Streamlined compliance. Easy onboarding. Killer payments.
Being passionate is what makes great products.
Deel started with a small team and a bold vision – we wanted to build an awesome product to help as many people as we can. That’s why our culture is driven by passion. We bring 100% to everything we do, we push ourselves, and we try to improve every day. We also practice what we preach. We’re a remote company helping other remote companies, so this helps us stay focused and motivated with the tasks at hand. And we look for other people who feel the same – people who want to work at Deel and contribute towards our mission.
We listen to our customers right from the start.
At Deel, we’re very customer-centric and customer-driven. From the beginning, we wanted to build the best product for our customers and support them in working with remote talent. This meant helping them take care of everything: compliance, payments, under one system of record. We began listening to their needs right from the start, and a lot of the features we’ve built in were initially requested by our customers. In this sense, Deel is what it is thanks to the wonderful support and feedback that we got from our early users, and we’re still doing this today – we listen to every piece of feedback and every feature request, and if it makes sense on a wider scale, we add it to our product roadmap right away.
Our co-founders Alex and Shuo have actually been on customer support since the very beginning. We think it's really important for them to be on the frontline, connect with customers, hear their needs and challenges, and be right there to fix it for them. Even the development team gets directly involved with customer support by hopping on calls with customers to help them solve any issues they’re having.
In the end, we realize that we’re not as smart as Deel’s hundreds of users, so the more input we listen to, the better.
A wonderful way to work.
Deel started out with a tiny team, so it’s had a family feeling from the very start. Everyone had their own defined role, but when a major contribution was needed, it was requested from everyone at the company. This meant anyone could give input and contribute to any area, and this culture has continued today. It helps that we all come from different background and experiences, so we each have our own way of impacting each other, and creating the space for that to happen. It doesn’t matter if you’re in marketing, sales, etc., if you have an idea that could help someone else, or our customers, or the entire company, you’re always welcome and encouraged to share.
Deel teammates are also spread across many countries and multiple time zones, and working with such a diverse team requires us to be super understanding. It’s true that at any given point someone will likely be online, but you also can’t expect someone to reply to your email at 3:00 am. So we always try to be transparent, over-communicate if needed, and be mindful and respectful of others in their habits, working ways, and lifestyles.
Find ways to do the impossible.
Our mission is to alleviate the burden of compliance and payments for remote companies globally, and when we started, we quickly realized that it wasn’t going to be an easy task. There was no way we could handle it entirely by ourselves, so we asked for help. We’ve since built a global network of legal experts that help us with this, and in doing so, we realized that not knowing how to do something, should never stop us. And since we’re offering this to a global audience, we realize that we’ll never know everything, and that’s totally ok.
With this mindset, we look for ways to do the impossible and overcome any challenge. If one of us is stuck, we see if we can find support within the team, and if not, we reach out to our extended network and see who else can help. We also try to anticipate problems and challenges. Every time we launch, we know that something will go wrong, but we never waste time by looking for someone to blame. When we encounter a problem, we don’t judge, we just act. All we really care about is fixing it and making sure the customer has a good experience while their issue is being resolved. With this approach, nobody worries that they’ll be blamed or lose their job, so it’s easier to stay focused on what’s really important and keep putting in their best work.
Things happen really fast.
Just as with any other tech startup, at Deel we move fast. We push something, revise it, iterate on it, and repeat. Sometimes our cycles can be as short as a week. For example, our Roadmap Meeting is a biweekly call where the whole team comes together and our CEO, who is currently Product Lead, gives us an overview of what has been done in the past week, and what will be done in the next. Things are moving really fast! And these changes are not just bug fixes; they can be bigger than that, such as developing and shipping a new product feature.
A fast-paced environment is definitely not for everyone. It can be tough, and you definitely have to be up for it and be quick on picking things up. If you’re not constantly in the loop, you can lose the thread and get lost. Of course, this will happen to everyone at some point, but we try to minimize it by over-communicating and being transparent. And once you get the hang of it, it’s a great experience. You come to appreciate decisions being made quickly, so you can start acting on it right away. Everyone on the team has come to love it.
Supporting the remote work community.
Being customer-driven and community-driven are highly intertwined at Deel. We’re part of a larger remote community – companies who work remotely, and individuals within those remote companies – and a defining feature of this community is that everyone is very helpful. It’s a space where everyone is constantly supporting each other, and as we build our own network, we help others get plugged into it as well. We believe it’s important for anyone working in the remote work space to be community-driven in this way.
Independence to put in your best work.
We have no working hours at Deel. We don’t care if you’re working early in the morning, late at night, or over the weekend. We’re also not input based, so it doesn’t matter how many hours you put in, as long as the work gets done. It’s this independence that allows us to be at our best whenever we can. Many of us have regular schedules when we’re usually online, but this might be interrupted by some errand, or not feeling productive, and it’s great to have the freedom to pause for a couple hours and then come back to work. At the end of the week, you simply report what you got done, what you didn’t get done and why, and how you’ll resolve it.
We value spending time together.
Seeing your team in person is invaluable. You can be remote as much as you want, but eventually meeting the person behind the laptop is super important. And it’s not an either/or situation… the key is finding a balance between the two.
At Deel, we try to have two meetups per year. So far, we’ve met up in San Francisco, while our co-founders were at Y Combinator, and in Tel Aviv, where several of our teammates live. We’ll typically stay together in apartments, and spend a week working together, going out for dinner or drinks, and doing other fun activities. We’ll definitely add in some team bonding exercises, but we’ve also realized that a lot of the bonding happens during unplanned, shared moments like accompanying a teammate to the nearby café to pick up coffee for the rest of the team, and having those 10-15 minutes alone to chat one-on-one.
Regardless of how it happens, this type of bonding is important for our remote team. If you haven’t met them in person, it takes a few minutes to get into the groove of working with them whether it’s happening over Zoom or Slack. But after you’ve met in person, there’s an existing close bond. There’s already a personal dynamic to checking in and catching up, and a work dynamic to how you collaborate. That’s because you’ve already developed these dynamics in person during the meetups, and then carry them over into your remote work.
Deel Headquarters is in San Francisco where our sales team likes to show off their view over the San Francisco Baybridge. Otherwise we are remote. New York, London, Toronto, Belgrade, Kiev, Tel Aviv and everywhere and anywhere else.
We like to surround ourselves with people who are warm and creative, move quickly, enjoy building things, and can reason and debate without animosity. We're generating revenue and growing fast. We're backed by A+ investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator, Elad Gil, Weekend Fund, Daniel Gross, and more.
Deel co-founders Alex Bouaziz and Shuo Wang at Y Combinator, Winter 2019.
