My first interview with Shuo Wang (@shuooo), Co-Founder & CRO of @Deel. 1:08 Designing Deel To Scale Quickly 3:28 Why Companies Should Go Global Early 7:30 Building Deel’s Sales Team 10:33 Why Shuo Loves Sales 14:44 Pivoting 3 Times During YC & Being Shameless 19:06 Dreaming About Intercom 22:04 Solving Payment Delays Early On 25:11 Joining YC As A Crypto Payment Platform For Content Creators 32:37 How To Make Decisions Before You Have Data 36:30 Why It Was So Painful To Open Corporate Entities During Covid 39:57 Thinking Outside The Box 44:15 Why Covid Was “A Lifetime Opportunity” For Deel 46:11 Deel Speed 47:55 Argentina & Brazil 50:07 Interviewing Deel’s First 400 Employees 51:33 Screening For Happiness 52:59 Creating Ghost Busters (Special Projects Team) 59:16 Having A Co-Founder You Can Rely On 1:03:31 Why Offsites Are Important 1:06:07 Torturing Yourself Into Greatness 1:07:20 Learning How To Run A Business From Her Mom 1:11:26 Growing Up In China With Her Grandparents 1:15:51 Moving To The United States At 16 1:24:13 Building An Air Purifier Company In China 1:30:18 Being An Outsider In Silicon Valley 1:31:08 Focusing On One Product vs. Building Multiple Products 1:32:46 What PMF Was Like At Deel 1:34:46 How Shuo Thinks About Risk 1:37:18 Understand The Problem, Not The Solution 1:42:08 Creating An 11-Star Customer Experience 1:43:44 What Makes Alex Special 1:46:00 Poker 1:46:43 Always Look At The Positives Even In Tough Situations

We’ve raised $320M at an $11B valuation, led by Addition. AI is changing how companies are built. Teams are smaller, global from day one, and using agents more. We’ve spent 10 years building the financial rails for that world. We’re now building the intelligent layer on top.

🚨💰 BREAKING: Arsenal owner Stan Kroenke is reportedly ready to reward EVERY Arsenal player with a brand new Rolls-Royce Phantom worth between $530K–$580K if they beat Paris Saint-Germain tomorrow and deliver Arsenal’s FIRST EVER Champions League title. 😳🏆

Co-Founder of Deel (@deel) Shuo Wang (@shuooo) says that Deel "screen for happiness" during their recruiting process: "What it means is that we want to hire people that have the belief that they'll be able to solve the toughest problems out there". "We realise that only people who have positive energy, positive vibes, and are very hopeful and happy will be able to continuously push themselves and go forward." "That's what we mean by 'we hire happy people.' Both Alex (@Bouazizalex) and myself are very happy people and we are very resilient as well."

I’m excited to share that I’m joining Andreessen Horowitz as a Partner on the New Media team, focusing on the intersection of comms, networks, and investing. I’ve been working on these three things throughout my career, first in early-stage investing and most recently in comms at Rostra, writing about my perspectives and experiences along the way. For a long time, I thought these were three different paths I’d have to choose between. I’ve done comms, but I’m not just a comms leader. I write and build community, but I’m not just a writer or community builder. And I’ve invested, but I’m not just an investor. When @eriktorenberg approached me about the opportunity, he told me I could come do all of it under one roof, at a scale that wouldn’t be possible anywhere else, and crafted the right role to make it work. @a16z is the perfect place for me to manifest the full range of my interests, skills, and ambitions. Erik has been one of my earliest believers (since college!), so this feels like a long arc finally closing. I look forward to working alongside him and the rest of a16z’s brilliant team, and also hire even more great people into the firm. I’ll be taking some time between roles to touch grass and exist in the context. In the meantime, my DMs are always open.

Next season, @deel will become the official sleeve partner of @Arsenal 🔴⚪ When we partnered with @Arsenal last year, we set out to build something lasting, starting with rolling out Deel across their workforce and HR operations. Having our name on one of the most iconic shirts in world football is the next step in that relationship. We made ‘Patchmaker’ with the club, a film featuring Viktor Gyökeres and Patrick Vieira. Worth watching 📷 Yes, I'm a PSG fan. But like every French kid, I grew up dreaming in front of Arsène, Titi and the Invincibles! #COYG

Life update - Married the love of my life today ♥️

For years, we hit the same wall everyone else did. You automate a few steps. Then complexity wins. And your best people are back to doing work that should run itself. That's what we set out to fix - not for our customers first, but for ourselves. I'm proud to introduce Akai by Deel. Akai is an interconnected system of agents that learns your workflows, automates every step, and gets smarter with every run - auditably, on any system. Today, 100% of Deel's operations teams, across Finance, Tax, Treasury, Benefits, and HR, run on Akai. The results stopped us in our tracks: → 100,000 cases handled automatically every month → 8,000 hours of payment processing - now background tasks → Reconciliation that took 20 days - now done in minutes → 100% automation in areas we couldn't reach after years of coding → 91,000 manual hours saved every single month Now, every team is now building agents themselves. No developers. No IT tickets. Just the people who know the work, running it. That's the ceiling we broke. Now we're opening it up. With built-in voice, transactions across any payment method, and the ability to process and analyse any document or dataset - out of the box. Your first agents could be running by tomorrow! Get early access at akai.run

Kalshi raised $1B at a $22B valuation led by Coatue, with participation from Morgan Stanley, Sequoia, a16z, and others. In 2018, we were two kids who loved math, markets, and debate. And we had a dream: build the next generation financial market, where we capture a broader set of questions and harness the power of the masses to price them better than Wall Street. Kalshi was born to fulfill that dream. Today, most of these questions are traded indirectly, priced through imprecise proxies or negotiated bilaterally in opaque, restricted, relationship-driven markets. But thanks to our incredible community of users who make our markets work, Kalshi has the opportunity to change that by turning historically fragmented and untradeable risk into open, liquid, and standardized markets. We’ve seen this movie before. When interest rates, currencies, commodities, and crypto moved from dark to lit markets, volume did not just migrate: access expanded, new use cases emerged, and the opportunity grew by orders of magnitude. Today, Kalshi represents over 90% of US prediction market volume and the majority of activity globally, with annualized volume growing to $178B over the past 6 months. What started as retail is quickly becoming institutional — hedge funds, asset managers, prop firms, and insurers are beginning to trade, provide liquidity, and hedge real-world risk directly. The scope and scale of prediction markets are just beginning to take shape. We’re using this new capital to accelerate the institutional adoption underway — unlocking trillions in capital to facilitate active trading and risk management. Prediction markets are moving from early adoption to core financial infrastructure. This is just the beginning.

Kalshi raised $1B at a $22B valuation led by Coatue, with participation from Morgan Stanley, Sequoia, a16z, and others. In 2018, we were two kids who loved math, markets, and debate. And we had a dream: build the next generation financial market, where we capture a broader set of questions and harness the power of the masses to price them better than Wall Street. Kalshi was born to fulfill that dream. Today, most of these questions are traded indirectly, priced through imprecise proxies or negotiated bilaterally in opaque, restricted, relationship-driven markets. But thanks to our incredible community of users who make our markets work, Kalshi has the opportunity to change that by turning historically fragmented and untradeable risk into open, liquid, and standardized markets. We’ve seen this movie before. When interest rates, currencies, commodities, and crypto moved from dark to lit markets, volume did not just migrate: access expanded, new use cases emerged, and the opportunity grew by orders of magnitude. Today, Kalshi represents over 90% of US prediction market volume and the majority of activity globally, with annualized volume growing to $178B over the past 6 months. What started as retail is quickly becoming institutional — hedge funds, asset managers, prop firms, and insurers are beginning to trade, provide liquidity, and hedge real-world risk directly. The scope and scale of prediction markets are just beginning to take shape. We’re using this new capital to accelerate the institutional adoption underway — unlocking trillions in capital to facilitate active trading and risk management. Prediction markets are moving from early adoption to core financial infrastructure. This is just the beginning.

For years, we hit the same wall everyone else did. You automate a few steps. Then complexity wins. And your best people are back to doing work that should run itself. That's what we set out to fix - not for our customers first, but for ourselves. I'm proud to introduce Akai by Deel. Akai is an interconnected system of agents that learns your workflows, automates every step, and gets smarter with every run - auditably, on any system. Today, 100% of Deel's operations teams, across Finance, Tax, Treasury, Benefits, and HR, run on Akai. The results stopped us in our tracks: → 100,000 cases handled automatically every month → 8,000 hours of payment processing - now background tasks → Reconciliation that took 20 days - now done in minutes → 100% automation in areas we couldn't reach after years of coding → 91,000 manual hours saved every single month Now, every team is now building agents themselves. No developers. No IT tickets. Just the people who know the work, running it. That's the ceiling we broke. Now we're opening it up. With built-in voice, transactions across any payment method, and the ability to process and analyse any document or dataset - out of the box. Your first agents could be running by tomorrow! Get early access at akai.run