probably did that to help us as well, right? candidly so that the gmv of the platform went up but i think like looking back it's like i think that was a big unlock for us and that was like right before demo day that you guys figured out like a week and then we just spent a week trying to sell to whoever was willing to buy and we actually got traction it's like in like a span of a week i think we had like 200 contractors on the platform oh wow we went really fast that's a lot all the everyone in our batch that had a freelancer was on deal by the end of the week that's amazing and then we had a couple people that had like a lot of freelancers and like the Philippines and others at the time from like past YC Bash, which is cold, cold everyone.

44:12I think there's like, you know, you know that, but like Y Combinator being a very strong community, I think people are inclined to want to help you. So even if they were doing, even if they were like, I don't understand the value of your product, but yes, I am paying people. Like the small things, like the ability to do one click payout to all of them was, and the fact that they would help us was value enough for them to make the move. so it's like not exactly the best validation of product market fit but you know for us it was for the first time ever we had traction in something we believed in something that was something we like for the first time we had traction in something we believed for ourselves not to prove to some extent that's amazing and then how was Demo Day you just pitched it and Demo Day pitched it went well was it easy to raise money yes it was rather easy but I think most people invested on us as a team.

45:05Literally, my designer at the time is someone I called DM on Reddit. Oh, really? And worked with for like five years. Like, it's crazy. He's not in the business anymore, but he was like, he's still there for a long time. How about how you even find him on Reddit? Like, I read it for hire or something. I posted, like, I had some work and we kind of DMed on Reddit. Someone showed up. And I had never met him for years. And we, it's like, I have some crazy stories on that front. That's crazy. But actually, I think this is also like a very common theme for why like I believed in Dill so much like you're coming from a background of you know growing up on the internet growing up in gaming playing with people I don't know on gaming right like and you know I played a lot of League of Legends actually uh it's like playing with people you don't know and having a way to make it work um I had never have a problem building and working with people that I've never met in real life I can feel very friendly with someone and consider them close to me without having met them in real life.

46:01I'm exactly the same. Like my co-founder Pedro, we actually decided to start a company before meeting in real life. Yes. And a lot of our first engineers I met on the internet through gaming forums and stuff like that. I think it's very anchored in our generation. Yeah, I think our generation. I don't think this is true anymore. I mean, I can, maybe the next one is done, but like I can definitely do this. No, I know, but I'm saying like, I don't know if there's like the same, at least when I was growing up, there's all these forums and online places people met. I spend so much time on video game forums.

46:29Yeah, exactly. I mean, so much friends like this. Like so much friends just out of their game tag. That's all. And like, I like played so much, right? Yeah, exactly. I used to play Age of Empyre for a while. And I got really friendly with a guy. And 10 years later, he was my sister's, like out of nowhere, my sister's teacher in high school. Wow. It's like very full circle. So like I can totally like, and that's why I think, you know, like the idea of being able to like, I know we went in a tangent, but like being able to like run remote, distribute it, not having too many people. It was very anchored in, like, I think our generation.

47:02Totally. It's very fun. Totally, totally, totally, totally. So you had this little team of yours that were kind of working. Most of them are still here today, which is really fun. And they were remote or in ASAP? Fully remote. So, like, one guy met in Reddit in the UK. One guy met in Serbia, hired Upwork for a little bit. She now leads our content strategy. Two engineers in Ukraine. I told you, one is, like, senior director of engineering. The other one is, like, a super IC. But at YC, they were also in these places. They didn't come to ASAP. Yes, they stayed there. we made them come once so when when my co-founder quit I was like I like it's their boss to some extent right I need those guys to be excited about YC to stay to be there so I made them all fly to San Francisco we had no money so we all slept in the same apartment in like a tiny apartment where like one of them had a bed in the bathroom one of them shared a bed with me one of them shared a bed like the girl shared a bed with Shua it was like a mess but it was really it's like the early startup vibes And you think that your confidence was shaken at this time?

48:04No, I don't think so. No, I think I was sad that he left because I liked him a lot. I liked working with him. Right. So, okay. So you raised money through YC a little bit. And why did you, I guess, why did you go back? Why did you not stay in the Bay Area? We raised, actually, we raised a lot. We raised$4 million. For the first time, people were willing to give me money. And I have a lot of stories around this fundraising. like you know the GFC guys done and they literally met me and Shul in our building for five minutes left and came out with a one million dollar term shit and I was like what the fuck just happened you're like this never happened in my life I had to like beg for money literally I remember I remember like close people I had known for years me asking them to invest money in my company feeling so bad about it and them really not wanting to invest and feeling so bad that they were avoiding me for investing in the business and now this guy shows up in five minutes give me a million dollars.

48:57It's like, thank you. Are you sure that's what you meant? Yeah. It was very surprising at the time. But I think having actually struggled to raise a lot of money really gave us a lot of, you know, a lot of rigorousness in terms of how we spent. So we took$4 million out of YC. And you think it was a good terms for you? Yeah, because when we got to 1.5 million, we actually pushed the valuation to 15. I could have probably raised at a better price, etc. But again, like, I didn't really know what I was doing. I was just happy people were willing to give us a little bit of money. You're doing okay.

49:27Exactly, right? But the interesting part for us is because of the rigorousness we had from before, we actually got to our Series A a year plus later, had spent only$350 ,000. What? Yes. So I wasn't paying myself. She wasn't paying herself. Our teams were globally distributed, so not exactly super high salaries at the time. Right after YC, did you think about staying in the Bay Area? And so going back to the Bay Area, I stayed in the Bay Area after YC. Yes, I stayed in the Bay Area until COVID. Oh, interesting. A year or something? Yeah, almost like a year. I went back to see my family, but I stayed a year.

50:05And you had a visa? Yeah, I had an O-1 visa for legal path. I actually acquired the company that got me my O-1 visa eventually. That's amazing. It's a fun story. But yeah, so I stayed for a year. And then, so 2019, 2020, two days before Israel shuts down, And my mother calls me and says, hey, this looks bad. Get on the plane today. And I'm like, no, but I'm here in San Francisco. I have to work. So I can get on the plane today. And I did, you know, I listened to my mother to complain. Literally the day after, you could not get into Israel anymore. Oh, wow. So you went back. And then from there, you just decided to stay.

50:42You're like. Well, I was home. So, like, you know, I considered this place home. So I was like, yeah, I'll just stay. It's fine. It's working. Also, the team was growing. We're getting to a better place. I hired some people as well in Europe. Is that a big decision for you to decide to move? No, because I always thought I'll go like, I don't exactly love going on super long hikes and stuff. Like it's not my thing. Like I prefer to go down and like see people. And I prefer like, I prefer for restaurants to be open after 8pm. So I think San Francisco has an amazing vibe to it in terms of like building and being able to go like five minutes away from my house to send me to our apartment to San Hiron, right?

51:20And like all of those VCs are there. I think there's a lot of value into having a very vibrant, concentrated community of super talented people. But it just didn't feel right for me. Interesting. I go there. I spend a week or two. I'm very happy to go there. What part of the culture you felt didn't connect to you? I feel like Tel Aviv or Paris have a bit more of a soul to the city and the culture. And I feel personally a bit more attached to that. At least I feel more attached to that part of it. You know what I mean? I'm Brazilian. Brazilians are different than San Francisco I mean you see the differences between Brazil and San Francisco right and although I do think the most optimized place for business is SF depending on what you do I feel like there is value into being in an ecosystem and a place where you feel you can do your best work I think that for work it is from a work perspective I think I get significantly more output in my work when I'm in an environment where I'm more comfortable.

52:23Yeah, I think that makes a ton of sense. Interesting. So then you never thought you were going to stay there though. No, I knew I was going to leave, right? I think it was just a matter of like when does it make sense? I just maybe thought it would be like six years, seven years into the business, not a year into the business. And well, but also COVID, I think, launched the business massively, right? I mean, we're already growing 20, 30 % month for month. So like if there's one thing, there's a lot of things we got out of YC, but if there's one thing I would say we really got out of YC, is like that sharp focus on like week on week, month on month growth.

52:52Every month we had to grow. If we were not growing, something was wrong. So the business was actually trending up, right? Like I think from a marketing standpoint, we were able to really capitalize on the idea of remote work. But the idea of paying people internationally and hiring them globally is never really, it's always kind of been there. It just wasn't as legitimized. It wasn't as productized. It wasn't as, you know, generally there was less focus on this, right? Yeah, but definitely COVID, at least my perception was that it basically took like a, you weren't, if you weren't going to do remote work, you weren't going to do remote work.

53:29But if you were going to do remote work, you might as well get people anywhere, you know? Sure. But a lot of my, the customers I was like, context, all of the customers who were closing already had workers abroad. Right. We were not really a tool where like, when you're ready, we're here. Right. Most of the customers that brought business to us were people that already had people outside of the United States. So you didn't see a huge spike of people who never had people kind of coming in? So we definitely saw a PR spike, right? Like people talking about it more, people caring about it more, people Googling it more, people looking for solutions.

54:01We saw a lot of that. We saw a lot of enterprise businesses that we thought we would never have in a million years as customers come to us and say, hey, my best engineer is relocating back to Croatia. The same way I went back to Israel at the time, I'm going back to Croatia. What do I do? So like we definitely saw a spike of like search for a solution for sure. But like, you know, before you hire someone that's international versus it takes time, right? So most of our customers had already existing businesses, but they just weren't running it the right way. Makes sense. Makes sense. Makes sense.

54:31And so now going through kind of the journey of Dio, right? Like when it was the first time that you felt, okay, this is going to be a big company. Like I can, you know, I can see the writing in the wall. that's a loaded question I mean I still think depending what you okay first like what's your definition of big I think D was big from most of yeah so I think when we got to our series C which was our billion dollar round and started seeing trends of like 20 million 30 million to 50 million AR I told to myself hey like it's pretty safe to say this can be a billion dollar business plus. Because when you raise a billion dollars, you need to think that it's going to be a billion dollar company.

55:21That eventually it can at least make a hundred million dollars. Exactly. I think that's when the time where I had to say, because the previous valuation was$220 million, right? So I was like... That was your USB? Yes. Isn't that so funny? That's exactly your USB valuation? It's like, no, that time I was like, hey, even if we don't get everything right, there is an exit strategy. we could sell the business to someone it's still like it's a very high amount but let's say we get to like 15, 20, 30 million AR we'll find an acquirer for the business right like I know I know that there is an outcome there when you raise at a billion dollar plus in a different league right that's when I had to really think hey is this the right time to do this do we really have a shot at being at growing into being a billion dollar company right so I think that's the moment where I had to sit down and think is this going to be really big and I quote unquote realized that I believe it will.

56:15That's amazing. So let's talk about growth a little bit because you know, you guys, whatever you want to disclose, but what was the kind of like revenue trajectory of the business over the years? So I actually don't remember the first year. I think it was like one. Just a word of magnitude. So we went from like 50 to 250 to like 470 and last year 800 plus. So it's not bad growth. It's amazing. growth. It's like almost unseen. Especially at this scale. It's like unbelievable. I think it's a combination of a lot of hard work, good structure, the right place, right time, constant, constant obsession about customers.

56:59So what did you learn about growth itself? Like the functions that drive growth? Like sales, marketing, you know, you never did that before, right? No, my co-founder leads the sales organization with me. I think there's a lot of value into having your co-founder be the CR of the business. I think although there's a lot of the best practices you're missing because you don't have them, you can learn really fast. And the care and depth that you have in the business, if you can have the same way you would care about the product as an engineer, if you can have someone truly care about the go-to-market organization that way, I think it has a really high impact.

57:33What are some of the intuitions that maybe you learned from her over the years that you learned together?

57:40I mean, the first intuition for us has always been, it doesn't matter how good your product is. You need to have really good customer success and really good service. I think that trumps everything. People are going to forgive you bugs and things not being exactly the way they want it if you have the best service in the world. And we've always overemphasized on this. Like, we really, really care. We spend, like, I spend a lot of time personally with customers. and I don't, there's no, to me, some people are always kind of like, I'm not going to DM the CEO of the business to get this fixed. Like, that's my job.

58:15Like literally the thing I care about the most, I wake up in the morning, I want to work on, it's like, how do I make your life better? And that I think is the big insight for both of us. Like we're both engineers, right? So we analyze the problem from like a very, in a very pragmatic way. It's like, if you're here to help people use the, like do what they want to do, as long as they feel supported, And as long as they feel like you're doing things right and you care about making things better, then you will grow as a business. And I think we've carried that for years. And that's the one thing that helped us manage growth.

58:48Because growth is brutal, right? Like, you know, January was a huge month for us. We onboarded a ton of companies. But man, it was brutal. Probably the most brutal month I've had in the business so far. but because our culture is so centric around like as long as you're there for your customers things will be okay we were able to kind of pull through and that has been the common theme across the last five years of the business and what about to get that growth in the first place so how about a brutal month look I think we're very lucky to have a product that has pretty high ACV and when you have a product that has high ACV then although I try and aim to build really strong product-led growth, you can literally put a salesperson in front of every single customer.

59:32And you can put a customer success person in front of every customer because of your ACV, right? Like, I think our average, even SMB ACV is like 15, 20K plus, right? You can put a salesperson in front of this. And that really, really helped us because from a growth standpoint, you're able to really capture your revenue. You're able to really spend time with your customers rather than hoping they work out how to make it work when they're clicking a couple of buttons. So you should be able to simplify it. But if you are in a business where you can capture a lot of revenue, having a very heavy go-to-market organization is very important.

1:00:01I mean, I'm not going to quote this right. But one of our investors, very famous one, I don't think I can say who, told me, have yet to see, you know, a hundred plus billion dollar company that doesn't have thousands of salespeople. And I think we understood that very early in the business. And that really helped us on the growth side. Interesting. Interesting. Well, I guess Apple maybe, but yeah. I mean, that's consumer, right? I mean, B2B. Yeah, that's true. That's true. I think that's... Apple has a lot of business from the B2B side too, no? I don't know. I have no idea. I have no idea. On the B2B side, I can totally see what he means.

1:00:40Yeah, totally. Totally, totally, totally. What about marketing? What did you learn there?

1:00:47You know, I don't think... I think we have a good marketing team. I don't think we're especially great at it. And I think that's one of the things we're really looking to change this year. Like I think we could be a lot better. I think we've done a lot of things similar to yours, like the billboards and strong SEOs and a lot of the best practices. But I haven't found something surprising on the marketing side. Like it's been really like steady, go and like build the playbooks and like execute on the playbooks. Whereas, you know, I think on the go-to-market side, how you organize the team, how you structure the team, like I think there's much more meat at deal on that front.

1:01:22And I think marketing, you know, I've hired a great video marketing recently. I think this is an area that I want to level up into and start being significantly more creative or innovative. What do you think, you know, you're 30, 30, 31? 31. 31, yeah. Getting old. I know, I know. I'm turning 30 this year too. Oh, exciting. Yeah. We're getting old, man. We're getting old. I hope people feel in the room like I'm still very approachable like I did when I was a kid exactly you are you still have a very similar energy at least when I met you a few years ago hopefully I grew up a little bit though yeah you did you did I think you're you're growing up fast but like you know there's so many decades right ahead yeah what are you excited about for the next decades you know you're building this product it's getting a lot and you know it's in a compounding trajectory but like what do you excited about Yeah, I mean, it's like, I'm not going to give you a good answer outside of the deal, to be honest, because I'm very focused.

1:02:28And when I look at the opportunity that we have, when I look at the infrastructure we're building on the payroll side, on the HR side, I can see the path to building a generational business. Payroll is not something people care about enough. And it's still the backbone of every single company. and honestly, there's a huge lack of innovation there. You know, you were asking me what are some of the industries where I feel like there's enough room to improve. It's kind of like the thing that you never think about, and you don't want to think about unless something goes wrong. And as you know, in businesses, when there's something you don't want to think about, it's typically not super well-run.

1:03:09And that's very much what's happening in the payroll space, and there's some really bright people that are craving and dying for tools that are going to make their life easier. And when I think about the impact that providing those tools can have on people, like the end users, they're getting their money. I get super excited. They're getting hired, right? That's the thing. Yeah, they're getting hired. You might have not hired someone in that country. That's true. So that's the other side of the deal, right? The other side of the deal is like the idea of making it so easy for you to hire anyone anywhere, running your infrastructure, whatever infrastructure is, is super powerful, right?

1:03:43Like, that's always been kind of like the big tangent of this. Like, if we can help hundreds of millions of people get to work for the best companies in the world by making it so easy so that you just think, hey, you know what? This person in Kenya is amazing. Let me click a bunch of buttons and they'll be hired and have the best benefits, the best infrastructure. Like, it's such a powerful thing. And if you want to go back to the Disney thing, it's like making the world a little smaller, you know? Yeah, totally. Totally, totally. And, you know, I have to touch on Krypton AI. Sure. I knew you wanted to go there, but I was like...

1:04:12Yeah, so, you know, let's start with crypto is probably faster. But, you know, there's all this... You've been doing crypto for a long time. Yeah, you've been doing new crypto for, you know, smart contracts and for freelancers, NFTs. I love crypto. I think crypto is amazing. Are you leveraging all these stable coins already? 100%. We've been doing it for a while. What is amazing, companies that are able to actually... So we're actually launching in the next few months, WT4 employees to get big crypto as well. So today we enable contractors to be able to set. So when you get paid on deal as an independent contractor, you can pick how you get paid fully.

1:04:47So the customer runs payroll, we get the money, and then you choose how you want to get paid. One of those options being getting paid in crypto for like a Coinbase integration or BVNK integration, great products. Pure payroll, employee payroll is a bit more complex. But this is something we're super excited about. We're rolling it out. We've been working on it for a year and a half plus. We're rolling it out in the next few months where you'll be able as an employee to pick part of your salary and get paid in crypto automatically. That's awesome. And are these stable coins, do they actually provide cheaper and faster transfers?

1:05:19I mean, have you ever done a Swift to Brazil? No, not Swift. So if you want to get paid in Brazil and real, I think there's a lot of great companies that have built a lot of rails to make this happen, the way that works. But if you want to be able to keep your funds in USD, that's a different story. And as much as we love Swift for what they've built, Do you know Swift What were they built? Well they're a partner Yeah Like they built something That couldn't be done at the time Yeah So like we're happy to leverage them And work with them But like The Like What used to be acceptable before Which is like Three to five days Plus 50 bucks fee Is not acceptable anymore People want to be able To access their phone As fast as if they were in the US So I'm definitely thankful For what Swift have built At the time right Like I think they've definitely Like it's a very complex system That did help people get paid But I think Now you're kind of Entering a world where I want to access my funds today.

1:06:10Right. And, you know, it's kind of like the word is kind of equalizing in many different ways. Knowledge is accessible for free for everyone. Payments should be too. Right. And I think this is what stable coins really solve. Right. And is it solving already? Yeah. 100 % already solving it. Like, I think where people struggle is like when they do get those stable coins, how do they turn it into like tangent, like actual money that they can use, etc. The whole offering part is a bit harder. But like on Dill today, you can, you want to get paying crypto it takes literally it takes a couple minutes and it's like really great and doesn't matter where you are and but like what about the but can you just off ramp automatically for them as well or is that um or that's hard no we don't touch the funds in those flows okay so it's a bit harder maybe maybe eventually we could but not yet so do you think that like you know if you look in 10 plus years most money movement will be going through stable coins or now you think the infrastructure that was built historically are going to be there if swift changes their infrastructure to make it easier for people to get paid automatically if there is a way to do this.

1:07:12But people have been solving this with kind of the, hey, you know, you don't do SWIFT. You just, I don't know, WISE and others have the balance. But yeah, but they do it typically in the local currency, right? So what they have is like they have a local balance, a local bank account, and then they'll settle in the local currency. In order for you to be able to hold USD and pass USD through this, you still haven't solved that unless you have a WISE account and you spend on WISE, right? But do people want to hold USD or they want to? Oh, they do? Yeah. It's like a super stable currency. I thought people wanted to get paid in the local currency.

1:07:42No. So you should be able to choose. But the thing is, a lot of people value the stability of the US dollar. And they want to get paid in the US dollar. They want to be able to hold it. They want to be able to choose when they've done work. They're getting paid$5 ,000, let's say. They want to be able to choose when to bring that money into their local currency or when they want to use it. And there's crazy volatility. Look at the Turkish lira, right? Oh, yeah. It's like you want to be able to say, hey, let me decide when I make the transaction in my local country. Let me hold foreign currencies.

1:08:13I'm sure at least in Europe, I have some of my personal funds in euros, some of my personal in USD, some of my personal in GBP. This should be available to everyone. And I think a lot of companies have solved this through have a wise account and use it when you can. Revolut. Exactly. But like, your local bank, which is what most people are going to use, doesn't really offer that. That makes sense. That's smart. That's smart. I'm excited for you guys to launch that. I'm excited. So, let's go to AI then. How do you think AI is going to change payroll?

1:08:48AI in general for us, actually, I know a lot of people think AI is going to replace a lot of people. I think AI is going to give superpowers. It's like I think every single one of my employees are going to be able to do 100 times more than they were able to do before. And that's my vision. It's like, let's say today we're 5 ,000 people. 5 ,000 people? A lot of people. That's a fuck ton of people. Remember, I have infrastructure everywhere. I have literally lawyers, HR, payroll, finance in every single country making sure we stay compliant, making sure we're helping people locally. Like, it's a big infrastructure.

1:09:21I can't imagine a lot of that can get automated. Yes and no. Yes, I think a lot of it can be like, you always need a strong HR person locally. You'll always need a lawyer. Yeah. But will you need 10? Yeah, exactly. Right? So like, you will never replace my lawyer in Brazil. I need him to be there. Can I give him the tool so he can do 10 times what he's doing and replace a lot of the mundane tasks that he doesn't want to do? Yeah. For sure. But what about on the actual operations? On the operations side of payroll? Yes, in many ways. I think a lot of validation, a lot of the QA side of things, spotting errors can be fully automated.

1:10:01But I think it could also be automated before. Really good engineering as well. I think the main outcome you're going to get here is the same thing. You need less people to make sure that you're able to run payroll for hundreds of thousands of companies in a way that's fully automated. Even gross margins should go up. Oh, for sure. Yeah, it's definitely in our budgets and our plans. We'll always be looking at gross margins. But I think it's mainly tied again I think it's going to be mainly tied to needing less people but you still I do believe you still need the local skills in order to make things happen.

1:10:34Makes sense. It's definitely going to make our gross margins go up. We're excited about that part. Yes of course. And what do you do to stay on top of what's happening with AI? I mean we have we built our own AI product on top of whoever is cheapest and best at Time T and that helped us a ton but we have a team We have a very fun team at Dill. We call them the Ghostbusters. It's like the strongest youngish operational people we have at the business. And their job is to go and quite literally bust ghosts. So who is hiding? What is hiding? What's not operationally working? And like turn it around fully.

1:11:13And a big part of their job is also to make sure that there's AI adoption inside of the organization. That's awesome. I think every single leader should do that. For example, now I deal inside of our AI product internally that we give to customers as well. You can literally put the emails of your customer as a CSM with the tough questions that they have and get a fully crafted with the ton of voice email that you can literally send back to your customers and wait a lot of time. But yeah, I mean, this team, the Ghostbusters, something we came up with, they report straight into me and Dan, my COO.

1:11:46And we just literally push every single week, the whole organization on how we can make things better. so it's really fun it's amazing you should do yeah I will definitely tell Pedro about it you should hire a few Ghostbusters exactly exactly man I'm going to wrap this up here but this was amazing and I'm so impressed with your story and I'm so happy I got to you know go even deeper to get to know you it definitely got deeper I think than most people but hopefully you know this resonates with you it will and I think this will this will impact a lot of people in the world you know hearing a story hearing about the confidence you had early on and just trying so many times, right?

1:12:22Like, you know, going through the hardships and not giving up, right? You know, you kind of want to, a lot of times people see these stories and they think it's like, it's overnight success 10 years in the making, right? And you definitely shared a lot about how you got there the real way. So I really appreciate it. Of course, thank you for having me. Thank you. Thanks to our friends at Atomic Growth for helping with production and distribution.