Alex, I'm super excited to have the conversation with you today and super impressed by what you guys have built at Deel and the speed at which you guys have gone. I know Deel speed is something that I hear a lot about and more importantly see the results from. So, excited to have the conversation today, but just to get us going, I'd love to just learn a little bit more about kind of the origin story and what got you on the path to starting Deel.
Yeah. Well, first of all, thank you so much for taking the time. I've actually seen your content a few times and it's amazing. So, I'm glad I'm getting to do this with you. Yeah, and you know the story behind it, it's crazy, it's actually our seventh birthday tomorrow. So, very excited about this. But you know, it started very small, right? I was born in Paris. My co-founder was born in China and we both had very interesting paths of life, kind of going through, you know, meeting amazing people all around the world and you know, realizing pretty early on that the world is a large place, right? It's a small world after all, but at the same time you've got so many amazing people all around the world. And you know, pretty quickly when we started thinking about what could we do, how could we have very high impact, we realized, you know, we just want to enable amazing companies to be able to hire the best people in the world. And funnily enough, the world was converging towards this and there was just no infrastructure, no real infrastructure built for supporting it. And that's when we started doing it. And today, you know, we have 40,000 customers from small companies all the way to the largest companies in the world using us as a bit more than what we started the company with, their full HR and payroll system at the global level. And it's been an amazing story so far.
Yeah, I mean the timing of it was unbelievable because I remember back in like 2018, 2019 when you guys were first getting started, I learned about Deel for the first time and I was like, wow, this is a complex niche solution. And then fast forward 18 months, we go through COVID, we come out the other side and all of a sudden every single person knew about it and it was like amazing to see how quickly buyers really adopted an understanding of it.
Yeah, I think, I mean definitely the whole COVID thing kind of pushed for a lot of different things that I think helped us in a good way, I'd say, to some extent, which was suddenly everybody was quote unquote remote. It didn't matter if you were next to the company in the office or not, you were working from home. And what happens from there is, well, you wanted to treat everyone equally. You wanted to give them a great experience. And you know, the model before we existed was kind of paying people as contractors, not completely, or setting up one entity in one country and like kind of doubling down on one place. It used to be Ireland actually for a lot of different companies. And when we kind of came in, the fact that I think the balance of power of second tier employees versus first tier employees, people got really disrupted. And you know, people and HR leaders, which were at the time I think very overwhelmed, right? They were always very important, I think there was such a bright spot that was shined on HR leaders at that moment with all of the different things that came with COVID, that you know, they kind of took, they were assigned more budget to be able to do something that I think they always had in mind, which was making all employees have an amazing experience. So timing was right. And you know, today we're much more than this. I think EOR is the product that kind of got us a bit on the map, but you know, our global payroll product, but we help with all of your different entities, our US payroll products, our immigration products, our IT products have been kind of really added to the greater story of Deel, how we kind of reinvented ourselves over time and kind of stayed true to our core ideas and our core beliefs.
Yeah, that expansion of the space is something I really want to focus on. So, you know, we talked to a lot of buyers, you know, let's say 500 employee company and a lot of times they're exhausted. They've been on demos for the last two months and they're trying to figure out like where is this silver bullet solution that does like HCM to the level of like a Workday, does EOR as great as you guys do it, manages our contractors, can do US payroll, like all these different things. So, as you look at that kind of total scope, I usually think of it in like four buckets. It's like HCM, global payroll, EOR, and then HRIS from like a localized standpoint where it's actually like context specific for each country. Do you feel like the goal is to build all four of those categories and be that one-stop shop? And do you feel like that's something that creates so much surface area that it might be hard to accomplish?
Yeah, I think there's a couple things here actually at play. I think one of the very interesting things we did when we started Deel is we actually always looked at the HR market and realized that HR leaders and finance leaders are forced into one system, in one ecosystem, because you know, that's kind of like you live and die by that system of record product, which I think is actually completely getting disrupted. And at the time, we had the luck but also the vision to say, well, we don't want to be like that. What we want to be is like thinking of our product as standalone products in a way, but at the same time build up the infrastructure so that whenever you buy a Deel product, at the very same time you'll be able to sync it with all of the other products in the market, right? So actually it's kind of like a funny bundled/unbundled play where Deel will fit into any system and our APIs are fully open so you'll be able to do whatever you want when you're using our products. But at the same time we want to compete to be able to be that full stack solution. And I actually look at it the same way you do, right? And you know, I think there's a lot of room for us to improve. And when I look at the market, I do think we're ahead across actually most of the categories today, but I still think we're very far away from what we want to deliver. And yeah, I'm technically the chief product officer. We don't have a chief product officer because it's my role, quote unquote. So people reporting to me there, which is fun. And you know, when I look at the potential that we have there, I'm just so excited. There is a lot of opportunities for our customers and we're going really deep. And when I mean deep, I'm talking like building payroll infrastructure, like payroll engines in different markets, like localization of time off policies, of expenses policies. And I feel very comfortable telling you that no one is investing at the level of infrastructure that we're investing in. And look, again, these are not things where we're not perfect, but I think long term the fact that we've done those investments is just going to pay off into that solution that we think can fit it all and really help companies at scale.
Yeah. I mean when I look at the race and like companies kind of converging on this all-in-one from different areas, you know, I think we have like US HCM companies, you know, your ADPs, your Paylocities, your UKGs who did HCM very deeply and then kind of acquired a global payroll engine. But where they're kind of falling short is on that localization, EOR, and some of the, you know, owning that entire infrastructure. And so I think in some ways when we look at like the best path forward, it's like the hardest thing to do is global payroll across 180 countries with localization. Like if you can do that and land the plane there, then building a performance management tool or compensation management tool that competes with an HCM.
Yeah, I mean in many different ways I would agree with you. I think a couple comments on this. The first one is, I actually think although you're right at the very fundamental level, whenever most of the companies in our market started building, like you said, in the US or in for example specific countries in Europe, they actually built most of the time for monocountry solutions. And what that means is considering global time off policies, considering EOR workers, contractors, etc., was not part of the framework. So what happened is as we kind of evolved, instead of having this at the very foundational level of how they built, even their databases, right? They had to start adding things on top, right? Then like it just makes the experience very clunky versus like the core workers that they're used to and how they're managing it. So I think that is fundamentally also like a big difference with us, where like from the very get-go, whether you're in the US, in the UK, in Nigeria, in Japan, like we kind of built horizontally there, right? And we kind of took it from there, which makes it a bit easier, right? So it was which country are you from, then what worker type are you going to be, right? Because being the first, I think the largest EOR provider in the market today, understanding all forms of worker was very important for us as well, right? And then well, actually when it comes to the second part of what you said, I agree with you. And I think we've done actually a pretty good job at building the suite of solution around the HCM, like you said, the learning product, the performance reviews, etc. But one thing that we've been working on pretty heavily that no one really has, apart from making it AI first, etc., is the global aspect of this, right? Like when you're going through, you know, offering learning courses or, you know, performing performance reviews on someone in the US versus someone in Germany versus someone in France, like at the very core, how do you manage compliance at scale? And how do you actually deliver this in a way that works is something that most companies overlook because they're not usually global, right? They just build that performance review product. And being able to offer this at the core, right? Like global compliance and making it better every day, I think, is going to be a very significant differentiator over time.
No, it's something that I don't think some other US-centric partners fully even understand that that's a problem, but I'm like, we can't.
They don't. It's actually quite interesting because it's kind of been my story at Deel with Shuo, where very early on I used to hop on calls with customers and say like, no, you cannot pay someone in France via PayPal or TransferWise as a contractor. You need to make sure you have the right documents, right contract, etc. And there was always a lot of education around like, you cannot do this. You need to do it right. And over time I think we were right, right? And the market started shifting towards the solutions that we built. I think it's the same thing across all of the things, which is like when you talk to a great people success leader, right, an HRVP, they might not see it because they're usually, you know, applying what they know in their country. But then over time, like if I'm telling you that managing performance in Japan is not the same thing as managing performance in the US, you go, oh yeah, yeah, actually I understand. And eventually you need to care more as you go more global and as you run into complicated terminations without having done the right processes.
Yeah, one thing that you said earlier that I thought was really interesting was the idea of like a single system of record is being disrupted. And I want to just get more of your perspective on that because I see other vendors in the space who are really pushing the you have to have everything through us, more of a walled garden, more of our data engine is better if you have everything funneling through us. So tell me a little bit more about that perspective.
No. So I buy the idea that like if you use everything from us, for example, your data hygiene is really good and you can do hire to retire in a great way. But there's kind of like two ways of looking at this. There's like Alex from the last few years versus Alex of the last two months in terms of like my feelings towards this. Like at the beginning the way we approached it was more, I hate the way some of those products actually work, right? Like it's not okay to lock people into sub-quality product when you have one really good product just because you kind of hold them, you know, with a gun to their head because you're the system of record from an HR perspective or payroll perspective. And like I really wanted to fight this. And so there's actually, I wrote a blog post pretty early on, like I really wanted to make it so that as an HR leader, as a finance leader, from a product standpoint, you could bring all the products you love together and being Deel as one of those. And then you know, ideally we'll fight for the rest of the business potentially. It's funny because a lot of the companies in the market didn't think that we meant it, right? They saw this as like a Trojan horse where like, oh, we try and grab the rest of the market. But you know, a lot of our partners can tell you that we kind of stay true to that picture where depending on how, you know, our partnerships are structured, we only, you know, if we sell something, it's because we want to do it super well. And if customers end up loving and expanding it, then great, right? But we don't want to really push for something that's not our sweet spot or is not maybe built the way we want it just yet. Alex of today is very different because the way I think about it is in the next few months, if not already, the gun to your head thing is just not going to work anymore. You know, all of the moat that a lot of those companies have is honestly just migration. If you're using one of those big systems and you don't want to be switching because it's a pain and the costs are enormous. If you can start having AI agents doing the full migration for you end to end and switching a system goes from like months, if not years of rollout, into like a couple weeks or a couple days, then that moat's completely gone, right, in many different ways. And the best product is really going to start winning, which is something that I'm super interested in. It's not I was there at the right time, right place anymore. It's like am I the best product for my customers? And I think that's going to be a game changer in the system of record model. And the other part, and that's the last part, which I think we did decently well, is building API first and having a pretty open API ecosystem in a market where it's usually pretty closed. I'm actually pretty bullish on seeing more companies kind of vibe code solutions that they care about. And one thing that's going to be cool is like because our APIs are actually available and people are building on top of it, is as a company you can actually build what you want on top of Deel and then you can build and own what you want not inside of Deel, if that makes sense, right? Like let's say you really want, you know, I've worked with companies that really want to own the HR side of things but don't want to own the learning side or the performance side, or you know, they want to use our infrastructure and our databases but they don't want to own, they just want to own the UI layer on top of this and do whatever they want. Just building in that way, whether it's embedded payroll, like there's so many possibilities. I think that's also like a big part of the future things because if you're going to be moving out of a big HCM, a decent amount of those companies are actually going to try to take the bet of building part of that on their own. And if we can fit them all of the different structures of the things that they don't want to be building, I think it can be quite fun.
