20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't

I feel pretty confident that the same way we've been winning in the marketplace, we'll win in the court of law. So it's just, we just need to play it out. I think I'm in constant wartime sadly as well. That September was our first 100 million revenue month, which is a very exciting milestone for the business this round. These new investors, our board has always been with us, kind of show us for where we stand as a company towards this type of litigation.

This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and I'm so excited to welcome.

Back what I think is one of the great founders of our generation, Alex Bourzies. Deal Now Deal is the seventeen dollar global payroll juggernaut that just last week announced their latest $300 million fundraise. Led by Ribbit Andreessen and CO2 deal has been on the most insane journey. They now do over a billion in annual revenue. They just had their first 100 million revenue month and they've been profitable for over three years. I'm very touched by this show. I freaking hate podcasts where there's like a podcast tour and Alex chose to do one podcast to announce and he chose 20 VC.

That meant a huge amount to me. This show was fantastic and I cannot wait to hear your thoughts.

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You have now arrived at your destination.

Alex, dude, it has been like three years. It's been a while since we last.

Sat down and chatted on the show.

You've been actually working really hard.

Instead of Talking to podcasters like me. But thank you for agreeing to do this, man.

Well, thank you for having me. We actually did a stage together not too long ago, right in Paris or something like that.

I was actually pissed about that. You know why?

Because you were so good and we didn't have it recorded and I actually.

Wanted to use it for a podcast and the team were like, no, this wasn't a podcast session, Harry. I'm like, damn it, we missed a chance to put some great ads in.

Well, I'm very excited to do this with you. It's been a while and thank you for being a great friend and amazing dude.

You've got some exciting news. So I'm going to start with the exciting news. What is the exciting news that we've got today?

Yes, well, it's been a while actually since we've raised primary money. We did a small round in I think 2023, but since then I think the last time we raised significant primary capital was in 2021. So I think news for us is we're actually going to announce a round of over $300 million at over $17 billion plus in valuation. So it's going to be a big deal for us and we're super excited to share that with the rest of the world and actually the company because you're getting this a bit early, dude.

I'm thrilled and honored, really. I was so touched when you said we could do this over 300 at over 17.

Yes.

Who's doing the round, dude?

So I'm genuinely so excited about our investors. It's actually co led by three investors. The first one is Ribit Capital which is our new investor. It's actually the first time that they invest into. I actually love the team there. I've been trying to get them to invest into Deal since our Series A, I think actually. And then by our amazing and long standing investors from Andreessen, Horowitz and Koetu. So three of them actually are co leading this round.

By the way, I love Ribbit dearly. Nick and Mickey are some of my favorites. Three great investors that dude. Massive congrats. Why was now the time to do.

It by the way? Yeah, it's quite interesting because Deal has been a profitable company for three years now. So we've been generating cash which is always a great thing to do and we haven't needed investors investment for quite a long time. I think there's a couple of things here that were very critical for us. First, we've been pretty aggressive on the M&A front. I think we've done about 13 acquisitions which really helped us grow really fast, build new products, bring amazing founders in, and really kind of take over a big part of the global payroll market share. So bringing in from new fresh capital and resetting the valuation is also something that's important to the actual value of the company. The second part is, like I was telling you, I think Mickey and Nick are some of the best investors in the world and I wanted them involved in the business for a very long time. So them wanting to invest with the Coatu team, with the A16Z team was a great opportunity and it just made sense to kind of go for it when they came with the offer.

I would be in trouble from the Twitter sphere if I didn't progress this conversation. There was obviously a lot of publicity around the Rippling story. What's the latest with the long standing litigation with Rippling?

Yeah, so obviously I can talk about ongoing litigations. I think it's unfortunate that the way they're trying to compete is through media and through headlines and things like that. But I think the thing that really matters is how the business has been growing. Right. Actually we're going to announce as well that September was our first 100 million revenue month, which is a very exciting milestone for the business. And I think this round, these new investors, our board has always been with us, kind of shows for where we stand as a company towards this type of litigations. And we're looking forward on building for our customers and being focused on delivering.

It's so hard, dude, because like, I just have questions that come up mid conversation like, ah, am I getting in trouble for this? Do you ever feel like you are chastised for not being a Valley company? And what I mean by that is like Rippling have the Silicon Valley Illuminati around them. And in the same way for me, like there are some media companies which I'm not going to name because they'll hate me for it, but like they.

Just have the Silicon Valley, the collisons.

And the YCs around them which anoint them and I feel chastised for not being there and not being in their circles. Do you feel the rippling inner circle and deal outside of it?

So I think I can't really comment on Rippling. I would say that we're kind of in the middle. I'm not a Silicon Valley based founder, but we do have Y Combinator as an investor. They were one of our early backers. I would say that there is advantages into being in the Valley. Right. I think seeing a lot of people and them understanding the business very thoroughly is very important. I think a good example for us is looking at deal from outside of the valley. You're the hero until you kind of become the villain. And then back to the hero story. Because people were kind of looking at us thinking, they're growing so fast. It's so amazing. They're growing so fast. It's so amazing. How are they growing so fast? Right. And if you're not in the valley and people don't understand you, they can have a lot of questions, and if you're not there to answer them, you're not in the side conversation. It's a bit harder. Not that it matters, to be honest, because it hasn't mattered to us. I actually think a good learning for me is there's pros and cons on this. I'm not 100% sure how I feel towards it, but the fact that we didn't raise money since 2021, if you were not really counting 2023, means that I actually didn't spend a lot of time with investors. So no one actually knew our numbers apart from our shareholders. We've been buying every single secondary on the market every single time they could. So a lot of people were kind of looking at us announcing 1 billion in AR and being like, what's going on there? We don't really understand it. So I think maybe that would have been a good learning opportunity to spending more time with investors on my side. Just that they really understand how f growing and why we're actually growing, which is the most important part.

I see it with one of our companies also, Air Wallix, which is an incredible business.

I love Jack.

Love Jack, too. And the business is like one of the best businesses that I don't think people know enough about.

I'd say it's like, it's kind of a mix, right? Because as a founder, you want to be super focused on your business. But if you look at Jack's growth, it's like, outstanding, right? And you're thinking, okay, like it's an Australian founder, not based in the Valley. How is this business growing as fast when some similar businesses in the US are not growing as fast? And I think there is value into actually spending time educ investors that may be your investors of tomorrow. That was maybe a small mistake we made where the fact that we've been profitable kind of like made us not go out in the market as much.

In terms of lessons, if we're honest, what have you learned about playing offense versus defense in terms of going through this public dispute as a CEO?

Again, I didn't pay attention too much to it because I know where we stand. I know the facts, and I think think having our board behind us has been really helpful. I think it's always interesting, right? Like this wartime versus peacetime CEO concept as well. Right. And funnily enough, Ben is like my board member. I spend a lot of time with him, so it's always amazing to learn from him. There is moments where you need to understand where you're strong and where you're not strong. Right. Like, which fields do you play in, when do you play your hands, and how do you do it? We took an approach that really worked for us, which is like, focus on what we know how to do best, focus on navigating the stories in the places that are important for us and telling our truth. And I think that was the best thing to do. There's still a lot of work to be done, to be very honest with you. And I feel pretty confident that the same way we've been winning in the marketplace, we'll win in the court of law. So it's just we just need to play it out. I do think one interesting thing which I was telling you about is like, I've learned a lot about the media as well. It's like, you know, I've never really looked at it from these eyes, but you see like, those big tech journals that are kind of going and like, making up stories for clicks, which, you know, when I was a bit younger or maybe like an early stage founder, our dream was to get on some of those articles. And when you see the things that they can publish with unnamed sources that are completely false, with no retractions and things like that, you kind of start thinking that in many ways there's something super broken about media. And I'm looking forward to someone solving that problem, really.

Did you flee to Dubai?

No, I'm very happy living in Tel Aviv and I've been living here for the last five years. You know, you can come visit.

You said you don't really think about it. Do you really not? And you said, like, you go through hero, villain, hero when you're villain, do you really not? It hurts me when I have shit about me and it's nothing compared to what you got.

No, of course. I mean, you know, the person that gets a bit more pissed is maybe my wife because she reads some of the stories and she's like, I know that's not true on my side. I try my best not to. Right. Always. Because there's so many things that are happening in the business. Our customers give us our trust and they understand where we're going. I think a lot of the facts also make it a lot easier to explain many of the things that are being said and are not true. So I don't think about it. I definitely don't think about it as much as maybe in March, Right. When I had to deal with the early stage of the litigation. By now it's old school, old news for us until we really can bid it out in the court of law. So I think I'm being rigorous enough where I try to focus on my customers because that's the only way. And if anything, I think it's proven to be the right way of dealing with it. And we've been able to really grow in the last two quarters, which actually shows for an amazing resilience of the business as well.

I think you actually mastered a comms strategy in a very different world. And I don't know if this was a very. I'm sure it was deliberate and thought through. But when you think about the cadence of comms today, when OpenAI gets $100 billion investment from Nvidia, it's super interesting for 30 minutes and then it's like, what next? And the speed of news cycles is so fast. The best way to get over something is to say nothing. The worst thing to do is to start a response and then it becomes something that's a desperately bad mistake.

Yeah. There's different ways of dealing with this in general. I think my stance is when I feel right in my shoes and I know what I'm doing, I know where we're going. There's no point in trying to fight useless battles. Right? Like, let's win in the court of law. Let's put this behind us. Just like, you know, I don't know if you saw, but we had something in January, a similar lawsuit that we believe came from a similar company. Putting that to bed was the best way of showing that we know what we're doing and we're doing great.

I spoke to many of your investors before. It was great. Honestly, it was super lovely because I know most of them already, but like Yasmin, Anish, many more. And they all said that you're the most hands on CEO that they work with. And dude, like I introduced you to a Project Europe company for context. This is like two, three teenagers building an amazing business. And I'm like, Who should I introduce them to on your team? And you're like, like me. And I'm like, no, no, this is like a junior a job. No disrespect to junior AES, but like you're the only CEO who would be that hands on. Let me. And they said you're the most hands on CEO they work with. How do you respond when you think about how hands on you are and your approach?

So I think being hands on is very critical for the business as you grow. I think the worst mistake you can make as the company scale is to be too far away from the business to really know what the problems really are. I think this is kind of like a cultural point for retail, right? Top down, all of my leaders are hands on. And then if my leaders are hands on, middle management is hands on and the ICs see this the exact same way. So I think culturally it's always been very important for us as a business. It's always been very important for me and it really helped me navigate different paths of growth, new products or even spotting gaps into the organization. Right. I think every company at more than 50, 100 people start having flows in their designs, in their org in terms of response time, in terms of how things are happening and, and if you are 10,000ft above looking down at the organization, hoping to figure out what's wrong, it just doesn't really work. So actually even being seen by our customers, because it's not just you and our investor, my customers, I get a lot people pinging me about, hey, I have a problem with this, et cetera, directly, that really does help me have a better view of what's wrong in the organization in an everyday basis. And when you're growing at the pace where we are, billions in our profitable business acquisitions, 7,000 people around the world today, it's very easy to lose sight of what's going on if you're not really hands on and really focused.

Dude, how many direct reports do you have? Speaking of being hands on?

Not that many. I'm not Jensen at all. I have like 20 or a little over 20. The thing is, my direct reports are really strong, so I've never had one on ones with them. I've never truly had performance reviews with them. I kind of give them continuous feedback all the time and we talk all the time, we work all the time. And that is I think a much better setup from a hierarchy perspective than the traditional. Like I only have a few reports and I talk to them on a one on one cadence. Every week or whatever that is.

If you don't do one on one cadence every week, how do you think about building that continuous information flow? Especially when you're not in the office. But how do you have that tight feedback loop together?

I speak to them all the time, literally. If you take any of my reports, they get messages from you or they send me messages every day. My job, the way I view my job is I'm here to enable people. So what's broken? What's not working? Why is it not working? What can I do to make it better for you? Is it resources? Is it just prioritization? Is it reorgang? My job is kind of like looking at the different parts of the organization and being present for you to be your best self, right. And do your best work and being hands on with them in the problems they see every day really enables me.

To do that.996 in hustle culture is more pronounced than ever before. You said about that kind of work ethic hunger. How do you feel about the 996 obsession today?

I wish I worked 996. I think I work a little harder than that personally and I think most of my dealership does too. But I just don't think it works at scale really. There is moments in the company where you need to push hard and there's moments where things are a bit more in control. I actually like to break down this in different organizations. Not everybody needs to be going at 1,000 miles per hour all the time.

Time.

Some parts of the organization at a very specific moment need to. And as long as you're in control and you're pushing for the right places at the right time, you're not going to burn through. Amazing talent, right? So actually being hands on is very helpful in there, right? When you're able to say, okay, you know what, like that product is not good enough. Open the wire room. Everybody's going to work more than 996 for a couple weeks to get it ready. That makes a lot of sense to me. If you're just pushing the pedal all the time, you're not going to do yourself a favor and your team is just not going to work out. Out.

Does being rich help you be a better leader?

I've done less secondaries than you think, actually.

I think being rich as an investor makes you a better investor. You see upside, not downside. You're actually able to align more with founders because your career is not on the line. You've already got enough money. It's Fine. Yeah, much more level.

I'm torn on this because and I'm not going to name anyone, but I do think that a lot of my friends that have built amazing businesses go through this awkward phase where they've made enough money to not work as much anymore. And a lot of things happens in their life because they get pulled by so many different external topics that want their attention and the business starts stagnating a little bit. Because I do think founders create a lot of momentum within organization until they actually get pulled back when they see the business is not as growing anymore and they start having maybe some troubles with the their board and things like that. So I actually do think it has a form of a negative impact. If you're not thought out about how you're going to manage this at scale and how this is going to impact your day to day work, how does.

It have a negative impact?

Very pragmatic. Right. Like if you never had money and you suddenly have a lot of money on your bank account and you start spending it on a lot of different things and your mind is just somewhere.

Else, I would say that's just like a B tier founder and I'm being direct with that.

But like no, it's your founders as well. I've seen it happen with amazing founders. It's easy to get lost and eventually you get a big reminder of why you're here and get your ass kicked. Because no matter how many of them has made money, it's typically not as much as it can be a lot of money, but it's not as much as the potential of money they could make over time. And there's a lot of people eventually on your cap table. They're here to remind you that they've trusted you with a lot of money and they want you to deliver on the promises you have. So. So if you're very thought out about what it means to you and how you're going to manage this and how it's going to affect your life over time, then it's fine because it is going to affect your life. Right. I've seen that trap happen to a few of my friends, but thankfully they've turned it around big time. So I can't say anything back.

Did you ever get high on your own supply? We mentioned both being young there. I was a little bit younger than you. I definitely got high on my own Supply at 21, 22, thinking I was the shit.

It maybe. I think there is a moment where you're like hot shit. Everybody wants to invest. You're getting term shifts left and right where you start being inconsiderate. But I actually kind of like, have gone through enough cycles now, although it's not been exactly a long time where I actually kind of regret not having been some of those times, slightly maybe nicer or more considerate than I was. And I see it with some of my friends or some people that are raising like crazy runs right now or where my take is, at some point, everything that goes up must go down. And at that point in time is when you start thinking, maybe I shouldn't have done this or I shouldn't have done that. I don't think I was that intense on this. I'm sure some people might think I was. If it was. It was never intentional. I'm sorry. But I do think that over time, it happens to founders that build companies that have significant traction for a short amount of time.

What's the craziest VC story you have of term sheets flying to see you? You name it, you were and are one of the hottest companies in the world. But also, hey, we're still hot.

It was still hot. Thank you.

Was one of the craziest stories.

I have some crazy stories that are not good stories, so I can't really share those ones.

You can.

One of our investor at our Series A calling me about COVID and telling me, you need to fire everyone and stop doing whatever you're doing because Covid is going to kill the company and me answering to them. No, we're doing okay. We're actually going to raise a Series A and getting back channels from this saying, the guy thinks you're a carpet seller. He thinks that you're bullshitting through your Series A and there's nothing that's going to happen. And then me going back two weeks later with a term sheet from Andreessen Horowitz telling them, look, this is my Series A, but you weren't very nice to me, so you're not getting your pro rata. That was a funny story, for sure. I would say, look, if you wanted a crazy story, I mean, we did raise $700 million from my living room in Tel Aviv, right? Like on Zoom, without meeting any of our investors.

What? Well, tell me this story.

What do you mean? Every single round we raised was during COVID 2020, 2021, 2022. I was in Tel Aviv, you know, so I did raise most of the capital we had at the company without meeting our investor. Actually, you know what? The Ribbit guys flew in to see me And I flew like, we kind of met halfway in the country. And that was the first time I ever had a closing dinner in my life.

No way. Did you not want that? Like, before I make an investment, rule number one from 2021 mistakes. I will not invest unless I meet a founder in person. It just led to bad investment decisions. So much is learned from me seeing you. Dude, I love you as a person. When I see you, I feel your energy, your charisma. You need to be in person.

Yeah, but, yeah, I mean, I agree with you 100%. But, you know, in 2020, 2021, I couldn't be in person. And this is when we raised most of our money, so. And we didn't do any big fundraise until this one now. Right. So that was my experience, right. From fundraising without actually meeting meeting people.

Did you think pro rata should be an actual right?

No, I think pro rata should be earned.

Do you advise founders always raise at the highest price?

No, because I think M and A is a very viable option. A very viable option. And I think the higher you are, the harder it is to get done. It depends what you want in life and it depends how big your business is actually going to be. I think trying to go for the home run, I'm very glad I did. In terms of the ambition, we still have a lot of work to do, but I'm very glad that we went for the billion dollar valuation and all of those things. It could have backfired as well. So I think that was much more naive from my part, which worked out okay. But I do think that there is some optimization where you need to think about the future of the company. And highest valuation does not always mean best outcome for the business and the people. People.

Do you think venture investors do actually add value?

I mean, you know, I think Andreessen Horowitz has been adding tremendous value. And I'm not saying that for like, they helped me find board members, they helped me place amazing people in the business. I think General Catalyst.

Have Andreessen been the best?

I think Andreessen has been top tier by far. They've always been super supportive through rainbows and unicorns, all the way to shitstorms. They stood by us like no investor ever did. I think in a journey, if you can get investors that are value aligned with you and that truly care about the business, not just the return, then you can make good friends that you can entrust yourself with. It's a long and tough journey.

The hard thing is though, dude, today this is fundraising on the ground. In venture today, founders run a more transactional process than ever. I meet you today, you say, hey, Harry, round's moving fast, I need a decision by Friday. It's Wednesday.

That means you didn't spend time with me before. You're coming in at the last minute to jump in on a round that's already more or less done.

No, because they've been told by their prior round, investors do not take an investor meeting until you're fundraising. Don't build relationships. And so you have to.

Yeah, no, that's a mistake. I think building relationship with great people is helpful and I think there's a lot of ways for founders to make those meetings useful. For example, I would have never taken a meeting with an investor building up the relationship. The outcome of that meeting wouldn't be, for example, example, like 2, 3 business intros of potential customers. Right. So there's value for you, there's value for me. If I can get a bit more value, it's even better.

Do you share numbers in those meetings?

I share high level numbers. Why not? The thing is, most of your numbers are available if someone really wants to figure them out. Right. It doesn't truly matter. I don't believe in hiding numbers. The way I think about venture capital transactions, it's not them giving, sure, very early on, it's them giving you money to try to build something, knowing it's going to fail. But as you grow as a company and there's a brighter future and a clearer vision of where it's going, I see this much more as a transaction where it's you selling them a part of your business for them bringing you value which goes beyond money.

Do you know, Mickey taught me one thing. He said, harry, you've never won or lost. You're only ever ahead or behind. This is an infinite game, remember that. And it was especially about relationships and the value of long term relationships, not being here for the quick win or getting something.

I'm not getting to the Yoda advices from Mickey just yet, but I'm excited about them.

How important is investor brand? You have big brands behind you now with your Andreessens, with your ribbits, with your code. Does investor brand really make a difference?

I think so. If you want to assemble the best team in the world, you got to have the best investors in the world. And I think in many different ways they can help you attract talent, they can help you attract more capital, they can help you navigate through complex situations that they have lived before. Right. Like Every time I talk to Ben, right? Like, it's crazy the amount of knowledge that he has, right? It's crazy the amount of pattern matching that he has in terms of how the business.

What's your Yoda knowledge from Ben? I gave you mine from Mickey. Come on.

Oh, Yoda knowledge. Okay. I hope he doesn't get mad at me for saying that one, but in his mind, most chief marketing officers are not good. The truth is I actually agree with him. For a while I was looking for a CMO with this experience, that experience, that experience. And what I've realized is like the best CMOs I've encountered over the last few years are the ones that are just able to be so much more first principle into understanding what's going on and going really deep into the data instead of being super superficial. And you don't usually get that from a traditional CMO background. So the contrarian stance me and him have kind of developed is that your CMO should be an engineer.

Do you know what's so funny? The best CMO in the world to me is Alex Schultz from Meta. He's also the VP of analytics at Meta. He is engineering mind. He's a physicist also, but he's also incredibly creative. And he is this unic horn of. He's an artist, visionary, creative with an engineer analytics growth engine.

But that's not the classic CMO background. So, like there's amazing people at brand, there's amazing people at lots of different things. I think if you want to efficiently drive marketing strategy at like a high intense growth company, you got to be much more engineering background, right? Like I was sitting with the CMO of Wiz, who is like one of the strongest CMOs I've met in a long time. You should probably interview her. She's like asaf's a magic weapon the way she just thought through some things that are just accepted in marketing, right? Oh, we're spending X amounts of money on paid ads and that's returning X. Kind of like taking over the role, kind of going back and saying, okay, that is a lot of money. Let's go back, let's understand, let's deeply understand how this works. I think being able to cut spend by half, but increasing the number of leads by half by just going really deep into understanding the problem. Only people that care about truly understanding how the system works, work deeply, can get done is what I found to be the right people for all roles, but specifically for marketing, given how much.

Money goes there, insane amounts of money. It's the Hardest thing. You know, this is age old statement which is, you know, 50% of my marketing expense, very efficient and 50% is totally wasted. I just have no idea.

50% for me is a lot of money. Right. So I actually want to, want to make sure I'm optimized on this revolut.

I interviewed Nick and he was like the biggest mindset change I've had is actually in the value of brand marketing. Do you think brand marketing is as valuable?

Yes. And this is new to me by the way. Nick is my favorite founder, probably the person I look up to the most in many different ways. He knows that it's aligned. Yes, a thousand percent, but now, not before. So I think when I look at deal and growth over the next few years, the only way for us to be what I think we can be, which is a hundred billion dollar plus company that truly changes how HR and payroll is perceived and really disrupts this whole market is for a brand to be aligned and for the brand to be much more known. Right. And that didn't actually matter to me two, three years ago. But today when I see the path to get to the numbers we want, which is not insane by the way, what I love to tell investors is okay, today we have. Have you done any consumer deals or are you like anti consumer?

No, I've done consumer deals.

Okay. What would you say to. If I was a company coming to you and telling you okay, Today we have 1.5 million people, OK, getting paid on deal, we're going to get this to 10 million people. Would you think that's crazy?

No.

Okay, so 10 million people, given that today we're over a billion in AR would mean quite a bit more revenue. Right.

Basically you need to get to 10 billion in AR to be the $100 billion.

Exactly. But you can also push that even further. Again, consumer investors. If I was telling you that we will do payroll for 100 million people over the next few years, it's not that crazy.

Well, it's quite crazy. That's actually harder to believe when you actually look at TAM and when you look at.

What do you mean everyone needs payroll? Every single person in the gets payrolled. Almost. Right. Like okay, maybe not every single person in the world. Most people in the world get payrolled, right?

Yeah. I mean a, that's your time.

Every single worker in the world.

Yes and no. I don't think it works for all parts of all companies. One, it doesn't work for all geographies. Two, you're not working in Japanese agriculture.

My friend, I do payroll for oil and gas, for agriculture companies, for airlines. You're wrong. We do payroll for a lot of people.

And then you actually look at assumptions on market take. Okay, let's do this in five years time. What does the market map look like? Is there like one winner who gets 80% or is this like a 25? 25? 25, 25.

It depends how much I spend on brand awareness. No, really?

No.

No, it doesn't. Well, see, I think we can be very aggressively winning most of the market. I actually think the gap between 10 to 100 million over the next five to 10 years is not that big if the brand is known. If we build infrastructure, that really changes.

Where would you most like to spend on brand marketing that you haven't yet? Do you want to do an F1 car?

Well, we'll do some of those actually, so you'll see some of them coming already in the works. The thing about brand marketing is I actually don't know the subject well enough. So you're going to have to give me a little bit of time to get educated in terms of how this works properly. And we'll probably make a bunch of mistakes in in the meantime, but we're going to try really hard. I do think there's value in into F1, into football, into golf and things like that for us. It's an interesting thing to navigate because I want to be able to make both sides of the equation happy. So if we own B2B assets that we can bring customers at events and things like that, it's great for short investing into our customers and getting them to be excited about the company. But at the same time, if I can get the end user and the funds excited, I think there's a long term value aligned brand here as well.

Well, where would you most like to cut spend that you haven't cut spend or can't cut spend?

I would love to cut spend on the pure paid marketing side. I think that'd be cool. And I think that comes from brand awareness. The bigger your brand, the less you need to pay per leads. That's very aligned in terms of where we want to go. Obviously Deal is a very operations heavy business because, you know, we have maybe a couple thousand people in operations around the world and I think over time, you know, with AI and with a lot of the infrastructure we're building, we'll be able to have, you know, the best performers stay at the business and reshuffle their little bit.

Where's AI impacted deal most? We Spoke before about kind of speaking about the future. When you look forward, where do you think AI will impact deal most?

Function wise pure operations, right? Like automating through agents, task 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 that are being done manually today until they're fully automated through tech. Right? Like just being able to bring like a Manus AI type of software. Really a big game changing impact for us.

Do you use Manus today?

We use a competitor and them until one of them becomes good enough for our solution. But I really like the Manus guys so I think they might be it.

But they're not good enough today.

No, because it's too early.

Do you have AI customer service tools?

Yeah, we built a lot of AI stuff. So one super interesting thing at Deal that has actually been probably the best investment we've made at the company is we built our own knowledge base. So two, three years ago I was talking to one of my board member and telling them how we have that very unique knowledge, right? Like global employment, global benefits, global payroll, very very detailed, kind of like mini encyclopedia deal with like 20,000 articles and like 70,000 different data points. Chang every year I was talking to my board member, we were keeping this in Google Doc and notion. I was like I think this is going to be one of the biggest things at Dell. If we can actually nail our knowledge and own it, it's going to just make such a big difference for how we operate. And I was jamming at night with Sebastian actually from Klarna who is thinking about AI 247 and probably one of the sharpest mind in terms of integrating AI into your business. And I was like Sebastian, I need to do something about this. And he came to me and he said, you know, I'm actually building our own knowledge base inside of Wiki JS internally and it's working really well. And I'm like shit, that's actually brilliant, right? Because you can build parameters, you can build your own infrastructure and then you can layer AI on top of your own data so you're in full control and there is no hallucination and you actually own the data itself. And we did that over the last two years and it's probably one of the best investments in the world we could have ever done. Because every single time you come and talk to us us we're able to get the right data almost straight away about the very specific use case we're talking about which is impossible for most other people to get.

What have you not invested in internally that with the benefit of hindsight you would like to have done. I think you learn lessons from mistakes.

We under invested in our internal tools and processes. I told you I look up to Nick a lot and Nick's mantra is build everything. If you own everything, you do everything well. So I don't know if you know about Revolut builds ever. I think he's right. I think in many ways software is a lot of SaaS are not tailored enough to the different applications that we want to build and owning most of the software makes a significant difference in many different places. But let me give you a very small project that we're very excited about. A very strong example. Over the last year we built our own GRI like product internally. So basically like ticket management at scale because being able to route the right tickets to the right person. So let's say you have a problem, you're a customer, you want to talk to payroll, you want to talk to hr, you want to talk to to finance, whatever that is. Being able to write your own tickets is very critical and no software was really agile enough to be able to do this. And now what we're launching this week internally is the ability to just as a salesperson, as a CSM at whatever within the company, being able to type your problem and basically with AI automatically create the right ticket, automatically routing it to the right person and cutting the time at 90% in terms of resolution that we can have. That only comes from being able to build a lot of your internal infrastructure. And it's the dumbest thing to do when you're scrolling more, but it's the smartest thing to do. I think as you scale and the moment at which we should have started should have been a lot earlier because when we knew we were on the path of like we know where we're going, we can start making longer investments and longer bets. We should have like transitioned this a little bit.

What is the sign that you should.

Transition to build own couple hundred percent year on year growth plus profitability is a good sign when we started. Here's another example, right? Like building your own payroll engine, like I'm geeking to you about earlier is like a very bold move. It's something that you go like why would you do this right? Like PayFit is a unicorn in France, just doing payroll in France. Gusto is a unicorn in the Decacorn in the us just doing payroll in the us, right? So building our own internal infrastructure from ground up with the ambition of rolling out 100 plus countries is something that most people will look at and go, you're a little crazy. Crazy. And that's true. It's like a very crazy play actually. But when you're four years into the business, you're profitable, you're on path to grow really fast, you kind of have some decisions to make, right? Like how big of a company do you really want to build? Can you make a lot of those long term plays that you think are going to be significant for the value of the company and for your customers? And that's where we kind of got into a place where we're like, okay, do we want to be an acquisition outcome with a great 1, 2, 3 products or do we want to actually own the rails, like be as close to the metal as possible in a way that no one has ever done before for. I think you can only start making those plays when you are truly profitable and truly growing at the pace where it's okay to take a couple hundred people and build the infrastructure that's going to serve you tomorrow.

I think my biggest takeaway from Nick actually is how he treats Revolut in some ways like an incubation unit for new product testing. And he has like 26, 27 new product bets where he gives people like 2 million bucks a year and then really measures cadence and how they progress.

I'm not there yet. I'm not there yet. I think for me what's most important is we've kind of gone through, it's an interesting phase at the company today. We've gone through having two amazing products into having now like 10. And for me the most important is making that system work amazingly well together. So I'm not really looking to launch 10 new products next year. It's not really my thing. It's more like how do we give the best end to end HR and payroll experience to our customers? And then when I get into a place where I'm like, okay, we've kind of killed the market the same way we had for global payroll, eor, et cetera, then that's when we might make more new bits.

How do you do sales teams there? Because when you have 10 products, you think that verticalization is great. They can really know the product, really know the problem. But then it's really hard to do the cross sell well and sell a suite. What's the winning solution?

Yeah, well, here's an interesting data point for you. I know you love data. 60% of our revenue actually comes from cross sell today. So cross sell is actually a big part of what we do well, expansion, cross Sell and expansion as well for our customers. Right. So we do well and they want to open new countries or they just hire more people and things like that. So the way we've done this is basically, and I think it's pretty similar to like a couple other big organizations like Oracle and others, but it works really well for us. We basically have what we call our core salespeople and they sell the product that we feel are fully mastered inside of the company. Right. From an enablement perspective, from like an experience perspective, from like an end to end perspective, we feel like we're in full control. Our core is we'll quickly ramp up and quickly be the best in the market at the selling this. And then we have what we call those overlay teams. So it's like our IT business. So we acquired Huffy for example, a company you invested in, which is doing amazing for us. It's grown almost 100% year on year is very specialized. Right. And we're building a lot of IT products. So you have an overlay team that is brought by the core AE team when this is an interesting product for the customers, but at the same time it's a standalone and a land product. So you can actually have leads that are only interested in this and they will be the ones selling it before moving it to a core ae. And we do this across all of the different products. So immigration, global payroll, all of those different products. And an interesting thing is over time some of your products become mature enough and your organization and your data and your knowledge becomes mature enough that you can bring some of those products into the core team. Right. That's like our holy grail is for things to be so smooth that I can bring one of those products into the core team rather than having overlay AES on that front.

When you think about building out the sales team, what's been the biggest lesson for you in how you've done it successfully? It is a fricking hard part to scale.

One thing I always tell early stage founders that we did really well actually and really helped us because if you think about Dell's revenue split today, 50% comes from the US, a little over 35% comes from Europe and the rest is the rest of the world and we're growing all parts. One move we did pretty early on is hire salespeople in different GEOs pretty early on just to understand the market. So instead of having a lot of salespeople just in one country, hiring a few salespeople into other countries and kind of say go and figure it out out was really helpful for us because it really helped us ramp up across all markets really fast and having a strong understanding of what's going to work, what's not going to work and how we should reshape our strategy. For example, we launched Japan two years into the business and it didn't work for the first year and a half. And then eventually we changed country leads with all of the learnings from the first one and now it's doing really well. And all of this happens in parallel where a lot of people are like, yeah, it's going to defocus you, you shouldn't be doing that. I'm like, hire a sales guy, see if he sells or if she sells. And if they do amazing, you can ramp up and hire more of them. If they don't, then it's fine, you let them go and change them.

I get you, but how do you think about defocusing?

I don't think having one person running around when you're like 10 people, 20 people trying to sell something is defocusing. The only thing that can be defocusing is if they come and start telling you, for Brazil, I need this specific thing for this country. And here you just say no, sell what you have. But I really don't think having salespeople in different places is defocusing. And that really helped us move really fast in shaping go to market.

Listen, it clearly worked. And so this is a hilarious debate because I know shit and you know everything having lived it. But like I don't agree if it works, they need more time and more resources. And if it doesn't, you need to do something about it. So it does objectively defocus you like I think of this with our media companies today. We could do new shows, we could do different types of shows, we could do politics, we could do consumer fashion, food defocus like win what we do.

When it comes to sell, I don't think there is any defocus because if they sell, it works. Then if it works, you'd be the happiest person in the world to give them more resources. If it doesn't work, it's okay. You tried.

You said 50% US, 35% Europe, 15%.

Yeah, maybe it's 30% Europe, but in.

Those numbers kind of ballpark. Yeah, circa when you were at 100 billion billion market cap, 10 billion in revenue, what are those numbers then?

They'll be more or less the same. It hasn't changed from 1 million ARR to this stage. So I don't think it will change.

That's fascinating. You mentioned Hofi. One really interesting element is 13 acquisitions in six years. It's a lot. And all of your board members told me I had to touch on this. And they're really successful, which is also.

Not all really successful, but we've made the most of them, let's put it that way.

Hoffy is really successful.

Hoff is very successful. This is why you backed them in the first place. It can be a $10 billion company, I think DLIT. So basically what we do with acquisitions, we have quite an interesting playbook. I think that's what most of the investors were mentioning you. What we do is we do two types of acquisitions. We either do acquisitions that are core to our market and then we in a way, buy the team, buy the revenue, bring them in house, and kind of rip and replace their infrastructure with ours pretty fast. And we're pretty good at this actually. Or we buy smaller companies that are inf in adjacent domains that we want to get into. And what we usually do is we don't try to patch things together. We take the founders and we rebuild the full infrastructure from ground up. And the way we do this is kind of interesting because it really worked for us. So, theory of sales. Most salespeople take nine months to a year to be comfortable selling a product. And in that process, you're going to have a couple early adopters, which are actually the best people in your organization, that are willing to try to sell something new new because they're curious and they want to. And what happens with acquisition and the way we operate is we basically bring the product, rebuild all of the front end inside of deal, while being connected to the backend of the current company. And that happens in like two months. So we can basically like launch the product that we've just acquired in the space of two months and then give it in the hands of our sales organization so they can start learning how to sell it in parallel. We're rebuilding the full backend of the product inside of dill native. And in the period of like, depending on how complex the product is, it takes us like 3 months to 12 months to rebuild the full backend and migrate all of the customers and all of those things in parallel, but in parallel. Your sales org starts selling your product. The early adopters see DLIT and they start selling it. And you know, it doesn't work as well sometimes. And it takes time to ramp up, take time to fix bugs, and they hate you for having sold this but over time you learn so much that you can really quickly, quickly close the gap and build the best product really, really fast. Fast so that when the organization decides itself that it's ready, which is usually nine months later, you can actually start ramping it up and selling it much more aggressively. Because it's amazing and it really works. If we weren't doing this, you would basically spend 12 months integrating and then start selling and have another delta of 12 months to be able to really reach the scale that your go to market team needs to have. So that very interesting playbook of integrating the front end, giving it to your sales org, migrating all the customers in parallel in the back end really paid for dividends to us. And all of the acquisitions we have have grown by like hundreds if not thousands of percent in the last few years.

Dude, after 13 acquisitions, you do build a real nose for deal making. And you're a deal maker. I love you for many reasons, but you're a brilliant deal maker. What have been your big lessons on how to price a company when you're buying it? How to incentivize founders with re ups, with stock, with cash comp. What are those lessons?

Yeah, I have one funding principle and this actually who came to me from my father. So my father in his past Life did over 50 plus MA. That's actually how he grew his business. One thing he taught me on deal making was the only way to get a great deal done if both parties come out of the equation five years later saying we're happy this deal was actually happening. So structuring the deal in a way that's fair for both sides, even if you have the upper hand, making it in a way that you look back on this and say, hey, you know what? As the founder of the other business, I'm so happy this deal went through is the most important part. So whether it's on retention package, whether it's on how many people from the team you keep, whether it's on how brutal you are about the integration, a lot of the things that go there need to be aligned so that you're optimizing for both sides to be really happy about the deal. And it's not obvious because a lot of those negotiations, transparently we have the upper end as the company that's buying, right? So we could be assholes and be like, whatever, I'll just get the best deal possible. But sometimes we'll over optimize on the outcome of the acquisition down the line versus the best deal we could get.

Is now a Good time to buy. Are you seeing a lot of companies who are not in the AI wave are not doing insane, insane, lovable growth where they've fallen out of favor with venture investors and you have the chance to pick them off at good prices?

Yes, of course. And I think this fundraise is definitely going to be helping on that front and doing more acquisitions. That was one of the reasons we also raised the capital. As you know, venture capital always comes in flavor of what's everybody looking at at the moment? Right. So this comes in circles. Right. And in cycles. Right. So eventually things will shift. And I think the companies that are maybe not AI first or in that AI hype just need to kind of hold tight and. And make sure that they deliver for their customers and stay close to their customers and kind of rise above the noise. If they can do that, I think they'll come up on the stronger hand. If they cannot do that, and they're amazing, then we're always looking to buy.

How do you think about the founder packages in terms of cash versus stock? More cash, less cash, how to do those incentive plans?

Right. It's situational. Sometimes we make acquisitions where we really want the founder to stay, and sometimes we actually don't think the funder is needed. So I'm going to assume you're talking about the part where we do want the funder to stay. And if we do, if you don't.

Think, do you tell them that?

Yeah, why not? It's not a bad thing, right. When you get to a point where you work for seven, eight years in your business, there's kind of two ways to behave. Right. First way of behaving is acting like you're going to be there for the next five years and then leaving after one year, which I've seen many people do, or there is just being honest, like, hey, is this what you want to do for the rest of your life? Is this where you want to. To work? If we give you the resources, if we give you the infrastructure, do you want to be here for a long time? And again, you cannot always measure those conversations. And you're maybe not always going to get the right honest answer, but I think it's important to have frank and honest conversations here. For example, going back to Huffy, when we acquired Huffy, I was not going to run dlit. It's so far out of my scope in terms of truly understanding the business, the buyer, the profile, what we need to build, etcetera, Et cetera, that if you remove Sami and Michael, it's going to be very tough. The alignment here has to be very package equity oriented. It has to be very aligned that they're going to be here for a long time and they're here to really build some other companies. It's a bit different where actually if anything I don't even need the leadership. I just want the customers, the infra and a few other things that they have. So being very upfront around, hey, this is what we're going to need just sets you up for a better relationship. It's what I told you before. It's about keeping people happy. I've made the mistake of keeping a founder for a year or two into a business where he wasn't needed anymore. And, and it's sad. They lose their grid, they lose their effects and it just doesn't work out. So having this conversation I think is part of creating a deal where both sides of the equation come out happy.

The beautiful thing about Venture is it's the most forgiving business in terms of your buy price because the upside is exponential. It's very different to PE where like you know what you got like a 2 to 3 expanded upside in most cases if you spend 50% more than you should if you buy Hoff. I'm just taking making bullshit numbers here because I really can't remember but if you buy Hoffy or X company at 75, not 50, if you do it well, it doesn't make a difference. How price sensitive are you on buy?

I like to pay fair market value. So revenue growth, quality of the team, gross margins, potential of the business will pay depending on how and in that case adding a full new line of business to deal which is very critical. Right? Not just being core product. We'll pay the right price, we won't overpay, we won't underpay and we're known to pay the fair price. So if it was between a 50 and 100, I'll go at 75 probably.

Stackrank me and you are in review. What's the number one acquisition you've made.

Best performing in terms of what? Infrastructure, long term of the business impact or revenue?

It could be either. It could be impact through revenue, it could be impact through infrastructure.

Payspace. So Payspace is a company, amazing company. We acquired them about a year plus ago. 15 year old business. 3 brothers and 1 brother from another mother. That's how they like to talk about themselves in South Africa. And they basically had been building the payroll infrastructure we wanted to build for the last few years. We looked at Every single company in the market and I have a very aggressive corp dev team, as you may realize, and nothing, nothing was good. Most of the infrastructure, most of the technology, most of the teams were very weak. And we just stumbled upon that team in South Africa that not only understood payroll really well, but were forced to build global payroll because South Africa was such a tiny market that they had to expand to all countries in Africa in order to be able to create a real business that can really scale to their ambition. And without realizing, they had built payroll infrastructure that could scale in multiple countries because they were forced into it from the get go. And we met them and we looked at the product and we said, that is probably one of the best products we've ever seen. We're just going to bring it in house, give them the resources and just start building out on top of this, all of the infrastructure we really need. One year into this, we've got infrastructure in Singapore, in Canada, in Australia, in India, in Malaysia, and we're building 10 to 15 new engines per year. And that is giving such an incredible experience to our customers. If I would have gone into building payroll engines and infrastructure on my own, it would have taken me five to 10 years to get it right. That just fast tracked everything we could do in like, it literally shortened our timeline by five plus years. In terms of getting it right.

How much did you pay for it?

You know, over $100 million, let's put it that way.

Over 100 million. It's a nice rule. Which is like you can say over axe. Yeah, yeah, $100 million.

Honestly, a bit more than that. But it's like long term strategy of the company, the quality of the founders, of the people of the product and how much it helps from an infrastructure perspective, from a gross margin perspective, from an experience perspective, it's probably the Instagram to our Facebook.

On the flip side, you humbly said not all have worked. You don't. I'm not expecting you to name a company.

No, I won't name them, I won't name them.

I'm not expecting you to. To name a company, Name the founder, take me to one that didn't work. And what were the lessons for you from that that impacted how you think about the playbook?

I think the ones that didn't work were mainly the ones where we said why not? Instead of hell yeah. So, you know, they come to us and they are at the end of the line, they have some revenue, they have something that's adjacent enough for it to be kind of relevant. But not in scope enough for me to truly care. And it's there. So you're like, why not? And I've learned a lot from this. So we get a decent amount of acquisition inbound. If it's not a hell yeah, I just don't go for this anymore. And that was like a big lesson for me and what I would say. We've always managed to make the best out of all of those acquisitions. So if it wasn't hell yeah, we still most of the time got really, really great talent out of this that shaped the company in many different ways. Ways. But now I won't go through the struggle as much. I will just hire the person if I like them.

How quickly do you know if it's not great?

Pretty quickly. Yeah, we're pretty aggressive on integration. I think integration we didn't talk about this is the most important part of doing M and A really well. And we've got a team that's really good at it. Combining our HR team with our corp dev team and our operations team, I think we can execute really fast on acquisitions and integrations. If there is reluctance from many parts of the business to integrate, Great. It probably means that it was a bad acquisition.

13 acquisitions, six years. With the new round, you obviously reset the price. You have kind of more opportunity to.

Buy, reset the price to its real value. You know, we could have raised even more and at a higher price too.

How much could you have raised at 20?

I could have raised that higher, but not with the people I wanted.

What is the 13 acquisitions in 24 months?

We're very opportunistic. I want the best founders to join us if we can acquire them. And they're really talented. Said we've been doing. And there'll be some news about this pretty soon, actually. Consolidation in the market. We're starting to see a lot of companies that raised a lot of money in our space that want to join forces. And we've actually acquired one company in the uk, a very known company in the uk, in our space. And you'll know about it pretty soon, I'd say. Decent chance that we'll do a bunch of them. I wouldn't put a specific number on this, but 20.

30.

Nah, probably in the next 24 months. Between five to 10, most likely. Likely we've already done one, so, you know, nine to go.

I can't wait to get offline and then you can tell me what this is. I don't know if it's one of mine. Is it one of mine?

No. It's not one of yours. It's already done. So you would know.

I'm going to be honest, you did acquire another one of mine, I think. And I didn't realize until I saw the list of acquisitions.

Which one?

I think Atlantic Money.

Yeah, we did. Great example. I mean, they're a great team and they brought us licenses in our payment infrastructure. We're building our payroll infrastructure. We're also building our payment infrastructure structure. They made us win two years in terms of how fast we could get our structure.

You're profitable. Is that a strategic decision? Other players in the space are not. Is that like a. Well, no, it's just true.

Other players in the space are very nuts. I think I told you this before, but when we raised our Series A, and maybe you can ask Anish about this, we had raised $4.3 million in our seed round. We showed up to our Series A pitch meeting with Andrew Sen's team having burned, I think 400 a year and a half later. So what I'm trying to say here is as a funding principle, we've always favored sustainable growth. What's important for me is for the business to be sustainable over growth and then if we can grow as well. Amazing. And the reason for that is if I'm a company in HR and I'm burning $300 million a year as a customer, I really wouldn't want to put my team on that platform because the uncertainties behind it is pretty big. Right? And for me, what's most important is to have a long term partner that can really scale with me. One thing that's interesting in our go to market is as we grew, we started signing four or five years deals or even seven years deals because payroll is something super stable, something you invest in, not something you change every year. It's not the type of software that you want to change on a yearly basis. Being able to show super strong financials where you're like, hey, we're 15, 17% EBITDA, we're generating profit. We've been generating profit for three years, is such a strong signal that you can build with us in the future and for the long term. So it made sense for us.

If you look at yc, it's a very valuable source of getting in early. Who gets more YC companies? You or rippling?

I think that YC founders are more and more international and they move to the Bay Area. So by design, I think a lot of them understand the value of deals straight away and want to hire from back home. But the truth is now we do everything. We do US payroll, we do hr. Are we kind of like the full stack solution for early stage founders as well? So I think our market share there is pretty high.

If you had to IPO in the next 12 months, what would you most need to change about deal?

12 is a bit short. Give me a bit more time.

Why is 12 short? No, seriously, like at a billion in revenue and profitable and growing the way you are legitimately, it's not at this stage. This is a personal choice.

No, it's more. There's like SOX compliance infrastructure, there's some leadership hires we need to have in place in order to be able to go out. There's things to be done there. And my take is you want to have four or five clean quarters with your exec team before you go public as well. Right. So there's a couple different things at play here.

What would need to change?

Most significantly, I think it's just about being ready. Like if our infrastructure is ready, if our compliance is ready, if our leadership team is ready, which I'm just reiterating from my last answer, then we'll consider going out. That's kind of our plan.

Do you want to be a public company? Circumstances year.

I think that as long as I'm the best person to run this business, no matter whether it's public or private, I would like to be the one running it.

Best and worst thing about working with your dad?

I love working with my dad. Honestly, not a lot of negative things with working with my dad. I think the best thing is wholeheartedly trust him and he's able to drive a lot of decisions in a way that comes with experience that I don't have. I'd say if you want to say one negative thing is like a lot of people have a strong misconception of working with family, at least in the United States, which was like a little weird to me. But most of the people that know us very well, they understand the dynamics between the two of us and how we work. And the closer you are to us, the more you understand how valuable the relationship really is.

I work with my brother and actually I think the trust that you have with a brother, a father, is so special. The only lesson I have is there has to be a hierarchy, which is like a co ceoship.

No. Yeah. The hierarchy is. Thankfully my dad kind of looks at the business and understands that I'm leading it and allows me to, despite sometimes his very strong opinions, allows me to make the mistakes that I want to.

Make where's he had the strongest opinion that you've disagreed with him many times.

Actually we disagreed all the time. He hates that story. But the biggest thing he disagreed on with me, which actually was the best decision we ever made as a company, was building up our infrastructure for our employee of record product. Basically the way employer of record work is we enable you as a company to be able to hire anyone anywhere without having a local entity. We have local entities all around the world and we employ people on your behalf as a more risk averse person. And acting CFO at the time looked at the business and told us, hey, if you actually own the infrastructure, you take on so much liability. Let's work with partners. Which was how the old school model was. And at the beginning I pushed back and I said partners, they work on Windows Vista. They don't have the same care for customers. They don't understand service. The way I think about service, the way you think about service, which is service of today, it's not going to work. And when your CFO says too much risk, you're like, okay, we'll try. We tried for two months and I came back and I said open the entities. Which he pushed back on until he decided not to. And today our employer of record product generated it's I think over 25, 30 million dollars a month. Right. So best decision for the business ever.

Yeah, dad, I love the way you chose the one that worked out perfectly well in your favor.

Yeah, yeah. The good thing is everybody is super aligned. We just want the best for the business, the best for our shareholders, the best for our employees. Having people that you can look at in the eye and tell the truth at. Because any way you trust each other is a huge advantage. And by the way, like people don't realize, but Shuo, my co founder is like my sister. I have three sisters. So I wouldn't say the sister that I never had, but she's my fourth sister in many way. And a lot of people like to think about funding companies with people as marriage. I think about a bit more as family for the sake of my wife being happy. And I think this type of relationship is super critical and the more trust you can establish, the better. And if it's trust that was given by nature, even better. If not, you need to build that type of trust of over time.

Dude, I want to do a quick fire round with you. So I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts. What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months?

I've really changed my mind on being much more prepared across different topics. So we had policy situations, litigations, pr. Right. And I think a lot of those things there showed and exposed a lot of things in the company that we hadn't thought about. Right. Like I don't exactly wake up thinking we need to be really strong at policy or we need to be really strong at litigation. So we're much more prepared and we're consistently thinking about where do we need to reinforce ourselves, which is external to purely product and customer experience, which maybe we didn't do as much before.

Are you a wartime or a peacetime CEO?

I think I'm in constant wartime, sadly.

Do you kind of enjoy the fight? Is there a masochistic enjoyment?

I like fighting people in product and go to market. I want you to kick my ass because you build a better product. But I'm going to give you a roundup for your money because I'm pretty decent at building good products. So I love the fight when it comes to fighting through who is going to serve our customer better. And I think there's some amazing companies in our space building that way. And all of the money that flew into this space and the quality of the people that we have just makes it a super, super interesting fight. Other fights, just not my style. I'm not a very. It's just person.

How would you have liked rippling to behave?

Well, I think you should read our lawsuit in Delaware. Three years of a poor way of competing in the market. You should have a read. A lot of those things are tied to old stories and old demons and we're in the crossroad. But it's okay, you know, it's not deterring us and we're able to perform for our customers. So it's all that matters.

Which founder do you think is most underrated today?

I was. I would have said Tarek a year ago from California.

Dude, you introduced me to him like three or four years ago.

Yes, he was one of the most underrated founders I ever knew. And then the guy just turned the hit around like fucking crazy. And he's now one of the most hyped companies in the world. So you know what? I've actually learned to love two founders that I think are some of the most underrated founders in the world. And I think their companies are amazing and everything they'll touch in the future will be just as amazing. Amazing. I don't know if you know them, but the first one is Johannes from Cree, dude.

He's in Project Europe. I met him through Project Europe. He invested in it. What a dude.

He's one of the most underrated founder I've met.

Why do you say that?

With him I think he's the right mix of clear thinker, first principle and at the same time relentless. He's got that hands on fire that someone that has built a 4,000 plus people company usually loses. And on the same spirit. I don't know if you know Fred from Voi, but those two guys. I've been falling in love with Swedish Tech recently. I think a lot of people have, but I've been falling in love for the last few years and those are two of the people that I've met that I know are going to either take those companies to huge numbers or build new businesses that are going to be significant.

Why have you been falling in love with Swedish Tech?

I think the mentality of the founder there is really good, good people, honest people that truly care about building great companies and great product. There are those tall giants that are sweet. At the same time they're in an ecosystem where it reminds me in many ways of the Israeli ecosystem where it's a very tight knit community. If you look at the successful Swedish founders as well, like the Klarna's of the world or the Spotifys of the world, like Daniel Sebastian, they kind of paved the way for those founders to be able to build great companies. And I think they really capitalized on this in a way that no one has before.

How do you feel when I say this? I love Fried and Johannes too, but I think they're both in really shitty markets. They're just hard businesses to make. What voice are hard?

I bet on the founder, not on the business. Remember I do.

But dude, at scale you got to fucking add in.

No, for sure. But I think they're going to have very long carries.

Oh, I agree. And if they're listening, let me do your seed of your next company. Who do you not have on the board that you'd most like to have on the board?

Well, he's going to love this. I really, really love Alfred Lin from Sequoia. He's going to be sad about that one. He passed on my sin run when I had no idea what I was doing. Me and SH met him in a coffee shop during or right after YC and I've just learned to know him over the years and just like I actually think he's one of the best investor in the world. So why he cares about founders in a way that's very rare. And he understands the businesses a lot more deeply than a lot of board members want to. And I saw that firsthand. Right. I mean, Alfred is on the board of Kalshi and Tarek is a very close friend. And I think the impact Alfred has had on the business is very significant. Same thing for Doordash and others. I think he's the right mix of sweet, sharp and well advised person that has seen things before. And I think he was an operator before as well.

Can I ask you, why do you not have Sequoia on the cap table?

Ask him, not me, sadly. They invested in every competitor you can think of. I have a great relationship with the team, honestly, I think.

Do you mind investors doing competitive investing?

Not as much as I used to. Obviously. If you're investing in a competitor that I care about. Right. Then I cannot share as much as I can. I used to share with you, but I've grown to care less. And in that specific case, you know, I have a great relationship with the, with the Sequoia team. I think Roloff, Sean, Julian, all of those guys are amazing and like, you know, I, I get to work with them in different ways. But if you ask me, like, you know, who would I have wanted on the cap table that I don't have today, it's definitely them and it's probably definitely Alfred.

Final one. I like to end on a tone of optimism. What are you most excited for for the next five to 10 years? What is like this gives, gives me fucking energy.

Look the way I think about our business, which a lot of people find super boring. I actually think this is why you passed. Not because you don't think there's a lot of potential into payroll, but because you think it's a boring business. I don't think it's boring because the way I think about this, and this is what like really drives me, right? When I think about payroll, hr, I think about like such significant moment in the life of people. It's where you get your paycheck, it's where you get your, your pay slips, your mortgage letter, your business visa, your payments, right? It's where you submit your expenses. So it's like a place that you interact with all the time in like very unique key moments and events in your life. And it's like super disregarded, right? I've never had someone come up to me and tell me, I fucking love my payroll software. It's the best thing I've ever used, right? And I'm like, when you're in such critical Moments of the life cycle of people. Right. New jobs like uncertainty. You can build such a strong relationship with your end users if you actually care to invest into the relationship you have there. And you can create. Going back to brand awareness, I think a very, very strong brand where hopefully one day people will tell you, I fucking love my payroll software deal is the place I want to be hired on, is the place I want to be paid. And that gets me excited. Right. Like building the first truly global brand that you love as an end user to get paid on and that really shares your value and understands your moment. Moment is like what in the long term of the business gets me excited.

I got to ask one more. You said critical moments in life. I've just become an uncle and I.

Oh, you're going into the that direction. Yeah.

I just want to ask for my brother. What's your single biggest advice to my brother on what it takes to be a great papa? She's like six months.

Oh, I think, well, she's older than mine, so it's, it's a bit tougher to say. My baby's three months old.

You've only got one?

Yeah, I've only got one. It's my first baby, so it's been a very fun year. As you can, as you can read realize.

Have you got help?

Not yet. My parents and my wife's parents are super helpful. She's so little. I want to spend time with her. That's the perk of remote work. I'm seeing her truly grow up, which is very unique. And I very value this in a way that most people can't understand.

But you do secondary so you can have a night nanny. That's why secondary exists.

Maybe without jinxing it. I think my daughter realized the nanny thing was not going to happen for now. So she decided, decided to sleep through the night. But no, look, we, we're very lucky that, you know, my wife has a nice matlie policy and we're able to be with her. And she's three months old. She's like changed how I view the world in many different ways. And she definitely is, is a very life changing moment. I never realized what people like, what people really meant by this. But like in the back of your head, it's like the thinking about the like small moments you're gonna get to spend with her is like, is a big deal. So I think your brother probably would have tips for me more than the opposite. But the one thing I would say is this is where remote work actually shines right Actually, you get to see her every day and a lot more I think, than the average dad.

Dude, I so appreciate the friendship. I so appreciate you. Thank you so much for this. This has been fantastic, dude.

Well, thank you so much for taking the time. And by the way, I think you're the first podcast I do in a while, so I don't know if that means that I'm back to less working, but I don't think so.

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