 What a stage, what a wonderful conference. It's my first time, and I'm so excited to be here. Thanks, everyone, for being here. Hi, Shwo. Hi, Zara. So good to be on stage with you, likewise. So you've already been introduced. You're the co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer at DEAL, a really impressive company that we are very fortunate to be investors in. DEAL moves so quickly that I'm having trouble following what you guys do. So tell me more. What does DEAL offer in terms of product today? Yeah. Well, super excited to be here. It's my first time at Slush as well, and I love the energy, and everything is just amazing. So what we're building at DEAL is an all-in-one HR platform. We help companies to run payroll, manage compliance, facilitate payments for international talents. Regardless of their location, we founded the company in 2019, and then today, we're the leader of our industry, and we cover 160 plus different countries. 160 countries. That's amazing. So at Emerson Collective, we focus on investing in what we call consequential companies, which are companies that have the potential to generate traditional venture returns and societal impact. And I have a strong belief, and it's one of the reasons I'm here today, that opportunity is really well-distributed, and there's amazing talent everywhere. And one of my favorite aspects of DEAL is how you enable talent wherever it is to have the kinds of job opportunities that a while ago only existed in places like Silicon Valley. So how has your journey as an immigrant impacted your desire to start DEAL? Yeah. So I have a very international background. I was born in China, moved to the States at the age of 16, went to MIT, met a group of really good friends that have similar background as me from international and new immigrants. And we all just want to find the best opportunities or work for the best projects out there. But the immigration process and the documents or the paperwork that we need to go through to be able to stay in the States or work for the best company is really complicated. And it often got delayed as well. So at that time, I just wanted to build a platform to remove the blockers, to empower talents like myself or my friends to be able to work whatever company that they want to. Today we help 300,000 international talents to work for the most innovative companies out there. So give us an example of a company that you work with, maybe either here in Finland or that's here today at Splash that uses DEAL to empower their global workforce. I'm super excited to share this company. It is one of my favorite app as well, Volt, which is a local food delivery services company. Super easy to use, fast UI design, and also it can translate the menu to whatever language that you want to. And then we're helping Volt to deliver and expand in eight different countries today. Thank you. So let's get tactical. I know most of you in the room are founders. You're a chief revenue officer. It's been reported that DEAL grew from just a few million dollars in revenue a couple of years ago to 200 million in revenue last year to 400 million this year reportedly. That's pretty meteoric growth, pretty crazy. So can you tell us more about your secret sauce as a head of sales and chief revenue officer as to how you achieve such crazy growth? Yeah. Thank you. Now I think about that. I think there are three things that I want to share with everyone. First of all, I really think team is very important. Talent, hire the best talent, build the strong team, can definitely contribute the fastest growth that we have. I remember at the early days of DEAL, I interviewed the first 400 employees that works for our go-to-market function. And then today, 90% of those talents are still with us. Interesting. And so maybe following up on that, can you tell us what the profile is of those first few employees and how you figured out who's the right salesperson for DEAL? So I have built this interview cadence. I'm going to share with you guys. It's my first time sharing it actually as well. So my interview runs about 15 minutes, and I ask them three questions only. Three questions, 15 minutes, everyone, for interviews. So the first question I ask them is, what is their quota? And what is their attainment? So because if they can answer their quota and explain their attainment to me, that means they're somehow analytical. And then we realize that the people who are analytical, that is, in sales, performs extremely well. So that is the first question. The second question is, I just ask them to introduce the product that they're currently selling, or whatever product they want to sell, and then ask them what is the biggest problem that they're solving using that product, just to see that whether their answer is convincing. If they can sell this product to me, that means they're pretty good sales, right? And then the third question I ask them is what they want to achieve, and how can I help, or how can you, as a platform, to help them to become successful? If we're aligned on those visions, I think we can be successful together. Wonderful. And then looking back, is there a traditional profile for those first few, let's say, for the first 10 or the first 50 salespeople you hired who are still with you today, did they come from a similar set of backgrounds, or is it very diverse? I think in terms of geo, it's very diversified because we hire globally. But in terms of, like, background, there's one common thing that we're looking for is execution, because we're a fully remote company and we have a culture that is what we call deal speed. We make sure that we hire people that is focused on execution through that problem solving and then be able to work together as a team, yeah. By the way, deal speed is a real thing. Whenever I email Shor Alex, her co-founder, they respond within one to three minutes, whatever the time of day or night, it's pretty amazing. I think it's really part of the secret sauce as far as I'm concerned. So you said first, people, what are the other two things that you wanted to mention? The second thing is, I think, build a really good process and then trust the process is very, very important. And then also always leverage data to make all kinds of decisions. So even though I'm running a sales team today, I am an engineer by training. I have a very technical background. So building all kinds of dashboard analytics to make a go-to-market strategies, focusing on headcount planning, as well as marketing spending paid as ROI measurement are very, very important. So I do think leverage data and then build optimized strategy is the key there. Got it. And what's number three? Number three is, I think, go global early. Since day one, we build a very global sales team, even though the team is very small, but because of the nature of our product, we serve global clients. So we have sales team in North America, APEC, Europe, Latin. So even though we only have one person, one sales rep to cover one region, but at the time that we found product market fit, we were able to grow very fast. Yeah. Thank you. So talking about this whole in-person versus remote debate, it's obviously during COVID, everyone went remote, every company was global, and we were all fine with it. It sounds like there's a movement going the other way now in technology where people are coming back in person. I don't know if you know this, and I find this extraordinary deal. So reportedly 400 million of revenue this year does not have a single office. They're a fully remote company. So you're being a little bit contrarian right now and you're enabling companies to have people across the world. So how do you do it? How have you managed to make such a successful company without an office? Well, first of all, we don't sleep. That's how Alex and myself were able to reply you very fast. But Joker said we are probably the largest remote, largest private remote company. We have 3,000 people across 100 different countries today. And then there's one thing that's like, as I mentioned earlier, what we're looking for when hiring talents is focusing on the deal speed. We first evaluate whether they can execute, whether they're great at the project management and hiring strong managers and trust those managers, let them to do the job, run the team. And then also by hiring a global remote team, we are able to cover all time zones. So whenever there is an urgent client issue where escalation will be able to help them to solve within minutes, by the end of the day, we're a payroll company. Our mission is to pay talents and then run the payroll on time and each time. Yeah, no, it's true. If you're not getting paid, someone getting back to you really quickly is very, very important. What tools do you use to manage your team globally? We live on Slack. So Slack is technically our office, even though we do not have a physical one, yeah. Wow, good ad for Slack. Cal is gonna talk tomorrow, I'm sure he will like that. So deal has been very vocal about reaching targeting and then reaching last year profitability. This is not something that most tech companies ever communicate on. And frankly, haven't really worried about as much in the first few years of their life. Can you tell me why you chose to do this differently and to be profitable and to say that you are so early on? I think first of all, all the credit to our very best finance and business control team because they control the budget, right? And then second of all, I think we care for every single dollar that we invest. We focus on ROI and then we have like a really good measurement on our ROI as well. We have been profitable for over a year and we value, like there is a one deal value is thoughtful for reality. That means we care for every single dollar that we spend out there. And then also with the current economic situation and the environment, we just want to be careful. Every investment that we put out there, we want to take our people accountable, yeah. Yeah, and I guess not having offices also helps. Yeah. But we do like, you know, sponsor way work process, right? So we encourage people to do meetups and then we have like, you know, big hubs, central hubs for different like big cities. And also we have like, you know, offside, team offsides and then holiday dinners, which is coming up for the holiday season. We often encourage people to meet on their own, even though there's no like one global headquarter or office, yeah. Where do you live? I don't even know where you are most of the time. I used to say I live in the Matter Wars, yeah. So I think last time we met is in San Francisco. Yes, yes, now in Helsinki. I met Alex in Paris last week. Yeah, so I spent most of my time in San Francisco, New York, London, and then Tel Aviv as well. Yeah, we have a big team in Tel Aviv, yeah. Amazing. So deal has been in the news a lot lately. It seems like you had quite the year from a media perspective. Can you tell us a little bit about how you've managed the maybe increased scrutiny that you get as you grow and perform the way that you have? Well, we are developing a very innovative employment model for global hiring. We're the largest for our industry. And then we have 3,000 employees across 100 different countries out there. That means we need to meet. We have a lot of standards and expectations to meet. And then it is really hard to satisfy all of the standards for all of those countries. We're trying our very best. And then as we grow, as we scale, there will be scrutiny. And I think it is very healthy. And it can help us to move forward and then create a really strict standard around ourselves as well. And then there are misconceptions around our model. We are not misclassifying our own workforce. We are not a platform for paying gig workers or gig economy. Compliance is what we live for and breathe for. And then we will continuously focus on hard work ahead and then continuously deliver product and then deliver high standard service for our clients. Wonderful. So when you started, you served mostly small businesses. And frankly, startups. So companies like a lot of the companies in this room, which you still serve. And I see your booth there. So I know that you do a great job serving startups. But it seems like you've started to grow with your customers and sell more into enterprise. As a Chief Revenue Officer, can you tell us more as to how you've managed that maybe change in your customer profile and maybe graduation from SMB to Enterprise? Yeah, definitely. That's a great question. DO is a YC company. And then since the beginning, we serve YC clients, YC community. And then today, most of the YC companies who are hiring internationally are using DO. So we started from SMB and then now focus more and more on upper market. Also, instead of focusing on selling one single product, we're more like put together all the products and then become a whole all-in-one HR platform. Not only that we manage payroll, but also we have an entity creation service. Also help international talents to manage their equity, file their taxes, and also create consulting services to help a lot of clients to optimize their global expansion strategy. So definitely, there is a change from selling to one single product to a whole platform from SMB to Enterprise, yeah. And do you hire different people to sell into Enterprise than you do to sell into SMB? Not much. And do you ask the same three questions that you said in the beginning? I do ask the same three questions. But my expectations on SMB sales rep versus Enterprise sales rep is very different, yeah. But we tend to hire. One thing is that we always think that when it comes to selling Enterprise, clients, Enterprise product, you want people who have 20 years of experience or have been in the industry for a really, really long time. But actually, not necessarily, as long as people are like, you know, be able to learn very fast and then ask the good questions and then willing to spend the time, build the consulting solutions, become a consultant for the Enterprise clients, I think they will become very, very successful. So from selling one product to SMB clients to a whole platform to Enterprise clients, we do see an increase of sales cycle, a lot more resources needed and a lot more decision makers are involved. But in the end, the deal size is becoming bigger and then the clients becoming stickier. And then we focus more and more on cross-sell and upsell for those clients as well, yeah. Got it. Wonderful. What is next for deal? Well, I'm very excited for the next stage of deal. Product-wise, we just released our deal AI product because over the years, we have built a huge data size, including salary insights from different countries, different positions, as well as global local labor law compliance. And then today, we open our verified data size to our clients and then to empower them to use those data sets, navigate through deal platform using our technology to help them to build the most optimized global expansion strategy. So deal AI is definitely one of the very exciting and promising products for next year. That's on the products side. From business side, as I mentioned earlier, we will continuously focusing on growing and also serving more and more upper market clients across different industry, different segments. And then by the end of the day, we want to empower millions of international talents to be able to work for the best opportunities and the companies out there regardless of location, yeah. Amazing. Thank you so much, Shro. This was a wonderful talk. Thank you for sharing. Thank you for being so tactical. Any last advice that you would give everyone in this audience who you were like them just a few years ago, starting your company, applying to YC, you told me you applied on the last day before you actually realized that you needed to apply the day that the applications were closing. It's never too late. Take the shot. You never know where it leads you. But any advice for the people in this room that are starting somewhere in their journey starting their company? Yeah. So I think for the audience, I don't know. Maybe a lot of you are founders. A lot of you are thinking about the funding your own product or startup. Just do it now. OK, it doesn't really matter whether you find it the perfect idea or you find it the perfect timing or market. Just act on it. And then all the ideas, all the product market fit, it will take time for you to explore. And it will take time for you to adapt and to change. But change is always good. And also, our booth is right there. You can find me if you want more, talk more about startup or global hiring. Thanks, Sarah. Thank you so much, Shro. Thanks, everyone. Thank you.