You Can Build a $10B+ Company Fully Remotely
A guest post by CEO & Co-Founder of Deel on how to build a great company.
A guest post by Alex Bouaziz, CEO & Co-Founder of Deel.
As Deel went from zero to $1B ARR, countless well-wishers asked us to ‘grow-up’ and build an HQ and an office. We grew fast not despite being remote but because of it.
Storytime: This is a picture of me and my friend Sami in 2014 taking a 2-hour nap during a hackathon in London. This photo encapsulates the ‘hacker-bedroom energy’ that was characteristic of early Deel (though this was taken much before).
I’m writing this essay to explain why we’ve chosen to embrace the hacker-bedroom energy, in a remote setup, possibly forever.
All large companies are remote companies.
The person on the first floor doesn’t know the person on the third floor. When they need to work together, they message each other, get on a call, and open a shared document. This is remote work.
An engineer at Apple opens her laptop, checks Slack, joins a standup on Zoom, and reviews a pull request from a teammate she’s never met. A product manager at Google writes a spec, shares it for comments, and gets on back-to-back video calls with engineering, design, and leadership, all on different floors or in different cities. A salesperson at Microsoft logs into the CRM, messages his manager, and joins a pipeline review with colleagues across three time zones. This is remote work.
The only people truly working “in person” at any of these companies are the 10 or 15 sitting within earshot. Everyone else is collaborating through screens. The entire infrastructure of how work gets done today is digital. The office is just a building around it. Past a certain size, every company is already remote.
Most founders get stuck on the question: should I build an in-person company or a remote company? The premise is that these are two fundamentally different modes of work. They aren’t. In-person work is possible with 10 people in one room. The minute you grow beyond that, multiple rooms, multiple floors, multiple offices, it becomes remote work regardless of whether everyone commutes to the same building. You can’t build a large company without doing remote work.
Deel has 7,500 employees across more than 110 countries. We went from $1M to $100M in annual recurring revenue in 20 months; at the time, faster than Slack and any SaaS company in history. We crossed $1 billion revenue in just over six years, while being ebidta+ for three consecutive years. We did all of this working remotely, from day one, without a single office. A lot of people ask us how. This is that answer in 3,333 words.
I’ll talk about:
1. A Reality Check on the nature of work.
2. Actionable Playbook to make remote work.
Hiring
First Month
OKRs
Meetings
3. Summary of the whole essay (skip to this part if you just want a TL;DR)
A Reality Check
1. The best engineers might be in San Francisco. But the idea that they’re only in San Francisco is a mistake.
You’re fighting over a limited pool of people.Though very talented and hard-working, supply is driving their price up without necessarily increasing quality.
NYC and SF attract ambitious people, but so do great companies. There are exceptional people in São Paulo, Kraków, Bangalore, and a thousand other places who never had a reason to move. Cast a wider net.
And those people stay. If you’ve got a great remote job paying significantly above the average salary in your country, it’s very hard to find another one like it. You’re not competing in the same marketplace. You’re competing in a much less competitive one where being a good employer actually differentiates you.
2. “If I can see them, they can’t fake work.”
People that don’t want to work will not work. You can’t motivate someone to do something they don’t want to do. Locking them in an office from 9 to 5 doesn’t change that. In fact, it’s easier for them to do less and justify it, because “if I’m in office, I’m working.”
You can’t convert a slow athlete into a fast athlete with a bunch of rules. If they want to be on Reddit and YouTube all day and fake work, they will fake work. The moment you need to be behind someone for them to work is the moment they shouldn’t be at your company.
What works instead: hold people accountable. Set goals, plan to meet OKRs, give people deadlines. We’re a very OKR-driven company. Every team and every person has OKRs with full visibility on where they stand. If you don’t hit your OKRs for two quarters in a row, you’re usually out. A culture of doers gets built in consequence. Non-doers leave as soon as they realize they won’t make it.
3. Nobody has six straight hours of creative output.
The real workday is from 9 to 11, then a break. 12 to 2, then a break. 3 to 6, then a break. That’s how people actually function. In an office, those breaks are awkward. You’re pretending to be productive or feeling guilty for stepping away. At home, you live your life between the bursts. Gym, nap, lunch, errand, and come back sharper.
Some people are more focused at night after the kids are asleep. Some in the morning. In China, people sleep for one hour after lunch because they cannot actually work. Remote work allows you to get more of your deep work hours because you can manage your schedule. Flexibility gets you all those bursts of productivity instead of flattening them into a 9-to-5 pattern.
4. “Working from home is full of distractions.”
Offices are worse. Every time you work from an office, people tap your shoulder, want coffee, need “just a second.” If you’re a manager, everyone wants your time all day. You don’t count those as distractions, you count them as work. But your deep work got squeezed into whatever time was left.
Not all offices have enough space for everyone to isolate and do deep work. But everyone can do that at home. In one morning working from home (four hours), a person can get as much done as eight hours in the office.
Remote doesn’t mean stuck at home either. We give people WeWork memberships. People work from coworking spaces, coffee shops, wherever they’re sharpest. And when you need a quick answer from someone, you don’t need to tap a shoulder. We’ve built a massive internal knowledge base. Someone has a question, they look into our docs and find the answer in 30 seconds.
5. “If employees prefer remote, they must want it so they can slack off.”
Employee-friendly doesn’t mean employer-unfriendly. The only thing that matters is setting the appropriate goals and hitting them. There’s no economic benefit in choosing where people work from. Letting them choose gives them freedom. They’ll work harder to keep enjoying the benefits of their position.
The first three months at Deel are purposely intense. It’s a very sink-or-swim type of place. People either thrive or they don’t make it. A lot of them, after a month or two, when they see the intensity and the speed, just leave on their own. The culture self-selects.
6. Two hours on a commute every day does no good to anybody.
Having your workstation next to your bed eliminates commuting. That’s 2 hours per day, 500 hours per employee per year. At 1,000 employees, you save 500,000 hours. Even if they don’t use all of that time to work, it’s a win. It’s 2 hours of daily life not spent in a tube.
When I’m working remotely, I can get out of bed and start working right away. The ability to just roll over, go to wherever your area of work is and turn on your laptop, that’s really big for a lot of people.
7. Written communication is clearer than talking.
Physical proximity means you talk to people because they’re there, not because it’s the best way to communicate. Verbal communication is more ambiguous. There’s a lot of room for interpretation. And if there’s no transcript of the conversation, no one feels responsible. Our minds trick us. Remote companies write things down because they have to, and it’s better for everyone.
8. Remote companies have a structural cost advantage.
Building an office or leasing a floor is expensive. Building an all-in-office company in New York is very expensive, and you have to convince people to relocate away from their families. Remote companies can hire excellent engineers globally for the same price as 1 in New York and have more capital because of the reduced fixed costs. You raise $5 million, my runway is significantly higher.
There’s a strong bias to who you hire when you see them in person. I had an employee in Budapest who’d been doing great work for two years. When I invited him to a company event, he told me something he’d never mentioned: he had a severe disability and couldn’t move.
I know people in New York who won’t hire new mothers. They won’t say it, but they do it. Remote hiring is a very strong equalizer. Video interviews are more objective, fewer distractions, harder to be fooled, and no impact from recent proximity influencing your judgment.
How we make remote work
Summarized in one line: Hire people with agency who want to work hard, set them up in the first 30 days, have practitioner-managers, be OKR driven both in culture and in incentives, and help your people meet every once in a while.
1. Hire for Agency
The key to SpaceX or Harvard is not that they produce high-quality people. It’s that they filter for high-quality people. The best founders build the correct systems to attract them.
What we look for is specific: high agency, high intensity, self-discipline, desire to work hard, desire to move fast. You can’t spot a great engineer if you aren’t one yourself. It’s hard to find these people, but these are the questions we use to do so:
Q1: “If you could clone yourself as a 20-year-old, what career path would you send him along?” Checks for self-awareness, breadth of interests, and drive.
Q2: “Tell me one topic you went from zero to ‘ready to teach’ in less than six months.” Checks for learning speed.
Q3: “What is California’s state budget for healthcare? Walk me through how you’d estimate it.” First-principles thinking and mental quickness. The answer matters less than the process.
Q4: “Explain something to me that you understand deeply but most people find boring or dumb.” Checks for work ethic and ability to identify what matters
Q5: “Is there something you’ve changed your mind about in the past two years?” Checks for ego and the ability to process new information.
Q6: “Have you ever wanted to do something, lacked the resources, and did it anyway?” Checks for high agency.
Q7: “What is the best thing you’ve built that no one asked you to build?” Checks for intrinsic motivation and initiative.
We don’t send a culture document. We just say it in the interview process: what’s expected, how we work, how we communicate. Telling the truth about the job’s intensity attracts people looking for a challenge and moves those along who aren’t. People should know exactly what they’re walking into before they accept.
2. The One-Month Impact Window
We want you to have an impact in your first month. A manager’s job is to make that happen.
Week 1, you ramp: training on tools, meeting the 3 key people you need to know (your manager, a peer, and someone from the team you’ll interact with most), and reading the internal knowledge base. This shouldn’t take more than a week. Then you’re in the trenches.
Days 8-30, you land a first win. The manager’s #1 job is to help the new hire deliver a visible, meaningful result in front of the team. An engineer ships a fix for a bug that’s been open for months. A salesperson closes their first deal. A marketer launches something the team shares. A new hire’s effectiveness is directly proportional to how much the team believes they’re good at their job. If the team sees results early, everyone wants to work with them. If they don’t, nobody does.
Every day for the first 30 days, the manager does a 10-minute standup. Not a status update, a blocker removal session: What are you working on? What’s slowing you down? What do you need from me? In an office, new hires absorb context passively. Remotely, that doesn’t happen. The check-in fills the gap. After 30 days, taper it off. By then, they should be operating independently.
The first 3-4 months are purposely intense. People either thrive or they realize the pace isn’t for them. A lot of them decide on their own that it’s not the right fit.
3. OKRs and Performance
Your company can’t operate correctly if there are no objectives set. It won’t move forward if goals are loosely held. OKRs are what bring order.
Every team and every person has OKRs with full visibility. Performance is evaluated on delivery, not hours. Every role is measured differently: Sales on quota and pipeline quality. Engineering on how much high-quality code they ship and how fast. Management on their team’s results, not their individual output. You cannot put operations, HR, finance, sales, and engineering in the same bucket. Different work requires different measures.
If someone consistently misses their objectives, something needs to change: the goals, the support, or the fit. People do what you ask them to do, so ask for the right things.
4. No Cheerleader Managers
When a manager stops being a practitioner, they lose the ability to judge performance. They become average, and their teams become average.
One rule: No pure managers. Even people who manage other managers must have direct IC tasks. We want managers that are doers. And we’re tougher on managers than on ICs. Most companies blame the individual contributor when a project fails. We look at the manager first. They are accountable for their team’s objectives.
5. Help Your People Meet Each Other
Remote doesn’t mean people never see each other. It means you’re intentional about when and why they meet up. We run executive retreats twice a year, director retreats once a year, SKOs for the full go-to-market org, team offsites on request, plus travel budgets, quarterly city dinners, and exec drop-ins whenever leadership is in town.
I’m from the generation of videogames. Some of the people I had the most fun with in my life are people I’ve never met. My first employee at Deel was someone I hired off a Reddit post. I didn’t meet him for four years. But even for people like me, meeting in person matters. So we invest in it.
My Advice If You’re Optimistically Skeptical
If you’ve read this far, here’s everything in one place.
The mindset shift:
- All large companies are already ‘remote’. If you have more than one floor, most of your people collaborate through screens. Same-desk work is almost remote as well.
- People who don’t want to work will not work. The office doesn’t fix motivation. And it makes it easier to fake work.
- Nobody has six straight hours of creative output. Remote work lets people work when they’re sharpest instead of forcing them into a 9-to-5 pattern.
- The office can be more distracting than home.
- Employees preferring remote doesn’t mean they want to slack off. It means they want to do their best work in the environment that suits them.
- Two hours on a commute wastes 500,000 hours per year at 1,000 employees.
- The best engineers are not only in San Francisco. Talent is everywhere, and with cost savings on an office, you can hire a full team globally, and they stay longer.
- Remote hiring makes it more objective and about ability.
- Remote companies have a structural cost advantage.
The playbook to make it work:
- Hire for agency. Screen for intensity, self-direction, speed, and ownership. Use the seven interview questions. Don’t compromise. Bad hires compound.
- Use the one-month impact window. Help the new hire land win in the first 30 days. Run a daily 10-minute check-in to remove blockers. Taper off after the first month.
- Set OKRs with full visibility for every person and every team. Measure delivery, not hours. Different metrics for different departments. If objectives are consistently missed, change the goals, the support, or the fit.
- Every manager must also do the work. Hold managers accountable for their team’s output.
- Help people meet each other. Retreats, offsites, travel budgets, quarterly dinners.
The most actionable thing I tell people is to just try. Hire a few people globally. Use Deel if you find it legally complicated to do so. See how they do. See if they fit with your team. A lot of people overthink global hiring. But most of them have never actually tried.
There would be value in having everyone in one place with you all the time, but the cons outweigh the pros.
Deel is 7,500 people across 110 countries. Every top startup you see is doing remote work. Every Fortune 500 company is doing remote work. All of big tech is 99% remote work. Every successful business has multiple floors, offices, people collaborating through screens. Remote is no longer an experiment. It works.
Hiring for ownership usually matters more than geography.
Very nice