An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth)

23:17Yes. Is there anything else you found that it's really important or effective for thinking about making a seowork? The biggest mistake people make is SEO is one of those things that you can try and automate it. Like you can do a lot of things at safety time, but it never stops being time consuming. And to do it well, it is going to be time consuming. So oftentimes people just get over it or they think it's below them to, you know, be going over and doing keyword research and doing all those things one by one. And that's oftentimes where people lose out is they try to cut corners. And when you cut corners, you just don't create a good quality resource.

23:51Like that's what it comes down to. It's like, is your resource good quality? Yes or no? So when you try to just be like, I want to rank and cut all those corners, you know, content is not going to be great. Nobody's going to want to read it. And your program is not going to go anywhere. So I think it's one of those things that people as they become more senior, think it's below them. And I think that's the biggest mistake. It's interesting that it's exactly the same advice for writing a newsletter, like the thing I do, where if a newsletter isn't working, it usually means the content isn't valuable enough to people.

24:19It's such a clear meritocracy. If it's useful, people will read it, subscribe, share, and if they're not, they won't subscribe. And at Google basically figures that out based on people's behavior. Yes, exactly. To give people a sense of the operation, how many articles are you putting out a month a day a week, whatever you can share there? We used to put out about 10 articles a week. That's net new. Whereas now we have doing more of five new articles and five article updates because the type of content we write, regulations change, things change all the time. So we need to make sure that even if something was published two years ago, it's up to date.

24:56So we have a team that is responsible for kind of continuously fact checking. So we do about five article updates and five net new articles written. And of course, we do it across many different languages. So what started off as English only operations is now in other languages as well. So there's no shortage of work to go around. Something that I go back and forth on a bit is if SEO is something every company should be doing and will work for them. And in my experience, there's certain products that are really good for SEO, especially if there's user -generated content or there's just like a bunch of data, like you say, Yelp or Clastor, where they can generate tons of pages in all these different ways.

25:35Do you have an opinion on what sort of business and company is best suited for SEO or is your feeling like everyone should probably be doing SEO in some form? And even if it's not a huge part of your growth strategy, it'll help. I don't think everybody should be doing SEO. I think if you are in a space where people are looking for a solution, you should be doing SEO. But if you are direct to consumer company selling people lipstick, which I'm a huge buyer of, you probably shouldn't invest in SEO all that much because people don't go to Google for that. They go to Instagram, they go to influencers, and even if someone types in the best lipstick of 2023, chances of your website ranking because you're not a third party objective company to other people is very low.

26:22So really depends on the solution, but if you are in a space which most B2B products tend to be, that you're solving an active problem very specifically, then I would say SEO is a good idea. If you're a consumer good, maybe a little bit less effort should be put towards it. Makes a lot of sense. Going back to the early days, your heart has had a growth of deal. There's a lot of things you could do. I'm curious how you decided where to prioritize your resources and what to do in the early days versus what you started doing down the road and what you could almost like not worry about early on. What have you learned about that early prioritization exercise?

26:59Yes. So I would say early days, it's very important to just go back to the basics. You know, build the skeleton before you put on the makeup. So the first question I would ask is, do you have a website? Is it fast? Do the search engine knows that it exists? Okay, great. The next step would be, can people find it? If they can't find it, you need to write content to make sure that people find it. The only after all of those Christians are answered should you then consider, do I have money? Can I put it behind some paid ads to make sure people come to my website? So like going step by step, but you know, you can't run a successful paid ads program if you have a website that's loading in four plus seconds.

27:40So really going back to the basics and starting from a good experience of the core and then expanding step by step from there is how I would suggest everybody starts and that's what I would do if I was to get hired all over again. I love that. So what are some of the steps to step one is do you have a website step two is make sure the website performs and people can actually have a good time in experiencing it. Imagine part of it is also to people understand what you do like tweaking maybe the pitch and the yes exactly and speaking of the pitch our copy team does an amazing, you know, job at this in the B2B world.

28:13It's very easy to come up with statements that could so easily be applied to another business and it would work just as well on their website and it sounds good and you know, you and your team feel really good about it. But then if you're one liner can also work for another business, please don't let that be your one liner. Like make it so that people actually understand what you do because right now there's a lot of, you know, statements out there like we do the complex things so you can focus on what you do best. Like what does that mean? And you can give that to 90 % of the B2B businesses out there and it would apply to them which means it's not good enough.

28:49Is there anything that you remember you changed in those early days in terms of the website or the positioning or anything along those lines that was a big improvement? Our website was hard -coded and so the first thing we did with the help of the, you know, DevT was to move into a platform that it was easy for me to access and edit so that we could continuously A .B. test things and outside of that we worked really hard on testing a lot of, you know, value propositions to explain to people exactly what we do, explain, you know, problem first, solution first and time savings, cost savings, you know, putting a lot of those against each other and rapidly A .B.

29:23testing. Once you got past that phase where maybe you started doing some paid ads and other things, where did you find you could invest more resources? Once we covered the basics of, you know, your big four or five ad platforms, we started looking into the long tail places. So those are the platforms that individually never contribute a significant enough chunk for you to individually care about it but if you add them up it diversifies your lead flow such that it kind of ends up being about 30 % of your overall kind of lead flow that's coming in. So those could be things like review sites, you know, or it's much smaller outlets that could also run ads, newsletter ads, podcast ads, all of those things, you know, when you run an individual podcast ad, yeah, you're probably not going to get 2 ,000 customers from one podcast, but you run 10 of those and then it starts adding up.

30:18So really long tail is where we focused on and we started going very niche with websites that have, you know, maybe 50 ,000, 100 ,000 visitors a month which isn't all that much when you're thinking about your paid ad strategy, but all of those places add up and they're oftentimes overlooked because they're not as easy. You have to take the time to set up from scratch to run it on everything, you know, our paid ads team, they spend just as much time running Facebook and Google ads as they do running those third party much smaller platform ads. It takes the same effort, but you need to have a diversified, you know, source of your leads.

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32:22And there's also awareness brand building component. I know you're not a big fan of awareness campaigns and marketing campaigns, especially early on. And so I'd love to get your perspective on why that is and how you think about that sort of investment. I'm not a huge fan of early awareness campaigns for B2B businesses specifically. So if you are a consumer goods founder, you can skip that spark, but the reason I don't like awareness early on is because to do a proper awareness campaign, it takes time. You need to have teams that are doing the strategy, doing the creative work, and they don't always hit you don't know if they're always going to resonate or not.

33:01And then you look back and you've worked on this thing for a whole month and it hasn't resonated and you've wasted a full month. So because B2B businesses uniquely are started because there's a very real need and there's a lot of people that are ready to convert like first tap into the bottom of the funnel and then go out and start speaking to the masses. But I promise you, it'll probably take you six to eight months minimum to tap into that bottom of the funnel of people that are ready to convert today before you have to start doing awareness ads out there. That's not to say never do awareness ads, but it's oftentimes the shiny cool thing that you want to do and it just ends up being a waste of time early on because people don't really even understand what you're doing.

33:42You haven't really even figured out what's the messaging that resonates, but you've done this creative campaign and people are like, this looks cool, but I'm just going to go ahead and continue looking for a solution for my problem. Is there an example of a marketing campaign or an awareness campaign that comes to mind that you thought was like, okay, this is if you do it this way, maybe it's worth doing. I've seen notions of a great job with their out of home ads. They didn't do it early on. They started doing it much later in their journey by the time when everybody that was working in tech kind of knew what it was and it was really to kind of drive home the message continuously rather than to introduce themselves to the world.

34:18So by then when you saw that layout on a billboard, it makes sense. You're like, oh, I know what they're talking about. So what is it about notion that you think was great? It was timing and then also the actual ad itself. You thought was great? Yeah, the ads that I'm recalling right now were showcasing their product interface. So they needed enough time and this is my obviously hypothesis if someone from Washington wants to jump in and say, that's the reason why we did this. Go ahead. But I think they needed enough time for people to get familiar with the interface because notion has a very specific interface that when you see it, you recognize it's not like any other product.

34:51So unless people built that awareness and recognition doing an out of home ad with that layout wouldn't have made much sense because just with that layout, they were able to communicate with product they're talking about. If they did that day one, people would be like, what is this thing that I'm looking at? So we've been working kind of through all the ways that deal has grown. We've talked about SEO community. You mentioned partnerships. Is there anything interesting there to mention or just like what partnerships have done? Yeah, I would say it's very important to know who you should partner with.

35:21So there's two groups of partners like people oftentimes end up partnering with any company that has a shared audience decent place to start. But just because you share an audience doesn't mean your audience goes to your partner for guidance when they have this problem. So, you know, in our case venture capital partners was a huge one because when you get money from a new VC, they ask like, okay, thank you for giving us this money now. We want to expand our team with the money you gave us. What are your other portfolio companies using? What is a platform that you trust that you would recommend?

35:51So, people go to their VCs with that kind of question, but there might be another tech company out there that is tapping into the exact audience that we are, but people never go to them to ask that question. So our partnership with them will likely not work just as well. So it's important to not only recognize the importance of like an audience overlap as well as whether or not those people are seen as a trusted resource or the solution you are putting out there. I really love this idea. You keep coming back to which is where are people asking this question that you can help them answer. And to make that even more concrete for people, what are some other examples maybe of questions?

36:27People ask the deal can help them with so that it could help people think about, okay, maybe our product can help them answer. These are the short to questions. Since the early days and it continues to happen, compliance is a huge question that gets asked. So when you are an HR leader or finance leader or legal leader in a company that works, let's say, in America, but you want to hire someone in another country. You don't know what you don't know. So it's very important to have people that know what they're talking about in context of your country of origin as well as the country that you're trying to hire from.

36:58So compliance is always a huge part of kind of, has been a huge part of what we did and what we've always answered for people. That's why we have in -house experts that answer those questions that constantly provide updates if the answer to that question has changed over time, which regulations constantly change. An answer we provided a week ago may change and you need to be very proactive in communicating that. Taxes is another one, especially in the space that we're in. You know, payroll hiring. Taxes change from country to country. You know, you need to know way you need to what pay what taxes when you need to not pay them and what types of work people do.

37:30So those are some of the types of questions that get asked. So for us, they're very nitty gritty and use case specific. You know, if you, the taxes you need to pay for someone who is an engineer, that's a full -time employee, might be very different than who is a designer, who is a contractor. So you, those are the kinds of specifics that we get into with people. God, so it's like, how do I pay taxes for an engineer I'm hiring in Turkey? And then you give them, here's the answer. And then it's like, if you just want to take care of it for you go check out deal. Exactly. Like, really the question is, what's the best payroll solution?

38:03It's like, okay, that's good to make sure what you're leaning towards isn't shipped and that other people agree with you. But ultimately, it's like, you need the best payroll solution because you need to make sure that things aren't going to go wrong. Speaking of answering questions and content, something that you told me is that you wrote a blog post at the IRS, ended up linking to you as the definitive answer to a question. And I don't think this was a deal, but can you share that story? Yes, actually, it was at my previous role. And the person who wrote that article is today a deal. So he came over to join us there too.

38:39But yes, it was right around when COVID happened and the US government rolled out the PPP program. And there was a lot of questions about, do I qualify? If I qualify, how do I apply for this? And at the time, company that I was working for had a lot of customers that were like, what do I do? Like, I need to gain access to this, but I don't know what to do. So the team there took the time to truly understand how the system works, whether you qualify what to do, and kind of created this resource for our own customers because we just want to help them. And then it ended up being such a good resource that it was linked from the IRS's website, if you have questions, check out this article, which was a great moment of pride.

39:19It just kind of went to show that when you do your best answer questions and other people don't have the time to do it, no matter what it is, they're going to kind of send people back your way. And it was at the time, you know, it happened to be a big moment of growth. There was a very unfortunate instance. You know, we wish we never had to write that, that it never happens. But yeah, that was kind of the story around IRS linking to the company's resource. That's the ultimate sign of the question has answered in your den with it. The IRS decides to link to it. So your sign that was actually a big driver of growth that IRS traffic.

39:52I'm curious how many people actually go read that. So that was huge for that short duration of a few week time when people were trying to apply for PVV. And then it died out as did PVV makes sense. One last question around paid. And then I want to move on to a different topic. Is there anything you've learned about what it takes to be successful pay growth from your experience to deal? Yeah. So a few things. Our paid team spends a lot of time on both the messaging aspect of things as well as the optimization. So optimization is, you know, the technical way in which you set your bids make sure that you don't go over budgets.

40:29Whether or not you can afford that. And then messaging is making sure that if someone sees your ad, whether it's on Instagram, Twitter, Google, that it makes sense for them. So creative fatigue is a real thing. You know, when you put an ad out there, that works for three weeks, people get tired of seeing that. You need to constantly update that. So our paid team is actually updating the ads we put out there on a monthly basis with the exception of a few gold. The ads, which need to be straight to the point. So get staying ahead of creative fatigue, making sure that you're messaging also keeps up with your product.

41:00Even if the ad is working really well, you need to make sure that, you know, as your product has evolved, so has the messaging alongside that. And also recognizing, you know, not just looking at the amount of leads that you generated from a campaign, but how many of them actually became a client. And how much money did you actually make from those clients to understand things around, you know, pay back? Because oftentimes marketers just tend to think about, oh, this is a great lead channel. And I get so many leads from it. But then you ask that question to sales teams, and they're like, yeah, I'm busy, but none of these are converting.

41:30So it's really important to look at not just the volume that you bring in, but what is the journey of that volume with your business, you know, one year out? How much money do you actually make from them to be able to properly decide, how much can I spend to win this customer? And the way that we've done it is we've worked with our data team to set up a dashboard that tracks that in real time. We know an average customer that comes from a Facebook ad, what rate do they converge from a lead to a qualified opportunity to a closed one and then on average how much money do we make from that customer one year out so that we can decide, is this a worthy channel for us?

42:06Do we not want to invest there? Or are we kind of reaching that peak and we can't continue to invest there? Something that I should mention as we talk through this, we're talking about all these ways to grow the product, but at the core is a great product that people actually find valuable and want to keep using. And maybe a question there's just how that plays into this whole growth strategy, like actually making the product something people want versus all these acquisition channels. Acquisition channels just straight up don't work if you have a product that doesn't live up to the expectation.

42:35I think I personally have been very spoiled and lucky because from the day I joined Deal, the product was top notch. You know, as I was joining an early stage company, I joined right after series A, I was kind of expecting certain things to be duct taped in the back. It happens. And I was like, oh no, like the engineers and the product team are, if they say a product can do something, it can do that and more. So early days of my team pitching deal was people were like, I don't think you guys can do all of that. I don't believe you. And it was almost like we had to tamp our down our messaging so that people would believe us.

43:11But you know, you can, you can be the best marketer in the world. If when people come to your products, even if your sales seem does a good job at convincing them to become a customer because you can do that. If the product doesn't live up to the expectations, especially in the B2B world, where people aren't going to put up with crappy products, they're going to leave. That's going to get out and people are going to know it's not a worthy product. So like that really sits at the core of everything that we do. I think it's very easy to take it for granted when you're at a company that has a awesome product.

43:40You're like, it is like this all the time. But you know, one of the things I would encourage anybody looking to join a young company is ask them what their team breakdown looks like. What I joined deal most of the team was product and engineers. So that told me that the core of this business is going to be solid. And then we built out those supporting things like marketing, like sales, like data to surround the product. But if you're talking to an early stage company that's a B2B product and they have six sales people into engineers, their product probably isn't going to be great for that much longer.

44:12Especially if it's like an outsourced you know, dev shop doing the product and they're like, oh, they'll take care of the product. We'll just sell it. Something else that I think is important to talk about is COVID was an important element of your growth. And so I guess one is that true. And then two, just what did you lean into and lean out of in terms of growth during COVID to kind of help people discover deal when they needed it most, which is basically people go in remote in a lot of ways, a lot of companies. Yeah. So COVID actually a lot of people think deal was started as a response to the pandemic.

44:45We actually got started before the pandemic and then the pandemic happened. So as kind of sad as it was, it did force people into like a pilot program of the vision that we had for the world. It forced people to work remotely. What are that means you're working remotely from someone who lives up lock away from you or you are working remotely from someone in Germany. So we did benefit from the fact that everybody was at least forced to test out this hypothesis of, does it work to not be in the same room as the people that you're working with. And one of the questions that we were getting early on as the code was coming to an end was, are you worried COVID is coming to an end that people aren't going to use dealing more?

45:26And our response to that has always been, we're not a remote work platform. We're a global work platform. So a lot of these businesses have gone back into offices. We have a lot of customers that ask people to go back to their offices, but now they have offices in Germany and in Canada and in US and in France. So we were never a remote work company. We were just a global work company and remote work kind of because there was a lot of news coverage happening around it, we just became synonymous with that. So I do think early on we did benefit from you know being able to provide that solution. And a lot of people saw the reality of like, Hey, I worked just as well with this person as I did when I wasn't in office with them.

46:07Well, the best person that I'm looking for the job may not be within my you know region. So let me go ahead and hire them regardless of where they are. People got comfortable with that and more and more companies kind of started moving in that direction. And is there anything that ended up being really important in terms of helping deal grow through that like a channel that's just like, let's go big on this channel because it seems to be working really well. Or is it just word amount basically and people just like, Oh shit, I really need to solve this problem. My hair's on fire. What's out there?

46:34Let me go find an answer. I would say it was word of mouth like maybe very, very early on. It was a word of mouth. But within the first few months of our operation that kind of stopped being short. At least the word of mouth stopped being a smaller percentage of the way in which people discover us. But it's always that you know people needed a parallel solution. They needed a way to hire independent contractors overseas. And we just were the answer to that. So we consistently put ourselves in front of them and said, Hey, if you're trying to do this or if you're already doing it and you're not doing it legally, we can help you do that legally.

47:10I want to chat about team building something that I've heard of your exceptional at. And my first question is early on when you're building the team, the growth team specifically ideal, what skills did you find were most important to look for and what skills and experience did you find wasn't as important early on that you could kind of sacrifice and wait till later to get early on. One of the first questions I would ask people is what are the KPIs that you're willing to commit to? So if someone's only willing to commit to you know lead numbers, that's not good enough. They need to be able to commit to you know closed one revenue KPIs to really show that they care about the business's bottom line.

47:49So it was those people that were willing to commit to the full funnel. And also oftentimes people tend to hire from you know the big companies that they want to become like because the brand name is a feeling. But if you're a team of 35 people and you're trying to hire the director of whatever from a huge company, you need to ask the question of when did this person join that huge company? They join when the company was already 5 ,000 people and from day one they had all the resources that they're disposal or were they actually one of the earlier employees who helped that growth because oftentimes the mistake I see people make is they'll hire someone from an amazing company that have accomplished amazing things but they're not used to operating with 10 % of the resources that they had.

48:32So they're not willing to kind of get down and do the dirty work and a deal we have this concept called little hands. I think it's loosely translated from French. Someone can kind of correct me on that but it basically means that no matter who you are where you sit with on the organization you need to be willing to get into the little things and kind of do the needy -gritty work and knock shy away from it. And it's very important to whoever we hire at when any level is like are you willing to do the tiniest of the jobs? And if the answer is yes that's great and some people are like I would build a team for that.

49:06And of course in the future maybe you should but that shouldn't be your first answer your first answer should be yes of course I'll do that. And if someone's not excited about that then they're not a good fit for at least a company at our stage right now. That is an amazing expression little hands. You talked about how you check that people are willing to commit to revenue goals. Is that like in the interviewers that like how do you because everyone just say like yeah I can't commit to anything you need me to commit to I'm going to go make this work great. How do you kind of get a sense of they're the kind of person that would do that?

49:38It happens within the interview process. So one way to find out is what are the KPIs that they have committed to in the past in their goals. So if they've never committed to a revenue goal or kind of a bottom funnel goal and they're saying they're willing to commit to that's probably not correct. And I always say you know if they haven't I say what are the KPIs that you have today and what are the KPIs that you think you should have because sometimes they're just not given those but they still think they should have been given the more bottom funnel. So that's something that I would look for in the interview process.

50:06And a really good way to also test for that is this is more on the case study process but asking someone you know to come up with a strategy with $0 with $10 ,000 and maybe $100 ,000 to see if they're going to be able to scale with you and to see how are they thinking about with different levels of spend and what are they willing to commit to different levels of spend because if someone's throwing up their hands and saying it's $0 I can only do social media monitoring. We're not going to get much because that's what makes sense. Well you probably know that they're not going to be comfortable committing to those bottom of funnel metrics until you give them all the resources that they and it sounds like the way you goal teams within Teal is also is revenue growth teams basically have revenue goals.

50:53It's not like you said leads or traffic or anything like that. Yes that's why we're called growth instead of marketing. We care about the revenue growth and you know of course we track leads and SQLs those are leading indicators to know whether or not we're going to hit the ultimate number that we all care about but at the end of the day that's not what we consider success. In terms of team structure how you thought about structuring the early growth team what did that look like and what was kind of the reporting lines and buckets of investment. Yeah so very early on we always seek to bring in kind of one leader to manage a part of the organization and then let them grow their teams.

51:29We don't love the idea of hiring people based off of a hypothesis that something is going to work that's a really good way to have to do layoffs because the plans you thought were going to work didn't work. So we always hired one person, prove out a theory and then let them grow their teams. So the first hire we made to the team was actually a product marketing person. To this day they lead our product team product marketing team and they were the ones who sit between the product team and the go -to -market teams really set the messaging and quickly we realized this person needs more help in kind of setting the messaging the tone.

52:02So then the second person we hired was a very talented copywriter and that person today kind of leads our creative teams and then the third person we actually hired onto the growth team was a data analyst because the sentiment was we're not willing to spend a dollar if we don't know where that money is going and what it's doing for us which you know a lot of people would assume that's a very early hire for you know data is too early to hire as number three but I still think that we did the right thing there. Now we have a whole data team but back then we didn't. So those were the kind of three teams that we started with on top and then the content was, content's person was already at deal by the time that I joined so that was first time mentioned that was early employee.

52:42So that's kind of kind of how we originally said it. Now the teams have changed so now we have a different structure slightly different structure which is we have regional teams and functional teams. The functional teams are basically subject matter experts they're good at what they do and we don't care where they are based in the world. So those are teams like product marketing, content, community events, paid advertisements brand. You know if we are looking for the best graphic designer in the world I don't care where they are they can sit wherever they in the world they are basically functional teams and then we have regional teams because we are selling into a lot of different regions we need to make sure that we have local expertise as well.

53:23So we have marketing managers for different key regions for us that then work with our functional teams to bring the strategy to life. So that's kind of how we've said it. I've seen businesses who you know said build out a regional team that has their own paid ad steam and their own content team but what we have found is when you take people away from their kind of group of expertise so if you take a paid ads person and if you have a team of paid ads people and you separate those five people and give them to different regions instead of letting them sit together and be a tight team the best practices learning and the skill like the leveling up of the skills doesn't happen as fast as they would if all of the technical roles are sitting together.

54:04So we are kind of continuing down the functional and regional setup. So say someone in Turkey wants to run paid ads they convince the paid growth team to invest in resources and growing Turkey. Exactly. So they would work with our central paid ads team to say I would like to run paid ads in Turkey. This is the audience I want to go after and then they work together to execute on that strategy. How does that team decide who is going to get their time? Is there a rough approach to that? So it depends on the total addressable market in our region. What are the opportunities we're seeing? What's the competitive landscape like?

54:38So chess is art if a market is what we consider to be tier one and it's a place that we have seen good growth. We will invest our resources into it and then we along the way we learn and we decide if we're going to double down or pull back a little bit. Awesome. I want to chat a bit about culture, culture deal. So we had Jeff from ramp on and their culture is described by one word velocity. Also being one of you being the fastest growing business of all time. I'm curious how you contrast your culture and broadly how you think about culture at a startup and how you help create the culture a deal.

55:12Yeah. So I would say culture is made up of two components. One is what do you bring to the company as a team member and what does the company give back to you? So what we expect the team members to bring to us is our version of velocity is something that we call deal speed is that we want to make sure that we act with urgency. It doesn't matter how big the team has grown. We want to act with urgency on behalf of our customers. If a customer has a problem, they're not going to wait two weeks to get an answer for that. They're going to get that answer within 24 hours. If we need to build out a product because many customers are asking for it, that product is going to get built in one tenth of the time that any of our competitors will likely build it.

55:51So deal speed is very, very important for us and that's something we expect from our team members who are committing to it. To say, what's the quickest way I can solve this problem properly and to repeatedly kind of push themselves to kind of act with urgency. We also care that we remain positive. We have deep old optimism because we are in a new space. So if someone's going to come into deal and they're going to be pessimistic and they're like, I don't think that's going to work for XYZ at reasons, they're going to just slow things down. We need people to ask the question I think it's going to work for these four reasons.

56:24Now let's see what are the risks associated with it and let's see to kind of solve those risks. That's again, something we expect from our team members. And then the last one, kind of, will not be the last one, but one of the kind of third important ones is, you know, fully giving a shit about your customer. Like at the end of the day, the product that we have, we are dealing with humans. We're dealing with their livelihood, the way that gate paid. We're dealing with the way companies hire. It's so incredibly personal. If someone doesn't get their paycheck on time or if someone gets into a legal trouble because their contract was inside of the proper way.

56:57So recognizing that it's not a software and a platform that we're trying to make it the best. But it's like, no, it's a business trying to pay a human. So they can live their lives and the business can continue growing. So that care is something that we need people to bring to the table. Now in return of those things coming, what we give back as a company is, you know, outside of obviously your pay, your benefits package, etc. is, you know, we offered people the flexibility to choose how and when they do their job, they get to decide on where they work from, hours they work. So we basically give people all the freedom to set up their life, how they want to, as long as they come to the table, giving us what they need.

57:38So I would say, we do have an intense culture. And that's expected. We share that openly with people. But at the end of the day, that's also what sets us apart. I love this deal speed. Are these core values, basically within deal? These are values that you come back to. Yes, exactly. And these are values that we publicly share as well. How early in the lifecycle of the company, the dual come, come up with these values that's something that a lot of startups think about as like, when should we actually crystallize these values? So we came up with them. I believe I was about a year in, but we didn't sit around the table and say, what should we call our values?

58:14Like, deal speed was something that, you know, our CEO would tell it people. He'd be like, okay, I want to do this, but I want you to do a deal speed. And one of the early jokes was like, let's have company swag that's deal speed, oh, and things like that. It's just like, it was already used so frequently with people that we were just like, okay, we keep saying this. Let's also kind of like define what it actually is for us and set it in stone and shirt with people. So we did go through that exercise probably about a year in into the company being, you know, kind of existing, but the culture happened well before we established that.

58:49Reminds me there being be there was a team that came up with the core values. I think I think it was like four years in probably. And there were six of them. And then a few years later, they realized two of them aren't actually true. They're like aspirational. And there's this kind of recognition that value should be who you are, not who you hope to be because it just doesn't click. And so they actually cut those values in the end that are having just four values. And maybe one day they'll bring them back. And so I think that's a really good lesson as you want to kind of see who you already are and then just represent them in a really interesting creative way.

59:21Yes, exactly. There's a version of what did you call it default optim, on yeah, default optimism. Airbnb's version of that was embrace the adventure, which is just like, this is going to be crazy. Just go for it and embrace it. This is what it's going to be like. Exactly. And you know, try and see how can I solve this? Like, how can this be done instead of why it won't work? Yeah, I love that. And as urgency piece comes up again and again, and these interviews I'm doing, what I think of is Frank Slutman, I think his name, the founder of Snowflake has his book called Ampita. Yes. All about, yeah, all about just like how they made Snowflake work.

59:57And something he comes back to is just you need to constantly have a sense of urgency because when you don't, people people get bored and they actually end up liking their job less because it's just like, I don't really know what I'm doing. Things are like sort of moving along. And there's actually a lot of value in moving fast. Jeff talked about this is just like, you have less burnout when people feel like things are getting done and out the door. Yeah, it's incredibly fulfilling. You know, I look back and sometimes things when, for example, when the SVB was going through the issues that were going through the entire team had to work on a Sunday to kind of communicate with our customers, like, no, we're good.

1:00:30Don't worry about it. But I remember that Sunday, you know, I had to miss out on a theater. I was so excited to see, but it just felt like, oh my god, like we're in this. It was like a war room. We're doing it. And that felt good. I didn't necessarily show up on Monday feeling already burned out, but it was more like, yes, like I felt alive. And I think the right people will feel that way. Yeah. And as long as it's not like constantly for years, just endless yes, late nights and weekends, it can't always be wartime. Right. I find that those are end up being the most memorable, meaningful moments is when you're working really, really hard on something that you're excited about and has to be something you're excited about in our product.

1:01:08Yes. Last question. I saw on Twitter, you show this photo of your home office and it was this incredible view at the window and then you took a photo facing your desk and it was an ironing board. And two questions there. One is just how did that all happen. And then two, I think you mentioned somewhere that you didn't even meet a lot of your coworkers for a year and a half after joining deal. It was very remote forward. So curious also just how you made remote work for you in that environment. Yeah. So I'll explain the ironing board first. So that was because I was actually visiting my family in Istanbul.

1:01:42And in the setup that we have, there's one desk. So my husband and I go rock paper scissors and we'll see who gets the desk and who gets to come up with a secondary solution. And he won the desk. So I had to come up with a creative solution. And because the view behind me was stunning of the boss first, every meeting I joined people were like, wow, I love your view. This is amazing. I was like, I don't know, you guys, I'm sitting on an ironing board right now. And to read that was both funny. And I kind of wanted to do a reality check the people to be like, come on, like this is not as kind of glorious as it looks.

1:02:16But at the same time, it really like in that moment, I was like, this is awesome. You know, I work at deal previously when I wanted to go visit my family in Istanbul. And I live in Canada. I would have to use my kind of days off to go. And for me, just meant a lot to be able to like do my work regardless of where I am. You know, I had a full day of work and meetings and everything. And my work just kind of continued. And I was also be able to be with my family. So like, it was a moment of deals promise kind of coming through in a very real way in my life. And I thought it was kind of hilarious.

1:02:49My dad thought it was so unprofessional that I shared that with the public. Again, he hasn't fully wrapped his head around the startup world. So, you know, it was just one of those moments of sharing that, yeah, work can be remote and it can be whatever you want it to be. So that's the kind of story behind it. In this moment, as we're recording this, I am in a proper home office with a desk and a back supported chair. So, you know, it changes all the time. And in terms of kind of to go back to the second question of early days, not meeting the team members. As I said, I joined deal in July 2020.

1:03:25Pandemic was kind of at its peak, meeting based in Canada. Canada had a very strict restrictions of you can't leave the country. We won't let you back in. So I had to stay put and I worked for a year and a half at deal before for the first time where I met our team members was at a conference in Lisbon. And I showed up and it was the surreal moment because I worked with them for a year and a half. We'd accomplished so much. You know, our revenue was already, you know, way past 50 million dollars. And I was seeing these people for the first time. So that was kind of very funny. But if I look at the early days of deal, there's a lot of little stories like that where, you know, we forgot to create swag until we reached a billion dollars.

1:04:07And it was actually when we were our photo was going to be on the NASDAQ and we wanted to give team picture that we're like, guys, we need to have t -shirts. Can someone please run to a store in New York and like print our logo on something? So a lot of those things kind of just by the nature of being a pandemic business kind of came in a little bit later. But the thing that allowed, I think for me, and deal to build the culture early on was because we all work from home, we've been like that from day one. We have the option to go into, you know, we work and co -working spaces if that's something that you choose.

1:04:40But we all get to show up as like our very authentic selves. So, you know, people have met my pets and my partner, well, before they would have if I was showing up to an office. So there's that kind of sincerity that comes with in being, with being in someone's home that we really relied on early on. And as a company, like I never felt the pressure to shop in a certain way or, you know, dress up for meetings or anything. So just being able to show up as yourself and, you know, whether you're an introverted person whenever likes to turn on their camera or you're someone who's going to be like, hear me, my dog, that just naturally built a team culture and kind of camaraderie well before we could be together in person.

1:05:20Clearly it has worked out. Multimiseranything else that you want to share before we get to our very exciting lightning room. We had a really good conversation. The one thing I would kind of tell people is most of growth. People assume is very difficult. I'm not necessarily saying it's easy, but it's relatively straightforward when you go back to the first principles of just figuring out where are the people at? How can I add value and how as long as your product is there to actually bring them value? So I would say like people should just recognize that it's much simpler than they think it is.

1:05:56It just takes a lot of discipline to kind of execute on it. It's not rocket science. Quentin empowering statement. I love it. With that we've reached our very exciting lightning ground. Are you ready? I am ready. Let's do it. What are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people? From the nonfiction world, how will you measure your life by Clay Christensen? That's when I recommend kind of takes the business learnings that he's had and applies into your life. It's a very short and easy to kind of get through a book. Outside of that, I constantly recommend fiction. I think at one point we became like it became uncool to read fiction that like every moment you have needs to be productive and you need to learn something.

1:06:41I don't be creative. Do something with your brain other than reading nonfiction and learning things all the time. I've had to make that shift myself and it's been great. But I still get your onto nonfiction. But a good reminder. Yes. What are some favorite recent movie or TV shows you've loved? Favorite recent movie I think along with everybody else was Oppenheimer. I thought it was great. I do wish they explored a little bit more of why he was the person that drove everybody to excellence. But overall love the movie kind of did not think I could sit through three hours without peeing, but I did.

1:07:13And favorite recent TV show was The Summer I Turned Pretty. I absolutely love it. I don't care that it's actually designed for TV troopers. I enjoyed a great second of it. What is a favorite interview question that you like to ask candidates when you're interviewing them? What would your siblings say about you? It's very telling. If they have siblings, if they don't, I will say what would your parents say about you? But it's very telling what do you think other people think of you? What do you look for in their answer that gives you a sign that they're a good candidate or not? I have a personality and self -awareness.

1:07:48Your siblings are never, I mean, I love my sister, but she'll probably should talk me a lot. And being aware of that is very important. If someone's like, my siblings will say I'm very organized and that I'm the one that brings our family together. That's probably a bullshit answer. But if they're like, they'll say these weird things about me that shows a little bit of self -awareness and humbleness that I want to see in a person. What is a favorite product you've recently discovered that you really like? This is a dangerous one. So two, one was new strips. They're caffeine strips. I find caffeine pills and everything.

1:08:22When I drink coffee, it's like, accidentally, I'll have 300 milligrams and then I'm buzzing. But these are 50 milligrams each. So it's very easy to stop yourself and they don't taste bad. So those I like for when I just need a little boost. So they're just like strips that you put in your mouth? Kind of like the serene strips. And you put it on your tongue and then it also doesn't give you the jitters. And it's just 15 milligrams, which is a very mild cup of coffee. I prefer dosing caffeine. Exactly. And the second one is I recently was gifted personalized library stamp, which I love, because I love to give books away.

1:08:56So I stamp them with my library stamp. And I like to think that one day in a second hand book, shop I'm going to run it to it. That's amazing. There's a a camp at Burning Man. That's a library and you can borrow books and you have to return it the year, the next year. Come back to Burning Man. Which is amazing. And then they have, there's a guy that has a megaphone or he's just like, Hey, book has been returned. Mix the whole scene about it. What is a favorite life motto that you often come back to or share with other people either at work or in life? The world is run by insecure over achievers.

1:09:30I used to think my insecurity was a downfall and I would just kind of hide it and try to pretend it's not there. And then someone that I really look up to told that to me, I'm like, Okay, so not the only one. And it's just, you know, I think I do think world is run by a bunch of people that have something to prove for a good reason or not, but it's better to embrace it than to pretend like you're all confident and you're just doing this because you're brilliant. Oh my god. So good. Final question. What is your favorite Canadian food? You live in Canada and thus the question. I mean, okay, it's not particularly food with scissors.

1:10:04They're basically bloody marries with clam juice. Oh, bloody Caesar. Is that what they're called? They're called Caesar. They're called Caesars. But the American equivalent would be a bloody marry. It's so much better than a bloody marry. It's not vegan. And then the reason I qualified as food is when you ordered in Canada, it comes with like pepperoni sticks and pickle theparagus and they can they'll shove a whole meal in there. And it's just amazing and something that America she definitely adopt to. I think I've had one. I think I prefer bloody marries, but good, a good pitch for the Caesars.

1:10:35Melton, thank you so much for being here. We talked about growth strategy, team building, deal speed, default optimism, so many things. Really appreciate you making the time to final questions. We're working for explaining online if they want to reach out. And how can listeners be useful to you? So they can reach out to me on Twitter at Melton K. I'm the fastest to respond there. Please don't reach out to me on LinkedIn. I never risked luck there. And the way readers can be useful to me is if they want, we're always looking for feedback on deals. If you see something out there that you think could be better, let me know.

1:11:07I'll make sure to communicate it to the team, whatever that may be. And also if anybody has tips that they think I would benefit from or any good book, good book, fiction, book recommendations, I'm always open to them. Amazing. Melton, thank you again so much for being here. Thank you so much for having me. Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts Spotify or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny'sPodcast .com.

1:11:47See you in the next episode.