Deel Hits $1.4B+ in ARR | CEO Alex Bouaziz Shares Growth Playbook

31:43Like, a lot of companies are trying to do this right now. I think I'm decently smart. I think my team are very smart. I would not be able to do what those guys did. So bringing that knowledge in-house and like rebuilding with them is like, it's just such an acceleration for the business. because we're in such an M &A acquisitive we're in M &A land right now and you have extra capital to do it what is your playbook and framework for onboarding them and actually getting those companies assimilated, the cultures, that kind of thing so actually one of the good things about being profitable is we can be a bit more aggressive than most companies when it comes to this actually I think it's a really great question because we built a pretty unique playbook and I think I briefly mentioned I think it's super unique and I think most companies should look at.

32:31The deal they are is because when we do acquisition of some of the smaller companies for product, we basically build a way to fully integrate their product and their customer base in like the span of 12 months. And I think it's like, I mean, I'm pretty proud of it because it really works. And most people always look at me, they're like, wow, an acquisition is going to take you so long. It's going to be so disruptive for the business. Like, what are you going to do about it? and actually fooled a lot of my competitors as well which is pretty fun because they looked at it and were like oh they're building through acquisitions and trying to like bring products together like this what we actually did which is really fun is we acquired the companies and we basically say okay for the first three months we're going to build on your back end right so you're a small product you don't have that many customers we do acquisition from like zero to five million in AR or ten million in AR so it's okay we're going to build on your back end you have your backend we're going to build within the deal using your backend and what that means in within the span of a month and a half because it's only from front end right even a month you already have the first version of the product on the product and then my learning is whenever you have a large go to market team like we do like a couple thousand people before a salesperson is comfortable with selling a product it takes like nine months to nine to twelve months and by being able to bring the zero of the product after month one even though it's using the backend of the company were acquired, you can get your salespeople trained and comfortable so that whenever, over the period of the next 11 months, you're going to rebuild the full back end of the product, when you get to that 12-month period, the team is ready to sell and is ready to show the product.

34:04Most companies, the way they work is they would rebuild their product for 12 months, then show it to their go-to-market team, and then have another lag of 9 to 12 months before the company is actually able to sell their product. So that little trick here gets us much more accelerated. And you can see it in the growth of the business, right? I think our IT business almost grew 100%. All of the different businesses we've brought in have significantly increased RIR. And it's part of our distribution strategy that gets strengthened from this as well, which is really great. What do you think the biggest mistakes are besides that most people make when they're doing acquisitions?

34:40There's a mix of both, right? I think the trick with acquisition is you cannot be over careful so you want to be super careful because like it's a very emotional moment for employees of the company they're switching they're migrating to a new one you know there's some you know what am I going to do how am I going to perform how is that going to happen so there's a lot of uncertainties for the employees of the company that you acquire and I think having a great M &A team on that front is very very important but at the same time you don't want to be too careful where it takes way too long to do it right because you're trying to like over optimize for every single detail of this happening so one thing I've always loved to do is like kind of talking to the people requiring and say hey it's gonna be a bit chaotic at the beginning but we're here for you and we're gonna make it work and this is just gonna help us get you integrated so much faster rather than trying to get everything pixel perfect in any way at the annuals crop somewhere and that I think is a huge learning for me in terms of how we can execute on M &As and how why most companies fail right like when you talk about M &As with other founders they'll tell you well it didn't really work or like one out of four worked right and i think most of it comes from the preparation either they over prepare and it kind of kills it from within because even there like the people are waiting they want to be part of your company they want to do things or they're completely underprepared and then when you integrate them it's a mess do you keep the founders long i try to i mean you know founders are fun i like working with founders i try to keep them as long as i can obviously it always needs to be appealing one thing i do which works decently well for us is I actually usually have the founders reporting to me directly for a while.

36:11So, you know, one, they have more freedom and second, they know we care, right? And it's important because they're smart people. They could go and build a new business within a year, right? And if you want some retention there, you need to show you care and you need to show they're here for the bigger picture, for that$100 billion vision and showing them how they're going to help us get there is very critical. Can you tell me more about your CFO? My new CFO? You should interview him oh yeah he's great yeah you really like him it's very funny because you know the way we looked at this so so for context um when me and shuo built uh our company actually brought in my father to help me on the finance side because with series a founder the last thing i wanted to do was finance uh and you know my father was actually he actually built a company in france that was that was public so he had very unique experiences where in france everything is about profitability and it can't grow too fast and things like that so he had a very unique like finance experience I had the luxury of seeing him start a company.

37:08I was born in 93, starting companies in 89. He was selling computers and softwares. I saw him grind through like for until 2007, I think, 7 or I need to double check that. But 2011 for when they went public. It was a small cap, small company. But such a grind to see him grow was beautiful. And so I brought him in to help us with finance because I really didn't want to deal with it. And eventually we got to a point where like, okay, like, you know, it makes sense to bring a CFO that has done American public companies, maybe from like a relationship perspective, like some Patterson CEO CFO was maybe not the best setup to be a public company.

37:46So we said, okay, let's transition and bring someone really great. And then we started like that search, which was really fun for me because, you know, it was about finding the right culture fit. It's not really that you can find someone that can run a 7 ,000 people company that's really global. And that had this type of experience. And this is one of the things I loved about Joe, right? Like, he's such, like, he's such an international guy. Like, he was in China. He's married to a Peruvian lady. And then he worked through IPOs. And then he worked as the CFO of a startup that got acquired for a decent amount of money.

38:21And then he switched from being the CFO of that company to being the CEO of the company. So seeing the business side of things. it's just like fit it so many or he crossed so many so many boxes that uh it was just so great to see right and it took me a while to find him actually so i'm very happy he's part of the team you should interview him he's much more fun than me we'll have him on we'll have shuo on oh he's he's uh he is one of the most interesting cfos i've met and uh the background is very impressive you know he speaks you don't know that but he actually speaks chinese i did know that You didn't know that.

38:57It's so cool. You see, like, you can actually speak in Chinese usual when they don't want me to understand. We'll have to get you some Mandarin lessons. It's fine. Let them have their language. You've mentioned IPO a couple of times. So how do you think about restructuring the business or getting it ready to do an event like an IPO? Yeah. Or maybe, I don't know. We'll see. Look, the way we think about this is we want the business to be as perfect as we can, be IPO ready, right? So that we can decide when is the right time if we were to be a public company. So it's part of the work, right? And actually one of the reasons Joy is even here, right?

39:34Bringing that public experience into helping us shape up into the cadence and the infrastructure of being a public company, right? So this is one of the key reasons he's here. And I think he's already done such a great job, right? So, you know, rebuilding a lot of, like, the structure, the governance. Remember, we're a six-year-old company, so a lot of the things, like, are being built as we grow as a business. But putting all of those things together that most people, you know, know take time, whether it's, like, how fast you close your accounting and SOX compliance and data governance. Like, it's been such a fun project to see kind of unfold, and I'm very happy is at the helm of getting that done.

40:14And, you know, it's kind of like growing up and maturing as a business. And even myself, maturing as a CEO, kind of seeing those things happen is like, yeah, it's at the same time very fun. And at the same time, it's my job to make sure that we do it in a way that doesn't hinder the business too. Yeah. I mean, I ask specifically because if you've seen recently, the stock market's been very volatile. Very volatile. Very volatile to a lot of new tech entrants as well. And we have a little nice little opening. And then, you know, I think it's still open. And I think there's still companies that are going to go public, but it has shown the kind of volatility that at least this market right now and this AI moment, this like mass autonomous self-improvement, AI agent chaos is bringing a lot of questions for future financing and valuations for public market companies.

41:06No, for sure. And I think it makes a lot of sense. I think the way, you know, I think the way I like to think about it is very much like business fundamentals, right? Like one is, does your business have AI tailwinds or headwinds, right? And for us, whether it's from the internal infrastructure and all of the new tools that we can build, right? Like we launched our AI workforce hub and there's a lot more we're working on right now. Like clearly we have AI tailwinds in terms of what we can offer our customers, right? And if you combine this with the regulatory work that we've done, which is really hard to reciprocate, like you can see that it's the foundations of the business are really hard to disrupt purely, right?

41:37And, you know, I would be very impressed if someone wants to vibe code payroll in Poland. that'd be and globally right that would be we love poland yeah we love poland but like do you really want to vibe co-pair in poland then well then when you're done with poland you're going to have to do it in many other countries to be able to do what we do right so like in many ways like the way i feel about it is on that front we're pretty covered and then you need to look at the fundamentals of the business right like the way we've been growing year on year the profitability profile of the company as well so look i think yeah i think your market corrects themselves in terms of the markets are beautiful they correct themselves and they eventually value the companies sometimes over time to what they should actually be valued so I look at the business fundamentals if I look at the tailwinds that we have you know I think it'd be important to price it right there's a reason why we didn't raise that the crazy valuation I think the price is gonna be very important if we were to be a public company and we're very mindful of it Well, before we go too far down, I have to bring up a very fun subject because I'm going to be called a puff peacemaker if I continue much longer.

42:44You're no puff peacemaker. To be clear, Deal is a sponsor and we love Deal, but we loved Deal even when they weren't a sponsor. we joked earlier about the location because you have been called a Dubai leading founder because of a large controversy that the company has been a part of could you share a little bit more on that yes I mean I've learned that sometimes the media are yeah they're open to running very inaccurate stories and not correcting them later which is always fun it's been a very fun learning curve for me. Yeah, I mean, you know, first of all, I'm based in Tel Aviv. I've been based in Tel Aviv for quite a while.

43:23I do think Dubai is amazing and the UAE. And if you haven't been, you should visit. Yeah, I know that that was not exactly accurate. And maybe one day the guys at TechCrunch or wherever, if you want to correct the statement, that'd be great. But beyond that, look, I mean, obviously I cannot comment on litigations. It is the first time that as a company, even me personally, have such an open and public litigation. I do think that was on purpose for a few people. But the way I kind of look at this is very transparent. As a company, we're going to grow, and we're one of the largest, if not the largest in our industry, and we've got a target on our back.

44:01It's our job to improve. It's our job to be ready. It's our job to make sure that we have the right infrastructure internally to be able to work through those things. So far, I think we've done a decent job at this, and we have a lot more to learn. VCX by Fundrise, the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View the portfolio at getvcx.com. That's getvcx.com. Some of you may not have heard this yet, but our sponsor Public just launched something called Generated Assets, and it brings AI into investing in a way I've honestly never seen before.

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45:47Visit D-E-E-L.com slash sorcery. That's D-E-E-L.com slash S-O-U-R-C-E-R-Y. I've interviewed a few CEOs that operate incredibly competitive markets. One of them is Archer's CEO, Adam Goldstein. I saw that interview. It was very good. Thank you. When they went public, they had three-letter agencies go after them. Their competitors file lawsuits. CalShe was a sponsor. I love CalShe. They're in the most competitive market ever right now. And it's neck and neck with Polymarket, and they just keep on fighting. On top of that, we also have Brex. And I think we all know who their competitor is. but thou shall not be named so i'm curious for you as a ceo how do you navigate leading the company through difficult situations like this and how do you let it not affect your employees the funny part is although i have more affinity with some than others in all the companies that you've talked about um a lot of it is a little bit bullshitting because if you actually put the kalshiga in the play market in a room they would get along so well and if you put the breaks guys and it's my opinion right and the company we should not be named if you want in the room they're actually great people as well um so you know i think the media bubble the x bubbles there really doesn't help in buildings like some of those competitive mindset for for no real reason when like in terms of like the people themselves they're like such great people and they're being able to build such amazing businesses and sometimes people need competition to thrive but you know i wish it was different for them right because i think they didn't all really get along So operating in a complex and competitive environment, look for us, it's always been quite interesting because we've kind of always been ahead in our market, right?

47:38So what's always been very important for me, and it's very hard to do, but as we grew and as we take back shots from a lot of different companies and little steps here and there, having the company and everybody focused on ourselves has always been the most important, right? And sometimes it's hard, right? Like news, fundraising, or things happen left and right. and you're like, oh, wow, I can't believe I'm not doing this. Or, oh, look how well they're doing. And I think having the discipline of being very focused on yourself is probably the best thing you want to have as a company for your team and for yourself even as a founder, right?

48:11Look, I think in our case, we're pretty lucky in many different ways. One, some of the competitors that are trying to make us problems, some people know them. They know their backgrounds. They know past experiences. Not specifically, but some of the others. you know they know their backgrounds etc so it makes it a little easier for me all right because you have a better understanding of like kind of what we are up against in the practices sometimes but when it comes to to competitive environment i think you just got to focus on the customer how can you build the best product for your customers and that's what happens if you look at our numbers right we actually outperform our forecast despite some of the pr that was outside we outperform our forecast we beat our numbers and our customers are happy and they're with us and they're growing with us and that's the most important point How do you keep trust with your customers through a period like this?

48:57You literally grew tremendously through this period, which I think surprised everyone. Well, first of all, I think a lot of people understood how resilient our business really is. The second is being very transparent with them. Communications, telling them what's happening. Again, we're a bit lucky where within our market, people in HR, they know our competitors, so they're not very surprised at the same time. plus I think in general it's just been very good to show them that we're resilient as well right like a lot of companies maybe would take this very differently like we just focused on ourself and focused on them and them seeing us making sure that regardless of what was happening they had the best service and they knew all the time what was going on I think that really actually buys you a lot of credibility and I think that actually is what reflects into the numbers.

49:50Do you think that that kind of competitive play is fair? No comment. I think the way I look at this is you should compete in the market, in the product. You know, you have a lot of litigations happening at different companies all the time. How often do you hear about it? How often is it framed the way it's framed? I don't know. I hear about the Elon OpenAI litigation a lot. Yeah. You know, I don't know the full story there. but yeah you talked about like one other scenario which is a big one and i actually think to some extent it's it's a big pr play as well right um so this is what i think most people see through right is the purpose of this whole thing is pr and you know the way we look at it is we'll just keep focusing on our customers and i think so far we've done a good job at that and 2026 is going to be a big year for us and that's where we want all our attention focused on what do you think the biggest misconception about dealers?

50:49I mean, there's a lot, but the one thing I would say is we're Silicon Valley outsider, quote unquote. We do have amazing investors in the Valley, but I'm not based in the US, right? And I think a weird thing that happened with us is the combination of having really good numbers on the board, plus not spending time with non-internal investors, allowed for other people in the ecosystem to try to give reason to justify our growth right like oh you know they're growing because they're doing x or y or z and devaluing a lot of the work we have because like how could a company that's who is the ceo is not based in silicon valley grow as much as we kind of did right and i think there's a lot of learnings for me there in terms of like what we could have done proactively how we could have worked on that but you know it's always a matter of like how much do you care about the noise out there right like the only thing I cared about was our customers in our product and I don't think that was the wrong move but you know there's definitely some learnings from there.

51:50Another question we had from Mickey Melka. I love Mickey. On the topic of just executive leadership and navigating through challenges like this how do you expect your executive skills to improve in the next five years? I think first of all this year my skills improved a lot in many different ways right like I was not exactly super well verse in litigation. I was definitely not super well-versed in PR and crisis PR at all. I also, you know, if you want to go and check the pure product side, like I had never built multi-product go-to-market and kind of like make all of this product work together.

52:24So I think generally we've learned a lot, right? And this year has forced me in many ways to grow as a founder, as a CEO, in terms of being much more tactical in where I spend my time. Well, I'm a very open person, as you may have seen, so I need to be a bit more mindful of that as well. And look, I think I've learned more this year than I've learned in the last six years of building the company. Is it my favorite things to do? No, I'm a geek. I'd rather code, like be an engineer and a product person. But I think it's part of the journey of an entrepreneur to just face different type of challenges that are putting you out of the comfort zone.

53:01But overall, I think, you know, scaling myself, bringing the right people at the right time, right? like uplifting the company consistently those are the things that are going to be my focus over the next five years and i think the most important part is while i do that when i grow myself on that front making sure that the company stays true to itself in terms of like the product we're building the customers we're focused on and not going to get carried away with all of the noise around it is going to be the most important part one of the questions i love to ask is a brex question because they're all about performance spending smarter moving faster intelligent af finance yes anyways so on the topic of performance i believe a huge component of performance is who you surround yourself with yeah you've already mentioned shuo you've mentioned your team you mentioned working with your dad previously who is someone that you've long admired and looked up to that keeps you motivated um there's a ton there's a ton of people i definitely look up to you mentioned karshi i think tarik is tremendous i think the the work that they have done over the years around um regulatory like it's just incredible and like the faith of building a business for so long and like kind of waiting for it to be able to take off and then figuring out the growth like outstanding i think you had sebastian on the pod at some point i love sebastian i think he's one of the sharpest person i know i think he's very underrated in the market in many different ways like he's the type of person that's at the front lines of making things happen he's one of the sharpest thinker I know uh and you know every time you know I he'll tell you like sometimes he used to call me at like 11 midnight I was working and he's like Alex I have this idea why don't we try that why don't we try and like seeing this from like I think he's like 14 years in 15 years in like the hunger to build it's beautiful right it's like something that's very inspiring um and I have to go a little French right like I still still have to be a little bit of a patriot but I don't know if you've ever talked to Fiji uh oh I haven't you should Fiji is like uh it's like the person I one of the person I look up to the most right whether it's her state at meta whether it's her leading instacart for like very rough time whether it's her not open ai and kind of like figuring out the business life um she's one of the best execs I've ever I've ever seen and like just seeing her power through those things and she's always available like I need help what do you think of that and she's very sharp in terms of like her thinking um just very strong clarity of thoughts and strong executioner and it's like the type of like I wish I'm sure perhaps she's at the she's at OpenAI but like I wish she was working with me oh my gosh and so what have you learned from all of those individuals for key traits when you're looking to hire out the team you know I think those individuals are unhirable almost like this is like the special people that you have to co-found a company with them to be able to bring them to the table similar with Shuo right like or to some extent even myself like you want me on your team it's like you can't really hire me.

55:50I mean, you know, if we raise the same way Entropic and OpenAI do, maybe we can afford them. But it's hard to compare like the type of people, those type of people with who I want to really hire. But, you know, when I look at my, across the stack, but like let's focus maybe more on my executive team. I think the common thread we, I actually always look for, but as a team we always look for, obviously you have the skills. If not, we wouldn't going to be talking to some extent but you know being able to be grounded into building a great business being focused on your customer and understanding that you can't have ego like this is going to be a battle for the next decade in terms of like what we want to build how we need to build it all of the like challenges that we're going to see as a company you need people that are grounded that are happy and that are excited for the journey and that have the lowest ego possible so that you can actually go into battle with them and know that they're going to be the best people to have by your side.

56:50I mean, you're an incredibly happy person, and so is Shwo. You know, I'll tell you a secret. When we started Dill, my HR made me change it. Really? When we started Dill, one of our principles, right? We're kind of known for deal speed and genuine care, but one of our principles was, I don't remember the exact wording. We try to hire happy people. We change it to default optimism. That's something that we look for. And the reason why it's like, the way I think about it is, if I'm going to spend so much time with you, I'd rather be a happy person so we can have good times together, right? And that's not exactly something you should filter for, but I think the default optimism actually makes a lot of sense.

57:29It's like, when you have so much shit you need to go through, do you want the person that defaults into happiness or defaults into sadness? And for me, it's kind of like a no-brainer. what about you and maybe your upbringing and your childhood instilled this level of optimism in you yeah I think I'm pretty I'm very lucky to have grown into a very loving family a very close family you know I have three sisters uh they've definitely pushed me you know being a big brother of three sisters is a very interesting thing for sure and I love them for it to be honest I wouldn't be able to point it to something very specific it's just like the way I see the word is um well actually in hebrew there's a saying which is like which is like this is for the good right like whatever happens in your life it's for something you just don't know it yet but it's always going to be for the good and i think that's very much instilled in me in a way where everything happens for a reason and you should be happy about it regardless of what happens because you're just going to make the the best out of it the most out of it as long as you're learning from those experiences you can take it forward as we look forward the next year what are you most excited about a lot of things a lot of things i'm very like there's so much cool things we have kind of cooking but like when you tell me what are you excited about i usually think product just so we're on the same page because that's what excites me the most good okay let's talk about product uh well first of all like a lot of the things we worked on over the last two years are starting to come online so the life in my opinion the life of a product is like you work on it and after like a year and a half two years it gets to the level that you want it to be obviously it's not at the level of like the products i've worked on for five years but it's like respectable as a product and a lot of our products are coming online this year right like a lot of the investments we've done over the last two years is actually starting to pay off now and you can see it in the revenue numbers you can see in the quality of the product we're giving that we can actually see it really grow and our customers being really happy and the wave of product that we've built is just going to start really paying off this year and the idea and ideal that we've kind of built into having like that full stack solution that kind of works super well all in one and like even from a data standpoint flows from like hire to retire that's how we kind of say it in hr is just very exciting to me right like being able to like actually look a leader in the eye and say like i'm gonna run your full stack HR end to end actually excited so yeah it's weird it's like actually excited and then the second thing is I think we're evolving a lot as a company we have a pretty big launch coming in the next few weeks where we we're starting to branch out in a way where on our core product and what we've built like now we want to make sure things are amazing and we're deepening our infrastructure like investing in like a hundred payroll engine and stuff like that but we're starting to see that a lot of the things that we've built internally could be very useful for other companies so you know the same way you think about like amazon and aws for example we have a couple of things coming that like we're very excited about and we think the market's gonna love data centers in space not yet not that one no but like some cool ai products that we've been working on for a while and like where we've seen that it saves internally like tens of thousands of hours and we think it can really revolutionize some of the companies that are as deep in operation as we are right because like we're very in in many ways we have a lot of operations that deal and a lot of businesses have that you know we kind of live in a world where most of the ai companies we talk to they have no real understanding of like what is real deep operations and how do you actually function across like 150 countries and like makes making things actually work the fact that we're able to make ourselves like the first customer of things that really transforms our business is something we're very excited about i don't know if you saw but these autonomous agents are now going online and hiring each other are you gonna be payroll for autonomous agents um we did build autonomous agents on deal uh and it's working pretty well actually that helps you do a lot of different tasks we actually even built a way to bring your own agents from external platform inside of the platform because the way i think about it they're like salary range that they want so we tried because like the way i was i'm still i'm still not there yet but like one interesting thing it didn't work as well as i wanted it to be but we'll iterate on pricing is like the way i was thinking about it is like we built all the different agents and I was like all right like the way to price it like all of the work this person is going to do is probably worth like five ten thousand dollars a month we'll price it like 500 bucks a month and that's the salary of this person for doing like performance improvement plans for the company end-to-end or like screening through resumes and things like that didn't pan out the way I wanted from a pricing perspective where like some customers are willing to pay a lot more some customers are not willing to pay at all but I do think there's a world where and I think we can play a huge part in this where people will be hiring, quote unquote hiring, we'll have agents doing the work for them and we'll be monitoring performance against it.

1:02:12And I do think that the one place where most people live in a company is their HR system. Every single person is there. So I don't think it's crazy to think that those agents could be living inside of your HR system from like a monitoring performance perspective and assigning them to people in order to perform tasks. This is a really interesting side tangent, but how do you think about pricing all these products? A lot of the times, like I have someone that does pricing internally. She's amazing. She's super smart. She has a lot of recommendations that we listen to sometimes. But a lot of it comes from customers.

1:02:49Like the way I kind of think about it is like early customers, you kind of talk to them and say, this is what we do. How much would you be willing to pay for that? What makes sense for you, et cetera. And it's actually quite interesting because as you grow multi-product like we do, I hate the idea of like the incremental, oh, I pay a bit more for that. pay a bit more for that up a bit more for that something i'm trying to fight a lot internally so it's like a mix of like look you're using the platform like you should be having access to x and y and z um but i think it depends it depends on like the type of product you're kind of selling the way we kind of look at it is like we are a premium company in terms of the service we offer the infrastructure we're building even the sheer amount of people we have taking care of our customers so we usually price on the premium side of the market and that has worked out pretty well for us because people see the value that we're bringing to them well as we wrap up um i want to talk about shuo a little bit more sure what are the biggest lessons that you've learned from shuo so for the quick backstory shuo and i met when we were back at m.i.t um she went on to build a great company uh in you know in air purification so i know like hardware in china i went on to do a PhD actually in London and after a year decided I wanted to build companies and not do research in LLV and when we met back post MIT and post her like being in a place where she felt like she could move on from the first business that she had built we kind of were kind of lost right like both of us you know we had made some money from previous ventures or things like that and we're like okay what what do we want to do what do we want to work on and one super interesting thing that came from shuo and i think that's what you want from most co-founders is how excited she was about us working together even more initially than like the idea we're going to work on right and we're going to like ideate it together spent a lot of time together and like having someone that's just like i believe you know you should ask her but even six years in like has so much trust into each other and just excited to be building together uh is just unparalleled and And this is like, you know, in the same way I love my wife, I think this type of like love and partnership is something that like everybody should kind of look for because it really makes for a world of difference.

1:04:58And even, you know, when you have tough times, right, like having someone that's really solid that you can turn to, that's been a key part of your life is something that's very important. At a very core for education, she values that even more than the rest, I think. It's something that I value a lot. And then it sure has a lot of qualities. the one people love the most. It's not every day that you have like a female co-founder leading like such a big organization, leading a sales team. Like I love my sales people, but sales people are hard to deal with, right? Like they're not fun to deal with sometimes.

1:05:33Tell me more. You know, they're tough. They are demanding. They, you know, sales people in general are tough to deal with. Thankfully, they're ones that are very lovely. But, you know, being able to lead such a tough organization at scale is something that most people underrate, right? And growing into this, right? Like she's an engineer. I'm an engineer. She was a mechanical engineer. She was building exoskeletons, right? Like not exactly managing salespeople and quotas and commissions and revenue operations, right? But seeing her grow over the years into developing the skills, developing the empathy, developing the mechanisms to really be able to run that org and scaling it has been very impressive, right?

1:06:17And the resilience, like it's easy to call it quits when like things go wrong, like you almost don't hit your quota. Your best sales leader is moving to an AI company that's paying way too much money and you can't compete. Like those are the moments where like the resilience is super critical and she's got more resilience than most people I know. What do you think the key traits are that make a really good salesperson? The thing is I'm a good SMB sales. Enterprise sales is a whole different art that I'm yet to master, but I'm working on. I think it's a mix of different things. I think the best salespeople are willing to listen.

1:06:49You know, when you're a founder at the very beginning, you talk a lot because you're so proud. You want to say, I do this and that. The best salespeople are the people that actually listen. Hey, what do you have? What's your problem? The ones I actually, and it's actually not obvious, but the strongest ones are the ones that truly understand the problem. A lot of salespeople are very superficial about their understanding of the product that they're selling. ideal when you're looking at like okay you have an hr stack you have different companies you have different employees you have different contractors like how do you work through that like what product makes the most sense for you etc we've kind of built and went from being like a one product you sell it's very easy into like being very much like almost external consultants that help you as a company think about your global workforce think about where you want it to head and like that's very different than like you know just selling selling something super fast right and those are the sales people I actually value the most the ones that are able to really go deep and understand the problem and actually care about understanding the problems like they can help their customers so that would be also number two like value the relationship with their customers I love it when a salesperson look at one of our products that we're still building it's like I don't want to sell this just yet because it's not good enough for my customers and that just shows how much like they care and I think that's a key threat for a salesperson And there's a lot more to it.

1:08:07I actually think we are, well, and I really hope no one that listens to this trying to push people from me, but I really do think we are an amazing go-to-market school. And I think we've, over the years, built up some of the strongest sales ICs and sales leaders in the market. And you'll see a lot of amazing sales leaders coming out of deal in the next few years. By the way, talking about go-to-market, you've recently closed some really fun partnerships. I know one is for three but can you the best one the best one can you share more about them um I mean for example Arsenal is a cool one wow yeah well I can share everything but we have some really cool stuff coming up with Arsenal um and we're going to do a lot more of them right like so there's a couple things that are happening at Zill which is kind of interesting and it's been a very interesting learning for me as we kind of scale as a company where I'm realizing more and more how important brand and marketing are which you know as a technical geeky founder maybe two three years ago I was like oh logo cool looks cool website looks cool let's go and sell right like you need aura yes we're starting to build aura it takes time it's hard it's a it's a science that I have not mastered at all yet but we're working through that but one thing I realized is building up the brand is going to be super important and I'm not talking like Silicon Valley brand like great like sure I'm talking like global brand right because when we think about deal like the vision for the company is to build the most loved hr and payroll brand in the world i want you to go and you know maybe your employee to come and say please pay me on the deal because they've got xyz but because the association is really great right and like you really love what we're doing and how we're changing things and building partnerships and brand actually really really helps and one thing we did recently is we partnered with arsenal and it's going to be a pretty big partnership we're very excited about this and the way we thought about this was it was very straightforward and simple right as we're building up our global brand we'll invest in the U.S.

1:09:57we'll invest in Latin America in APAC and everywhere but you know what better than like the best Premier League club in the world in order to be able to to scale your brand and people are going to hate me for this but I saw I don't know how accurate that is so don't catch me on the number but I saw a stat on X last week where I think the Super Bowl had like 230 million views Liverpool versus Manchester City in the Premier League on the Sunday had 750 million views uh so like oh my gosh that is where you want to be and look we're seeing it pay off right whether it's on the hospitality side where we're able to take customers and showing them like you know that we are a partner and all of the things we're building and giving like giving them a reason of like seeing why deal is going to be a great brand and that they can invest with us uh as much as just you know seeing our logo on a stadium here and there i think i think it does pay out big time and we're excited to do more of this and it's very thought through right like we spend a lot of time thinking about how do we do this right and I think you'll see a lot more of those things in the next few years from us exciting any secrets you can share not yet okay not yet but uh you know I think in June we'll have a fun announcement that's a secret that's a secret June July we'll have a fun all right I'm waiting for June I'll be ready sounds good Alex, thank you so much.

1:11:14Thank you for having me.