How Do You Build a $1.25 Billion Business in a Pandemic?

Alex Bouaziz, co-founder and CEO of Deel, joined Colin Iles for the second instalment of the Future of Work series to explain how a bootstrapped hiring problem became a business valued at $1.25 to $1.5 billion inside two years. Bouaziz was blunt about the mechanics behind the growth: a fast, decisive founding partnership, a product built from his own bad experience paying international contractors, and a deliberate bet that legal and compliance complexity, not slick software, is what actually protects the business. Deel was still only around two years old at the time of the conversation, with roughly 200 employees across 43 countries.

The terrible bank UI moment: where the idea for Deel actually came from

Deel did not start as a single flash of inspiration. Bouaziz, who grew up in France and lived in the UK, Israel and the US, said the idea built up from years of bootstrapping his own companies without outside funding. Short on cash, he hired engineers in Ukraine and India because he could afford their rates, then ran straight into broken tools: off-the-shelf contract templates that did not work for Ukraine, and an Israeli bank's interface so bad he could not tell when payments had arrived. His co-founder, Shuo Wang, whom he met at MIT, had lived a version of the same problem building her first business back in China. The two treated November 2018 as the starting point and began building immediately, joining Y Combinator's January 2019 batch once the product was already underway. Bouaziz said his approach to building anything is to "throw a lot of things on the wall" rather than wait for a fully-formed plan, and that Deel is what stuck.

One platform for any hire that isn't local: what Deel actually sells

Deel's product, in Bouaziz's own description, is simple: it lets a company hire and pay someone in another country without setting up a local legal entity first. Traditionally, a company wanting to hire in a new country had to incorporate there and build out payroll, HR and accounting from scratch, a process Bouaziz called painful even for large organisations. Deel instead handles localised contracts, invoicing, payroll and benefits like a US 401k in a few clicks, whether the hire is an independent contractor in Colombia or a full-time employee in the United States. Bouaziz said the regulatory and legal complexity that would put most founders off, tracking changing employment law country by country and keeping lawyers on retainer everywhere Deel operates, is precisely what makes the business defensible: "the more work I put into it, the more cash I put into it, the more time I spend on it, the more valuable the company is." He pointed to Mexico changing its employment regulations as a live example: Deel updated its registrations and contracts the day the change happened.

Trust over hours: how a fully distributed company measures its own people

Deel has been remote and distributed since its first hires in Ukraine and Serbia, and Bouaziz said the only way to manage a team you cannot see is to stop measuring hours and start measuring output. Every quarter has defined goals and KPIs, and the question for any employee is whether they are contributing to those numbers, not whether they logged nine-to-five. "If you hire people to count their hours, you're probably hiring wrong," he said, adding that failing to hit the KPIs, not failing to be at a desk, is what ends up costing someone their job at Deel. He also described consciously working to remove himself as a bottleneck as the company scales past 250 people, citing the hire of a Head of Product as an example of stepping back from decisions he used to make himself: "hire the best people in the world, let them do their work, remove yourself."

The $8,000 debit card and the deal Deel lost: how the product roadmap actually gets built

Deel's product decisions are driven by customer demand and by testing ideas in the market rather than long planning cycles; Bouaziz said almost nothing should take more than a couple of weeks to ship a minimal version. Some features were "wild cards" built on conviction rather than requests, including a Deel-branded debit card and the ability for contractors to choose their payout currency, down to Bitcoin. Both were barely used at launch until a friend suddenly spent $8,000 on the card in one sitting, which Bouaziz pointed to as the moment Deel realised the feature had found its use case. Not every bet worked immediately: Bouaziz described stubbornly resisting a product change until Deel lost a competitive deal over it, which made him rebuild the roadmap around what became roughly 30 percent of the company's revenue.

Why can't companies just hire employees abroad without a platform like Deel?

Because most countries require a locally registered legal entity, plus compliant contracts, payroll and tax handling, before a company can employ someone there directly. Bouaziz said setting that up is slow and expensive even for large organisations, which is why Deel instead sells access to entities and compliance work it has already built, letting a company hire in a new country in a few clicks instead of months.

Are governments trying to restrict remote hiring across borders?

Bouaziz described a split rather than a uniform crackdown. Tier-one countries such as France and Germany regulate more heavily to keep IP and talent onshore, while talent-exporting countries like Ukraine and Colombia are doing the opposite, actively training workers and easing compliance so their citizens can work for foreign companies and bring wealth back home. He framed this as a reversal of the historical "brain drain" to the US, now possible because top-tier education and remote work no longer require relocating.