Deel

“We were negotiating to be the lead of the seed, and I literally were like this far apart and decided that was too far apart.”

“Why does some of these European payroll and HR, workforce management companies, not knocking on Europe, but why do you need a rippling for Europe? There's no Airbnb for Europe. There's no Google for Europe. Why do you need a rippling for Europe? Why do you nee…”

“I actually interviewed the first, I think north of 405 101st people at deal.”

“For the distributed company, no choice. We have to start with full trust, and it's here to be lost.”

“I think right now, unless you know, Microsoft or SAP, more Microsoft decides they want to get into HR. I don't see anyone being able to bring us in”

“Like for the first two years of the business, we grew 30% month by month.”

“Taking secondary at like the series A, I don't think it's super smart. Taking it a bit later kind of, I think makes a bit more sense. I mean, we have taken a little bit at our series B and then a little bit more at our series D.”

“I see everything you send is forwarded and read by all your competitors, and that's number one. Number two, I mean, even my board deck somehow ended up into competitors' hands, so.”

“If you look at what we got into Y Combinator in 2018 with the idea we started the concept was very similar, right? Like we wanted to help freelancers at the time get hired and paid by the best companies. And we thought the problem we were solving was around th…”

“Like payout infrastructure, we're paying five plus billion dollars we've paid so far, and I don't know how much of that is this year, probably most of it.”

“Four to 57, which is what we did in 21, I think, yeah, and then 57 to 302 95 is what we did in 22.”

“On my side, around 10, mainly to buy, like, an apartment and a few different things I wanted to do, like buying some of Presence from my father and my parents. But the cool part is that when we did that Sho and I, we actually allowed all our early employees to…”

“We raised most of our rounds actually, like without even meeting most of our investors, right?”

“Luckily for us, my CFO, who actually is also my father, that makes it quite interesting dynamic wise. Actually his first company who we took public as a CEO did about 50 plus M&A's to grow.”

“I think we might be like one of the biggest, if not the biggest private company that's fully distributed, by the way.”

“It's always hard to hire specifically at our scale, right, with 2000 people across a hundred countries, but hiring globally gives you a bigger pool of people to hire great talent.”

“I sent investor updates every month until September of this year. I realized most people weren't helping anymore. So I just stopped sending them and I'm just sending quarterly now, which is just, it's less about help.”

“So we've invested in 30 companies. Many of them have turned unicorns or decacorns like Deal, Presonio, Shoko, Forto, where we've had the privilege to be seed investors.”

“Maybe it's not even until after five or ten million where if you don't have capital, you can't all be Atlassian or Qualtrics. Or, and they fall behind competitively. And I think that's the trap of the fallacy of the lifestyle-esque business, right? Where media…”

“I turned down Deal and Vanta at Preseed, and I did both the times because I knew the founders were amazing, but I just didn't like the business, I didn't like the category, something else other than the founder.”

“If you're relying on them to manage your payroll, to move money on your behalf, you possibly can provide them having some kind of civil liability. But if it trends over into criminal liability, you probably have to find a new payroll provider, right?”

“I think you're going to hear a hundred, just like fraud. Like every day now we pull up the media and there's another founder that stole thirty million from the investors and we shrug it off. Right. There's going to be a hundred of these in this environment.”

“There's no chance they'll lose you know, it could get settled, right? Which is, they're always the right outcome, even when there's emotion. The right outcome is always to settle it, right? There's no way they lose a hundred percent. The facts are too bad. The…”

“If I was, my ass was on the line, and I was the CEO of Deal, I'd be like, how much money does it take to settle this thing by Friday?”

“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 …”

“They made us win two years in terms of like how fast we could get our structure.”

“We've actually acquired one company that, in the UK, a very known company in the UK in our space, and you'll, you'll know about it pretty soon.”

“Well, see, I think we can be very aggressively winning most of the market. I actually think the gap between 10 to a hundred million over the next five to 10 years is not that big.”

“He passed on my seed round when I had no idea what I was doing.”

“Over the last year, we built our own JIRA-like product internally.”

“Yes, of course. And I think this fundraise is definitely going to be helping on, on that front and doing more acquisitions. That was one of the reasons we also raised the capital.”

“Well, we'll do some of those actually. So you'll see some of them coming. Already in the works.”

“So we acquired Huffy, for example, a company you invested in, which is doing amazing for us, you know, it's grown almost a hundred percent year on year”

“I feel pretty confident that the same way we've been winning in the marketplace will win in the court of laws.”

“We had raised four and, 4.3 million dollars in our seed round. We showed up to our Series A pitch meeting with Andreessen's team, having burned, I think, 400 K a year and a half later.”

“I think every company had more than 50, a hundred people start having flaws in their designs, in their org, in terms of response time, in terms of how things are happening. And if you are 10,000 feet above, kind of looking looking down at, like, the organizati…”

“60% of our revenue actually comes from cross-sell today.”

“We are, right, like, billions in our profitable business, acquisitions, you know, 7000 people around the world today”

“Yeah, I actually think it will, it can be a ten billion dollar company.”

“So it's actually co-led by three three investors. The first one is Rubit Capital, which is our new investor. It's actually the first time that they invest into a deal. And maybe we'll talk about this after, but I've been I actually love the team there. I've be…”

“I have like 20 or a little over 20.”

“We're 15, 17% EBITDA. We're generating profit. We've been generating profit for three years.”

“I think a couple hundred percent year-on-year growth plus profitability is a good sign.”

“Very interesting playbook of, like, integrating the front end, giving it to your sales org, migrating all the customers in parallel in the back end, like, really paid dividends to us, and all of the acquisitions we have grown by, like, hundreds if not thousand…”

“Building a lot of your internal infrastructure, and it's the dumbest thing to do when you're small, but it's the smartest thing to do, I think, as you scale.”

“I'm very happy living in Tel Aviv, and I've been living here for the last five years.”

“One thing that's interesting in our go to market is as we grew, we started signing like four or five years deals, right? Or even seven years deals.”

“We use a competitor and them until one of them becomes good enough for our solution.”

“I've never had one-on-ones with them. I've never truly had performance reviews with them.”

“I think we've done about 13 acquisitions, which really helped us grow really fast build new products, bring amazing funders in, and really kind of take over a big part of the global payroll market share.”

“Today our employer of record product generates, I think over 25, thirty million dollars a month, right?”

“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, is probably, it's probably the Instagram t…”

“For example, going back to Huffy, when we acquired Huffy, like, I was not going to run the IT, right? Like, it's so far out of my scope in terms of, like, truly understanding the business, the buyer, the profile, what we need to build, et cetera, that, like, i…”

“You know, over a hundred million dollars. Let's put it that way.”

“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 know, for Brazil, I need this specific thing for this count…”

“Andreessen has been top tier by far, and they've always been super supportive through rainbows and unicorns all the way to shitstorms. They stood by us like no investor ever did.”

“We've been buying every single secondary on the market every single time they could.”

“But the truth is now we do everything. We do US payroll, we do HR we kind of like the full stack solution for early stage founders as well. So I think our market share there is pretty high.”

“I think there is a moment where you're like, hot shit, everybody wants to invest, you're getting term shits left and right, where you start being, ah, inconsiderate. But I actually kind of like have gone through enough cycles now, although it's not been exactl…”

“I share high-level numbers? Why not? Like, the thing is, most of your numbers are available if someone really wants to figure them out, right? Like, it doesn't truly matter. Like, I don't believe in, like, hiding numbers.”

“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, righ…”

“So I think the big news for us is we're actually going to announce a round of over three hundred million dollars at over seventeen billion dollars plus in valuation.”

“We could have raised even more and at a higher price too.”

“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 investment for quite a long time.”

“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 moments is like what really In the long term of the business gets me excited.”

“My take is you want to have like four or five clean quarters with your exec team before you go public as well.”

“If you think about deals revenue split today, 50% comes from the US, a little over 35% comes from Europe, and the rest is that kind of rest of the world”

“I've done less secondaries than you think actually.”

“September was our first one hundred million revenue month, which is a very exciting milestone for the business.”

“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.”

“Well, I think you should read our lawsuit in Delaware. You know, three years of poor way of competing in the market.”

“Sadly, they invested in every competitor you can think of.”

“I think the worst mistake you can make as the company's scale is to be too far away from the business to really know what the problems really are.”

“We're going to get this to ten million people.”

“I think I work a little harder than that personally, and I think most of my leadership does too, but I just don't think it works at scale really, right?”

“I think it's unfortunate that the way they're trying to compete is through media and through headlines and things like that.”

“Probably in the next 24 months, between five to 10, most likely.”

“So, so one super interesting thing at Dill 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 members and telling them how, you know, we ha…”

“At the margin, I'm, of those two choices, I would bet at the margin, despite a little distaste for what went on in terms of the de-espionage thing, I would say, maybe I want to say is the TAM and the, Competitive matrix is more attractive for deal.”

“I met Alex at Deal when it was two on 10, and I looked at paychecks.com and ADP, and I was like, nah, shit market, incumbents, distribution advantage, crap investment. What a mistake.”

“Yeah, I think we're not the size of Revolut or Deal, right? And so it probably doesn't make sense for us to do that. And Langchain and a lot of their surrounding tools have gotten a lot better. And so I think we're in the job of, and our engineering team is in…”

“You know, I turned down deal at the seed round, because I was like, payroll? Really? Paychecks? ADP? Come on, this is ridiculous. With this kid, Alex, who's now a friend, he won't mind that.”

“I pinged Alex on a Sunday morning seven a.m., Saying, hey, they want an intro to a sales rapper on your team. Who's the best person? He's like, intro to me, please. I'm like, dude, it's like a thousand dollar deal. He's not worth your time. He's like, no, no, …”

“There have been several companies where we've had, like, one percent offered to us, Deal, 11 Labs, Starcloud, where we were like, one percent, we can't be doing that, and now I look back and all of them would have returned huge amounts of money.”

“I look at ours, and our biggest mistake, and I can look at Deal, 11 Labs, I can look at Granola, and Starcloud, Fractile, could have done them all, but would have had one to two percent, and all of them we turned down purely for ownership, and that is hundreds…”