🎧🍌 Growing Deel to $300M+ ARR in Four Years with Alex Bouaziz, Co-founder and CEO of Deel
🎧🍌 Growing Deel to $300M+ ARR in Four Years with Alex Bouaziz, Co-founder and CEO of Deel
Pivoting one week before YC demo day, growing 20% per month for a year, how to move fast, the benefits of taking on lots of angel investors, how to pick board members, and being a default optimist
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Alex Bouaziz is the Co-founder and CEO of Deel, a full stack global HR and payroll platform. But the company didn’t start that way, and we’ll talk through Alex and his co-founder Shuo’s journey from zero to one, starting with a product that helped startups hire international employees.
Alex and Shuo launched the company one week before YC Demo day in 2019, and have since scaled to 20,000+ customers and raised over $685 million. They’re supported by investors like YC, a16z, Spark Capital, Weekend Fund, Coatue, SV Angel, Soma Capital, Quiet Capital, and angels like Lachy Groom, Nat Friedman, Ryan Petersen, Alexis Ohanian, John Zimmer, Dara Khosrowshahi, Rex Salisbury, Justin Mateen, and more.
In this episode, we discuss:
The initial insight around remote work that started Deel in 2019
How they initially built the wrong solution
Pivoting one week before YC demo day
Listening to customers to build a better product
Growing 20% every month for a year
Being a default optimist
Dealing with emotional ups and downs of building a startup
Moving at “Deel Speed”, and how the team operates so fast
Deel’s remote-first approach and its “WeWork Squads”
His advice to other leaders building remote teams
Why founders shouldn’t share too much information with early investors
How Alex’s approach to fundraising changed through his Seed to Series D rounds
Why founders should always be selling their product
How picking board members is a form of marriage, and what founders should prioritize when choosing them
Why Deel raised a Series A and B in a three month span despite only burning
$300k since closing its Seed round
How deep pocketed investors unlock optionality as a company scales
The benefits to taking on lots of angel investors
How Deel prioritized international expansion as it grew
Deel’s new Visa / immigration and HR AI products
Two things Alex would do differently if he could start over
The founders he most looks up to
Follow Alex on Twitter and LinkedIn
🙏 Thanks to Zac and Xavier at Supermix for help with production and distribution.
Transcript
Find transcripts of all prior episodes here.
Turner Novak: Alex, how's it going? Thanks for joining me today.
Alex Bouaziz: Good. Thanks for having me. I'm excited.
Turner Novak: So I want to start things off. I told people what Deel is. Can you give us a quick one liner on how it works and what the product is.
Alex Bouaziz: We provide a full-stack HR and payroll product for global teams.
Turner Novak: But you didn't specifically start out that way, right? When it started, it was a little bit more niche?
Alex Bouaziz: Yeah. We started coming in 2019 and the quick background is, we're both international people. We wanted to help companies hire the best people in the world. And at the time, we were a bit more niche because we figured like, “Hey, what do we see people do when they want to hire around the world?”
And then the first thing we saw was engaging them as freelancers for small missions and things like that. And we wanted to fix that. And then we did the good old talk to your customer thing and we built a lot of things for our customers over time. I'm sure we'll dive into this, but yeah, it's been quite the journey.
Turner Novak: When you first started Deel, you said 2019, or maybe it was 2018 when you were working through ideas, what was the thinking like around global teams, remote work? What did people think? Were there many businesses that specifically focused on that? Or did people think you're crazy trying to build this company for remote work in 2019?
Alex Bouaziz: Yeah, but we ideated for quite a bit. We changed the idea quite a bit until like a week before demo day in 2019.
Turner Novak: This is YC?
Alex Bouaziz: Yeah, Y Combinator Demo Day at the time. Yeah. I think there's a couple of things. Before Deel, there used to be three ways to hire people internationally. So people used to do it, but just they would either do like, contractor hires and pay them for PayPal or Pioneer and TransferWise.
Turner Novak: So that's kind of shady, sort of.
Alex Bouaziz: No legitimacy into the relationship, right? Like no contract in place, no understanding of local laws on the other side. You're just missing the infrastructure that you need to have in order to do the relationship correctly. I mean, who can blame you? How do you expect to know that in France, there's 10 different ways to be a contractor and, you need to verify that? So that was the first way.
The second way was, I don't know if you know about this, but there are local agencies in-country, and that you can hire people through that. And they take a shitload of money actually, plus percent on top of the salary of those people.
Turner Novak: Would you say 30%? 30%+?
Alex Bouaziz: More. I've seen it vary from like, 10% up to like 50%+. It's crazy. And they would basically hire them locally on their local agency on your behalf.
And then the third one, which I loved, was like, “Oh, we're going international.” What does that mean? “We're opening an entity in Ireland and we'll create a thousand jobs.” That just means you're opening up in Ireland, right? That doesn't mean you're going global. You're just opening up shop in Ireland.
People always knew that there are amazing people around the world and it's become more and more apparent. I'm an international student, right? I studied in the U.S., I studied in the U.K., I studied in Israel. So I think there's definitely been a path towards having great people from around the world, having the skillsets and being just as good as your local people.
It’s just, there was no real infrastructure to do this the right way. And it was just very painful, right? We just wanted to build the infrastructure that makes it as easy, because if it's easy, then you might actually consider more of those profiles and therefore give them a lot more opportunities.
Turner Novak: Yeah. So basically, initially what it was like was using PayPal to pay and probably not being fully compliant, fully following every single law in every country, or was using an agency that possibly not also doing all the things legally, but also was taking a lot of money.
Alex Bouaziz: Yeah. Relying on third-party local agencies to me is never a smart idea. You have no control and you might feel like you're pushing away the responsibility. But not really. So this was also, there's a big, big part around this, which is experience, right?
Like when you're hiring people, you want to give them an amazing experience. And, those felt like second-class citizen experiences, right? They just weren't being treated as well as people that you'd hire locally.
So there was a form of acceleration right on that front during remote work. Because now everybody is working from wherever from home. Why is that person not being treated as well as the others? And that was a pretty big catalyst as well for Deel in general.
Turner Novak: How did you guys initially settle on that idea? I've heard you say before you were almost using blockchain, but it wasn't actually crypto. Can you explain what you guys were first trying to do to solve this?
Alex Bouaziz: Yeah. I still think blockchain is great. And crypto is great. We enable, I think USDC payouts or even BTC payouts to change the word of payment. So I still think it's great. When we started, we just had the wrong hypothesis. Our hypothesis was, the reason why people don't work together globally is because there is no relationship of trust between the two parties.
And we thought very stupidly to some extent, “Well, what if we remove this, the trust and somehow the money gets unblocked when the task is done.” But really, it was never about trust. There's still some parts of it to some extent, but it's less about trust. It's about ease of creating that relationship and doing it right.
So initially, the hypothesis we had, which could be solved through smart contracts, more than blockchain, et cetera, the idea of like, “Hey, when this task is fulfilled and deserves payment, pay it automatically.” So solving the trust between the two parties is just… the problem set was right. The solution was incorrect.
Turner Novak: Because you were like, once certain tasks are completed or thresholds are met, then the funds are released.
Alex Bouaziz: That doesn't work when you're doing regular work, right? Again, we just had a misjudgment in terms of: why are you not working with that person? And we thought it was trust between the two parties, but clearly, when we moved towards the compliance around the relationship, the payments, the ease, and the peace of mind of doing it right… I think this is where we unlocked a lot of different things.
Turner Novak: And so then how did you get closer to solving the problem? Was it just talking to customers?
Alex Bouaziz: Yeah. We talked to some of our customers, but the funniest story here is, I remember one day, one of our customers used our platform. And we're still very early, so we're building things out. So PayPal had this option of holding the money until the task is done. So at the beginning, we're doing the smart contract thing and then, we start moving to PayPal because we needed some people to actually move the money.
And one of our customers put into the PayPal thing, like 8,000 plus dollars. It was a friend of mine. “Why are you doing this? What is wrong with you? It's so much money.”
Turner Novak: Wait, he said that to you or you said that to him?
Alex Bouaziz: I said that to him. I was like, “This is too much money.” And I think it’s actually one of the bigger realizations of Deel very early on, where he really appreciated, because compliance is something you build over time, right?
We were still very much building the very beginning of Deel. And actually, the thing that he made me realize is the idea of tying contracts to money. The same way a smart contract was, right, to some extent, tying those two things, which are usually very separated.
Like you sign a contract with someone somewhere, they'll cosign or whatever. And then, at some other point, you pay them in another way. The idea of bridging those two things was very appealing to him. And it just gave a good experience to the other person, and having that security, that platform.
And that's when we're like, “Huh, okay. So you're engaging them, signing the contracts, wanting to do the payments. Okay. There's something there.” And that was the real catalyst for us to go, “Okay, we've got something. Let’s double down and let’s build.”
Turner Novak: So it was basically just combining them all together. All the legal compliance and payments in one.
Alex Bouaziz: Exactly. Exactly. Rather than separating all of those things in different places, right, bridging everything together. And, for sure there was some aspect of them trusting us with that amount of money. But still, I think there's something non-trivial in the way he used the product at the time. And I was like, “Okay.”
Turner Novak: And so you said it was one of your friends. Was that a lot of the very first customers? How did you initially get people to use it?
Alex Bouaziz: He was a batch-mate at YC actually. Maybe you know - smart plug for them - Sunsama.
Turner Novak: I’ve heard of it, yeah.
Alex Bouaziz: The management app. Yeah. Very, very cool team and very cool product. But yeah, I think early on you’ve got to be within some form of community of people that are willing to. It's a very great way to penetrate the first market.
For us, it was friends like YC companies or things like that. Generally I think there's a ton of ways to generate your early, early customer and to test out your product real quick. And for us, that definitely helped.
Turner Novak: Let's say you have, I don't know, a couple of customers, however many you were in, what was then what you did to really double down on growth? Were there any channels?
Alex Bouaziz: For us, we've always been very metrics-driven. So being two engineers out of school, right, my co-founder - you should have her on the show. She's more fun than me.
Turner Novak: Maybe a couple of months. We'll give people a break from Deel. And then once you guys have some cool stuff that happens.
Alex Bouaziz: Yeah, but we were both very engineering-centric, we're both engineers. So like, growth every month. We were not looking for hyper-growth at the time. We're looking for consistent growth, are we consistently bringing customers that are excited about the product, that see the value?
And, at the beginning, we also had a lot of education to do. Like, no, it's not okay to just send some cash to someone somewhere on Paypal. Education is actually something that today is much more laughable. At the time people are like, “What are you talking about?”
Turner Novak: Yeah, “It's just PayPal. Who cares?”
Alex Bouaziz: Yeah, like, “Why do you care?” Of course. So there was some education there, for sure. But I think there was just small things that different people liked within the platform.
And as long as we kept on doubling down on those, like the payment experience, the end-user experience, the compliance aspect of the relationship, different people like the solution for different things at the time. And you know, actually this product is not the most successful product at the company, right?
The products we built after are more successful, but it definitely geared us towards being very metrics-driven and making sure that we keep improving the product and keep having those sales. If you're not going, then you're dead. Pushing a lot of our potential customers to see why Deel is great has always been a main thing.
We’re quite go-to-market-led as an organization. We're a compliance product, but go-to-market too. Shuo actually takes care of go-to-market. So she's solely focused on that all day, every day.
Turner Novak: You mentioned doing YC. Some of this pivoting ideation stage, was that during YC, before, or after?
Alex Bouaziz: We actually pivoted into this idea one week before Demo Day or two weeks before Demo Day.
Turner Novak: Did you have one of those nice demo day charts that was starting to go up?
Alex Bouaziz: Yeah, definitely, of course.
Turner Novak: Of course. Revisionist history.
Alex Bouaziz: It's funny because I see our partner, if you met him, Aaron Harris, he was the one that bet on us. And I remember him looking at me doing the first pitch ever of prep for a demo day. And he's like, “Everyone, they pivoted on Friday.” And I was like, “Shit.”
But for sure, the thing is, when we had the very initial idea, we had a lot of people interested. So we had initial traction and obviously there's the story part of fundraising, and the storytelling part of fundraising, but we were excited, right.
Because for the whole beginning of YC, and I think most early stage funders are that way, you lie to yourself a lot, “I need to build that feature, that thing that's going to help me.”
Turner Novak: That's going to solve all the problems.
Alex Bouaziz: Exactly. But when you have something that feels like it's going to be interesting and it's going to get traction, you feel it.
And that's why you get those kinds of charts, right? That's reassuring yourself that you're actually in the right direction is super important because you have a lot of self-doubt and stuff when you're building. So, this was key for us for sure.
Turner Novak: How, as a founder, have you dealt with that self-doubt, uncertainty?
Alex Bouaziz: First, bring it on, the question. I'm always ready. I think we are, and it's actually one of our principle, like, we design deal principles, similar to a lot of different companies, but very focused on who we are as people and what we want the company to reflect. We have this idea of being default optimists.
A lot of stuff is not going to go your way. A lot of things, you can't control. Every day is a very different day. And as long as you suck it in and just move forward, that works for me.
Emotionally, I'm able to say, “Whatever. I can't control this. It happened. Let's move into the next thing.” And I think that's a very good skill to have. It's also very important not to apply this too much in your personal relationships. Cause that one…
Turner Novak: That's a good point.
Alex Bouaziz: But, on the work front, it's important. Because, I think it's a skill as a founder that if you don't have, it can be very hard, especially as you're in a 10-year plus journey, and so many things are going to happen that are not going to make you happy in general. And you're going to need to have control on this.
Turner Novak: Yeah. Have you always had that skill or did you have to learn it?
Alex Bouaziz: The thing is, I come from a pretty entrepreneurial family. I've seen my father go through things like this and be able to - it never had any impact on my life growing up. So, maybe I have it from him, but yeah, I think it's more education and background.
For example, being an engineer helps me a lot there, where I can break down the problem and extract what I think is important versus not, and just format it in a way that my brain, and I guess even my heart, can process it.
Turner Novak: It's almost like, if you just think about it from just a purely numbers perspective, or like you said, breaking it down, if you're going to decide to be default optimistic, it's like, “Okay, something didn't happen, but there's so many other things that are good that hopefully will happen in the future.”
Alex Bouaziz: But at the same time, for us, we have that genuine care. It's actually another principle at Deel where we do take things to heart. So, one thing we do is every time someone thinks poorly of the company or thinks poorly of the product, many of our customers, right? We actually go above and beyond.
We have a Slack channel at the company where every single review across every single platform comes through. And, you get nice five-stars, et cetera, but the one-stars are the one that hurt. What happened? And we actually have a lot of people that are here to fix those things and make sure the experience improves for our customers, make sure we understand so we do better.
And, I think on that front, you should never be emotionally unattached when it comes to your customers. That's the reason you wake up every day. You should care about everything they say, and you should heavily invest in this.
Turner Novak: What's a good way to do that?
Alex Bouaziz: I think this is top-down led, right? If you do it yourself, and I still do a ton of that myself, because no product is perfect. No team is perfect. You're going to mess up. You're going to have things that are outside of your control. And as long as you recognize this and you just - I think people are quite understanding as well.
And their own company is not perfect most of the time, right? Regardless of where they work, or what they do. So, we have this thing called Deel Speed, which is very much the one that defines us the most.
And what we think about that is, never push things to tomorrow. If there's something you can do today, just do it today. And it's even more important for us, because when you work in payroll, contracts, compliance, like someone doesn't get paid at the end of the month, you're not saying, “Hey, I'm sorry, it's a bank holiday. I'll talk to you tomorrow.” Even one day is not okay, right?
And if you combine the speed of execution that we want, the care that we have for our customers, it just creates that whole company culture of being very focused on our customers. And I think if you don't have that in an industry like ours, you're doomed.
Turner Novak: I was going to ask what that’s actually about, Deel Speed. So I was talking to Ryan Hoover and he's like, “I don't know how Alex does it. I'll text him or email him and he responds in like, five minutes.” How do you do it?
Alex Bouaziz: I literally have my phone and I respond. So Deel being a global company, we have 3000 plus people across a hundred countries now. I think at the leadership level, what I've seen is that most people, because we give the flexibility, we have no offices. We have one tiny one in Germany from an acquisition that we can't really break the lease of, but technically we don't have any offices. We give WeWork membership to everyone, and they can go into whatever WeWork they want. They actually go in squads now, which is kind of cool.
But I think the default idea is you get to manage your time. You work from wherever you want. You're in control of your time. You have things in your life and you need, you take care of the things that you want at the right time. And we're a lot more focused on output.
And when you do that, then the trade-off, at least within the leadership at the company, is that you need to be available, right? Like something goes wrong on the sell-side in the U.S., or on customer success side in the U.S., or in APAC. I think as a leader, you kind of have to be there. And it fits really well, at least with my lifestyle and my mindset today, and it looks cool when Ryan thinks I answer in two minutes.
Turner Novak: You mentioned something else there that was really interesting. The squad swinging into the office. What is that? Can you explain?
Alex Bouaziz: Because we don't have any offices, well, it [WeWork] is basically our office. So if you come on Zoom, you'll have Deel London, Deel Barcelona, Deel Madrid, Deel whatever. And what we're seeing, which is kind of cool, is we give those WeWork memberships to people and they can go to WeWorks whenever they want.
Turner Novak: They’re all access pass, where it's just anywhere in the world, you can.
Alex Bouaziz: Exactly. Then you'll be like, “I'm going to WeWork's Covent Garden today.” And then you'll get like, “Oh, me too.” 60 people in the U.K., which is cool, they'll all come to the Covent Garden WeWork today. And people, they love the ability to choose where they work and they love the ability to work with their coworkers.
So giving that flexibility is really fun. And when you get to a threshold where, the other day I was in Florence for some conference, and one of my teammates was like, “Did I just see you or do you have a twin?” I was like, “Wow, okay. We're getting into new levels of org” which is kind of cool.
Turner Novak: How many people work at Deel right now?
Alex Bouaziz: About 3000, something like this. In a hundred countries plus. So you pick a place, you'll have a friend.
Turner Novak: Wow. And you started the company in 2019?
Alex Bouaziz: Ideation was like 2018, 2019. I think we launched our product officially demo day 2019, whenever that was, like March something 2019.
Turner Novak: So going from the two co-founders to 3000 people in the matter of four or five years, how do you do that and not have things fall apart? Because that just sounds impossible. I'm sure you just ran into a ton of problems.
Alex Bouaziz: Yeah. And problems are part of the job, right? I think whether or not people are together, you still have a lot of problems. I think a few things. We're lucky where the mission of the company is we want to help hundreds of millions of people get to work for the best companies in the world, regardless of where they're from.
And I think it just attracts very specific types of people, which are very excited about this. In English it's like second-generation immigrants, I think that's how you say it. But when your family has had to completely move out for you to have opportunities for their job opportunities and what would their life have been if they would have stayed in their home country with their family, if they wanted to?
So I think that it's just very hungry people that want to build a product for like what, what if, right. And that's the first one. The second one is, we've been remote for since we've started. So, building a lot of the infrastructure to make people that want to be in that environment as successful as possible is great.
And if you think about it, if you have some form of product market fit where you can grow and hiring the best talent helps you, the fact that you're not limited to like 30-miles radius around your office to hire the best talent is definitely a huge accelerator. You suddenly can hire significantly more people and you get to pick from the world, right?
So you get a very big, big sample of people when it comes down to hiring. So I think both of those things definitely help. And then, the last thing that helps us generally grow fast is Deel Speed applies to what we build. We just build with our customers and we build fast.
I think our timeframe, we've got a really great product and engineering team and they just build amazing products really fast and listen to our customers. And it's definitely paid off.
Turner Novak: The other thing too that I was just thinking about as you were talking was, let's say you have an office and you want to hire more people. You're going to hit a limit on that office and you're going to have to open a new office.
I'll talk to a lot of HR leaders or CEOs and they’re like, “Yeah, we really need to, we need to expand in Utah because we're trying to hire more people there. We need to open a new office in this one country.” You never run into that. Just the office is Slack and Slack can scale indefinitely. So you don't run into room-capacity issues.
Alex Bouaziz: People don't love it when I say that, but another thing I think that's very cool about, that's very useful about not all being in an office together is you really love your coworkers to some extent, because when you're in an office with someone all day, you just unconsciously start not liking things here and there, but when you talk to them at very specific moments of the day, when you get to see them and the big events or the SKOs you're doing together, you're super excited to see them rather than every single day. Because it's true, there's some co-workers you're going to love and love every single minute of it. But at the end of the day, if you work in a big office, there’s like, hundreds of people, right?
You just have more camaraderie because you're just spending very specific times together, so you only get the best out of people, because why would they want to give you anything else when they only see you like 30 minutes-ish or there?
Turner Novak: And you probably just have a ton to catch up on too. Like you're just excited to meet finally and just share presence with each other?
Alex Bouaziz: Exactly, you nailed it, right? Like you always have stuff to talk about when you don't see each other every single hour of the day.
Turner Novak: Well, so then if I'm a founder, building, scaling, or even not a founder, anyone doing a remote team, what do you think is crucial to get right? Or what are some of the mistakes that people make just structuring these and making sure that everything flows well.
Alex Bouaziz: I'm not going to talk about all the compliance stuff.
Turner Novak: From the people perspective?
Alex Bouaziz: It depends on the stage of the company, but my default mindset personally, Shuo and myself, our mindset is we trust people by default. I know not everybody has that.
And when you trust people, when you're in a remote work environment, you can't really be thinking, “Are my teammates working?” So if you're focused on output and you default-trust people, I think that's the best way to operate. And if someone doesn't deliver and someone quote unquote “betrays your trust,” then they’re just not a fit for the company, right?
So that's the first big thing, and I know it's hard, specifically when you're a founder early-stage, to let go and truly trust people on different things. I'm still learning myself to let go on a lot of different fronts. That's number one.
The second thing is, you have to be thoughtful about how you build your infrastructure, from onboarding, expectations, making sure that - even by the way pre-hiring, you’ve got to set the right expectation in your interview.
And I think all of that, so that people that joined - it's always hard to know if they're ready for the type of environment that they're going to be working in, but the more you can set them up, the better, for sure.
And the last one is, I think a lot of people are overthinking it. I talked to a lot of CHROs and CFOs around in-office, remote, et cetera. But we work in an office together, there's 10 floors. You work on floor 10. I work on floor two. We don't really work together, right? It's basically the same thing as I’m working from home and you're working from home too.
Turner Novak: I think about all my office settings. It's always been just a small team, three-to-ten people really at the end of the day.
Alex Bouaziz: I think three-to-ten people is a different story. Like, would I love to have every single one of my teammates next to me all day? I love to spend time with them all the time, right? It's just pros and cons, right? If I would have done that, I would have probably not been able to hire 99 percent of them.
And I would have missed out on this talent, right? So there's a ton of those, you know, pros and cons on when you're building these type of things.
Turner Novak: So I actually had a question about this interview process you guys have. I forget where I heard about it, but you said you specifically interview every employee. You have 3,000 people. Is that still true? Are you still talking to every single person?
Alex Bouaziz: I stopped at 500 or 700.
Turner Novak: Okay, okay.
Alex Bouaziz: I still do for a couple of roles. Typically, I get involved in interview processes where I don't think that the team’s quality is where it should be anymore. So I’m coming back to reset the bar.
But I think in early stages it’s important. First of all, I think people follow people to some extent. So if you're joining a company, it's because you believe in the people that are leading it and the way they see the world and the way they're building. I think it's important to always be super approachable and to be able to communicate this vision if you want people to get excited and if you want people to really appreciate the company and the mission of the company. That's number one.
I think second, I think I'm a decent judge of character on whether or not you'd be a good fit for the company. And I felt it was an important part of the process. And when I got to a point where I felt really, really confident - again, I was telling you earlier, knowing when to let go, right?
When I came to a point where I felt like my team really had a good hold on that. And when I was basically approving most of the candidates they were sending me, I was like, “Okay, I'm ready to let go. I think they've done, they're ready.”
Turner Novak: And do you still do Deel Speed on the interview process? I think I remember hearing you did like, four interviews in a day or two. Is that still the process? Just super quick.
Alex Bouaziz: It's just because it's you, but usually 15 minutes and then I'm not focused anymore.
Turner Novak: Okay.
Alex Bouaziz: So no, I'm doing this for people. I think you can understand whether or not someone is going to be - again, you have amazing people - they're just not good fit for you and for the company, for the company that you're building and your team, right?
So I think you can know whether or not someone is a good fit within five to seven minutes. And then after that, I just take this as an opportunity for them to know what they want to know, right? And ask the questions that they think is important.
And hopefully, it doesn't matter if they get the role or not. I just hopefully want them to come out of this with a good experience and for them to be excited and be a promoter of the company regardless of the end of the process.
So, by now, I truly rarely pass on candidates. My team's just done a tremendous job at bringing great people and it's paid off.
Turner Novak: And then do you guys still do really quick offers and I don't know, I guess passes or just super quick through the process.
Alex Bouaziz: I think it depends on the role, there's roles like leadership roles a bit different. I think it's important to spend the time with the people and we're hiring for a couple like head-of, which is our bureaus basically. At the end, I think it's important to spend the right amount of time.
I think the interview process - I think we spend enough time, like five to six interviews is more than enough. It's just the question is how fast do you move on those in between?
And I'm sure that we're a little slower than we used to, probably we need to go check after this interview and see, but I think when you are early stage, when you're excited about a candidate, it's important to show that excitement and to show the momentum, because top talent has a choice and you want them to choose you, so momentum is always key.
Turner Novak: I wanted to jump back, because usually I like to go through history of the company and learn all the secrets, which we've started to skip over a little bit, but so going back, you were in YC. You raised the seed round.
I've heard you say you don't think it's a good idea to share a lot of information with investors. Can you explain that?
Alex Bouaziz: It depends on the size of the company. When you are coming out of Y Combinator and you are raising your brand and you’re very early anyway, your numbers are way too early. There's no show of traction. Those guys are basically betting on you and the team, I think. And also, I think in this very specific scenario, you have people trying to quickly say no to a lot of companies because they're scared of missing on the other companies round. That's kind of the dynamic of a Y Combinator demo day if you haven't seen that.
Turner Novak: Yeah. No, it's definitely true.
Alex Bouaziz: I think it's important to keep your cards close to your chest so that you can close your round really fast. I think as you grow, when you raise your B, your C, your D, it's an open book, right?
People that are investing have a good perception of what we do and how we do it, et cetera. I think this is very, very focused on raising your first round. And again, it's in a very, very unique dynamic, which is like DemoDate and Y Combinator. But yeah, for sure. If you give too much, there's a lot of reasons to say no.
When you're in a seed round, they're not investing truly because of your numbers. They're investing because they think you're building something cool. So, don't give them a lot of reasons to say no, ideally. Unless you have amazing metrics, then open your books all the way. Most companies like us that pivoted one week before demo day do not have amazing metrics. They have the beginning of something.
Turner Novak: Well, so that's an interesting question. I didn't think I was going to ask, but what's been the difference on fundraising as a, you know, seed Series A company. And now, I think the last public number you said was like $295 million in ARR and this was months ago. So you're probably, you're north of 300 I would hope.
So then what's the difference been in how you approach fundraising between early stage and later stage, or maybe another question would be, how's your strategy personally changed over the last couple of years as you've grown?
Alex Bouaziz: For me, it's always been the same. It's, again, first round is very different than the rest. First round, I think I remember Michael from YC telling me, “If anybody's willing to give you money to build your most likely stupid idea, take it and just run, and try to build something, and say, ‘thank you.’”
So I think that's probably the pre-seed seed round and how I would, how we'd see it. Post-that, I think it becomes different. So for us, it's always been, I never wanted to depend on fundraising. When we raised our seed, we had 4-point-something million dollars in the bank.
When we raised our A a year later, I think we had burned $350K in a year-plus, so we had infinite runway technically, and I could have converted into profitability at the time, right? So that just gives you a lot of momentum. The worst thing you want to be is on your back foot saying, “If you don't raise within the next X months, you're dead.”
So if you do that, you have better negotiations and you have, you just raise on your own terms. And I think we've done that every single round since then. I'm not even sure raising that much money and doing that many rounds is always the right path for companies, right? You should be raising at your pace and you should be raising when it makes sense.
But what's important is you want your destiny in your hands and you don't want to be going around send him roll begging for money in order for your company to survive, right? That's the worst position you need to be in. And so being super burn-conscious, and I think every entrepreneur needs to put themself in this mindset.
Turner Novak: And then I think you mentioned earlier, I was going to ask about this. Growing 20 percent every single month - what's the method to do that? How did you think through what was the system you guys put in place?
Alex Bouaziz: We were pretty relentless on that. We had to grow this amount. So whatever we needed to do from a customer perspective, I remember Shuo cold-calling hundreds of customers a day herself. And she would not let that one go. I think being very, very conscious about like, “Hey, this is what we want to do.”
Ryan can give you actually some insights on that growth from the investor updates he got, but we're always aiming for this because if you're not growing, then something is wrong, right? And if something is wrong, you better figure it out really fast. So being a bit mindful, sometimes you have off months, right?
But overall, you need to be growing. I think at that pace, specifically, when you're going from $1 to $2, you need to be growing at this 20 plus percent, ideally at a hundred percent month-on-month, right? So if you want to build a big company, maybe not monthly for everyone, but on like a monthly basis, you should be growing. If not, there's something wrong and that's okay. It's just maybe a different type of business.
Turner Novak: I was talking to Vinay, one of the Loom founders. He said, “You are the most sales-focused founder or CEO he’s ever met.” What do you think that means?
Alex Bouaziz: I'll take it as a compliment, I guess. I think what he means is, I'm very genuine in my relationships always. But at the same time, I'm always a bit annoyed when my friends or people around me that I like don't use Deel. I always remind them that it's not so cool. They should.
Turner Novak: So you just try to slide it into everything that you do. You're always, always selling.
Alex Bouaziz: Always, always. I need to slide it. But it's more like I love working with people and I love them being customers. I love them bringing feedback. It's one of my favorite relationships. If you look at my WhatsApp, I have a hundred plus of our customers on it where they're sending me feedback all the time and they're talking to me.
And I think my friends should, they better be customers. If not, I'm doing something wrong. If my product is not good enough for my close friends that are running companies to use it, then shit.
Turner Novak: You guys did the demo day seed round. This was - was this 2019 or was this 20?
Alex Bouaziz: Winter 2019, yeah.
Turner Novak: You said you raised your Series A right before COVID hit. Was this like January-ish?
Alex Bouaziz: No, something like March.
Turner Novak: COVID would have hit like, weeks later.
Alex Bouaziz: Yeah, but I don't think it was yet, I don't remember the exact timeline to be honest. I'm getting old. I think it was more or less at the same time.
Turner Novak: So you basically had this product that was just ready to serve the world when COVID broke out.
Alex Bouaziz: Well, we spent a year building, so definitely had a much better product than a year before. I definitely had invested on the compliance infrastructure, which definitely helped us quite a bit.
But yeah, we were in a good place and we were getting to a point and that's actually the reason we raised that round even, we were getting to a point where we were moving from too many inbounds, too many demos. So you start moving from a funders-led motion towards like, “What if we add someone to help us? There is some repetitiveness to what we're doing, which is great. That means you can teach it to someone, maybe it's time for us to bring on people and start scaling this.”
And you always have inflection points at the company, and that felt like a very strong inflection point where like, “Okay. Maybe time to also raise money. So that we’re in a better place.” And the people that at the time gave us our term sheet, were good people. So we're like, “It looks like everything is falling into places. Let's do it.”
Turner Novak: You did the Series A from a16z, and they were the only real firm you were really keeping close.
Alex Bouaziz: Well, I had a couple other term sheets at that time, because you have an a16z term sheet, you get a couple others. I actually don't think a16z was the first term sheet either. I think we had another one. I think they were keeping more tabs on us to be honest. They were keeping tabs on the market.
They had a market thesis at the time, and they actually were looking at one of our competitors at the same time. They told me that at the end of the process, if I remember correctly. But yes, I had a good relationship with Anish, he's my board member. Today he's really great. And I think appreciated the market. And if you have a market thesis, and you've done work before, then it's a lot better than companies, funds coming in blind, just trying to throw a term sheet at you because you have another.
Turner Novak: It's a long-term relationship. You want someone who's fully on board.
Alex Bouaziz: And he's just been on our board for the last three plus years. He's seen a lot and has been super supportive. So definitely need to pick the right way. I’ve seen relationships go sideways with board members and it's not pretty. It's a long term relationship for sure.
And Deel has gone faster than I think most companies. So technically in non-Deel years, it could have been a couple more years already, right? You need to pick your board members really, it seems like a light engagement, but it's a form of marriage. So you need to pick it wisely.
Turner Novak: What do you think are the most things to prioritize when you're picking a board member?
Alex Bouaziz: Really depends on your stage. A couple of things. The first one, I would always reference-check before taking any term sheet, any board member, because it's really helpful to hear from people. Actually, ASICs did a good job at that. They put me in front of people that both had bad experience from a company perspective and how were they as board members when the company didn't go well versus going well.
And obviously do your own reference-check as well. But I think depends on the stage, depends on how much value they're going to bring. It's hard for someone that's sitting on a board meeting every quarter to truly have an impact on your company, right?
So I think you need to have people that have experience working in your field that have seen. One of the things I'm lucky enough to get to work with Ben, one of the things that's magical about working with him is, you just tell him your headcount and he tells you the problems you have, and he's freaking accurate about it every time. Being able to have those people that can truly help you solve those problems because of pattern-recognition or be there for you when things don't go well is super important.
So the worst thing you could have, not the worst thing, but like, the last thing you want is a board member that's absent or, even worse, a board member that can have a negative impact on the company, which is the one big no-go in my opinion.
Turner Novak: Did you make any mistakes in terms of how you approached that initially?
Alex Bouaziz: I don't think I thought too much at the time. I was just happy that someone wanted to give me money. I just got really lucky. And the people that I have were great. I could have definitely made the wrong choices. You talk to someone two, three times, it's not technically the best way to have a 10 plus years relationships. I got really lucky on that front. Maybe I would have done a bit more due diligence, but at the same time, you're building a company, someone's willing to give you 10 plus million dollars at a good valuation, it's tempting. You can't really blame younger self and it worked out for him, so it's fine.
Turner Novak: I'm thinking maybe alongside Zoom at the time, it was probably one of the quickest, fastest needed products in the world.
Alex Bouaziz: I think we raised most of our money, if not all, without having met. I think I met Anish once for 20 minutes in a coffee, like in 2019, September. I think every single other run we raised was fully on Zoom. So maybe, again, I wouldn't change it for the world, but maybe I would have thought a bit more at the time.
I should have thought a bit more at the time, but for us, it worked out amazing because our board members are great and we learn a lot from them. So lucky.
Turner Novak: You raised the Series B a couple months later, just later in the summer?
Alex Bouaziz: Like three months later. Yasmin, the other board member, DMed me on Twitter and basically gave us a term sheet like a week later. It was the fastest one I've ever seen. But it was, again, it was a great price, great board member, very ambitious, very happy to have her on the board and she's been great.
Turner Novak: And you didn't really burn that much money it sounds like. Why did you raise money? You could still own a hundred percent of the company or 80 percent or whatever.
Alex Bouaziz: You can't really predict the future. The valuation was good. The dilution was low, more cash in the bank as we're thinking about taking over a big market. We're pretty aggressive. You can do a lot of what-ifs with those things, right?
And I think the reason why Deel is what it is today is because Yasmin giving us the Series B got YC and a16z more excited eventually to the Series C, right? Made us more confident to go hard, more aggressive on sales or on some different things. So it’s very hard to know. But again, today I'm very happy with my ownership of the company. I'm very happy with the direction of the company. So definitely no regrets on that front.
Turner Novak: And then, so with the Series C that was, I'm trying to remember, that was like a year or something after the Series B?
Alex Bouaziz: The Series C was in May, a year later, like May 2021, I want to say? And that was led by a16z, led by Y Combinator Growth and a16z together, co-led it, and that was our unicorn run.
Turner Novak: Basically you were just like, “We're raising money to do some acquisitions.” Did that happen?
Alex Bouaziz: No.
Turner Novak: But you still have done some acquisitions, right?
Alex Bouaziz: We were raising. We did, but we wanted to do one very specific one that didn't work out. But my board was kind enough to still make that round happen. We tried really hard at the time. I think they probably regret it not happening, but no.
Look, you need to make sometimes some moves and that's actually a good learning, having investors - in that case, like a16z - that have deep enough pockets to follow you on a potential big acquisition like this is very important. Because if you're working mainly with smaller investors, which are amazing early stage, if you want to go out and do those kind of big things, you need to have the big guys on board to make it happen. And having a16z at the time definitely helped a lot.
Turner Novak: And you said that was an accident that you just happened to have an investor that had really deep pockets, or did you think about that a lot?
Alex Bouaziz: Now I realize it, and I’m happy it happened, and I’ll see it as good advice, which is, well, think about it. You want to make that acquisition happen. You have your insiders with enough money to make it happen. Great. You want to go and make it happen. No one has enough money to make it happen. You need to go out and start pitching the company. And if you don't have a relationship, they don't know who you are. They need to review the whole business. It's a grind. So it was definitely a big advantage for us, for sure.
Turner Novak: And I know you've said too before that you've really thought it was a smart move to have a lot of angels on board early on.
Alex Bouaziz: It's nothing specifically new, but I think early stage when you're an early stage funder, there's so many of them. I think people wanting to spend time with you is social capital of theirs. A way to make them excited is for it to be, a lot of people pay it forward, but if they own equity in your company, they care more, right?
And the more people you have that care about your company, the more chances you get to build a relationship with them. And I'm actually staying right now in London in one of my amazing investor’s place, because I'm staying here for two days for work. And that relationship - he's an amazing guy. Deel is how we got to know each other truly, because there's so many amazing people they could be meeting, like, “Why us? Why me?” Right?
And I think it helps in so many different ways. And you just need to value that into your equation when you're fundraising. And I genuinely think that the more people want you to win that are important, the more likely you are to win in general when your company gets bigger.
Turner Novak: So when I see all these announcements, like Deel’s launched in APAC or you're in whatever country, what does that mean? Because your product is already sort of global. Does that mean you launch an office or you're serving end-customers that are in that market?
Alex Bouaziz: Yeah. A couple of different things. Like you said, we're already global. We have infrastructure in every country. We've been working on it for a long time. We're building our infrastructure from a sales team, from a customer success team, from a customer support team, from all of the different ones to truly serve local customers.
So that's what we say is like, “Hey, we now have a country leader. The country leader is here to make things happen here as a face and as a representative of the country to push things forward. We feel comfortable with the infrastructure that we've built there from a people perspective.” We're now even more ready than before to take on the world in that region.” That's how we see it. And I think it resonates with the market quite a bit.
Turner Novak: How do you decide which new market to lean into next?
Alex Bouaziz: Candidly, it's where our sales grow the most, right? If there's a lot of interest and if the initial salespeople and the sales organization that we have and the customer base grows really rapidly, then there is more support required and therefore we invest more into the country. So, it's a pretty simple equation for us.
And there's some markets that are a bit more complex than others where you need to go into it with the right infrastructure straight away. Like for example, Japan is a very tough market, but it's such an amazing market. There's not as many engineers as I'd like it to be. So if you want to hire the top engineers and being able to lean into other regions in Asia is a big thing, right? So some markets are a bit different than others on that front, but you look at your customer base, how excited are people for the product, and then you double down on the region.
Turner Novak: If you could go back early days of Deel, anything you'd do differently. Or maybe not early days, maybe it was last week, but anything you’d do different?
Alex Bouaziz: I think there's a couple of different things. The first one is definitely a couple of people that I should have fired a little faster because they had an impact on the company that, as a - I wouldn't say first time founder, but like first time founder of a company that's more than five people. There's definitely a couple of things that I learned there.
The second thing is always the same, right? For example, when we started Deel, on the independent contractor side, we build a full infrastructure in-house. On the employee side, we started by leveraging local partners and aggregating them because we're like, “Okay, are we going to open 120 entities? That might be a bit complicated.”
And there actually was two different players in the market - one that did it all in-house, one that aggregated all of those and we're like, “Okay, aggregation seems to be the faster way to do it.” And three months into that, we realized, “We don't control compliance. We're relying on those local agencies.” Like you said earlier, we don't know if they're doing things right. And most of the time, they actually don't do things right.
“We can't control the customer support experience, the customer success experience, if it's not our entity, our own things.” And we pivoted straight into like, “Okay, no, that's not going to work. It's not to the level of what we want to provide to our customers. Let's open our full infrastructure.”
Maybe we would have done it like this earlier, because I think the lap of creating earlier on, I think creating our entity versus using the partner, like some people, and it took us a bit of time to rectify this, like, “Oh yeah, they're an aggregator at the time.”
So now, we fully rectified and everybody knows we actually have the biggest infrastructure there. Maybe doing that differently, maybe I would have done it straight away. And obviously I think I would have even shifted. If you think about a product roadmap, there's a couple of products that are significantly more successful than our first one. At the very beginning, we didn't want to get into those markets because of focus. Realizing how much more successful they are, maybe we would have shifted that a little bit and do it earlier.
Turner Novak: And I think you guys launched a really cool product recently. It was an immigration support product. Can you explain that?
Alex Bouaziz: Yeah, we have a ton of products. Okay. So I'm very excited.
Turner Novak: Okay.
Alex Bouaziz: So immigration for sure. So we acquired a company called Legalpad. We actually did my own old one when I moved to the U.S. for YC. And basically what we realized is, as you help enough companies go global, immigration becomes a huge topic, right?
You want to hire that person, that country, they're on a visa. What do you do? You want to move someone from one country to another? What do you do? And we realize immigration is such a key part of the deal. And it's such a, in my opinion, so tied to the mission of the company.
We want to help you hire people from all around the world, give them an amazing experience and help them move to the country of their dreams, if this is what they want to do, right? So immigration is a big thing for us, but we're also doubling down on our U.S. core offering.
Because now that we've become so good at global, we have this unique opportunity of full consolidation where you can do everything in one platform. Because on the global side, we're very hard to catch up on, right? We've built so much. We have a lot of things productized, going back into full HR and U.S., et cetera, and doubling down on this so that you have one system for everything is a very unique opportunity.
And our market is very exciting. We launched our HR product, our USPO product, our U.S. payroll-embedded product, and all of those things that are super important for early stage funders in the U.S. as well because it’s how you start your company. But bridging payroll, HR, full global, same good, amazing experience in the U.S., but amazing experience in outside of the U.S. as well in one place is something that the market hasn't seen.
Turner Novak: So you basically went from being a way to support an international team to suddenly, it's just full-stack HR, anything you need to pay people, benefits, et cetera.
Alex Bouaziz: Exactly. So when we started with contractors internationally, then employees where you don't have entities internationally, then we started doing payroll for where you have your own entities. And we realized, “Well, okay. Now everyone's getting paid through Deel. What if we become the source of truth as well from an HR standpoint?”
And we have so much learnings, right? If you think about HR software, it's always hyper local, right? I'm solving for the U.S., I'm solving for the U.K., for France. We had the global angles straight up and we were just, “We can bring.” I think about time of policies, there's different time of policies based on the worker type, based on the countries that you have. And we fill it, because we help companies hire that way. Bridging HR and all of this payroll for the first time was a big deal.
And then just taking all of this - that was earlier this year - and taking all of this and saying, “And now we're going to be the best one in the U.S. market as well. So you have everything in one place” is I think a pretty big and unique opportunity.
Turner Novak: So you can essentially have employees in every single country. You can hire someone in Romania, move them to the U.S., pay them benefits. Do you have retirement plans yet? Is that coming?
Alex Bouaziz: Everything. Yeah. I'm going to help you run your U.S. team. I'm going to help you run your Philippines team, your Japanese team, all in one place, and make sure that if one day you want to move that French person to the U.S. or Canada, we can make it happen too.
Turner Novak: Wow. That's amazing. And then I think you guys also just announced, hopefully we get the timing on this right, an HR AI assistant?
Alex Bouaziz: Yeah. I'm so excited about this. Actually, every quarter I take one team under me directly and actually that one I've kept for a bit longer. So I've had it for the last six months. So basically, if you're thinking about Deel, we have so much knowledge, right? Like employment, compliance everywhere, benefits everywhere, taxes everywhere, maternity leave policies, et cetera.
All of this, we built our own inner wiki for it. And we built something really substantial. And we realized, “Oh, okay. All our people are looking for this data to answer our customers to answer our sales conversation. What if we layered good old open AI or strong product on top of this so that we can truly leverage what we've built?”
And what we've built is like 250 plus compliance people in-house, lawyers internally in countries, payroll managers in countries, local HR in countries. “What if we layered on that content, an ability for you to be able to ask any questions you want related to your HR workforce or related to global employment and all the things together?”
And I'm super excited. I use it all day. For example, you'd go and say, “What's the employer cost in France?” And you get a full breakdown and fully parametrized. So when it changes in a year, then you'll be fully updated as well. And you can even compare the history. Or, “What is the paternity policy in Ukraine?” Whatever that may be, just being able to do that at your fingertip rather than like, ask our support, ask our success team, is super powerful.
And the other thing which is super important is internal alignment. I think a lot of companies suffer from this. Just when you have a wiki that you're looking at internally, I think a couple of companies are trying to solve this right now, but you search in a different way than I search. Therefore, sometimes we don't find the same answers, right?
And then, when you're talking about such a sensitive topic like, termination of a person in a country or things like that, you need to give accurate answers. So by doing that, we're just making sure that we're channeling and we're making sure we synthesize the right answers across all of our organizations so our customers can be super happy.
And yes, like you said, we've worked on it for so long and now it's actually going to be customer-facing as well, not just internal.
Turner Novak: Yeah. Wow. So that seems like an anomaly. I feel like you guys, you move really quick on stuff. Why did it take so long to build that one out?
Alex Bouaziz: Because of privacy data and privacy of accounts. The current infrastructure is not ideal when it comes to this. So we had to do a lot of work in the background. And again, also because of sensitivity as well, right? When you're looking at this type of data, you want to make sure you give the right answer.
Like I would hate to tell you, “Oh, you can just terminate that person in that country like this.” And it doesn't actually happen. And we're a global team, GDPR, I'm making sure that we do things the right way.
Turner Novak: That's true. With whole new complexities.
Alex Bouaziz: Yeah, we really spent time on this because we started wanting to make it great internally. And when we felt really, really positively and strongly about it, that it was going to serve our customer well, and make sure that data, privacy, everything, is done the right way, we could make it customer-facing.
Turner Novak: Okay, well, I guess I'm curious. Do you have a favorite founder or CEO or business, or just like any period in time that you really look up to or get a lot of inspiration from?
Alex Bouaziz: There is definitely a couple I love. If you know, Arik from a company called Rapid in Israel, 15 plus billion dollar company. Great guy. Super sharp. And if you know Sebastian from dLocal? It’s a public company?
Turner Novak: dLocal? Yep, they’re payments in Latin America.
Alex Bouaziz: It's in Latin America. I think he's an awesome founder.
Turner Novak: So what do you like about these guys?
Alex Bouaziz: A lot of grit. We live in a market that's very tough. Running these type of companies is very hard. And you can look through, for example, dLocal’s history. There's a lot of people trying to - I don't know exactly the details, but without truly understanding what they're doing, trying to give them a sheet left and right.
And just the mental fortitude of being able to build such companies that are successful. And that's crazy with the margins, which is super impressive. It's just those are people - there's so many others like Fidji from Instacart, and others - whenever I have a problem, I feel very comfortable just saying like, “What would you do there?”
And they all lived through it and there's no one better than someone that has lived through things to tell you what they would have done different. And it being very applicable because your investors, your friends, they're not operating the same way you are. They probably have kind of seen it, but not as closely as you. So they're not truly in your shoes. And the only way to have a real, unbiased, “Hey, this is what happened. This is how I would have done it differently.” Like heart-to-heart, is by having the friends that have lived through things.
Turner Novak: How do you meet people like that? How do you find a mentor?
Alex Bouaziz: Social capital. Get them to invest in your company. That's a great way to build a relationship.
Turner Novak: Tying back to the earlier question. So angels you think are, it's just so undervalue.
Alex Bouaziz: I think angels are - again, that's why operators are, to me, the best angels, because depending on the stage of the company, depending on what you're seeing, there's so many things that you can just map them one-to-one, right? And you can pattern-recognize angels for sure.
And eventually, those people, just as much as you, are looking - when you get to that stage - they’re looking for other people that are living through those things. It's just good to have people you can talk to as you're building things like this. Most of the time, they're super nice, very down to earth, and trying to just figure their shit out day in, day out. And, they're there, they value their time. And it's hard at this stage to build strong bonds and connections. So going through things that are tough, like building a company, definitely connects people together.
Turner Novak: Last question - I've been asking this one a lot lately. Do you have any questions for me at all on anything?
Alex Bouaziz: Let me think. I love your Twitter. So I think I might have a couple. Where do you want to go? I'm seeing a lot of different places around your social and some of the things that you told me earlier on, I don't know if I can talk about it, that you're working on.
It's quite different paths to me. What, it's just fun, or do you have a master plan of how all of those things work together?
Turner Novak: Yeah. I would say there's a very faint master plan, but I'm not really tied to it because nothing ever really goes the way you think it will. So I guess when I think about the evolution, it was like, I started tweeting a decent amount, like blogging, newsletter, now the podcast. It's just all these different content channels. You take a content-first approach to it, to venture, just to meeting founders.
And then, I don't know, I guess I've kind of accidentally built a media business too. So it's figuring out how all these things tie together. I really like investing, that's the main thing. And I feel like founding a venture firm is not the same as founding a startup. Maybe you can sympathize with smaller scale problems that are not quite the same, but it makes it a little bit more relatable.
Alex Bouaziz: Right. I think a lot of creating your community, creating your mark, your customer base, they can be SAS customers or they can be end-users, or taking on your content and loving your content. So that definitely makes a lot of sense. And maybe instead of a venture firm, you can build a fun business out of it.
Turner Novak: Yeah. I mean, both. It's a new type of venture firm. I don't know. But I just think for me, I take myself very seriously, but I'm not a serious person, if that makes sense. I'm very intentional and serious, but I'm okay having fun. So when you talk about Twitter, I don't know, I’m just having fun out there, I don’t take myself too seriously.
Alex Bouaziz: You're definitely making me laugh. So maybe I can pick up a couple of things from you and better try to have fun as well there.
Turner Novak: Yeah, definitely. Awesome. Well, it's been great. Thanks for coming on.
Alex Bouaziz: Of course. Of course. Thank you for listening to me for an hour. That must have been tough.
Turner Novak: Yeah. No, I think it was good. I think people liked it.
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