If an Organisation Is Comfortable, They're Not Challenging Themselves: Deel CEO, Alex Bouaziz

0:00 Alex, welcome to Giant Ideas. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Well, thank you so much for having me. Excited for this. >> At the time when when you guys started, there were a few people trying this. COVID obviously helped. A big driver, I imagine, of everyone's growth in this sector. but you guys specifically won. You you are the biggest, the best. What is it that you did differently to others that made you win? >> Well, I I like to think we're the biggest and the best. I think we still have a lot to do to get there.

0:29 but you know, for for context, Deel today serve over 45,000 companies, right? Across a multitude of HR and global payroll services, right? So, we've evolved a lot as a company and I know a lot of people like to paint us as a, you know, kind of one of the COVID winners. but the truth is we were only 1 year old when COVID started. we started in 2019, like I just said, and I think COVID started in 2020, March 2020, which corresponded with us raising our Series A. So, I think the the team did a decent job at riding that wave, I think. not on purpose, to be honest. We were a very small company, 15, 20 people at the time, but the fact that we were enabling a lot of companies to to help hire globally really played into the hands of what a lot of people thought COVID was pushing forward. And but you know, today we've evolved a lot as a business and, you know, very much focused on building infrastructure to help the companies being able to scale, and remote workers are just a part of this.

1:27 >> Alex, I was talking to a founder, Elliot O'Connor, who knows us both, in preparing for this. And he told me to ask you about something quite specific, which he thinks was profound, which was when you were starting out, you started by enabling companies to hire contractors rather than employees, when everyone else was starting with employees rather than contractors. So, you kind of zigged when when others were zagging. Is Elliot right? Was that an important early decision?

1:54 >> Look, I I I the story of Deel where we got really lucky is we followed our customers. The initial idea was was very simple. Was, you know, a lot of companies are hiring globally and one of the model in which they're hiring globally is through freelance, right? It was very common for companies to hire people through the freelance model. And the unique insight I think we had was I know how the French system works, right? I know how the Israeli system works. I know how the company's system works. And I know that you cannot just send money to someone on TransferWise or PayPal.

2:24 That doesn't work. So there there there was definitely something there in terms of by design, right? Like you need to understand local structure in order to engage money in another place. We were very sure of ourselves, right? Like we knew that we had to fix that problem and we we launched the freelancer product as our first product and it's still one of the key product of the business today. And then we very much followed our customers, right? I I remember getting on customer calls and them telling me, "No, but Alex, I really want to be able to hire employees in different geographies." And I was like, "Well, we don't do that just yet." And you know, after hearing it once, twice, three times, you're like, "Well, maybe I should just build it, right? Maybe that's the best way to do it." And the story of Deal is actually built through following our customer base, right? Today, you know, we we went from contractors to employees where you don't have infrastructure into employees where you do have infrastructure into having your full employee base on our HCM into having to manage immigration because some of the employees we're hiring on your behalf needed a visa, so might as well figure it out for the whole stack. So I think we're very much the story of if you listen to your customers post your initial idea and your initial conviction, you can build something really big and there's a lot of breath that you could be doing.

3:36 >> And in the very early days when you went through the accelerator Y Combinator, did that involve pretty radical changes to what you were trying to do? Did you essentially pivot a few times early on? >> Yeah, you know, I think Yeah, I'm I'm quite academic and so was my co-founder, right? I went all the way to a a PhD, which I eventually dropped out of and I think Y Combinator in many ways feels like school a little bit, right? Like they usually take pretty young people, put them in a room and and kind of put them in that like time bubble. I don't know if you've ever watched like Dragon Ball Z, right?

4:09 When you're like in that time chamber where you just focused on delivering for your customers and growing and telling your story and working through that and it was very interesting cuz they really put us in in a place where you know, based on the the way they function, you have group office hours every other week and you need to show progress, you need to show growth, you need to show that you've talked to customers and built a building a good business. and what that really allowed us is like being in a quote-unquote time chamber that really got us to focus on the metrics that were super important, including talking to our customers and through that very intense three months, you kind of have to be very honest with yourself, right? Is what I'm building the right thing? Am I talking to the right people?

4:48 Am I trying to convince myself that I'm building something great or not and that experience was super valuable for us cuz I think throughout this whole time as a as as a team, we pivoted actually back and forth between ideas almost like three times. and I remember our YC partner, who's one of the best partner I think YC ever had, Aaron Harris, ha joking around like a week before demo day when we had our first presentation ever saying, "Oh guys, they pivoted on Friday." Which was eventually what the idea of Deel was. So I think I think that time chamber is very well served for for founders in order to really get to the right market and to the right product.

5:25 >> So you guys are famous for being the fastest from zero to 100 million of recurring revenue. I think you did it in two years. >> We were. We were, but you know, AI and Wiz have changed the game a little bit there. >> Yeah, but still not bad and you're you're now up to a billion, I believe, and more. But let's talk about not not the the sort of 10 to 100 million. Let's talk about the one to 10 million, that really early journey. How did you very tactically go about doing that?

5:49 >> Yeah, so the interesting part is like that time chamber I talked to you about is something we carried on till today even, right? Like very much looking at month-on-month growth, how we're evolving, how are we changing, even sometime week-on-week growth still. so we kind of kept that same mindset, right? Like the thing after those type of accelerators is after you quote-unquote like graduate plus then funding you, you're kind of alone, right? and and one thing we're able to to really tackle was carry this forward. So we we kept doing the same thing, like every month are we growing? Are we going forward?

6:21 Are we in the right directions? Are we onboarding enough customers? Are we talking to enough customers? and that really helped us carry the momentum where you know, the combination of this and similarly, right? Like if you translate the concept of office hours doing monthly investor updates, where you tell your investors, "Hey, like this is where we are, this is what we're doing." Kind of keeping yourself accountable more than anything else really, is what carried us to eventually, you know, raising our series A and the momentum that we built up there. So you know, it was a a mix of just a lot of great a lot of cold calling and cold emailing and trying to bring as many customers on the platform and just iterating really quickly. And you know, funnily enough, with the scale that hasn't really changed, it's just a lot more people I guess doing it at the company.

7:04 >> You guys are probably the best example of a startup sort of doing speed of execution essentially. And VCs and founders love talking about speed of execution. I'd I'd love to demystify that a little bit with you, Alex, and just talk in reality about what that has been like. What does speed of execution mean to you? What are the tactics you you did deploy and still deploy? What's the culture you need to build in order to move fast? And why does speed matter so much?

7:32 >> Yeah, I think it's I mean, it's obviously a very loaded question and my my answer to that is always the same. It's what I find is as a company gets bigger, right? Like the beauty of a small startup is everybody is in the room, so everybody is moving fast cuz you're holding each other accountable all the time when you're in constant momentum to get stuff going. And the thing is the more people you bring into the company, the more the company scales, the more it becomes normalized to get something done later on. Again, today, you know, maybe I'll get mad at someone after this call, you know, they need to get something and in their email they said, "Oh, I'll get back to you on Thursday." And I'm like, "Did you want to do it Tuesday? Why don't you get back to the person at the end of the day, right?" And I think that's the the type of momentum that you need within a company for it not to become stale. Because that applies everything.

8:16 It's not just to customers, although it is the most important, but it's also in how fast you launch product, how fast you iterate, how fast you try new things, how fast you hire, how fast you fire, right? And And that momentum is something that was very important for all of us and something that's very important for for me as a person. Like I, you know, I want things to be always moving. I want things to be always trending into the right direction with our customers. And you know, I think generally you kind of have to be the status quo where as your company is going to scale, everyone is like, "Oh, you know, you need to slow things down. You need to go a little bit slower." And things like that where we're always very against it.

8:57 And one of the most fascinating thing actually happening at the moment is with the whole AI bubble-ish, depending on how you think about it, but I actually think very pragmatically, with this whole new technology, it's actually become great again for founders to be able to go into the details and move really fast. So that, you know, that part of the job that I really love and where people be pushing back on me internally, like, yeah, everybody's like, "Well, no, please lean in. Let's Let's try to change as fast as we can, right?" Which is very very amazing to see. But yeah, if you were to narrow down to speed, you know, for me it's always going to be about how do you create constant momentum? How do you make sure everything is always moving forward and there's things happening inside of the organization across the whole department and no one rests on their laurels, right?

9:39 whether you read a book like Empired Up, which I think is a great representation of that, or you should always be uncomfortable. Right? If the organization feels comfortable, if one part of the organization feels comfortable, it's because they're just not challenging themselves to do better, and this is what Teal Speed has always really been about. >> That speed obviously compounds, doesn't it? You know, the over many, many decisions, many people as the company grows, that speed compounds. As the company grows, what do you look for in people? What what what are the characteristics of the employees you're trying to get to make sure that as you grow across thousands of people, you're still quick?

10:13 >> Yeah, you know, I I don't think running across thousands of people is the thing you should be doing as a company. I think there's different scenarios in which companies should, right? In our case, we have infrastructure, we had to deploy it across 150-plus countries, and having the understanding and the scale and you know, building payroll engines locally, like it it's very complicated, right? But I think you should always optimize for having as many A players in a very high talent density teams at your company.

10:40 and if you can't because of the virtue of how the business is set up, then you just need to have a very high bar in terms of how you're hiring things. And one of the trap, you know, I've seen a lot of companies fall through and fall in, is whenever you are looking to hire really fast, you tend to lower the bar, right? In terms of who you're hiring, cuz even your internal team, right? Like they just need someone to do the job. Is that person the right person for the business? Maybe not. As long as they can do the job, you know, they will be inclined to to hire them, which is I think the downfall of most companies, right? Like when you start having that mentality, which is actually I don't really care, just want I just need the help, that's when the company's culture and the company's talent density really start to fall apart, which has in my opinion, huge repercussions, right? It has huge impact in terms of your your best talent, right? If I'm an A player and I'm carrying the team on my back, there's a point where I'm like, you know, screw it.

11:30 >> >> I'm just going to go somewhere else where they evaluate players better, right? So, that has always been super important to us and we've always spent a lot of time thoroughly think about who we're bringing to the company and and what culture what part of the culture do we want them to embody. And you know, the before you just the reverse side of things here is you know, we also fire quite fast, right? Like what's important for me is I want the A players to be able to be empowered to do their best work and a big part of that is make sure they're surrounded by other A players that that want to be here. So, you know, we have pretty strong culture of making sure that to the time density stay high.

12:09 >> So, you obviously hire brilliant people, but one way you supplemented hiring employees is is you bought companies. You bought an unusually large number of companies. I think it's 13 companies in 6 years you bought. is that partly to get entrepreneurial talent into Deal alongside yourself and your co-founder? Is it is it as much about getting that founder DNA in leadership positions as it is getting the product that they built? >> Yeah, it's a mix of both and I think this is something that's quite misunderstood about Deal strategy which has actually paid such significant dividends for us. The first one is you know, the way you go about going multi-product as a business is typically two paths, right? Like the first one is the founder spends a lot of time thinking about the problem set like I did for payroll or for HR and and the first products that we ever built are freelancers. And then you know, there's just so much you can do, right? Like there's so much personally for example I can do and I can go deep on.

13:03 So, then comes the second wave of product that you're building and the two paths is either you hire PMs from companies that have built similar products and you're like, "Hey, here's my budget or go and build it within our ecosystem." Which to me you know, I I love my product team, but I do think there's something special behind someone deeply caring about some a subject and building a company and spending years going deep and talking to thousands of customers. I think that's the best way to build companies.

13:30 So that's the other part, right? And the other way is going and acquiring companies with amazing founders that have actually really built a great business, right? And and really kind of piggybacking on all of their learnings and years of spending time with customers and rebuilding that inside of the application. And then what you do there is you give them the resources and say, "Okay, we love your product." Typically, you know, you do this with a company that's had series A, maybe series B at max, and you just give them the the infrastructure to be able to rebuild their full suite of product inside of Deal with the knowledge they have, with the experience they have. You know, when when you're a founder and you're building towards product market fit, you tend to build so many features.

14:07 But if you were telling me, for example, at Deal, like I could tell you the features I'd build that brings zero value to the company. So you actually the the even the higher impact that you have is you get them to build what actually matters and up all of the things around that didn't really drive sales or didn't drive customer experience. So bringing that was super valuable for us. There's another reason we do M&A as well, which is less reflected in this and and maybe less reflected into our product.

14:32 It's generally a bit more revenue-driven. You know, we are, as you said by now, the largest company in our market, and you know, payroll is a very, very sticky product. Typically, you don't change payroll provider unless you have a very bad reason to. So being able to go out into the marketplace and buy companies in our space and buy amazing logos into our space and move them into our infrastructure so that we can show them how much better we are, but also show them all of the other products we could be consolidating for them is is very helpful.

15:00 So yeah, I mean, you know, I think M&A is probably one of the most underappreciated strategy to grow a business, and it's really helped us develop ourselves a lot faster than most companies would. >> Alex, I sold one of my startups to Microsoft, and it was pretty simple. It was, you know, amazing and and but ultimately pre-transactional. And you you stay for the earnout, and then by the end you're like itching to leave the big company, and you want to go start something else again, and you get out and you move on.

15:27 And there are not that many examples of acquired founders and CEOs sticking around at the acquirer longer than they have to. But you've done something different. How have you incentivized founders that you acquire to stick around and be truly motivated to build great businesses? Like the Hopsy founders that we know, for example, you acquired, it seems like they are now truly on a mission to build Hopsy inside Drizly to be enormous. >> I I sure hope so. You know, if if I stand by the first part of what I told you, right? Like you don't really want to lose out on those talent a year after, right? So, you know, there's a couple of things. Obviously, there's financial incentives, and whenever you structure an M&A deals, you know, one of the things I've learned is you want to build a deal where both sides of of the transaction come out happy. All right? Like I want to be able to look at Sami and Michael, right? Who are the founder of Hopsy, which you mentioned, in 5 years from now, and I want them to feel to to think at least like that acquisition was the best path forward for them. And if you get there, then that's already a huge win. And the second part is, you know, what most founders want is the flexibility to be able to operate. the the last thing you want is to become a cog in the system where you don't really have impact anymore, and you cannot really drive your business. And there's multiple ways to solve for it. The first one is typically, what I do is I put the founders straight into me for the first year of them being into the business, so I can empower them, enable them, and make sure that they are well served in to building whatever they're meant to be building inside of the business.

16:53 the second part is most of them are usually, like you said, on a mission. The reason they started 5, 3, depends on the company, years ago is usually because they deeply cared about a problem, or yeah, or they wouldn't have survived anyway, right? So, they they typically deeply cared about a problem. So, giving them one, the resources to hire more people, hire smarter people, and more expensive people to build with them on a problem they cared about combined with the distribution that Deal can bring today to a business, right? Like 45,000 plus customers. that that's huge that's a huge strength, right? And even if you talk to me today like what drives me to build product is typically getting it in the hands of users and having them, you know, experience the product, give me feedback and and seeing them happy to use the product. And I think that doesn't change for most product-based founders, right? People that actually love the the the sentiment of building. So the ability to suddenly have access to a huge user base where you can show them what you're building and see them adopt the product is a huge drive for endless driver in general for a lot of founders.

17:58 >> Alex, we talked a little bit about the journey from, you know, 1 to 10 million of ARR and then you got to 100 million, now over a billion dollars. I'm just wondering wondering about the next phase of growth. And to me it seems like the next It's two It's two I'm sorry. Okay, two. >> No, no, no, the next step after one is two. >> Right? That's what I was going >> >> I I I thought maybe you'd grown from one to two in the time that you told me to prepare for this.

18:20 >> almost. Give me a little more time. >> >> but the the path from one to two and then two to 10 and then two to 100 it it strikes me that you might be even faster because of because of AI and and specifically this concept of agentic software buying. So rather than at the moment, you know, Deal sales people are going out and selling to customers like me who use Deal at a giant and saying, you know, it's an awesome product and maybe if you're a really big customer of Deal you get taken to a football match and you know, and it's kind of like it's very subjective. Whereas an agent from your customers buying Deal you know, based on like is the is the documentation better than the competitors? Is it a better product? And is the pricing fair? Strikes me that we're going to have sort of this hyper-concentration of of category winners just getting bigger and bigger and bigger exponentially because if Deal is the best product at the best price with the best documentation, software agents AI agents will just buy that every single time. Do you feel like you're going to be a real beneficiary of that?

19:20 >> We have huge AI tailwinds in general, right? Whether it's through the operational efficiency that we're getting at the company. I don't know if you saw recently we went on to product called Akkai, which is doing amazing. And it's basically our infrastructure that has helped us automate in like 2 months almost 140,000 hours. generally in a very complex system like ours, like AI just does wonders cuz you can bring complex plus, you know, agents can actually do the work that a lot of people are doing manually today, which really changes the game.

19:49 when it comes to the concept you just mentioned, I do agree with you as well, right? Like this is how you reinforce the category winners. And I think we've kind of gotten to a a stage where, you know, people do perceive us as one of the category winners. So hopefully agents will too based on the on all the different parameters that you've been given us as well. and and generally more excited about the the customer experience, right? Like I think as we've kind of grown as a company into, you know, this series of products, this full stack solution, and really being the only provider in my opinion that can do global payroll at scale.

20:22 the idea of being that you can just personalize the next experience of your customers through building it a lot faster and closing the gaps that you have from an automation standpoint at scale is just crazy to me, right? And you know, I always thought that we were pretty excellent when it comes to to operations. this this is just giving us superpowers so I'm very excited about this. And and you can see it compounding our growth as well, right? Like if you combine this with the amount of new products that we've built and the speed at which we're able to build and do the we're seeing that compounding the revenue and we're very thrilled.

20:55 >> That way of growing the business using AI and these advanced techniques is is the future. But it strikes me that you're also deploying a tried and tested very old school way of now getting really, really big, which is brand marketing. You sponsor Arsenal Football Club. you are you're using tactics and and strategies which have been serving big, big companies for a long time. Tell us a little bit about why a company like Deel, who ultimately, you know, sells into businesses, small or big businesses, why you want to build a big consumer level brand awareness by doing an an Arsenal Football Club sponsorship, for example, to take that example.

21:31 >> Yeah, well, you know, pretty lucky cuz London's been red for the last couple of weeks, which is great. But look, I mean, there's different parts to where the business is and where we want to go, right? I think we've gotten to the point where for various factor, there's a lot of value into building up our brand on the consumer side of things, right? I don't know if you've seen, for example, we've launched our new crypto product last week, where you can earn you can earn crypto, and you can you can basically transact in a way that you really couldn't transact on before on Deel. So so this shows you, you know, we've always been very consumer-oriented as a as a business, but that really shows you that we're building for end users as well. And you know, I may be biased, but I feel like in our market, companies have always missed that, right? Like I've never seen someone tell me, "Wow, Alex, I'm so excited that I'm getting paid on X."

22:27 right? But but when you think about it deeply, there's no reason for you not to, right? Because it's usually a system where you get your contract, your mortgage letter, your pay slips, your paychecks, and potentially like a myriad of features that make your life better. Like, you know, we released something called early payday, right? Like where you can basically anytime pay, where you can basically get your your paycheck earlier for free, right? Like, all of those suites of products are very important to me, because it kind of changes the status quo of like, as an HR company, as a payroll company, we actually care about our end users and not only about our clients.

23:01 so that part is very important to us. I I think something that you that most people don't realize is you know, Deal has scaled into into enterprise over the last year plus, right? And I think a significant part of our revenue today is actually driven by mid-market and enterprise. And you know, hospitality is something that you actually said traditional brands have have understood that a long time ago, and I think tech companies are starting to follow the trend, right? Like you've seen us, you've seen Revolut, we have Aldi, right? Like as some companies are starting to follow. It's just that as you scale towards enterprise, it just brings a lot of value from a hospitality standpoint of being able to take customers into into great amazing experiences. And scaling experiences is something that we're going to be doing pretty heavily over the next few years.

23:47 yeah, you know, all in all, I think we we love the partnership we have with Arsenal. You know, it is beyond a doubt the best club in the Premier League by by far, and it's been a wonderful, you know, experience for me. I'll tell you, when you're walking at the final of the Champions League or in the streets of London, and you see people wearing your logo on on their jersey, it's pretty insane. I won't lie, and it's probably one of the few moments at Deal where I was like, "Holy That's pretty crazy." But the impact it's had on the brand so far is tremendous, and if you can afford it, which, you know, thankfully at Deal we've been a profitable company for over 3 years now, then brand marketing is such an amazing thing to do, and I I strongly advise founders at our stage to be able to actually invest in that.

24:28 >> I'd love to challenge you on Arsenal being the best club in the Premier League as a United fan, but you just won the league, so there's nothing I can say. Alex, what >> I'll I'll tell you though, like the like if you if you take out the brand aspect of this, the chances of me getting you to a London-based game versus a Manchester-based game as a customer are much higher. So just for that, you know, Arsenal wins there.

24:48 >> What have you learned about brand marketing? Cuz you you kind of bring a first principles approach to everything you do. As an outsider, has there been stuff that has surprised you about what does and doesn't work with brand marketing. >> Yeah, I'm still forming my opinion on it. It's the first partnership we ever do and there's a few in the works right now, but it's probably even going to be the largest we do for a bit and I think we got really lucky. like you said, we took a very first principle approach, you know, I'm I've always loved Arsenal because of the French side of of Arsenal, although I it's not as much there anymore. Maybe one day they'll come back. so, you know, it's kind of like the club that most French kids growing up kind of look to up to. but it's just so impressive how well-run the club really is, right? Like I had the chance to talk to a myriad of clubs before we invested, you know, just as part of my of my due diligence of how, you know, sports investment kind of work. And it's such a well-run club.

25:36 It's it's impressive, right? From the partnerships team to the marketing team to the leadership team to the the owners, how how they approach and how much they care about the business is is to be honest, it's something that a lot of tech companies could learn from and I, you know, the thing is when you are in tech, you're usually a bit braggy and you think this is how companies are run, but it's just very impressive how that company is is being run and how well-oiled the club is in terms of like all of its different functions and how it's consistently evolving. I think it's part of just like the mindset that Josh Kroenke, the owner of Arsenal, has brought in the leadership team that they have there. I think beyond that, one of the perceived value I've seen more recently is in the age of AI where things are becoming more and more AI generated. I think there's only a very few things in the world that more will truly last, right? And from a brand perspective and I actually think sports, you know, having been a sports fan and you know, Paris fan since I was a little kid going to the stadium, I think it just builds something very unique with with the communities that that they're attracted to to that brand that is very very hard to build and it's just been so impressive to see how attached people really are to the club and how how much they care and you doing right by the fans is something that we really try to do in every single part of how we operate at the company.

26:59 but I've I've just never seen something like this before, right? It's a This is even like as I'm telling you that people will listen and say like, "Oh yeah, of course football fan care about their club." Now you don't understand how much they care about the club, you know? It's kind of like it's super powerful. >> Agreed. It's crazy. Alex, let's talk a little bit about remote work. you you run this $17 billion plus company, you know, like billions of revenue, huge company. You have 7,000 employees, I think. And yet you're kind of on your own, you live in Tel Aviv, and you're just kind of doing your own thing, and then there are just all these people who work for Deel, all this revenue, all these customers. It is kind of an amazing story of of remote really working. So I want to ask you about that, but first of all, has being a remote company doing a business which serves remote companies and enables companies to be remote at least somewhat, has that really helped? Sort of eating your own dog food to test products as a as a customer who genuinely understands it. Would you say that's been integral to your success?

27:57 >> Yeah, I mean 100%. I wouldn't have run this any other way, and I think it's very complicated to tell you That's why I love this market. It's like a lot of the companies we compete against are in office, and I'm like, yeah, okay. That America-only company or London-only company is going to teach you how to hire globally without the infrastructure that you need to do that, right? Like in order to really understand like you know, the culture, the complexity, the local laws, like you actually need to have presence in those countries. The world is is big.

28:30 >> >> And you know, although our job is to make it a little smaller, so that companies can hire anywhere, the complexity that come with that are something that you shouldn't underestimate, right? And you know, being the largest company in the space and a a company in the space, we see it every day, and I think that investment pays dividends. You know, when you start getting a an audit for X or Y or Z in Kenya, trust me, you're very happy that you have local employees in Kenya that understand how things really work, right? And I think that's something as I as we've grown, most companies kind of look at they from afar and say we can replicate that model, but if you don't really live it and if you don't understand it, it's very hard to operate. Now, you know, is remote work the best model for every single company?

29:13 You know, I I I I think it depends how how you frame it, right? The the first part is you know, I I I I love it when people tell me, you know, we wouldn't be able to operate on in a remote company, and then I ask them, you know, how many people are in your office? Thousand people in your office? How many floors do you operate on? Oh, you know, we're 10 floors in San Francisco. Great.

29:35 So, the person on the first floor and the person on the 10th floor never see each other anyway, right? So, they won't even notice if you were at home. so so so that that part is something that people have a hard time picturing, which is like very obvious to me. but I do think when you're very early stage, right? Like the presence of having people next to you and being able to tap someone on the shoulder and say, "Hey, I need your help on that." is is very powerful, and I think that's something that's very important. And and and don't get me wrong, right? Like I've said that multiple times. I wish I had all this I don't know if they want to do that, but I wish they were all with me next to me working, all 7,000-plus people, but the the the other side of this is, you know, we really get to have arbitrage in terms of the talent we can hire, right? When everybody's fighting for AI engineers in San Francisco, saying crazy offers left and right, we can hire AI engineers anywhere, and trust me, there are really talented people around the world. And And that arbitrage is something that most com Well, actually, I would say in the last few weeks I've seen some companies starting to realize it once again, which is fun and not fun. fun from a revenue perspective, less fun as a as an employer. Let's put it that way. Were you in person at the very beginning, you and your team when you first started the company?

30:45 >> Yeah, we were. So during YC we were in person and we actually made the few first people we brought on come to see us in person as well in San Francisco. I think that was a super important experience to building the company. I think when you're very early it's very important. I think as you scale the game changes a little bit. You know, I was with a friend of mine who who who runs you know a similar size company.

31:10 And you know they're starting to realize that like they're good at marketing team. If they want to be able to cover as much as they want, the only way to do this is to go global, right? Like even if you think about the US, right? If you hire all your sales people just in New York and San Francisco, you're pretty overwhelmed pretty fast in terms of how much talent you have access into, right? So again, I think in person has a lot of perks.

31:30 I I usually find to be honest with you that when I spend one day in person with my team or two days in person with my team, I can talk to all the problems that we need to talk about and it's more than enough. but you know, in my experience is that whenever I am around a lot of them maybe it's because we're not always together. I don't get any focus to be honest. It's just like I get kind of pulled in every direction all the time.

31:51 But I would say one thing we did that's very unique is we we give people WeWork memberships. and we basically tell them, "Look, if you want to work, you know, I have a little one at home now and yeah yeah trust me when she starts screaming you want to be you want to in you're in the middle of a call and it drives you a little crazy. So I understand that people want to have their own space, right? To work." And one thing we did which worked really well is we gave them you know the access to those WeWork memberships and what's really fun is because they're so global people typically have like deal Paris, deal London or whatever that channel is and then they'll say, "Oh, today I'm going to like Covent Garden's WeWork." And suddenly you'll have like 100 people from deal going to the same WeWork and basically it becomes a deal office which is >> >> which is always really fun.

32:37 I'd say you know that this there's other things that people don't really think about which are very helpful when it comes to being a remote company. You know, a couple a couple months ago my board member needed to go somewhere in India and she didn't know how to manage or navigate through it and I was like, you know what, give me the name of the city I bet you I have someone working not far away from here.

32:59 You know, little did I did I know 5 minutes later I had three names of people that were working like a couple a couple hours or like 1 hour away from there and we were able to to take him to that place which was really fun. So, I think it's very anchored in the culture of the company and and who we are and to be honest I wouldn't run it any other way. At the core what's very important for me is that you know, we really enable companies to think beyond local places and being able to really grow and I think as we I think so many things are actually touched by that, right? Like let me give you a very simple example. I was in the US and meeting you know, a few different people in Washington and being able to tell them that you know, companies in their jurisdictions locally who can't compete with big companies who can't pay the same salaries are still able to compete in the marketplace because they can hire people with similar skill sets in different places is something that you you know, really makes the world a bit more even and this is what we really want to do.

34:02 So, >> Alex, that's a great place to end part one. We're going to come back next week to talk much more about your leadership style and behind the scenes building Deal into this juggernaut. See you next week.