Deel

Deel has raised $300M at a $17.3B valuation Shuo and I started about 6 years ago, struggling to even make $10K I've never shared this before because of how embarrassing our start was. 1/ Shuo and I were in completely different worlds. She was in China, I was in Israel. Both my parents family emigrated from North Africa with nothing. One of my grandfathers used to work at the French subway and the other was an electrician. I grew up in a entrepreneurial family, but when we arrived in Silicon Valley, we were outsiders. 2/ Our original idea was to ensure freelancers get paid and not ghosted after delivering work. We built an escrow platform where money would be locked upfront and automatically released when milestones were completed. 3/ We pitched Reddit freelancers our milestone-based contracts. Nobody cared. The crushing realization: contractors don't choose payment methods, clients do. 4/ We entered pivot hell. I started being a collection agency for freelancers using our product sending legal letters to companies We recovered $7,000 from a $15,000 invoice after my email. The freelancer gave us $1,000. That was a huge WIN. 5/ We thought we'd found product market fit. But we never collected another dollar. 6/ Then a YC batchmate from Sunsama used our product differently. "I like tying contracts to payments and having payment happen as work gets done," he said. "Plus you're giving me contracts out of the box and a way to pay internationally." 7/ We listened to the customer and pivoted to a contracts product. 8/ Within ten days, on Demo Day we had 290 contractors, $5,000 monthly revenue. This business only scaled to +$100M. 10/ Throughout this time, I've had hundreds of customers on WhatsApp and Slack. (I still do this) Our customers told us what their bigger problems were. We listened. 11/ We launched Employer of Record - Deel would put people on its own payroll on behalf of the client and handle all compliance. This became a $300M ARR+ business. 12/ We then launched Payroll - a system to automatically do tax calculations and remit the correct tax and net salary to employees globally. This became a $150M+ business. 13/ Deel was a remote only company and as Deel grew it became obvious to us what problems companies face running global teams. So, we built Deel for Deel. In the last 18 months, we launched 6 more products, hit $1bn ARR and September was our first $100M revenue month. All good things start small and shaky.

Deel has raised $300M at a $17.3B valuation Shuo and I started about 6 years ago, struggling to even make $10K I've never shared this before because of how embarrassing our start was. 1/ Shuo and I were in completely different worlds. She was in China, I was in Israel. Both my parents family emigrated from North Africa with nothing. One of my grandfathers used to work at the French subway and the other was an electrician. I grew up in a entrepreneurial family, but when we arrived in Silicon Valley, we were outsiders. 2/ Our original idea was to ensure freelancers get paid and not ghosted after delivering work. We built an escrow platform where money would be locked upfront and automatically released when milestones were completed. 3/ We pitched Reddit freelancers our milestone-based contracts. Nobody cared. The crushing realization: contractors don't choose payment methods, clients do. 4/ We entered pivot hell. I started being a collection agency for freelancers using our product sending legal letters to companies We recovered $7,000 from a $15,000 invoice after my email. The freelancer gave us $1,000. That was a huge WIN. 5/ We thought we'd found product market fit. But we never collected another dollar. 6/ Then a YC batchmate from Sunsama used our product differently. "I like tying contracts to payments and having payment happen as work gets done," he said. "Plus you're giving me contracts out of the box and a way to pay internationally." 7/ We listened to the customer and pivoted to a contracts product. 8/ Within ten days, on Demo Day we had 290 contractors, $5,000 monthly revenue. This business only scaled to +$100M. 10/ Throughout this time, I've had hundreds of customers on WhatsApp and Slack. (I still do this) Our customers told us what their bigger problems were. We listened. 11/ We launched Employer of Record - Deel would put people on its own payroll on behalf of the client and handle all compliance. This became a $300M ARR+ business. 12/ We then launched Payroll - a system to automatically do tax calculations and remit the correct tax and net salary to employees globally. This became a $150M+ business. 13/ Deel was a remote only company and as Deel grew it became obvious to us what problems companies face running global teams. So, we built Deel for Deel. In the last 18 months, we launched 6 more products, hit $1bn ARR and September was our first $100M revenue month. All good things start small and shaky.