The Pomp Podcast - #1190 Daniel Westgarth On How To Build A $12 BILLION Company

Episode Date: April 23, 2023

Daniel Westgarth is the COO of Deel. In this conversation, we talk about building an international behemoth, unscalable things they had to do to get operational in many different countries, entrepreneurial start, what he learned growing up on a farm, flipping parking spots, and all the lessons he has learned along the way. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 235,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/

What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. We have no advertisers on this podcast, so it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Daniel Westgarth is the COO of Deal.

In this conversation, we talk about building an international behemoth. We talk about all the unscalable things that they had to do in order to get operational in so many different countries. We talk about his entrepreneurial start, what he learned growing up on a farm, from flipping parking spots in Newcastle and many other things that Daniel has gone through, the lessons he's learned, and the people he's met along the way. I really enjoyed this conversation with Daniel, and I hope you guys enjoy it as well. Here is my conversation with Daniel Westgarth. In Toronto, every arrival is a statement, and nothing says it better than this.

Cadillac Optic was the number one selling luxury EV in Canada for 2025. Find your rhythm across a seamless 33-inch display and an immersive 19-speaker AKG surround audio system. This city demands agility, and Optic delivers with precision to make every drive extraordinary. Let's take the Cadillac. Find out more at CadillacCanada.ca. Luxury sales claim based on S&P Global Mobility Canadian New Vehicle Total Registrations for Calendar Year 2025 for the Cadillac Definition of Luxury. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments.

All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Alright, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Daniel here.

Daniel, you are the ultimate entrepreneur in the sense of you've had to do a ton of crazy things in order to help build Deal into this behemoth, doing hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue. And one of the things that I know you guys have had to do is go to many, many different countries to help set up all sorts of legal entities. I think at one point you guys were even carrying a physical printer with you. Talk a little bit about some of the unscalable things that you've had to do to build what everyone looks at from the outside as this really sexy, fast-growing company. But really, it's just a collection of small, unscalable things that you guys have had to

figure out as you've gone? Yeah. So I think the first thing to realize is the deal really is built like any other international corporation. We have headquarters, parent company, and we have subsidiaries across many different countries around the globe. And a lot of those countries, it's pretty easy to go there and set up. For example, you can go to the UK, you can go to the UK government's website, and you can set up a company in a pretty easy way. You go to Argentina, you go to Brazil, you go to Malaysia, that process is very different. Most of the time, you have to physically be there, you have to physically be there, go to the Secretary of State, yeah, you can have an attorney do it, but sometimes they actually

require the director to be in that country. And then you need to print out all this documentation. So we literally had a team of people that would go country to country, prepare these applications, and then we would file them. And in some cases, the directors, which are me, the CEO, the CFO, would have to actually physically be there. So that meant we would fly around country to country with a little HP printer in our luggage, arrive at the hotel room, plug it in, print off the documentation, meet with a notary and then go to the Secretary of State to file documents to incorporate the company or obtain

a relevant labor license. So what's always interesting to me is whenever somebody has this kind of entrepreneurial DNA and you see it later in life, especially as they become more and more successful with various things that they build, you can almost trace it back, right? And for you, you grew up on a farm, I believe, and that's really kind of where you learned entrepreneurship. And then throughout your early childhood, you did a whole bunch of entrepreneurial things, which we'll get into, but talk a little bit about growing up and kind of how you learned some of these skills and really focused on just like, how do you solve problems and build, you know, what ends up being businesses in an entrepreneurial way?

Yeah, sure. I mean, great, great point. I did grow up on a farm. I'm a small town boy. And my dad was the farmer. I'd wake up from an early age, maybe 10 years old, and I would work with him every day. And I think the farm taught me a couple of things, maybe three things, which are really important. The first thing is hard work prevails. And my dad, as soon as his eyes open, he's up, he's out of bed, he's working and he's doing something. And I learned that and apply that in business second thing is every journey is made up of many different steps and those steps can be as small as you want i think about planting seeds growing a crop harvesting that crop sending it off to a mill to finally manufacture bread bread that you eat at home

there's so many steps in that process um and that's the same in business and entrepreneurial entrepreneurial-ism. Every kind of idea needs to be broken down into so many different steps and you follow those steps and eventually you get to where you're going. And I think the final thing is diversification or ability to pivot. All of the farmers that I met in England, and these are small town farmers. These are not big corporate farms. These are very, very small little places in England. All of them diversify. Maybe they have some crops in the ground. Maybe they have some livestock. Maybe they have some people that keep horses on the land. Maybe they have other things going on. And my father would constantly diversify his business to survive.

Let's talk about once you leave the farm, and you start doing all sorts of entrepreneurial things. One of them is this, like, I'll call it we work of parking lots, which is just an absolutely insane story. But like, what were you guys doing with parking lots in your teenage years? Well, yeah, I wanted to find a place to park my car in Newcastle, which is where I went to school with my local city and it was really tough to find a parking spot in the urban area the same as it is in New York or any other major urban city so anyway found a parking spot it was great I paid the owner 120 pounds a month or whatever it was and I quickly realized well there's a ton of other vacant parking spaces in the local area so maybe I could rent those spaces I could

negotiate pretty good rates so much I'm paying on a kind of long-term lease and then I could to sub-rent those spaces to commuters or other people that were visiting the city for shorter amounts of time. And I did that. I think the first step, I found another parking space, rented it for 120 pounds a month. And I thought, well, if I don't sub-rent it, it's okay. I have an extra space. Maybe I have friends come and visit, whatever. I don't care. I signed that lease, rented that space. And within, I think, one day, I had someone that wanted to lease it from me for 12 weeks, a significant markup. And we repeated that across many different parking spaces and it was really really good fun so when you're doing that is it like hey how do i just

become like a parking empire right like like the king of this parking empire or is it more so you kind of understand hey this is great right now we can make some money but eventually i want to go and do other things yeah i think for me to go to go a layer deeper uh i quickly realized that i wasn't going to become the person i was flipping parking spaces in newcastle england And to be completely transparent about it, at that time, the Social Network movie came out. I watched that. I loved it and thought, wow, you can build businesses which are backed by venture capitalists and raise a huge amount of money and build businesses which can produce a huge amount of money. And at that point in time, I realized I don't want to be flipping car parking spaces. I want to work for one of these companies. And that's where I found Revolut, which was my first proper job.

And as you are working there, it's obviously with Revolut, this intersection of kind of like finance, technology. Talk a little bit about what you learned helping to scale that business to the size it is today. If I kind of think about fundamentals, very similar to what I learned growing up with my father. I think the things that I didn't learn growing up, but did learn in Revolut are focusing on the problem at hand. everything that we are doing should be building towards solving a problem problem for the customer or a problem for an internal service i think the second thing that i kind of learned a revolute which i did not learn in my earlier days is that collaborating and working and hiring other smart like-minded people produces a compounding effect of working like we didn't have that in the small

town days, right? You were limited with working with a small group of people. Working in a venture-backed business, you can bring smart people together that buy into your vision and then accomplish huge things very quickly. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. And one of the things that I think Revolut, you know, it almost feels like you've expanded over time, right? So you've got the farm, then you're kind of in Newcastle, then with Revolut, now you've got kind of a bigger, you know, kind of more diverse group of people that you're working with. But deal, what when you and I have talked previously that you told me, which I found absolutely fascinating, is I think you have colleagues in like 80 different countries. And so you can pretty

much go to like almost any city in the world that has some level of density, and there's likely to be a deal employee that works so that you can meet up with. Exactly. And it extends past major cities and extends to, I would say, other interesting places. For example, I was in Uruguay in January, meeting with one of our partners. We were in Punta del Este, which is our holiday destination, vacation destination in the middle of Uruguay. And we have deal people there. It was great. We went out for dinner. We went over some work stuff. We relaxed. We socialized. It was super cool. But yeah, we have teammates from over 80 different countries. So as you think about your rise and kind of the connectivity you have globally,

it really does mirror what we've seen over the last 150 years or so. Like some of the books that I've read in the past, you know, there's this book, The Rise and Fall of American Growth. And it talks about between kind of 1870 and like 1940, and how, you know, a home was basically self-reliant and had to have food, it had to figure out water and like do all this stuff. By the time it gets to the 1940s, everything's connected with roads and telecommunications. And now there's specialization, whatever. But also, if you then you go and you look around those same times, there are these organizations that have been built over, you know, 100 plus years, take Cargill, which is a huge business here in the United States. And what you see with that

business is that they literally start off as like a grain family, like they are providing grains and storage for grain. And then now you fast forward and like they do everything from clothing all the way to equipment, et cetera. And so it's almost as like as the world has become more connected, it feels like there has been more and more economic opportunity. Capitalism kind of seeps into all these corners but with deal you all are solving this like very specific problem with which is like yeah it's great to do commerce with all these other countries but what if you're actually going to be employing people in all these other countries and kind of talk a little bit as to like how you see this connectivity and the rise of internet adoption and all of that really

driving the need for the business and product that you guys are building i think globalization is inevitable and people are going to live in different places and that should not constrain who they're working for. I firmly believe that there should be no borders when it comes to talent and to work. And that's really what Deal is here for. Our mission is to connect millions of workers with the best companies around the world. And we do that And we do that through software. We have one platform where companies can hire, onboard, and manage their global workforce. So when you look at that product today, how many of the companies that you all are onboarding are like the two, three-person startup that is trying to scale rapidly versus the larger corporations?

And how do companies kind of evaluate, should I hire, quote-unquote, locally? right? Whether that's locally to a city, a state, or even a country versus no, I actually should go and have kind of employees across the globe. Yeah. I think startups really are finding the best talent. The talent is choosing the startup. Startup is choosing the talent. It's, I have founders, friends of the founders that have recently started up and they find someone they want to hire. They don't care where they're based. They don't care if they're in Canada, Mexico, Argentina, or China. Like they really don't care. They just want to hire the person and they want hire them as quickly as possible i think when you get to the large kind of corporation stage then

the business is much more strategic about where it wants to hire and there's typically um time zone factors in there there's cost factors in there there's risk factors in there um there's working style and culture factors in there and we've seen that for for for decades if not centuries We've seen large Fortune 500 companies outsource part of their workforce to different countries. And the term outsourcing is never really used entirely correctly. It might be that there is a big office in India for an American Fortune 500 company, but it's not actually outsourced. Those people are working for, let's say it's Bank of America. They're working for Bank of America's India subsidiary.

When you see these companies, is it more productivity? Is it lower cost? Is it just, hey, the best people regardless of cost? What is really driving to the business bottom line? And I always go to like, yes, everyone talks about, hey, I want the best talent, right? I want the best people. But the best people can be measured in many different ways. The best people could be I want people who can get the job done and cost me the least. The best people can be the most productive, the most talented. They can be the best educated. Like, what are you seeing as these people are hiring?

And also, are you seeing certain pockets around the world where it seems like maybe there wasn't a lot of attention being driven there by these large companies that were hiring? And now there's an explosion. In the content world, the Philippines has become like this huge honeypot of video editing talent, et cetera. But are there other types of trends or locations that you guys are paying attention to? First of all, startups are going for the best talent. We see that time and time again. They really don't care. They just want the best person, and they want them to start as soon as possible.

When we get to the big companies, I think there's two buckets here. They also want the best talent, but it's not for all roles. maybe they want the best talent for their sales or their biz ops team but they don't necessarily need the best talent for some other um function maybe it's a services function maybe it's back office they don't necessarily need the best in that scenario we're seeing companies be much more strategic and almost surgical about where where to hire and that's really where vp of finance cfo comes in because frankly when you're running a startup scale up not that many people are watching the bottom line that's the reality of it everyone might pretend yeah we're watching

the bottom line with cross-portraits whatever the cfo vp of finance are really the guys that are looking at it um precisely and they're gonna make the strategic decisions of yes we're gonna hire in this location or this time zone now to your final point of those kind of honey pots of expertise yeah that's the really cool part and we're seeing that in say argentina a lot of cool um ux ui talent in nigeria we're seeing a lot of good technical operations talent that are working in tooling, applications, automation, or tech support. Really, really cool stuff coming from Nigeria. And then sales. America remains to be the holy grail of the kind of global sales machine. We've seen so many companies from Europe wanting to hire American salespeople because they want

to expand over here. When you see all of this talent, what is their thought process? So let's switch to the the employee side of this uh they've got skills they have internet access they have some entrepreneurial dna because they want to go work at a you know kind of a smaller startup you know the challenger rather than go try to get a job at ibm for example um how many of these people are looking at the startup roles is simply like hey that's my training ground that's my practice for eventually i want to go start a company versus you see people wanting to stay for long periods of time at these companies. And one of the things that I think is important here is like, if a lot of these folks are trying to learn and then want to go start companies, are we going to see this

explosion of kind of startup activity we've seen in the United States spread globally as well? Yeah. I think great question. First thing to know is deal has been really successful in the grand scheme of things. We're still tiny, the tiny number of heads on the platform relative the global population and what that means is the people that are using the deal platform and finding work through the deal platform from these emerging markets let's take greece for example i'm going to greece soon let's say i'm a young guy in greece i'm going to use deal to find my next job by virtue of using deal and knowing what deal is and um using it to find my job i am a one percent type of person. I am very entrepreneurial. I want to work harder. I want to grow myself. I have

growth mindset. But that's really, really interesting. As deal gets larger and it gets more saturated in certain countries, for example, in Argentina, deal is very well known. We do big deal events down there with the community. Generally, deal is very highly regarded in Argentina. And that's when you kind of get that honeypot type of effect. It's like, oh, well, Actually, there's a community now of UX, UI developers, professionals that are using DL to find work. And that community becomes really, really strong. You have a ton of young people who reach out to you.

You're relatively young compared to most people who are in your type of role at large companies. And sometimes they're asking you for career advice. Maybe sometimes they're pitching you ideas. What are some of the most interesting things that you've seen people working on recently? Yeah, it's something I'm certainly passionate about. I started off in my tech journey, age 21, initially was a customer support guy, did customer support for a few weeks, got top of the leaderboard and then went into ops.

So yeah, I love to work with young people and help them. I think that within Deal, we have a number of people that fit these parameters and we've watched them grow over the past three or four years, which has been amazing. And some of those guys are running end-to-end programs now at the company in different areas or one guy for example responsible for the full um pay and payout stack payment stack payments to contractors he runs the whole program it's freaking amazing he does a great job and it's just amazing to see that person join the company as a very inexperienced somewhat nervous individual grow into this competent program manager that owns a part of owns a moving part of the business today that's really cool externally yeah

ton of people reach out and would love to listen to everyone, but the reality is you can't. I think there's been some really interesting stuff in crypto. It's starting to seem to die down a little bit now, given we have AI as the new hot topic, but a ton of interesting stuff in crypto and a ton of projects, which I guess caught my friend's attention. When you think about information that you've consumed that has made you so successful, one of the books I know that you like is The Messy Middle. Talk a little bit about that book and kind of the importance behind the information that you gleaned from it. Yeah, I think in conclusion, The Messy Middle gives you an element of reassurance.

When things get really messy, really hectic, I refer back to that point of many different steps in a journey, hundreds if not thousands of steps in this journey. And it could be you're on a certain step and the thing is just crazy. It's so messy. Things are breaking. Relationships aren't working. People are falling out and you're in the messy middle. And what that book is really telling you is the messy middle is what is signifying progress. Without all of that mess And without being in the middle, you're not progressing. You're not growing. That book is really good at giving reassurance and helping me communicate that reassurance to the wider team of people. When you think of that book specifically, are there pieces of kind of information you pulled out? And then can you talk about like a specific situation, a deal where you feel like you implemented it and can kind of say like, oh, I got that from that book? Sure. I'm going to roll with payments to contractors. So to set the scene, a contractor

might be using the deal platform to raise their invoices and get paid. It's very typical for startups or for cross-border working arrangements. Say I'm in Turkey and I'm working for a US company. I'm going to invoice that company. I'm going to get paid for it. Now, we like to give the contractors, or we do like to give the contractors a range of payment methods. We let them choose how they want to get paid. They can get paid to the deal card, they can get paid to their PayPal wallet, they can get paid to their bank account. One of the issues we had is we were giving these contractors too much optionality. We're saying, hey, you can get paid through any different payment method you want. And some of those payment methods were not fit for purpose.

What I mean is, for example, bringing pounds or euros as currency into Turkey just wasn't working. The banks in Turkey were pausing the payment. They were screening the payment and the contractor wouldn't get their money within the time frame they expected. So when this was going on, we have contractors which love taking euros and pounds to Turkey. We have other contractors which aren't getting their money on time. It's creating a lot of noise. We have people writing in on customer support. like boom this is hella messy and we have people at the company that want to keep bringing euros

and pounds of turkeys with contractors love it you have other stakeholders like let's shut this down because it's causing too much friction and you're in the messy middle and you have to work with those different stakeholders and find the optimal solution and we found it we found the solution which continued to give the contractors the options that they want to get paid but reduced a lot of that really messy overhead and some of those complex cases which produce delays. So along these lines, people who have had an operating background, they have done an incredible amount of good things, but also made plenty of mistakes. And usually when they're making decisions, they actually don't know if it's a good decision

or a bad decision. They hope it's a good one, but you kind of don't know until you have the benefit of hindsight. Is there anything that in your career you're like, hey, I made a decision. It was the wrong decision, but here's what I learned from it, or here's how I identified I won't repeat X or Y. And I think about this a lot in terms of when bad things are happening, I always try to stop and say, like, what's the lesson here? And so, you know, I'll give you an example first, which is we were hiring an employee for one of our businesses, and they verbally committed to us on a Friday. And so we went and did a bunch of work Friday night and Saturday, you know, get all the documentation and kind of work through it. By Sunday night, they hadn't signed it yet, but we had already started to talk internally and let people know, OK, hey, this person is going to be joining us.

Here's the changes we're going to make, whatever. And by Monday morning, they said, you know what? Look, my heart's just not in it. And so we had to basically put together the standard operating procedures around like, OK, At what point do we actually share with the broader team that someone's joining or not joining? Is it if they signed or not signed? Like there was all these lessons that we learned, but it came out of a situation where we're like, look, we wish it had gone a different way.

And so is there something like that that you've been able to identify where you're like, yeah, this is kind of how I went through a process and was able to take out some insights and make sure that I didn't repeat those mistakes in the future? Yeah. First of all, we have the exact same case with you.

I had a leader join, really, really excited, really great guy but last minute heart wasn't in it wanted to do something different and we had to tell everyone it really sucked so we also have to upgrade and develop out those sops um it's a tough question to spring to on a podcast if i'm honest um what do you think your biggest career mistake has been how about that like if you could go back and change one thing you're like if could do that again i would have done something different well biggest career mistake is all around hiring it's about bringing people into your circle to work on the same project and submission so if it was biggest mistake i would literally pinpoint certain people that we we

brought in to our circle to work on the project which didn't work out if we if we analyze scrutinized interviewed better made better decisions we would have done more and like there's multiple people obviously i'm going to say their name there's multiple people i can i can speak to and think of immediately that they if we hadn't spent four weeks five weeks six weeks interviewing getting to know them and then another similar period of time onboarding and then working with them for four months and then making the decision to off-board them that's so much time wasted that is the number one thing yeah and it always goes back to i think it's uh vanode cosla is like you know the team you build is the company you build and so you're trying to get it

right but the process you just described there are four to six weeks of interviewing four to six weeks of onboarding and then four months later i mean you're basically talking about six to seven months from start to finish uh and to most people that's going to sound like an insanely short period of time right but actually in the startup world that is like two lifetimes in terms of not having the right person because then once you know that you've got a off board that first person you have to find the actual person who's going to fill the role and so it ends up extending that timeframe pretty significantly. I think in interviewing, it's really important to trust no one.

And it's don't trust yourself. Don't trust the candidate. Don't trust the references. In this case, got a reference saying he was the smartest guy the referee had ever met. He was very, very confident and very, very sure it was the right role for him. And that made me feel confident that he was the right person. I should have brought in more third party. stakeholders, cross-reference, cross-analyze. And then when you have all that day-to-day, you can actually say, well, this person probably isn't right for us.

Yeah. And when you're going through those interviews, how do you kind of get people to tell you the truth, right? And I always say in terms of, I think in interviews, most candidates are trying to put their best foot forward, obviously. They want to impress the interviewer. They want to get the job. There's all these reasons and personal incentives that take over. But how do you try to get at, you know, who is this person going to be not on day one, but on day 747? And like, that's who we're actually trying to hire is somebody who's great on day 747, not the person who comes in on the first day. You know, they're kind of dressed up extra special. They show up 20 minutes earlier than they normally would.

And like, they're trying to put their best foot forward on day one because they're enthusiastic. But how do you get at that in an interview? I think break down the professional paywall, first and foremost. just break that down as quick and efficiently as possible and start to have a human conversation with the person. And it doesn't start and stop with the interview. All of the exec hires I make and that I am currently recruiting for, it's a whole process. We are iMessage, WhatsApp, we'll do off-the-cuff calls. We will have the professional touch points where we have an hour long interview where we speak to each other over camera in a very formal and professional way.

But that can't be it, especially for an exec hire. You really need to understand the person. You need to understand their level of interest. You need to understand their level of commitment. Working at a startup is an incredible level of commitment. You need to work so hard and stay focused on the goal. It's not for everyone. And there's no way that you can accurately read that in an interview type scenario. When you think about the startups are not for everyone, what is the day-to-day schedule of somebody at deal? Are you guys still working 12, 14 hour type days? Has it scaled back as you've gotten larger? Talk a little bit about that experience on a day-to-day basis. Because I think when people hear it's not for everyone, they're like, oh,

it's just a different mission or it's a different industry. I don't think they sometimes understand how different it is working at a startup versus even working at Facebook or Google, let alone, you know, kind of a more bureaucratic and bloated, you know, non-tech type company. Yeah, I think in too long, didn't read kind of format. Yeah, we still work really, really hard. There's no doubt about it. I have friends that work in private equity. They work in big law firms.

They work in investment banks. They are working really hard, really long, but there's so much dead and inefficient time which would kill me as a human being one of the reasons that i can be comfortable with working so hard and committing so much is the work is highly efficient it's async i can call people when when i need to call them in a human way i can call them when i'm walking my dog if i had a dog um but i can call them when i'm going to get some fresh air right that type of thing is really really meaningful in some in some environments the formalized touch points of meetings have become so important and so significant that it becomes the only touch point to connect to people

to properly connect to people that's a disaster that is so expensive for the company that constrains time and productivity so much you need to be working fully async you need to be trusting your entire team it doesn't matter if they're taking a call while they're outside getting some fresh air it doesn't matter if they're taking a call while they're eating their lunch because they're on the go and they have a tight schedule it doesn't matter if they're taking a quick call before they jump on a plane. It's all about trust and working asynchronously. And in that environment,

how much is it systems and like documentation and stuff like that, right? If it is this async type environment, like communication is still important, but async communication is obviously different than kind of synchronous communication. Like what are some of the systems that you guys have tried to install

or things that you've seen work really, really well, whether it's for you personally or for the company? I loop back to the messy middle for a moment. I think you can have a lot of informal, fluid conversation and note-taking in a pretty unstructured way. As long as that is underpinned by structure, then you're fine. And that's how we generally work a deal. We can work on these hot topics for two or three days at a time. It's very, very fluid. It's pretty messy, frankly. There's different phone calls going on. There's different Google Meets, forums, different documents. But the point of it is, at the end

of the project, everything is formalized and put into an SOP or a standard organizational structure. And so as you see that occurring, one of the pieces that I always kind of go back to is it's kind of like software engineers. There's a lot of software engineers that can write amazing code and do it very quickly. And then there's a lot of software engineers who can write amazing code and do it with the proper documentation and notes and kind of like understand they're working in a bigger organization and so it's like clean code that can be used later by other people and they're not gonna have to call me to figure out what was I doing or why did I make certain decisions like how much of the company today is like just write code and you know ship it right

or whatever the equivalent is for each job role versus it's like no we need to go quickly we need to have high quality work but we also need to be focused on those operating processes you know documentation and that type of stuff. Yeah, early stage startup is always a mess. Engineers pushing code very quickly, no proper QA, no proper documentation. It's just get it out, deploy it to production. If it goes down, we'll fix it and no one will notice.

You know, running a business the size of Deal on the platform the size of Deal, you cannot do that. It's incredibly dangerous and everyone is watching. There were tens of hundreds of people using the platform every minute. I think that once the startup gets to around 50 to 100 people, not saying you need to use headcount as the metric, but there's some metric that you could use around that size, the engineering processes become robust.

Those checks and balances are in place, documentation is happening, everything is very clean and organized. We're two and a half thousand people now. So we have startups within startups, all of that kind of stage. So you have those global SOPs, guardrails, checks and balances. But at the end, you have many different product teams, which are run like startups with kind of a mini CEO, which is responsible for the area of the product and responsible for pushing it forward.

I think when I ask my friends who have large teams, you know, hundreds, if not thousands of employees, one of the things that they still find a lot of enjoyment in is sometimes they will see an update get pushed or they'll see some sort of product feature get shipped. And they're pleasantly surprised because they're like, I would have never thought of that. But like this team is doing a great job or, hey, we hired really high quality people who thought differently than myself or my co-founders or whatever. And what you're describing here with almost like these small startups within the company, I'm assuming that you guys get a lot of that because if you sit all day and you just think about this one part of the product,

you probably end up thinking more deeply and critically about it than, let's say, somebody who spends five seconds once a week and tries to figure out what we should do there. Man, that is the best feeling. Seeing one of those teams produce something which you have no oversight over. You don't really know what's going on. You know the objective. You know what they're working towards, but you don't know how they're going to meet it. Then they produce this product and you're like, wow, that's fantastic. I wouldn't have built it this way. I couldn't have built it this way. That's killer. Like that is the best feeling. Yeah. I think, uh, I think that is shared across every company that I talk with. Um, Enzo Ferrari is, uh, uh, a world famous

entrepreneur. Uh, although some people may not think of him that way. Um, I know that you've thought a lot about, you know, his obsession with just like building a beautiful car. Talk a little bit about like his rise and building a Ferrari and trying to make it perfect. And maybe the corollaries of like, how do you think about the craft and like what you all are trying to do and the obsession that you have in solving your problem? Yeah, it was a friend that was speaking about this to me. And he basically said, if you want to build a car from a spreadsheet, that's what Ford have done. And if you want to build a car to become a piece of art, that's what enzo ferrari did i think that's that's like a very fascinating notion that you can go

one of two ways and maybe there's some kind of hybrid in between um and i think that you don't want to be full full spreadsheet right you want to make sure there's some um artistic license uh given to the team so they have agency to make really cool creative decisions and build things which are more than just um a spreadsheet yeah it also feels like i guess you know for um, is uninspiring. Like nobody, I don't think anyone gets in like a Ford Explorer and they're like, wow. Right. They get in and they're like, this is a great vehicle for what I need to accomplish. It gets the job done. It's durable. It's reliable. It's, you know, all of these types of things. Um, but the Ferrari is a whole different, uh, you know, kind of experience.

I think, uh, what's interesting to me is like maybe Tesla. And again, there's some people who love tesla some people who hate tesla whatever but like maybe they're one of the companies that's trying to like be the middle how do you build something that's beautiful and inspiring and kind of captures the imagination of you know a bunch of people but at the same time can they drive the price down you know to sub 50k versus having to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a sports car first of all i'm a big admirer of elon musk i think he's fantastic he's an amazing entrepreneur and i think tesla is an amazing product i don't have one myself um but i would like one tesla's like right uh very very cool um super cool technology yeah uh and and i guess part

of uh this idea of like building off a spreadsheet versus building off of you know kind of an artistic desire uh it also depends on the company right like if you almost think about uh deal to some degree like you all probably sit down and look at a map and you're like okay like what are all the countries that we need to be able to be operational in and then the idea of like carrying the physical printer into the country like that's not a spreadsheet right that's like more the art and somebody probably was like hey i'm tired of you know running around trying to find a kinkos or whatever the local equivalent is instead we can just plug our own in and go ahead and just print documents there how big is it does it fit in my bag is it heavy you know like you just kind

figure it out and then you have this great story to tell but actually it was highly efficient and effective for fitting back into kind of that spreadsheet type uh approach of like what are the countries we need to be operational in i think it's also closely correlated with culture and attitude i have people at the company that work with me and they're amazing but culturally they're just not going to take a printer from country to country with them i would say no it's not going to do it for me i'm totally fine um so that culture and background can also drive approach and i think that's why you hire say your design creative team from a certain culture from a certain background with a certain mindset so they can make those decisions and then you hire your

ops guys with slightly different mindset so they can really focus on accurate operational delivery how important is it to have people from both of the cultures like the people who would say yes i'll carry the printer and the people who say no i won't do it like is the diversity of culture important or actually do you wish that you had more people who would carry the printer uh rather than less i think diversity is so so so important and we're so diverse this weekend we've had people celebrate the easter passover ramadan and probably some other stuff i don't even know about that that diversity is so important and so cool to what we are a deal and has had a huge impact on what we've built.

Yeah. I always find it interesting as well, given that the business is international. You know, when I worked at Facebook in 2014, 2015, like it's easy to get caught in, oh, I'm a United States citizen sitting in Menlo Park and we're building products. And like, let me check out what this feature looks like

on my iPhone on, you know, whatever it was, 3G, you know, internet at the time. And then they literally built this testing kind of facility, and what they did is it allowed you to use all kinds of other different mobile devices, and they were able to throttle the internet connection. And so you could literally see what does this product or feature look like on a T9 texting non-smartphone device if I was in a rural part of X country. And you're like, yo, that shit looked real fast and cool on the iPhone. this is a nightmare on this other device how do we solve and kind of make it work on both right yeah i have a crazy story related to this topic so former boss his name is vlad cto at revolute he wasn't my direct boss but he was one of the bosses of the company he's worth a ton of money

he built revolute he's still to this day at least last time i saw him still to this last time i saw him uses a really old shitty android phone like the like the worst phone i have ever seen like to turn the screen on or for it to wake up i'm pretty sure it takes two or three seconds and he does that because he wants revolute to run perfectly on the worst tech possible oh that was amazing the the um uh yeah the word empathy i think has like become kind of this like weird thing that everyone wants to run around and yell and scream about but like that's ultimately what it is right it's like if i put myself in the seat of the people who are gonna have the hardest problem in accessing our technology, and I'm able to solve it for them, then we're going to be

excellent for the people who have great internet, great devices, all this stuff. But also, it's not just the technology. I think one of the other pieces that's really interesting is when you're dealing with employees being paid. I know Uber, for example, had a huge challenge. And when they went into India and a couple of other countries, there is not a credit card culture. And so if it's heavy cash like how do you deal with that and then not only how do you actually like quote unquote process the payment but then like how do you prevent the driver from stealing the money right and like you kind of like deal with all like the fraud mitigation and things like that but also if you think about um the the idea of like when do people get paid right in the united

states i think most people get paid twice a month you know there's kind of like this like cultural uh agreement but i've got to assume maybe i'm wrong you can correct me but like i've got to assume that around the world, the way people get paid in terms of, you know, bank deposits or whatever, how often they get paid, like all that stuff changes on a country to country basis. And so you all have to understand that in order to actually serve the customer, correct? Totally. Typically, the schedule which people are paid changes, whether it's twice monthly, once monthly, sometimes it's post and in arrears five days after the end of the month. But salary payments aren't the biggest variable. It's onboarding, onboarding an employee. You think

about onboarding here in the US, it's pretty easy. You get all of that kind of employee's key information, social, date of birth. You run a quick immigration check with the US government service. They sign their employee agreement and they start. You go to certain countries, medical tests. The employee has to go to a doctor and have a medical assessment that needs to be passed and certified before they can start work. Military service certification. They have to prove that they've completed military service. We have to vet that. We have to validate that. I think the most interesting one is immigration. We help employees from different nationalities work in different countries. It is fascinating to me where in the United States, if you said to someone,

hey, you got to go to the doctor before you come work here. That would be like taboo and may even be like the headline of a hit piece article saying like, can you imagine this company is doing this in another country? It's mandatory. And just like when you now have this connectivity where individuals can work at companies not in their country, it really changes not only the employee expectations, but reverse, right? And what you guys help with is like now the companies have to go learn around the globe, what are all these requirements that we have to fulfill in these countries and so it's almost like a complexity on both sides and i think a u.s company probably is like hey this is making our life harder but actually for an employee who's

getting a job at a u.s based company maybe it actually is making their job easier right like they actually see it as oh i don't have to do all these steps that maybe i would have to do if i worked at a local company and so it's very fascinating how the same exact uh kind of uh trend can be seen as a pro or a con depending on which side of uh of the marketplace you are yeah the biggest delta for me is the company that's hiring the person their head of hr vp of people or whatever they typically know hr in the home country and maybe one or two other countries really really well it's really rare to find a people leader that has experience over many different countries and that produces a delta in expectations because maybe they know

how to onboard off-board do pto rollover in the us uk germany but they have no idea how it really works in malaysia they have the fundamentals assuming that the systems are fundamentally the same but really they don't know that's where the biggest delta comes from got it okay that makes uh that makes a lot of sense um talk to me about what advice would you give yourself 10 years ago like you now have been working in tech for about 10 years what what are the things that you you wish you knew when you started i think when something is if something is going badly the time to react to that bad thing should be as short as possible at this stage in my life when something is going wrong i'm very quick to react whether it's in personal life professional

life whatever can react very quickly and we can produce change and we'll basically try another way of solving that problem and doing that thing maybe it'll be better maybe it'll be worse hopefully it'll be better maybe it'll be worse and then we try again i look at my kind of younger self 24 year old self that kind of time to make the decision to change was much longer so the sooner you can shorten that thinking time to make a decision the better so it's almost like uh from hey i should do this to like action or execution the shorter that time period you think just the the faster that you're able to get things done and kind of drive uh output and productivity it kind of but it can be a little bit deeper than that it could be relationship based maybe you've

got a higher someone on the team is looking after a certain program or a certain area of the business oh well you know i think pomp is great but um i'm just i'm just not sure if he's if he's going to grow. I'm going to be here in six months. I'm doing the right thing. There's a few issues with this program. And you speak to him and then you try and say like, well, I think you need to do this, this, this better. You need to change your working style there. And then a couple of moments go and I haven't probably paid enough attention to make sure that things have improved. And then we get to a point in time where you're super dissatisfied with the job because you're not succeeding and not having a fun time. I'm super dissatisfied as the manager. If we'd actually

made that decision to take action sooner and pay close attention to what's going on probably wouldn't be where we are today so i think that's a really good example yeah and i think that that is a uh a situation that people experience across the world right it doesn't matter if you're in a tech startup if you're in uh kind of a fortune 500 you know more bureaucratic company or literally you could potentially just be working. I always go to the extreme example, like you could be working on oil pipelines in Texas and there's someone there who's the manager

who's like, hey, I wish that that person would do X. And that person's like, man, I really don't enjoy the job right now. And so I think that's a great lesson that applies across different businesses. My last question for you is, if you weren't working at Deal, what would you be doing?

Ooh, that's a really tough question. To be honest, I don't think about this too much because I'm really happy working at Deal. So I don't think I have a good answer for it. I would like to think I'd be working on something that's A, really scalable, B, it's international, and C, it has some type of good social impact. That's a great answer because although you don't know what it is, you kind of have a framework to evaluate what it would be, which I think kind of speaks to the fact that you've

got a pretty good sense of what you enjoy doing and kind of what are the things that you want to be working on. So I think that's as good of an answer as anyone can give me. Um, where, where can we send people to find you on the internet or find out more about deal? Uh, deal.com. I'm on Twitter. I'm on LinkedIn, uh, posting pretty frequently. So that's a good place. What, what is your Twitter handle? Do you know? Uh, down west. All right. We'll send some people over to Twitter and, uh, hopefully we can get more, uh, more content out of you, all the operational, uh, insights and, uh, uh, secrets that you have. We need to spread because there's

not very many people who have, uh, employees that, you know, thousands of employees across the world, 80 different countries, hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. You guys are doing an absolute killer job of scaling this thing and operations is at the heart of it. So I appreciate your time today. I learned a ton. I think a lot of the audience will have learned a lot as well. And we will definitely do this again in the future. Thanks. Appreciate it.