How Deel Scaled From $100M to $1B+ ARR in 3 Years

Molly O'Shea (0:00)

Welcome to Sourcery.

Shuo Wang (0:10)

The potential of photonics. The technology to interconnect these GPUs. Global payroll and HR platform.

Molly O'Shea (0:16)

8 billion operational data points.

SPEAKER_3 (0:18)

Scale-ups over startups. You'd rather have a million of something than one of anything. Building the intelligence layer through the fence. There isn't enough power, there's not enough memory chips.

Shuo Wang (0:27)

We're at the end of physics, of what we can still do.

SPEAKER_3 (0:40)

Shuo, welcome to Sourcery. We're here at the Strike Summit. How's it going?

Shuo Wang (0:46)

Thank you so much for having me. Everything is going well.

So far, I have been loving Monocle.

SPEAKER_3 (0:54)

So we're going to talk with you about sales and growth. For people who don't know Deel, I'd be very surprised if you don't, they're crushing it, if not killing it.

So Deel is a $17.3 billion company. They most recently surpassed 1.5 billion in ARR.

Shuo Wang (1:11)

Yes.

SPEAKER_3 (1:13)

Shuo is the CRO of that. So she's handling all the sales and building the teams around it. So Deel went from 1 million in sales to 100 million in 20 months. Then they went from 100 million to a billion in ARR in five years. So Shuo.

Shuo Wang (1:32)

In three years. Oh, revise that. From 100 million to 1 billion within three years. Yeah.

SPEAKER_3 (1:39)

Okay. Correction. So how did you scale from 100 million to a billion in three years?

Shuo Wang (1:45)

For a little bit background info about Deel, Deel is a global payroll and HR platform, and we help companies to hire, manage, pay talents globally, and we're live in 160 different countries. So that means for every single country, we have our own entity, we have our own compliance team, payroll team, taxes, legal, everything, and we build automation and then products in-house. So that means we automatically have a huge time.

Then within that huge time, theoretically, everyone can be paid on Deel, and then we just grow very fast because of the market. Also, we're global since day one, and it is very different from a lot of the Silicon Valley company that you focus on one country and you do it very well and you expand. So we can build a global team very, very early on, yeah.

SPEAKER_3 (2:43)

What was your decision to go global on day one and not just dominate one market?

Shuo Wang (2:47)

I think it is from the founders, right? And also the product itself. Alex, my co-founder and myself were very international. I was born and raised in China and moved to the States at the age of 16, and Alex is French and then he moved to the States at the age of 19

And then just from our background, we realized that the world is a very big place, and then there are many, many great talents from every single country out there. And then it is not only a concentration of one city, and then we want to build a system where we want to build a product to empower everyone to be able to find the best job that they can, regardless of their location, yeah.

SPEAKER_3 (3:36)

I know you have some big customers. Are you able to name some of them?

Shuo Wang (3:39)

Yeah, like, you know, I know here 11 Labs, right, European company, doing extremely well. They're running everything on Deel, and we have AI companies, we have retail brands like Chanel, Hermes are all Deel clients, and what are some other companies?

SPEAKER_3 (4:03)

Sourcery.

Shuo Wang (4:04)

Sourcery. Of course, and a lot of like, you know, we work with a lot of banks as well, and venture capitalists as well.

SPEAKER_3 (4:15)

So I have known Shuo for a while. I recently recorded with her at the Hill and Valley Forum in DC. It's like, for those who don't know, it's kind of like a defense tech bipartisan conference, and I was asking everyone their hottest take. I asked David Friedberg what his hottest take was. It went completely viral. We asked Shuo what her hottest take was, and it was probably the hottest, most honest take in the room. Shuo, what was your hot take?

Shuo Wang (4:44)

My hot take back then was like, I think people need to sell more. Yeah, people are not hustling enough, and then people are now like, you know, trying their best to get revenue or get clients.

SPEAKER_3 (4:55)

The one thing I've noticed with you, whether we're on vacation or in Hawaii or here, no matter we're at any dinner, she tries to sell whoever we're sitting at the table with, and she'll follow up with it at the end. So if you guys haven't met her yet, she's coming for you. She's really great. But you started off as an engineer. So what made you like work yourself into whatever principles you use for sales now?