Dan Westgarth, Chief Operating Officer at Deel: From Revolut to Deel: inside two hypergrowth companies

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0:33Hello and welcome back to the Scaling Europe show presented by Deal. Today I've got an amazing guest, Dan Westgoth, COO of Deal, an amazing European operator. Dan, thank you for joining me. How are you doing today?

0:42Dan Westgarth:Hey, Sab. Yeah, pretty good. Pretty good. How are you? Very good. Very good. You've had an amazingly interesting career. You've worked at two of the most successful tech companies of the last decade, Revolut and now Deal. How have you got so good at picking the big winners oh it's uh it's an interesting question i i think to a certain extent uh luck has a little bit to do with it um but at the same time i think you you know pick a company that you really believe in and picking which company to to join and be employed by is a way bigger decision than making an investment in a company so i said that's my philosophy only work the companies that you'd invest in yeah it makes sense and i'm curious to hear about the transition from revolute to deal you know you started revolute as like a very junior kind of like operator i guess you got rose through the ranks pretty quickly you were acting as a general manager at that point you then decided to leave deal and at that point deal was still incredibly early yeah i mean i joined so i joined revolute in my early 20s my first job was a customer support agents so uh i had a lot of fun at revolute i did really well from my time at revolute but i wanted to join an early stage company as a senior leader rather than a support agent i wanted to benefit benefit from that early equity in a different way you know i did it still did really well at at revolute but uh you know um it's a bit different kind of joining as a c-level exec.

2:18Dan Westgarth:And then also, I just have much, much larger impact. I think some of the things I did at Revolut still hold strong today, but I've had way more of an influence on deal than I have at Revolut. So I think those two things really drove the change. And why deal? What was it about the team or the company that gave you the conviction to join? Well, I mean, first of all, I started a full process. I kind of made the decision to go out to the market and look at different companies and meet different founders so i was i was pretty active i think with deal i really like the founders and from the moment that i met and was connected i think we chatted every single day up until today um which is crazy so there was a good energy there and a nice way of thinking about problems a deal at the time was a pretty simple contractor invoice and payment platform with a hr element wasn't really sure where it was going to go but i conviction that the founders were great and they would figure it out yeah interesting at that point it was it was really early on and you know a deal went through yc and it wasn't necessarily the hottest yc company when it went through um but you still joined um and what did you what did you take with you you know you spent four or five years at revolu operating scaling what were some of those key principles that you took with you to then apply as a you know as an exec operating leading a very early stage company i mean revelin deal are actually very different companies when it comes to uh to building and operating internally um i think that the kind of the main thing that i took with me was uh it's almost cheesy to say but it's the it's the work ethic you know hard work always prevails um breaking things down into first principles focusing on the problem and just underpinning that with really hard work i think that's the main thing that I carried across between the two companies and will carry across in all other ventures in life.

4:14Yeah, just put in the effort, put in the time. And tell me about Deal. You know, Deal seems to be absolutely flying right now. You know, I was there for a couple of years. I left probably almost a year ago now. Since then, you guys have surpassed a billion of annual revenue. You raised it in over$17 billion valuation. What's it like? How's the business performing

4:31Dan Westgarth:the other way yeah i mean deal is awesome we pull a group of really amazing people together that are high energy and want to want to work on impactful problems i'm certainly still having a lot of fun i think the market that we're operating in is just massive um every company that onboards into the platform has the opportunity to use all of our products and those products add value to their internal operations um so yeah it's all things are good a deal we're continuing to grow continuing to develop new things continuing to make the older ones better and continuing to scale the business and how have you found scaling the business you know you joined as such an early stage your role today versus you know six years ago must be almost unrecognizable how have you found that process from being a very early senior leader in a very small team to now being the senior leader of a company which is what, 6 ,000 employees, something like that?

5:30Dan Westgarth:Yeah, I mean, we're just over 7 ,000 people. I think as a senior leader, and to be honest, at any kind of level, as a company grows and scales, and especially at the rate of one like dealer revolute, you need to reinvent yourself. you need to be willing to adapt change and pivot i think um my job uh chief operations officer i'm reinventing myself every three to six months you know using different techniques thinking about things differently leaning on different people for advice um and that that's really really important and how has your job changed itself you know like i spoke to kind of the head of operations at 11 labs and she's now saying that they're in this stage of trying to double head count and so so much of her job is around hiring and finding people and absolutely smashing that process of recruitment and onboarding internally right as they scale from 400 to like a thousand or something like that where do you find most of your time today is it the internal operations of the business is it recruitment like what does your role look like on a day-to-day i mean recruitment and hr is a massive part of it is to spend a lot of time bringing bringing people together and ensuring that they're incentivized the right way and working on the right thing um that i would kind of summarize it into three buckets i think customers efficiency and and product need to have happy customers um we need to have a good product that they that they like products still a big big focus of mine and then efficiency just covers so much um is it how efficient the product is is it how many people i needed to actually run a part of the business or run a part of the product um is it kind of how we're hiring and who we're hiring and how we're targeting i think those are the three themes and they just cover so much and what does deal look for you know like i've had since leaving while i was there i had so many people trying to get me to help them get a job at deal you know what is it what are the characteristics of the traits that you think make a great dealer?

7:38Dan Westgarth:I think it's somebody that has a high rate of energy that's able to operate at deal speed. They're able to work in a chaotic environment and sift through that chaos and ensure that their objectives are always met. It's somebody that can break things down into first principles and think really deeply about the problem that they're solving and at the same time be able to zoom out and see what's in front of them. Actually, one of the big differences from my time at Revolute to deal was how we how we use data so Revolute was an extremely data focused company which it needed to be because it's dealing with millions of accounts and tens of millions of accounts a deal then we launch new products the products are used by a much smaller number of customers so we always rely on the data exclusively we also look what's in front of us we've got a lot more time speaking with customers and understanding what they have to say verbally understanding how products make them feel understanding how products work in their workflows um that's also a big part of what we do and i feel like you like as as a business deal is so product focused as an operations leader as a coo you were also so product aware you were so tuned into the product that there were times when you were you were messaging me about the product that i was working on and you were finding issues you were going through the workflows it feels like a very unusual type of CRO role but you are also so product focused why is that uh I think because I spend a lot of time with with customers I and I understand exactly what the customers experience further to that I use the product myself in our own internal HR operations so if I see something which isn't quite right I see something which could be improved made better and i don't hesitate to speak to the product manager or the designer i think it's a combination of kind of being close to a customer taking your own dog food and having very strong bias to action um by the way i feel like if you're using any product or any app as a leader and you find a burger you find something which could be made better and you don't communicate that back to your product team in real time like you're not doing you're not doing a good job no that's definitely true yeah but yeah i mean everybody at the all the senior leaders like are essentially product managers, it feels like, for all of the products, which is definitely, I think, quite unique.

10:03I always want to ask about scaling the business from a handful of employees to 7 ,000 being remote first. There's a lot of anti-remote rhetoric that we're hearing of 996 in office. A lot of people are saying you can't build generational companies remote, and it's ridiculous, right, because Deal is absolutely the fastest SaaS company to hit a billion dollars when it hit that, I think. or certainly some of the earlier milestones, all remote from day one. How has Deal scaled so successfully a remote culture?

10:34Dan Westgarth:I think being remote first and exclusively remote really helps. I think companies that have a hybrid approach really struggle with this because there's a real bifurcation in ways of working and then how you distill that down into rules and policy. but because we were remote first from the get-go and were explicitly remote, the playing field is somewhat level. After this, it's really important to have various strong processes when it comes to recruitment and managing talent. Culture also needs to fit. There needs to be a high level of trust in the workforce. You can't walk through the office at 4 p.m.

11:18Dan Westgarth:on a Friday and see who's trying to go home early. right it's um it doesn't work that way so it's it's more you know if you've stepped back from that notion of kind of walking through the corridors and walking around the office on a friday afternoon it's like who's missing their objectives at the end of march as we close out q1 and like that's the way it should be that's the way we certainly are a deal yeah it was a very high trust high accountability culture when i was there it was like you're trusted to get on your work but it would be very clear if you're not doing it and if you're not doing it you're going to be held to an account which i think was it's amazing it's like my biggest lesson from working at deal was that remote can absolutely work but you have to have people who really want to work hard and so the people who want to be who want to have great careers want to be successful are going to work hard if they're on a plane if they're in an office if they're at home no matter where they are they're going to get the work done i think that's been the biggest takeaway from me that you can't build a remote company if you are an average company right if you've got people who are going to skife and take their foot off the gas you've got to be you've got to have this really high functioning culture um i want to talk also about your your roles outside and your views outside of deal and operating you've been investing for a number of years now um you've been yeah one of the leading operators you've got expansion capital you do a lot of angel checks what's your state of the overall market at the moment you look across tech you look across the industry you look across ai says how are you viewing the market so i i typically think about companies and the products they're building as a user or a customer would i use it in internally how would it what impact would it have on me or on my my business um the key thing that i'm seeing this this sounds so crazy to say but i'm gonna say anyway the key thing that i'm seeing is it's still such a challenge to actually distill value from ai that all these products out there that are scaling rapidly the business metrics are amazing but like how do i actually get fundamental value from these tools and it's it's it's still it's still a massive challenge um going across environment sucks like you know if you're gonna if you're gonna use a browser-based agent from 10gpt or claude or whatever it is like going across the environment still sucks like it takes a lot a lot of time like when i'm i was using i was using claude at the weekend um to do some deal stuff and i closed out the chrome browser a couple of times then the operation not to restart it was just like a huge pain like why is getting the value from this thing so hard and the security can be a bit of a nightmare and then scaling multiple operations at the same time is tough so i think i think that's the main the main thing that i'm seeing and i haven't really seen a solution which uh solve all those problems yet yeah the wow fact is massive you know you use these tools for the first time and you're like this is amazing like i used you know like a open claw and it was like wow this is so cool i'm like talking to a bot on telegram and it's like doing all this stuff for me and this is amazing and then it's like okay like how do i actually use this to help me and it's like a a very different uh a very different challenge uh and i'm curious because your portfolio as well it's very when i was looking at it's mentioned it's very revolute mafia focus right you've got to you back a lot of ex-revolutors what's that ecosystem like you know is there like a big community of people who are investing in ex-revolut companies do you almost have like this network of angel investors who are like backing the best that come out of Revolut?

15:02Dan Westgarth:I think the Revolut, the Revolut Mafia, the ex-Revoluters which are acquiring that early cohort, they all want to help each other out. They've all been through the same experience, which was a pretty tough experience, especially for those that were inexperienced and young. In fact, for even those that were more experienced, it was tough. Nick, the founder and CEO, which is a big advocate of his, was a very, very tough founder and boss. So going through the experience of working with him and building Revolut in the early days creates some sense of community. So we all want to help each other out.

15:40Dan Westgarth:So I think when one of us is building a company, everyone wants to be involved in some capacity. Yeah, amazing. And the quality of the company is coming out with it is insane. What about you? Do you think you'll ever take the plunge and try and do your own thing? Or are you happy at Deal for the foreseeable? No, I think I'm really happy at Deal. We're working on a lot of really interesting stuff. And there's so many problems that I want to solve. There's so much opportunity there. I'm staying with the mothership for now. Amazing. How big do you think Deel can get? You mentioned the market size is massive.

16:10The global payroll market itself must be huge. How big is the market that you think Deel can win?

16:15Dan Westgarth:It's so tough. And Joe, our CFO will be telling me if they give any numerical answer. So I better not. But if you just think about how many employees there are in the world and how many companies there are and think about what we're touching today, it's huge. So I think there's a huge multiple from here. Amazing. I want to ask one final question, which is about the adoption of AI within Deal. When I was there, it was at the forefront. It was like, you have to be using AI. There's a lot of internal tooling that had been built to help employees leverage AI. How is Deal thinking about transitioning, I guess, from being at the very start of its journey, kind of like a more classic SaaS company almost, to now being like an AI native company, which is, I guess, almost a different beast in some ways.

17:06Dan Westgarth:AI is everywhere. Every team, multi-platform, multi-model. We have internal tools. We have customer-facing products that we're building. We have so many different levels. AI is everywhere. And getting value is the challenge. Getting value from it is the challenge. And therefore, we're working really hard to make happen a deal. Yeah, amazing. Well, you guys are absolutely crushing it. And I'm looking forward to seeing you guys go from strength to strength. Thank you so much for joining me, Dan. Thanks, Seb.