The Ledger
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Bouaziz regrets being inconsiderate to investors during Deel's hot fundraising rounds
“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…”
Bouaziz: Deel currently processes payments for 1.5M people
“Today we have 1.5 million people getting paid on deal.”
Bouaziz: 200% YoY growth plus profitability signals when to build internal infrastructure
“I think a couple hundred percent year-on-year growth plus profitability is a good sign.”
Bouaziz: Deel generates 60% of its revenue from cross-sell
“60% of our revenue actually comes from cross-sell today.”
Bouaziz: Deel generates 50% of revenue from US, 30-35% from Europe
“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”
Bouaziz: Salespeople require nine to 12 months to comfortably sell new products
“Most salespeople take nine months to a year to be comfortable selling a product.”
Bouaziz discloses Deel paid over $100M to acquire South Africa's PaySpace
“You know, over a hundred million dollars. Let's put it that way.”
Bouaziz: Internal reluctance to integrate indicates a bad acquisition
“If there's reluctance from many parts of the business to integrate, it probably means that it was a bad acquisition.”
Bouaziz reveals Deel has acquired a well-known UK competitor
“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.”
Bouaziz reveals Deel operates at 15-17% EBITDA margin
“We're 15, 17% EBITDA. We're generating profit. We've been generating profit for three years.”
Bouaziz claims Deel holds high market share among Y Combinator startups
“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.”
Bouaziz: Companies Need 4-5 Clean Executive Quarters Before IPO
“My take is you want to have like four or five clean quarters with your exec team before you go public as well.”
Bouaziz reveals Deel's EOR product generates $25M to $30M monthly
“Today our employer of record product generates, I think over 25, thirty million dollars a month, right?”
Bouaziz: Kry and Voi Founders Will Build Massive Businesses
“Those are two of the people that I've met that I'm, I know are gonna either take those companies to huge numbers or build new businesses that are gonna be just significant.”
Bouaziz: Deel aims to build the first global consumer-loved payroll brand
“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.”
Startups can relaunch products 10 times without the public noticing
“The guys on product hunt or Twitter, They don't, right? And you can relearn, like, 10 times. No one will ever notice.”
Alex Bouaziz: Startups should never intentionally slow down sales execution
“It depends, right? Like when it comes to cells, I don't think you should ever reduce the speed. I think you should always triple down. So that's something that's to me very important.”
Deel grew revenue by 30% month-over-month for its first two years
“Like for the first two years of the business, we grew 30% month by month.”
Deel has processed over $5 billion in total payout volume
“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.”
Bouaziz: Sales operations is the main growth engine after product-market fit
“If you're sure you've got a form of product market fit, Revenue operations, sales operations is what's truly going to enable you to scale because your reps are more efficient. Your close rate is better. You have a better understanding of what's going on. Your …”
Deel stopped monthly investor updates because investors were no longer helping
“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.”
Bouaziz denies fleeing to Dubai, stating he lives in Tel Aviv
“I'm very happy living in Tel Aviv, and I've been living here for the last five years.”
Bouaziz: Took minimal secondary liquidity despite Deel's high valuation
“I've done less secondaries than you think actually.”
Bouaziz names Revolut's Nik Storonsky as his favorite founder
“By the way, Nick is my favorite founder, probably the person I look up to the most in many different ways.”
Bouaziz discloses Deel sports sponsorships like F1 are in the works
“Well, we'll do some of those actually. So you'll see some of them coming. Already in the works.”
Bouaziz discloses Deel uses AI agent tool Manus for internal automation
“We use a competitor and them until one of them becomes good enough for our solution.”
Deel built an internal encyclopedia with 20,000 articles and 70,000 data points
“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…”
Bouaziz calls Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski a top mind in AI
“And I was jamming at night with Sebastian, actually, from Klarna, who is, like, thinking about AI 24 seven and probably one of the sharpest mind in terms of like integrating AI into your business.”
Deel built its own internal JIRA replacement over the last year
“Over the last year, we built our own JIRA-like product internally.”
Bouaziz: Acquired IT platform Hofy is growing nearly 100% year-over-year
“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”
Bouaziz: Hofi acquisition package was equity-heavy to retain key founders
“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…”
Bouaziz claims acquiring PaySpace accelerated Deel's payroll roadmap by 5+ years
“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 …”
Bouaziz: Atlantic Money Acquisition Saved Deel 2 Years of Development
“They made us win two years in terms of like how fast we could get our structure.”
Bouaziz claims Deel burned only $400K of seed funding before Series A
“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.”
Alex Bouaziz: Deel signs enterprise contracts lasting up to seven 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.”
Bouaziz intends to remain Deel CEO through public transition
“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.”
Bouaziz: Sequoia's Alfred Lin passed on Deel's seed round
“He passed on my seed round when I had no idea what I was doing.”
Alex Bouaziz: Deel employs 2,000 people across 100 countries
“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.”
Bouaziz: Deel's initial YC hypothesis around freelancer trust was wrong
“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…”