In The Room with Shuo Wang of Deel.
Welcome back to Season Six of The Room Podcast. After 54 episodes, across five seasons, we are delighted to be back in the room with you sharing more inspiring and informative stories from founder and funders. Thank you to all of you for being loyal listeners and helping us continue to open the door!
To kick off this season, we welcomed Shuo Wang, Co-Founder and CRO of Deel into The Room. Evaluated Valued at $5.5 billion in the fall of 2021, Deel is a global payroll solution that helps businesses hire independent contractors or full-time employees using a tech enabled self-service process. Shuo grew up in China before moving to the United States at the age of 16, where she later attended MIT to become a mechanical engineer. She founded her first company, Aeris, which was centered around designing consumer electronics products, before creating Deel in 2018. Since going through YC, and bringing on hallmark investors such as Andreesan, Coatue, and Spark Capital. Today, deel supports over 6,000 customers in over 150 countries.
Listen to the first episode of season six here. This episode’s key themes include the power of rapid feedback in early product building, how to align your business growth with your customer’s success, and the future of global hiring.
Let’s open the door.
Key Theme 1: Power of rapid feedback in early product building
After being a part of YC batch W19, Shuo and the deel team faced difficulty when designing an MVP, as the product failed to catch on with their initial target user base. Using feedback from, and open lines of communication with, founders within their batch, Shuo was able to focus on which features of the original prototype gained positive reactions and which caused hesitance. Shuo incorporated this feedback into a second round of product building, and ultimately generated the initial payroll prototype that is still in use today.
Key Theme 2: How to align your business’s growth with your customer’s success
Deel is reportedly the fastest startup to go from $0 to $100 million in revenue. A key way in which they accomplished this is by growing their revenue as their own customers grow their business. Now with 6,000 customers, each of these employee bases grow exponential year-over-year . This employee growth is directly correlated to deel’s success. Therefore, incentives are closely aligned for deel to accelerate the “time-to-hire” for each of their customers, because they quicker those companies can hire, the quicker they can hire. And so the cycle continues. When thinking about setting up your growth engine, empower your customer’s with a tool that wins when they do. Some other great companies that support this model are Snowflake, Twillio, or Cloudflare. While Shuo didn’t explicitly share their net revenue retention, we’re willing to believe it will be quite high!
One of the main ones being, as Shuo notes, understanding the relationship between sales reps and clients in ensuring mutual success. Shuo emphasizes the significance of forecasting the amount of customers that will require help moving into the next quarter, and using that information to decide whether or not to hire more reps in order to maximize revenue. Looking to last fall, Shuo recalls how the immense growth of clients overwhelmed Deel’s support team to the point that people took to Twitter to complain about the lack of assistance. Shuo learned from this mishap, and remarks on the importance of scaling business growth — the support factions in particular — in tandem with the needs and success of customers.
Key Theme 3: Future of Global Hiring
Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, which has embodied the possibility of remote hiring and working from home, Shuo understood the benefits of being able to work both domestically and internationally. She believes this increase in global hiring and international teams will only increase in the future, declaring: “It’s going to be the lifestyle. It is going to be the mainstream. And then today we’re still at this very early stage of this huge, massive market.”
Shuo postulates that we still exist in the early stages of this transition because companies are slowly understanding the gains of global hiring. Shuo acknowledged however that we live in unique time because this process is only possible given the technology developments of today, such as Slack and Zoom. Our increased use of these technologies, however, will allow for the future growth of international hiring that Shuo envisions.
Thanks for checking out this episode of The Room Podcast. Stream this episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. We will be back next Tuesday for a new, inspiring conversation. In the meantime, catch up on all our latest episodes, available now on all podcast streaming platforms, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
